(USSR) Former country in N Asia and E Europe that reverted to independent states 1991; see Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.
history
For history before 1922, see Russia, history. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formed 1922, and a constitution adopted 1923. Lenin, who had led the new regime, died 1924, and an internal party controversy broke out between the communist leaders Stalin and Trotsky over the future of socialism and the necessity of world revolution.
Stalin’s socialism
Trotsky was expelled 1927, and Stalin’s policy of socialism in one country adopted. During the first two five-year plans 1928–39, heavy and light industries were developed, and agriculture collectivized. The country was transformed as industry grew at an annual (official) rate of 16% with, as a consequence, the size of the manual work force quadrupling and the urban population doubling. However, the social cost was enormous, with millions dying in the Ukraine and Kazakhstan famine of 1932–34, as well as in the political purges and liquidations launched during the 1920s and 1930s. Leading party figures, including Nikolai Bulkharin, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev were victims of these “show trial” purges. In the process, the Soviet political system was deformed, as inner-party democracy gave way to autocracy based around a Stalinist personality cult.
From 1933 the USSR put forward a policy of collective resistance to aggression. In 1939 it concluded a nonaggression pact with Germany, and Poland was invaded and divided between them. The USSR invaded Finland 1939 but signed a brief peace 1940. For events 1941–45, see World War II. Some 25 million Russians perished during this “Great Patriotic War”.
Cold War
During the immediate postwar years the USSR concentrated on consolidating its empire in Eastern Europe and on providing indirect support to anticolonial movements in the Far East. Relations with the West, particularly the US, sharply deteriorated. On the death of Stalin in March 1953, a collective leadership, including Nikita Khrushchev (CPSU first or general secretary 1953–64), Georgi Malenkov (prime minister 1953–55), Nikolai Bulganin (prime minister 1955–58), Vyacheslav Molotov (foreign minister 1953–56), and Lazar Kaganovich, assumed power. They combined to remove the secret-police chief Lavrenti Beria in Dec 1953, and introduced a new legal code that regularized the political system. Strong differences emerged within the collective leadership over future political and economic reform, and a fierce succession struggle developed.
Khrushchev’s “liberalization policy” Khrushchev emerged dominant from this contest, ousting Malenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich (the “antiparty” group) June 1957 and Bulganin June 1958 to combine the posts of prime minister and party first secretary. At the 1961 Party Congress, Khrushchev introduced a new party program for rapid agricultural, industrial, and technological development to enable the USSR to move ahead of the US in economic terms by 1980 and attain full communism. He launched a “virgin lands” cultivation campaign in Kazakhstan, increased rural incentives, and decentralized industrial management through the creation of new regional economic councils (sovnarkhozy). In addition, Khrushchev introduced radical party rule changes, sanctioned a cultural thaw, and devised the principle of “peaceful coexistence” with the West to divert resources from the military sector. These reforms enjoyed initial success; having exploded its first hydrogen bomb 1953 and launched a space satellite (Sputnik I) 1957, the
USSR emerged as a serious technological rival to the US. But Khrushchev’s liberalization policy and his denunciation of the errors and crimes of the Stalin era at the Feb 1956 Party Congress had serious repercussions among the USSR’s satellites —a nationalist revolt in Hungary and a breach in relations with Yugoslavia and China—while his administrative reforms were fiercely opposed by senior party and state officials. After a series of poor harvests in overcropped Kazakhstan and the Cuban missile crisis 1962, these opponents succeeded in ousting Khrushchev at the Central Committee meeting Oct 1964.
A new and conservative collective leadership, based around the figures of Leonid Brezhnev (CPSU general secretary 1964–82), Alexei Kosygin (prime minister 1964–80), Nikolai Podgorny (state president 1965–77), and Mikhail Suslov (ideology secretary 1964–82), assumed power and immediately abandoned Khrushchev’s sovnarkhozy and party reforms and reimposed strict censorship in the cultural sphere. Priority was now given to the expansion and modernization of the Soviet armed forces, including the creation of a naval force with global reach. This, coupled with the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia 1968, resulted in a renewal of the Cold War 1964–70.
