The Cold War: The Rise Of Communism

When Mikhail Gorbachev became Secretary of the Communist Party, he had to deal with an ailing and frail Soviet Union. The country had entered a state of serious economic decline and the Soviet people, discontent with their political party, looked to Gorbachev to solve their problems. Spurred by patriotic duty, Gorbachev introduced democratic reforms known as perestroika and glasnost. These sought to free businesses and Soviet peoples from harsh government regulation and censorship, respectively. While Gorbachev believed these policies would strengthen the Soviet government, this was not the case. Perestroika did not do anything to

The forty-five years from the dropping of the atom bombs to the end of the Soviet Union, can be seen as the era of the new conflict between two major states: United States of America (USA) and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). According to Hobsbawm, ‘cold war’ was the constant confrontation of the two super powers which emerged from the Second World War. At that time the entire generation was under constant fear of global nuclear battles. It was widely believed that it could break out at any moment. (Hobsbawm, 1994) The consequences of the ‘power vacuum’ in central Europe, created by the defeat of Germany, gave rise to these two super powers (Dunbabin, 1994). The world was divided into

After WW2, United States became the greatest power in the world; many American politicians thought that Unites states should play the role as a leader to “lead the rest of the world to a future of international cooperation, expanding democracy, and ever-increasing living standards (Give me Liberty P952).” They wanted to express the idea of equality, civil rights, and the freedom to the world, and hoped to build an easier world for democracy and capitalism. However, Soviet Union, which was the only power that could rival the United States, claimed that communism could make the world more organized and ordered. Both countries hoped to expend their influences around the world, and their confliction generally turned to be a cold war, in other words, a battle between Capitalism and Communism. The cold war coincided with the civil rights movement in the United States and had a strong influence on Africa-Americans’ action of pursuing racial equality. Although some left-wing activists in the united states pushed the blacks and some whites into fear of speaking for the Africa-Americans, cold war still provided the blacks a good opportunity and a great starting reason to fight for their civil rights and also enabled the U.S government realized the importance of racial equality for their promotion of democracy because of domestic and international pressure.

Though the Cold War was mainly between the two super powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, it also encompassed their European allies, split by the Iron Curtain. It divided the world into the Warsaw pact and the NATO, cementing Europe’s role in the Cold War though its alliances. The constant threat of the nuclear weapons meant that the Cold War became more psychological war rather than of military actions1. .The United States developed their nuclear weapons to strengthen their own military potential after WWII, but the Soviet Russia took this to be more an offensive tactic after the bombs the devastation of the atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The Cold War then largely became an arms race, due to the

Communism in Eastern Europe was an ideology that took hold of the region for more than forty years. Each state fell into the Soviet sphere of influence after the end of World War II, and from then on until 1989, communism was the absolute norm for all of Eastern Europe. Though communism was the only form of government found in the region, each state was unique in how it carried out its policies as some were more lenient than others. As time progressed through the Communist Era, there were changes seen within the Soviet Union and these changes were reflected in its satellite states. Hungary is one such example of where communism took complete control of the country, and like the rest of Eastern Europe, went through different phases. Within

The Cold War was a non-violent military arms and technological race that happened in the latter half of the 20th century. Two main factions arose; Communism and Capitalism. Prior to the turn of the 21st Century Communism and Capitalism could never see eye- to-eye. Each offered a different form of utopia. Communism primarily concerned with having a classless society, while Capitalism offered class transcendence otherwise referred to as class mobility. The pursuit of happiness as it is written in the constitution. This seems to fall in line with previous philosophical works such as Aristotle. The telos, or end goal for all humans is eudaimonia happiness. Yet, one must read through the lines to understand what the pursuit of eudaimonia is in

The 1980s encompassed a critical turn of events of the Soviet Union. Its economy and agricultural industry were crumbling. Advanced technology was lacking and factories were inefficient. Citizens had no choice but to purchase low quality products, as a result, and social freedoms were inadequate. Additionally, foreign affairs such as American rearmament and tensions throughout the Soviet Bloc negatively impacted Soviet stability. In an effort of reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet Union General Secretary, stepped in to improve the communist system my implementing democratic principles. He introduced the concepts of perestroika, which means to reconstruct, and glasnost, which means openness. Glasnost allowed for increased freedom of the press, while perestroika allowed for governmental reform. One of these reforms included marketplace changes in the economy. Gorbachev wanted to de-monopolize businesses and eliminate price controls. In addition, political reforms introduced contested elections in which multiple candidates were allowed to speak out. The goal was to mimic the success of capitalist countries like the United States and Germany by giving citizens a say in the government. Unfortunately, Gorbachev’s changes did not help the Soviet Union. Even though foreign

1985 was at the end of the Cold War, that means that the soviet economy was flourished from the arm’s race and the war in Afghanistan. Hence, gorbachev’s main goal was to try to modernise the economy and to increase soviet industry. Therefore, he was focusing on two important reforms: glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). Perestroika was basically shaping up the economy as it was very weak. To do that he firstly, cut down on the arm’s race and signed a treaty with the USA to remove most of its missiles from Europe.

