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poligny@webear.com Last updated on Last updated on Abril 05, 2000
Copyright Poligny 1997-2000
R U S S I A
RUSIA. To write about Russia is a task about the size of that country. Not only is it one of the largest, but its politics and economy are changing so rapidly that it is dificult to keep up to date. As with some other large countries, when Russia sneazes the world trembles.
Toward the end of the 1980s there was a revolution of the comunications which later brought in the 1990s the globalization of the economies.
Russia with its comunism was cut off the western world and tried to remain like that. At that time it was said that the private use of modems allowed western style to pass the russian controls and show to the minority which used them the true west world. The question is that president Gorbachev loosened the controls and tried to change the russian economy to a western style.
What happened was really a technical change. Do you know that in ski the kristiania was until the 1950s a switch of the upper body toward the valley followed by the skies and legs afterwards. Later on it became like a twist where you turn at the same time the upper body say to the right and the legs and skies to the left.
For Russia something similar happened. They searched the happiness of their poeple through millions of orders. Not surprisingly during the Tzars an order was an UKAS and it remained in literature like an order imposible to desobey. Hating the Tzars the russian comunist reinvented the UKAS. The problem with the million orders is that many people started to take advantage of others obediance and got rich on their behalf. As they are far from being dum even if sentimental the inteligentsia searched for some way out.
During this century the USA and the AEA (American Economic Asociation) were devoted in changing the driving of the economy from man produced ideas to practical maximization of economic variables, by determining their reciprocal influence. You can see an example of that by the way the FEDS determine the interest rate as a function of avoiding inflation. But lets get back to Russia.
Today we can see that many small countries have left comunist economies efectively but Russia is still strugling to do that. The main reason appears to be that western capitals can help small or medium coutries but have not enough liquidity (not even the IMF) to help giant Russia.What also helped small comunist countries is the fact that they are nearer to the western capitalism than Russia. Even Russia and China have a different path. China had only 18% of its population working in state enterprises while Russia had 90%. Russia now still has a similar system of gang they had before but now they are capitalist. However the enourmous effort done by the russians to improve their economy is highly appreciated by the west and also helped when posible.
The formation of citizens asociations for honest purposes can also improve the stability of the system as can also some religious congregations. Improving relations with hight tech small foreign firms can benefit research, exchanging technology for market size.
The first inhabitants.
But lets start from the beguinning. European Russia was occupied by Indo-European and Ural-Altaic peoples from about the 2d millennium BC. In the early centuries AD the Goths, the Huns and the Avars ruled the area. The Khazars (7th century) and the Bulgars (8th century) established substantial states. Slavic settlements in the area are documented from the 6th century on.
The SLAVS probably came from southern Poland and the Baltic shore and settled in the region of mixed forest and meadowlands north of the fertile but unprotected steppe lands of the south.
The Vikings.
Later on the Vikings, warrior traders, on their route to Constantinople exacted tribute from the slaves.Around 862 a group of Vikings led by Rurik took control of Novgorod and a few years later of Kiev.
The invaders became slavicized and ruled the region with their grand dukes. Duke Vladimir converted to Eastern Cristianity around 988. Kiev developed into a major cultural center, with splendid architecture, richly adorned churches, and monasteries that spread Byzantine civilization. This lasted for more than two centuries until the Mogols (tartars), surging from central Asia overran the South Russian plane. Kiev was sacked in 1240 and they established their control over most of European Russia for two centuries.
The Mogols
The Mogols did not really stay in Russia but requiered a tribute payment in silver and made frequent raids to mantain the russians in obedience. Politically the yoke was not burdensome, for the Mongols ruled indirectly through local princes, and the church was even shown respect and exempted from tribute (enabling it to assume a cultural and national leadership role). The most deleterious long-lasting effect of Mongol rule was isolation from Byzantium and western Europe, which led to a turning inward that produced an aggressive inferiority complex.
Members of the ruling family of Kievan Rus' had seized free lands in the northeast and colonized them with peasants to whom they offered protection in return for payments in money and kind. Each one of these princes was full master of his domain, which he administered and defended with the help of his retainers (Boyars). A semblance of family unity was maintained by the claim of common descent from Rurik and of a "national" consciousness based on the Kievan cultural heritage.