the Brezhnev doctrine
During the later 1960s, Leonid Brezhnev emerged as the dominant figure. He governed in a cautious and consensual manner and brought into the Politburo leaders from all the significant centers of power, including the KGB (Yuri Andropov), the army (Marshal Andrei Grechko), and the diplomatic service (Andrei Gromyko). Working with Prime Minister Kosygin, Brezhnev introduced a series of minor economic reforms and gave new priority to agricultural and consumer-goods production. He oversaw the framing of a new constitution 1977 where the limits for internal dissent were clearly set out and the “Brezhnev doctrine” was also promulgated 1968, establishing the power of the USSR to intervene to “preserve socialism” in E Europe as it did in Czechoslovakia.
era of détente
Brezhnev, who became the new state president May 1977, emerged as an international figure during the 1970s, frequently meeting Western leaders during a new era of détente. The landmarks of this period were the SALT I and SALT II Soviet-US arms-limitation agreements of 1972 and 1979 (see Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) and the Helsinki Accord 1975, which brought Western recognition of the postwar division of Eastern Europe. Another cultural thaw resulted in the emergence of a vocal dissident movement. The political and military influence of the USSR was extended into Africa with the establishment of new communist governments in Mozambique 1974, Angola and Ethiopia 1975, and South Yemen 1978. The détente era was brought to an end by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in Dec 1979 and the Polish crisis 1980–81. The final years of the Brezhnev administration were ones of hardening policy, mounting corruption, and economic stagnation.
Andropov and Chernenko
Yuri Andropov, the former KGB chief, was elected CPSU leader on Brezhnev's death Nov 1982 and began energetically to introduce a series of radical economic reforms aimed at streamlining and decentralizing the planning system and inculcating greater labor discipline. Andropov also launched a campaign against corrupt and complacent party and state bureaucrats. These measures had a perceptible impact on the Soviet economy during 1983, but when Andropov died Feb 1984 he was succeeded by the cautious and elderly Brezhnev supporter Konstantin Chernenko. Chernenko held power as a stop-gap leader for 13 months, his sole initiative being a renewed search for détente with the US that was rejected by the hard-line Reagan administration.
Gorbachev’s “market socialism”
On Chernenko’s death in March 1985, power was transferred to a new generation led by Mikhail Gorbachev, at 54 the CPSU’s youngest leader since Stalin, although Andrei Gromyko was actually president of the USSR 1985–88. Gorbachev introduced a number of reforms. He began to free farmers and factory managers from bureaucratic interference and to increase material incentives in a “market socialist” manner. Working with Ideology Secretary Yegor Ligachev and Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, he restructured party and state bureaucracies and replaced cautious Brezhnevites with ambitious technocrats. Ligachev soon became the leading voice for the conservative wing of the Politburo and was increasingly considered an obstacle to Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost (“openness”). Ligachev was demoted to the agriculture portfolio, and he was openly ridiculed and accused of corruption. Gorbachev made explicit his renunciation of the “Brezhnev doctrine” 1989.
These changes were not lost on the opposition leaders in the Baltic republics or on Communist deputies in the newly assertive Soviet Parliament. Lithuania declared it would permit free elections, then the Lithuanian Communist Party declared its independence from Moscow. By Jan 1990, Gorbachev was faced with growing calls for secession from the Soviet Union, and he had been forced to reconsider his earlier opposition to a multiparty system in the USSR itself. He also was provoked to declare a state of emergency and despatch troops to quell warfare between Armenians and Azeris, fighting each other for religious and territorial reasons.
détente initiative
Working with Foreign Secretary Edvard Shevardnadze, Gorbachev made skillful use of the foreign media to put the case against space weapons and nuclear testing. He met US president Reagan in Geneva and Reykjavik in Nov 1985 and Oct 1986, and, at the Washington summit of Dec 1987, he concluded a treaty designed to eliminate medium-range Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) from European soil. This treaty was ratified at the Moscow summit of May–June 1988. As part of the new détente initiative, the USSR also withdrew all its troops from Afghanistan in Feb 1989 and made broad cutbacks in the size of its conventional forces 1989–90.
glasnost and perestroika
Gorbachev pressed for an acceleration (uskoreniye) of his domestic, economic, and political program of restructuring (perestroika) from 1987, but faced growing opposition both from conservatives grouped around Ligachev and radicals led by Boris Yeltsin. Gorbachev’s glasnost policy helped fan growing nationalist demands for secession among the republics of the Baltic and Transcaucasia. To add momentum to the reform process, in June 1988 Gorbachev convened a special 4,991 member All-Union Party Conference, the first since 1941. At this meeting a radical constitutional overhaul was approved. A new “super-legislature”, the Congress of the USSR People’s Deputies (CUPD), was created, from which a full-time working parliament was subsequently to be elected, headed by a state president with increased powers.
