The Fall of the Soviet Union

The era that preceded the formation of the Soviet Union was earmarked with social unrest, famine, and failed governments. After many struggles, many smaller soviet republics joined to form a large conglomerate nation, known as the Soviet Union in 1922. Vladimir Lenin, leader at the time, replaced the failing capitalist government with a communist government. . At the end of WWII, most of Eastern and Central Europe’s countries were being occupied by the soviet army. They came to be controlled by the Soviet government and pulled back behind an “iron Curtain”. Winston Churchill’s famed Iron curtain remark refers to the countries that fell under the spell of the Soviet Union and shut out the western world ways of capitalism. The countries of

In 1945, one major war ended and another began. After World War II, the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union were involved in what became known as the Cold War, which was a period of mutual fear and distrust. The war was given the name "cold" because the two sides never actually came into direct armed conflict; it was a war of words and ideologies rather than a shooting war (Crawford, 2009, p. 6). The Soviet Union and the United States came out from World War II as the new world superpowers, and despite their common victory with the defeat of their enemies, their primary bond was broken. There were deep-rooted ideological, economic, and political differences between the United States and the Soviet Union prior to the Second World War. Their differences, most notably their political systems and their visions of a postwar Europe, were intensified as a result of their mutual suspicions and during and after the Second World War drove the allied nations into an ideological conflict that lasted for 45 years.

The Cold War is over, but the influence of the Soviet Union is not. The Soviet Union grew out of the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War in 1917. Eight leaders and 74 years later the Soviet Union fell in 1991. The story of those 74 years leaves much to tell. However, three areas are most necessary to understand: its cultural achievements, its military strength, and its political oppression.

In 1989, the world saw the fall of the United Soviet Socialist Republic (U.S.S.R.), which was also known as the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a block of 15 Communist Eastern European states that was ruled by one government with various puppet governments located throughout the states. Its collapse brought about new issues that the world had never had to deal with before. The fall of such a large block of Soviet states created many problems and some of the solutions that were used to solve these problems, as well as many of the tensions that were created during this time, still affect the world today. Some of the ramifications resulting from the Soviet Union’s collapse are still being felt; however, many problems have been solved

Former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev presided over the disintegration of a country based on an uncompromising ideological dogma, the unlikely inheritor of Marxist/Leninist communist philosophy. The Soviet Union’s unwieldy economic superstructure left it vulnerable to Ronald Reagan’s aggressive economic/military policy, an approach based on the belief that a military build-up would force the Soviets to spend to keep pace, an effective strategy because it pushed the Soviet economy over the edge into ruin. The subsequent implosion ended communist domination in Eastern Europe and opened the way for democratic elements that radically altered the political landscape in Moscow. When the Soviet Union officially came to an end in 1993, it briefly recalled the end of tsarist rule in 1917, with the potential for the kind of chaos and violence that turned the Russian Revolution into a bloodbath. President Boris Yeltsin used the military to disband parliament but his call for new elections moved the country toward a more open, democratic form of government. Lacking any real background in representative government, Russia ultimately proved incapable of fulfilling the promise of democratic government and descended into a form of anarchy riddled by increasingly strong criminal elements. In recent years, the rise of Boris Putin, a new strongman in Moscow, helped restore a sense of order and allowed the resurgence of communist elements. The government that now holds power, and which

During the era of the Cold War, starting in 1947 and definitively ending in 1991, the United States and the Soviet Union faced off in conflicts with each other through smaller states.

President Reagan and the White house began a military buildup that stimulated a new arms race. Subsequently, the Reagan administration adopted the Strategic Defense Initiative to build up a space shield for security and drove the Soviet Union into an arms race. As a result of the competition created by the Cold War between the two superpowers, the USSR challenged by the US, heavy industrialization was introduced to accommodate defensive expenditures and as a result a strain was imposed on the Soviet budget. Economically under pressure with the combination of Mikhail Gobrachev’s radical policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (free market economy) the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and gave rise to 15 different nations.

The main causes of the fall of the Soviet Union was because the Soviet Union couldn’t afford to keep up with the arms race during the cold war, the government couldn’t manage to keep the people content with things such as housing and food and communism government system completely failed in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was built on about the same territory as the Russian Empire which it succeeded. After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Socialism was a newly formed government that was developed by a philosophy. Socialism government is when property is held in common and not individually and relationship are governed. Socialism gradual transition to Communism. Communism is a political theory that Karl Marx came up with. Communism is when the society in which property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs. The state of Bolsheviks indentation was to overcome national differences and rather to create one monolithic state based on a centralized economical and political system. This state was built on a Communist ideas, was eventually transformed into a totalitarian state when the Communist leadership had complete control over the country.