Some of the local princes--for example, those of Vladimir, Yaroslavl, Moscow, Suzdal, and Tver--became dominant in their region and gradually forced the weaker rulers (along with their boyars) into their own service. Of these principalities Moscow gradually emerged as the most powerful. Its ruler Ivan I (Ivan Kalita; r. 1328-41) was granted the title grand duke of Vladimir by the khanate as well as the right to collect tribute for the Mongols from neighboring principalities. His grandson Dimitry Donskoi won the first major Russian victory over the Mongols at Kulikovo (1380). Finally, after victory in a fierce civil war, the elimination of a main rival at Tver (1485), and the winning over of most small independent princes, IVAN III, grand duke of Moscow (r. 1462-1505), emerged as the sole ruler in central Russia. The Golden Horde had regained control after Kulikovo, but a century later it was seriously weakened by internal strife. In 1480, therefore, Ivan III successfully challenged Mongol overlordship by refusing the tribute.
The absolutist times.
The culmination of absolutism was dramatically symbolized by the grandson of Ivan III, Ivan IV (r. 1533-84). Assuming (1547) the title of tsar, he underlined his claim to the succession of both Byzantium and the Golden Horde. The conquests of the khanates of Kazan (1552) and Astrakhan (1556) followed, putting the entire course of the Volga under Russian control. These conquests initiated further expansion (1581) into Siberia, whose western regions were conquered by the Cossack leader Yermak Timofeyevich, sponsored by the Novgorod family of salt merchants, the Stroganovs.
Relying on his absolute power and increased military potential, Ivan IV attempted to eliminate the competition of Lithuania and gain a port on the Baltic. The 25-year war (1558-83) against Poland-Lithuania, Livonia, and Sweden--accompanied by several devastating raids of Crimean Tatars against Moscow (for example, in 1571)--ended in failure and seriously debilitated the country. To mobilize all resources and cope with internal opposition, Ivan IV set up his own personal guard and territorial administration (oprichnina, 1565-72), whose exactions and oppression did great damage to both the economy and the social stability of the realm. The combined needs of the military servitor class for labor and of the government for tax-paying peasants led to legislation limiting the mobility of peasants. The edicts of Ivan's successors (Fyodor I, r. 1584-98, and Boris Godunov, r. 1598-1605) initiated a process that culminated in the complete enserfment of the Russian peasantry (Code of 1649).
The Muscovite dynasty ended in 1598 with the death of Ivan IV's son Fyodor I. Real power during Fyodor's reign had been exercised by his brother-in-law Boris Godunov, who was chosen to succeed him. Although Boris was a strong ruler, he was regarded by many as a usurper. The exhausted country was, therefore, precipitated into turmoil marked by the appearance of a series of pretenders to the throne and provoking invasions by Poland, Sweden, and the Crimean Tatars ( 1598-1613). Disgruntled boyar families, enserfed peasants, Cossaks, and lower clergy tried in turn to take advantage of the anarchy, but none succeeded.
The Romanov Dynasty
Eventually, a militia of noble servitors (dvoriane) and townspeople of the northeast, based in Nizhni Novgorod, expelled the Poles from Moscow, drove back the Swedes and Cossacks, and elected young Michael Romanov as tsar in 1613. The Romanov dynasty was to rule Russia until 1917.
During the 17th century the religious crisis exacerbated the cultural conflict over the extent and character of Westernization. Trade contacts, especially with England and the Dutch, brought foreigners to Russia, and diplomatic exchanges grew more frequent as Russia became involved in European military and diplomatic events. The importation of Western technological innovations for military purposes brought in their wake foreign fashions and cultural goods. The trend was reinforced following the incorporation of eastern Ukraine (1654). The ecclesiastical academy in Kiev (founded in 1637 by the Ukrainian churchman Peter Mohyla) educated future clergy (and some laymen) according to contemporary European neoscholastic philosophical and juridical curricula; its graduates often continued their studies at central and western European universities. Better trained and more learned than the native Muscovite clerics, the graduates of the Kievan academy were welcomed in Moscow.
Peter Viliki (the tall or the great)
By dint of his driving energy and ruthlessness, Peter I (r. 1682-1725) transformed Russia and brought it into the concert of European nations. He made many trips to western Europe to find new ideas for Russia. A struggle of almost 20 years with Charles XII of Sweden (1700-21) and wars with Ottoman Turkey (1710-11) and Persia (1722-23) radically changed Russia's international position (symbolized by Peter's assumption of the new title of emperor in 1721). By the Treaty of Nystad (1721) with Sweden, Russia acquired the Baltic province of Livonia (including Estonia and most of Latvia), giving it a firm foothold on the Baltic Sea and a direct relationship with western Europe. In the south gains were modest, but they marked the beginning of a Russian imperial offensive on the Black and Caspian seas.