The members of this CUPD were to be chosen in competition with one another. The authority of the local soviets was enhanced and their structures made more democratic, while, in the economic sphere, it was agreed to reintroduce private leasehold farming, reform the price system, and allow part-time private enterprise in the service and small-scale industry sectors.
“socialist pluralism”
The June 1988 reforms constituted the most fundamental reordering of the Soviet policy since the “Stalinist departure” of 1928, entailing the creation of a new type of “socialist democracy”, as well as a new mixed economic system. The CUPD elections of March–April 1989 showed clear opposition to conservative apparatchiks. In May 1989, the CUPD elected Gorbachev as its chair, and thus as state president. During 1989 this movement toward “socialist pluralism” was furthered by Gorbachev’s abandonment of the Brezhnev Doctrine and his sanctioning of the establishment of noncommunist and “reform communist” governments elsewhere in Eastern Europe. This led to the ruling regimes of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania being overthrown in a wave of “people’s power”. Responding to these developments in Feb 1990, the CPSU Central Committee agreed to create a new directly elected state executive presidency on US and French models. In March 1990 the Soviet Parliament authorized private ownership of the means of production,
forbidden since the 1920s. Further constitutional amendments made 1990 supported the right of self-determination, including secession of republics, and ended the CPSU’s monopoly of power.
popular discontent
The Gorbachev reform program showed signs of running out of control 1989–90 as a result both of growing nationalist tensions (which in April 1989 and Jan 1990 had prompted the despatch of troops to the Caucasus region, first to break up demonstrations in Tbilisi, Georgia, and then to attempt to quell a civil war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh) and mounting popular discontent over the failure of perestroika to improve living standards.
end of Cold War
In their Dec 1989 summit meeting in Malta, Gorbachev and US president Bush declared an end to the Cold War, opening the possibility of most-favored-nation trading status with the US, membership in General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and an influx of Western investment. A Gorbachev trip to Canada and the US followed May–June 1990 and a Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in Paris Nov 1990.
moves toward independence in the republics Throughout 1990 the political and economic situation deteriorated. In pluralist elections held at local and republic levels, anticommunist, nationalist, and radical deputies polled strongly, particularly in the Baltic republics and cities. Their new governments issued declarations of republican sovereignty and, in the case of the Baltics, independence. These Moscow refused to recognize, and imposed a temporary economic blockade on Lithuania. As the year progressed, a “war of laws” developed between the center and the republics, who kept back funds (leading to a worsening federal budget deficit), and the system of central economic planning and resource distribution began to break down. As a consequence, with crime and labor unrest also increasing, the USSR’s national income fell by at least 4% during 1990 and was to decline by a further 15% during 1991. Indeed, despite a bumper, but ill-collected, harvest, mounting food shortages led to rationing and an emergency inte
rnational airlift of food aid during the winter of 1990–91.
breakup of the CPSU
The CPSU also began to fracture during 1990 as a result of nationalist challenges within the republics and divisions among conservatives (grouped in the Soyuz and Communists for Russia bodies), liberals (Communists for Democracy), and radicals (Democratic Platform) over the direction and pace of economic and political reform. A split was formalized at the 28th CPSU Congress July 1990, when Boris Yeltsin, the new indirectly elected president of the RSFSR, and Gavriil Popov and Anatoly Sobchak, radical mayors of Moscow and Leningrad, resigned their party membership. Earlier, in the RSFSR, a new Russian Communist Party had been formed.