When I recall the specific time period, habitually referred as “Cold war era” and a communist regime arena where I spent my childhood, I retrieve traces of the impressions about Americans that I formed at that time. As stated by numerous propaganda, America used to be defined as almost the devil-incarnate who wishes war, also men who often depicted with beaver hats and embosom atomic bombs in order to destroy other countries where communist regime was nested. That was the impressions of my entire childhood about America.

The fall of the Soviet following the victory of capitalism over the Cold War brought an end to the era of legitimized communist government. Although there were states remaining in communist ideologies, these states found themselves converting to a more capitalistic society or completely cutting themselves off from the world, as seen with North Korea.

Mikhail Gorbachev stepped onto to the Russian political scene in 1985 as Leader of the Soviet Union. He was very different from the other leaders who had come before him because of their lust and hunger for power. Gorbachev felt that it was more important to promote peace throughout the world than to get what he and the leaders who came before him desired. This desire in Gorbachev's heart eventually led to the tearing down of the Berlin wall, the end of Communism in several European countries, and eventually to the end of the Cold War in 1991. Gorbachev decided that he wasn’t going to force his ideals upon the European nations, and because of that Communism quickly fell.

In the early 1980s, the Soviet Union continued to control every aspect of national life. The large state and party bureaucracy was beginning to experience serious economical problems. So when Brezhnev died in 1982, a change needed to be made to improve the performance of the economy. In 1985 a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was here to change the situation. Although Gorbachev believed in communism, he understood that it was unsuccessful and set out to change this by introducing new reform policies labeled as democratic socialism. The first of his new policies was called perestroika, it eased the government price controls on certain goods, gave added independence for state enterprises, and establishment of profit-seeking private cooperatives.

The derailed, scrambled mess of the USSR that was inherited by Gorbachev from gaining Party leadership in 1985 was a daunting challenge. The legacy of Stalinism, a broken economy, a crippled political system, and the terror of Gulags and public’s fear of dissent certainly did prove too insurmountable to solve that the state collapsed in 1991 . Yet, this did not stop Gorbachev from attempting to preserve the system through his initiatives of perestroika and glasnost, which involuntarily led to the USSR’s demise. The former was an effort to restructure the economy by rejuvenating it, but what is done to the economy is inextricably linked to political changes. The goal was to redesign the Soviet’s heavy centralized government so that it was more open and responsive to market forces, thus ending the old regime’s price controls and monopolies . The nature of perestroika’s dramatic restructuring was painfully slow for Russians that they would later gather together to protest the lethargic adjustments and long lines they waited in as a result . At the same time, it uprooted the social and political system built on Communist rule so that elections were now injected with political freedom based on Leninist principles. Thus, Gorbachev attempted to imbed democratic seeds into the Soviet Union through perestroika because he stated that the

The disparity between the Soviet Union economy and that of the United States was what alerted Gorbachev that the Communist economy was not doing well. Soviet’s command economy was not concerned with matching supply and demand but with administering inputs and outputs. In other words, the economy was detached from the consumer and producers. The Communist countries were unable to catch up with globalization because of the inadequate resources. USSR did not have the capital to modernize their industries. On top of that, there was a big gap in the quantity production and the quality was evidently poor as well. Much of the money that was needed for its economy went to nuclear arms, space technology and to support its eastern bloc countries. ‘Economic problems, however, were not isolated to Russia alone, by 1989 the satellite states had accumulated a foreign debt of 49 billion,’ (Maier, 1997: 59). Economic and industrial progress degenerated further when the USSR withdrew its support from the satellite states that were heavily dependent on Russia. The Communist ideology began to decline so quickly that the socialist economic system no longer worked as the best system. Against the backdrop of such austere economic prospects, Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika indirectly implied that the soviet styled economy was obsolete and clearly failing. This brought about

Under the ruins of the World War II (WWII), a new world order was beginning to appear. The old and weak European powers, were devastated from the war, and could no longer hold the world on its shoulders. Subsequently, new superpowers had to take over the control; they were the USSR and the USA. Soon after the end of WWII, new international tensions became apparent after the break of the Grand Alliance (Taylor, 1993, p. 49). The disagreements between the new superpowers grew to a point where the Cold War became a fact. That new world order split the world ideologically into two camps; the anti-imperialist(USA) and the anti-capitalist(USSR)(Ibid, p.51).The ideological war was underlined by a geopolitical transition, subsequently creating