A navy was created, and the army was reorganized along professional Western lines, the peasantry furnishing the recruits and nobility the officers. The local administration, however, remained a weak link in the institutional chain, although it maintained the vast empire in obedience. The peasantry was subjected to compulsory labor (as in the building of the new capital, Saint Petersburg, begun in 1703) and to military service, and every individual adult male peasant was assessed with a head, or poll, tax. By these measures the state severed the last legal ties of the peasants to the land and transformed them into personal serfs, virtually chattel, who could be moved and sold at will.
Other classes of society were not immune from state service either. Compulsory, lifelong service was imposed on the nobility, and their status was made dependent on ranks earned in military or administrative office (the Table of Ranks of 1722 also provided for automatic ennoblement of commoners through service). State service required education, and Peter introduced compulsory secular, Westernized schooling for the Russian nobleman. While resistance to compulsory service gradually forced its relaxation, education became an internalized value for most nobles who were culturally Westernized by the mid-18th century.
Peter's impetuousness did not allow the new structure and patterns to congeal, and after his death (1725) instability plagued the new institutional setup. Having had his son, Alexis, tortured to death for alleged treason, Peter abolished the traditional practice of succession, declaring (1722) that the emperor could choose his successor, which started a half century of unrest. The government proved unable to regularize its structure and practices through a code of laws because it was feared that such a code would delegate power to impersonal institutions. Personalized authority was favored by most subjects, however, as a protection against abuses of officials and as a source of rewards.
The tension between a rational and automatic rule of law and a personalized authority was never resolved in imperial Russia.
In the past, apart from the incorporation of small Finnish and Siberian tribes, Muscovy had known only one major territorial conquest involving non-Russian and non-Christian peoples--that of the Tatars of the Volga in the 16th century. Their elites were quite successfully incorporated into the tsar's service nobility (most eventually became Christians); as for the common folk, they were subject to a special tribute (iassak), but their internal tribal affairs were left to the care of traditional elders and chieftains.
The imperial acquisitions of the 18th century, however, brought a number of new nationalities under Russian rule: Ukrainians, Poles, Crimean Tatars, Jews, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Baltic Germans. Wherever workable, these nationalities' elites were recruited into the military and civil establishments. The common people continued to be allowed their own traditional institutions, provided they paid their taxes. The Russian church was discouraged from proselytizing. Legal disputes were resolved according to native customary law if no Russians were involved; otherwise Russian law took precedence. Before the birth of modern nationalism in the 19th century this approach worked well enough so that the imperial administration and the Russian elites were able to ignore the multiethnic character of the empire.
Imperial expansion and cultural Westernization were accompanied by economic modernization. Russia became a notable producer of iron, lumber, and naval stores (pine products) and witnessed the expansion of urbanization and social amenities. Catherine II intensified these developments and reaped their benefits. In February 1762 the nobles had been freed from compulsory state service by Peter III and had been given the right to travel abroad.y.
Napoleon Invasion.
Russia's involvement in the Napoleonic Wars proved in some ways an impediment to the normal evolution of the country. Napoleon I's invasion of Russia in 1812, although ending in his own defeat, was hardly a victory for Russia. The wars proved costly, and the ultimate political gains (Finland, penetration into the Caucasus) were rather slim despite Alexander's diplomatic role after 1815 (notably in the Holy Alliance). On the other hand, the reconstruction of devastated territories along the route of the French invasion and of Moscow (largely destroyed by fire during the French occupation) gave great impetus to an economic takeoff and involved entrepreneurial initiatives by peasants and urban commoners. It resulted in a rapid expansion of textile manufactures and the building trades, which generated capital and resources for later Russian industrialization.
Secret societies were organized under the leadership of progressive officers, and, on the sudden death of Alexander I in December 1825, they tried to take over the government. This abortive insurrection of the Decembrists traumatized Alexander's successor, his brother Nicholas I, into a policy of reaction and repression.
Nicholas I
Nicholas I's reign, however, was by no means static, and it proved seminal in many respects. In spite of strict censorship, the golden age of Russian literature occurred with the work of Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, the young Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoi, and Ivan Turgenev. Accompanying this literary flowering, discussion circles sprang up in Moscow and Saint Petersburg in which the intelligentsia debated Russia's identity, its historical path and role, and its relationship to western Europe (the Slavophiles and Westernizers represented the two main lines of interpretation that emerged).