The Cold War was a state of political hostility between the U.S and the Soviet bloc, the most powerful nations in the world. The two countries fought together as allies in World War II but toward the end of the War the two nations competing ideologies and visions of the post War prevented them from working together. The Cold War was by far the biggest threat to human existence the world has ever seen, although their was never any declaration of War between the two competing nations, the Soviet Union and the United States both had weapons of mass destruction, that was capable of destroying human life as we know today. From the end of World War II up until the collapse of the Soviet Union the two nations competed in expanding their spheres of influence throughout the world. By 1960 Communism had maintained a high degree of focus, coordination, discipline, and strategic coherence in spreading its ideologies throughout the world,the West seemed to be quite the opposite. In discussing the Cold War throughout this period, you will catch a glimpse of the various events that put the united states and the West on the defensive against communism.

When the term “Cold War” was popularised to refer to post-war tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, interpreting the course and origins of the conflict became a source of heated controversy among historians. In particular, who was responsible for the breakdown of Soviet-U.S. relations after the Second World War? During World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union were allied against the Axis powers. However, in the years that followed the end of World War II, the alliance became uneasy, and signs of strain began to show. Historians have disagreed as to whether the conflict between the two superpowers was inevitable or may have been avoided. Further, what exactly the Cold War was and the sources of conflict. While there remains great diversity of opinion regarding these questions, it is commonplace to refer to three broad “schools” of thought regarding the origins and end of the Cold War: “orthodox” explanations, “revisionism”, and “post-revisionism”.

The first and most simple reason the Soviet Union failed can be attributed to their geographical challenges. The Soviet Union suffered two problems in regard to geographic challenges. Firstly the country itself was far too vast, and its influence spread too far for there to be an easy to spread authority (Suny). With such as large state to control there was realistically no feasible way that influence from Moscow could control a large territory from Central Asia to Eastern Europe. This is a territory that contained various amounts of ethnicities, religions, and cultures. In an obvious perspective larger an state gets the harder it is to be controlled. Analytically speaking it is rather impossible to control such a territory from a central authority. With the Soviet centrally commanded system, authority from Moscow could not be spread vastly without a consequential use of money and resources. Secondly The Soviet Union was blessed with an abundance of natural resources. At first glance it would be easy to view this abundance of resources as a blessing for a powerful nation. However from a historical angle the Soviet Union was trapped in resource curse. A resource curse being an

The USSR was formed in 1922 and the earth was introduced to its first communist operating state. In February of 1917, Russia saw crowds of angry citizens flood the streets of Petrograd in protest of the brutal losses suffered in WWI. This conflict lead to a fall of the czar autocracy that had reigned over Russia, and power was shared between the provisional government and the Petrograd Soviet. During this vulnerable state that Russia found itself in, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin launched a successful coup of the government and established the world’s first Marxist state. This significance of this event lies within the fact that this was the first time that a form of extreme socialism (Bolshevism) had committed itself to violent revolution and seized control of a major state. This set up a nation, that in nature, had an ideology that conflicted with those of which the United States were founded upon. This Union of states that were all governed under the same

The Soviet Union was an empire centered in Moscow, Russia. The Soviet Union consisted of more than just Russia, it consisted of fifteen sovereign republics, and its formal title was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In addition to the 15 sovereign republics that comprised the Soviet Union after World War II there was also the Soviet Outer Empire. The Soviet Union Outer Empire was commonly referred to as the Soviet Bloc, which consisted of East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. The Soviet empire extended from Berlin in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east.

The Cold War from 1945 to 1960 exemplified the consequences of having two world superpowers. Following the conclusion of World War Two, the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the top nations around the world. The two nations were polar opposites. The United States was a flourishing democracy and an ideology of freedom for citizens. The Soviet Union under the control of the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin was a strict totalitarian government with communist ideals. The Cold War period would represent the tension, controversy, and differences between the two nations attempting to be considered the top power militarily, socially, economically and politically.

Communism was a very popular ideology which was in great favor during the inter-war period but in the 1980s, there was an unanticipated demise of Communism. So how can we explain the sudden collapse of communism in Europe? I would argue that there were several forces converging to the breakdown of communism in Eastern Europe. Factors such as the high expenses of engaging in nuclear arms, the lost of their satellite states, the growing economic disparity in Europe and the changing attitudes and values of the younger people converged together that brought communism to the brink of collapse in Europe. The most important factor, however, was the role of Gorbachev and his