Gorbachev’s swing to the right
In Dec 1990, concerned at the gathering pace of economic and political disintegration and ethnic strife, Gorbachev persuaded the Soviet parliament to vote him increased emergency presidential powers and approve a new federalized political structure. Subsequently, under pressure from the Soyuz group, the military, and the KGB, a clear rightward shift in policy became apparent. This was manifested by the appointment of the conservative Valentin Pavlov as prime minister, Gennady Yanayev as vice president, and Boris Pugo as interior minister; by the resignation of foreign minister, Shevardnadze, who warned of an impending dictatorship; by the dispatch of paratroopers to Vilnius and Rega to seize political and communications buildings; and by retightening of press and television censorship. In protest, striking miners called for Gorbachev's resignation.proposed new union treaty
From the spring of 1991, after his proposal to preserve the USSR as a “renewed federation of equal sovereign republics” secured public approval in a unionwide referendum (though boycotted by six republics), Gorbachev again attempted to reconstruct a center-left reform alliance with liberals and radicals. In April 1991 a pact aimed at achieving stable relations between the federal and republican governments and concerned with economic reform (price liberalization, progressive privatization, and the control of political strikes) was signed by the presidents of nine republics; the Baltic States, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova refused to sign. Two months later, the draft of a new Union Treaty, entailing a much greater devolution of authority and the establishment of a new two-chamber federal legislature and a directly elected executive president, was also approved by nine republics. In July 1991 Gorbachev’s standing was further enhanced by his attendance, as an invited guest, at the Group of Seven (G7) summit of t
he leaders of the chief industrialized Western countries, held in London, and the signing, in Moscow, of a Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), to reduce the number of US and Soviet long-range nuclear missiles. At home, however, Boris Yeltsin, who was popularly elected as the RSFR’s president June 1991, pressed for even greater reform and in July 1991 Communist Party cells were banned from operating in factories, farms, and government offices in the Russian Republic. In the same month a Democratic Reform Movement was formed by Eduard Shevardnadze, Alexander Yakovlev, and the mayors of Moscow and Leningrad, Anatoly Sobchak and Gavriil Popov.
abortive anti-Gorbachev coup
These liberal-radical initiatives raised disquiet among CPSU conservatives and in June 1991 Prime Minister Pavlov unsuccessfully attempted to persuade the Soviet parliament to vote him extra powers. Two months later, on Monday 19 Aug 1991, a day before the new union treaty was to be signed, an attempted coup was launched by a reactionary alliance of leaders of the Communist Party apparatchiki, the military-industrial complex, the KGB, and the armed forces. It was declared in the early hours of the morning that President Gorbachev was ill and that Vice President Gennady Yanayev would take over as president, as part of an eight-person emergency committee, which also included Prime Minister Pavlov, Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov, KGB Chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, and Interior Minister Boris Pugo. The committee assumed control over radio and television, banned demonstrations and all but eight newspapers, imposed a curfew, and sent tanks into Moscow. They failed, however, to arrest the Russian president Boris Yeltsin,
who defiantly stood out as head of a democratic “opposition state” based at the Russian Parliament, the so-called “White House”, where external telephone links remained in operation. Yeltsin called for a general strike and the reinstatement of President Gorbachev. On Wednesday morning, having failed to wrest control of the “White House” and win either international or unionwide acknowledgment of the change of regime, and having endured large demonstrations in Moscow, St Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), Chisinau (Moldova), and Lviv (Ukraine) on Tuesday, the coup disintegrated. The junta’s leaders were arrested and in the early hours of Thursday 22 Aug President Gorbachev, fully reinstated, arrived back in Moscow. There were 15 fatalities during the crisis.
aftermath of the coup
In the wake of the failed coup, established communist structures, as well as the union itself, rapidly disintegrated, faced by a popular backlash which resulted in such icons of communism as the Felix Dzerzhinsky statue outside the KGB headquarters in Moscow being toppled and the Red Flag burned, being replaced by traditional, in some cases tsarist, symbols. President Gorbachev initially misjudged the changed mood, intimating his continued faith in the popularly discredited Communist Party and seeking to keep to a minimum of changes in personnel and institutions. However, forced by pressure exerted by the public and by Boris Yeltsin, whose stature both at home and abroad had been hugely enhanced, a succession of far-reaching reforms were instituted which effectively sounded the death knell of Soviet communism and resulted in the fracturing of the union and its subsequent refounding on a much changed and truncated basis.