Nicholas's government also brought to a successful conclusion the codification of laws (1833; the achievement of Mikhail Speransky), which enabled an orderly and systematic economic development of the country. The building of railroads was initiated, the currency was stabilized, and protective tariffs were introduced. As a result private enterprise was activated, especially in consumer goods (textiles), in which even peasant capital and skill participated. These developments only served to underscore the backward nature of an agrarian economy based on serf labor.
Nicholas's reign was for the most part peaceful, although Russia did participate in securing Greek independence (1828-29) and in curtailing Turkish power in the Black Sea. Nicholas also acted as the "gendarme of Europe" when he crushed the Polish insurrection of 1831-33 and helped Austria subdue the Hungarians in 1849. The empire further expanded in the Far East (in the Amur River valley). At the end of his reign Nicholas embroiled Russia in the Crimean War (1853-56). Although the immediate cause of the war was a dispute over the guardianship of the Holy Places in Palestine, underlying the conflict was the Eastern Question, the prolonged dispute over the disposition of the territories of the fast-declining Ottoman Empire. The Russians fought on home ground against British and French troops assisted by Sardinian and Austrian forces. The course of the war revealed the regime's weaknesses, and the death (1855) of Nicholas allowed his son, Alexander II, to conclude a peace (the Treaty of Paris, 1856) that debarred Russian warships from the Black Sea and Straits.
The 1861 serfdom abolition.
Russian society now expected and demanded far-reaching reforms, and Alexander acted accordingly. The crucial reform was the abolition of serfdom on Mar. 3 , 1861. In spite of many shortcomings it was a great accomplishment that set Russia on the way to becoming a full-fledged modern society. The main defects of the emancipation settlement were that cancellation of labor obligations took place gradually, the peasants were charged for the land they received in allotment (through a redemption tax), and the allotments proved inadequate in the long run. The last was a consequence of demographic pressures due to the administrative provisions of the act that restricted the mobility of the peasants and tied them to their village commune, which was held responsible for the payment of taxes; the former serfs remained second-class citizens and were denied full access to regular courts. Nevertheless, 20 million peasants became their own masters, they received land allotments that preserved them from immediate proletarization, and the emancipation process was accomplished peacefully.
Three other major reforms followed emancipation. The first was the introduction (1864) of elected institutions of local government, zemstvos, which were responsible for matters of education, health, and welfare; however, the zemstvos had limited powers of taxation, and they were subjected to close bureaucratic controls. Secondly, reform of the judiciary introduced jury trials, independent judges, and a professional class of lawyers. The courts, however, had no jurisdiction over "political" cases, and the emperor remained judge of the last resort. Finally, in 1874, the old-fashioned military recruiting system gave way to universal, compulsory 6-year military service.
Taken together, the reforms marked the end of the traditional socioeconomic system based on serfdom, and set Russia fully on the path to an industrial and capitalist revolution that brought problems of urbanization, proletarianization, and agrarian crisis in its wake. In part the difficulties resulted from unpreparedness and reluctance on the part of landowners (and many among the intellectual elites) to make necessary adjustments in their economic practices and social attitudes; but they were also caused by government policies that hindered the emergence of a genuine capitalist bourgeoisie and industrial labor force.
Nicolas Ist.
The acquisition of Caucasia, under Nicholas I, had required lengthy and difficult campaigns against mountain populations using guerrilla tactics to defend themselves. During the reign of Alexander II, largely on local military initiative, the independent or autonomous Muslim principalities of Central Asia were brought under Russian control and turned into virtual colonies for economic exploitation and peasant settlement.
Paralleling the south and southeastward expansions of the empire, the governor-general of Siberia, Nikolai N. Muraviev, forced China to relinquish control over the lower course of the Amur River (Treaty of Aigun, 1858), opening up the Pacific shore to Russian penetration and settlement.
The Russian Empire thus increased its territory and developed a genuinely colonial approach to the newly incorporated lands and peoples. With the possible exception of Georgia (incorporated early in the 19th century), native leadership was not absorbed into the Russian nobility or cultural elite, as had been the case in earlier conquests. New administrative practices developed in these territories with the help and participation of the military resulted in the imposition of oppressive rule and socio-economic discrimination against the native populations.These policies continued unabated under Alexander's son Nicholas II, whose government also curtailed Finland's traditional autonomy
Nicholas succeeded his father in 1894. The new emperor soon dashed society's hopes for political and social reform. To deflect attention from the worsening social situation and to neutralize the revitalized revolutionary movement, especially among the workers, the government embarked on imperialist adventures in the Far East, provoking a war with Japan (1904-05). Russia suffered a humiliating defeat, although the peace terms (Treaty of Portsmouth, 1905) were less onerous thanks to the mediation of U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt and Japan's exhaustion.