The new union cabinet was effectively selected by Yeltsin and staffed largely with radical democrats from the Russian Republic —the Russian prime minister Ivan Silaev became the Soviet prime minister. Yeltsin also declared himself to have assumed charge of the armed forces within the Russian Republic and, at a heated session of the Russian Parliament, pressurized President Gorbachev into signing a decree suspending the activities of the Russian Communist Party. In addition, a new Russian national guard was established and control assumed over all economic assets in the republic. Recognizing the changed realities, Gorbachev announced 24 Aug 1991 that he was immediately resigning as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and ordered its Central Committee to dissolve itself.
republics declare independence
The attempted coup also speeded up the movement toward dissolution of the Soviet Union. During the coup, when Red Army tanks were sent into their capitals with orders to seize radio and television stations, the Estonian and Latvian parliaments followed the earlier example of Lithuania and declared independence. After the coup the largely conservative-communist controlled republics of Azerbaijan, Belarus, and Uzbekistan, as well as the key republic of Ukraine, also joined the Baltics, Georgia, Moldova, and Armenia in declaring their independence. Their governments acted partly in the hope of shoring up their authority and privileges and partly because they feared Russian domination of the existing USSR and possible future territorial disputes.
new union treaty signed
At an emergency session of the Congress of People’s Deputies, the union was partially salvaged through the negotiation of a new union treaty in which each republic was to be allowed to decide its own terms of association, with much greater power being devolved from the center in what represented a new loose confederation, or “Union of Sovereign States”, though with the armed forces retained under a single military command. Ten republics—the three Baltics, Georgia, and Moldova being the exceptions— declared a willingness to sign this agreement. The Congress also voted 5 Sept 1991 to establish a new system of government in which it would be abolished and its powers would be assumed by a revamped, two-chamber supreme soviet, with its upper chamber chosen by the republics and its decisions ratified by the latter; a state council (government), comprising President Gorbachev and the heads of the ten republics; and an interrepublican economic committee with equal representation from all 15 republics and chaired by I
van Silaev. It also acknowledged the rights of republics to secede, opening the way 6 Sept 1991 for President Gorbachev to formally recognize the independence of the Baltic states by decree.
decentralization and new realities
The possibility of forging a new, decentralized union receded as 1991 progressed. Concerned at the accumulation of political and economic authority by Russia, several of the republics began to seek full independence so as to escape Russian domination, refusing to sign new economic and political agreements. Participation in the new supreme soviet and state council was patchy, their gatherings attracting members from, at most, ten republics. Although a declaration of intent to maintain a “common economic zone” of interrepublican free trade and to uphold existing factory ties was initialed Oct 1991, along with a civic and interethnic accord, the republics proved unable to agree on specific details of a proposed new economic and political union. As a consequence, President Gorbachev occupied the position of a figurehead leader, possessing little real authority, although his position was slightly strengthened by the return of Shevardnadze to head the foreign relations ministry Nov 1991. Instead, the preeminent lea
der in the new USSR, governing significantly from the former office of the CPSU Politburo, was Russia’s president, Boris Yeltsin. In Nov 1991 the Russian Republic took over control of the Soviet money supply and exchange rate, and began implementing a market-centered economic reform program. On 14 Nov preliminary agreement was reached on the formation of a new “Union of Sovereign States”, but in a subsequent meeting on 25 Nov the republican delegations that attended refused to initial the treaty.
The growing power of the individual republics became apparent in late Nov when the Group of Seven (G7) industrial countries reached a Soviet debt-deferral agreement with the USSR and included eight of the republics as signatories. On 8 Dec 1991 the most powerful of the republics—Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine—agreed to form the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a development denounced by Gorbachev. By mid-Dec, the five Central Asian republics (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) had announced that they would join the CIS, and Gorbachev had agreed on a transfer of power from the centralized government to the CIS. The remaining republics (Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova) except Georgia, torn by civil war, joined the others in signing agreements on 21 Dec to establish the commonwealth, formally designated an alliance of independent states. The formal dissolution of the USSR came on 25 Dec when Gorbachev resigned as president.