The Two Revolutions.
The war triggered widespread disturbances within Russia, including rural violence, labor unrest (in Saint Petersburg troops fired on a large crowd of demonstrating workers; Bloody Sunday, Jan. 22, 1905), and naval mutinies (most notably, that led by sailors of the battleship Potemkin in Odessa, June 1905). The turmoil of the Russian Revolution of 1905 culminated in the general strike of October, which forced Nicholas II to grant a constitution. Russia received a representative legislative assembly, the DUMA, elected by indirect suffrage. The executive, however, remained accountable only to the emperor. Limited as its powers were (the suffrage was further restricted in 1907), the Duma made the government more responsive to public opinion. From 1906 to 1911 the government was directed by Pyotr Stolypin, who combined repressive action with land reforms to improve the position of the peasants.
Following the abdication of the emperor the Duma established a provisional government, headed first by Prince Georgy Lvov (1861-1925) and later by Aleksandr Kerensky. The government's authority was challenged, however, by an increasingly radical Soviet (council) of Soldiers' and Workers' Deputies, and it could not stem the tide of disintegration. Eventually agrarian unrest, mass desertions at the front, turmoil in the cities, and disaffection of the non-Russian nationalities gave the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Ilich Lenin an opening to seize power in November (N.S.; October, O.S.) 1917. Thus the second of the Two Russian Revolution of 1917 occurred, leading to the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The new political activity contributed to the remarkable upsurge of Russia's artistic and intellectual creativity (called the Silver Age) that lasted until the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
Last, but not least, the Silver Age witnessed an extraordinarily creative outburst in the arts. The composer Igor STRAVINSKY, ballet impresario Sergei DIAGHILEV, and the painter Wassily KANDINSKY each had a strong influence on the emergence of avant-garde modernism before and after World War I.
USSR
The history of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics began with the seizure of power in Russia by the Bolsheviks (Communists) in 1917 and ended with the dissolution of the Soviet state in 1991.
Marxism predicted a socialist revolution in advanced capitalist countries. How could it be applied to a peasant country that had not even achieved basic political freedoms? In response to this challenge, the Russian Marxists argued that the Russian revolution should be seen in a world context: Russia may have been backward, but the world economy as a whole was ready for SOCIALISM. Many Russian Marxists also felt that in some way the Russian working class might be able to lead the peasantry toward socialism. A central dispute among Marxists was how to organize an effective revolutionary party under the specific conditions of Russian autocracy. The debate on this question caused a deep split into two groups called the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks; the leader of the Bolsheviks was V. I. Lenin.
In March 1917 the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty was overthrown. The Provisional Government that took its place faced an impossible agenda: to carry on the war, to settle the basic principles of a new state, and to carry out important social reforms. In reality, the government could not even guarantee minimum social and economic order. By the time the Bolsheviks seized power in November, the country was in the grip of spiralling disintegration. The Bolsheviks did not take over a government so much as offer to create an effective one.
The starting difficulties.
Given the conflicts in Russian society and the deep differences in visions of the future, there was probably little chance of avoiding civil war once the unifying figure of the tsar was removed. Armed conflict began in 1918. Between 1918 and 1922 there were so many challenges to Bolshevik rule that it is perhaps better to speak of "civil wars" in the plural. The challengers can be divided into several groups. The Whites, who relied principally on the elite classes of tsarist Russia, were led by former officers such as Aleksandr Kolchak in Siberia and Anton Denikin in south Russia.
National minorities also took advantage of the temporary breakdown of central authority to declare independence. Some--such as Poland, Finland, and the Baltic States--were successful; others were reincorporated into the Soviet Union. There were also peasant rebels, collectively called the Greens. Finally, foreign powers such as Britain, France, the United States, and Japan intervened in order to topple Bolshevism. Because of conflicting purposes and lack of coordination among their enemies, the Bolsheviks survived all these challenges.
The stabilization.
Given the many challenges to its existence, it is not surprising that the Communist party's most crucial accomplishment was the creation--largely by Leon TROTSKY--of a new Red Army out of the ruins of the old Imperial army. Yet this accomplishment could hardly have been predicted: the Bolsheviks were a radical working-class party that had strongly opposed militarism and the war against Germany. They not only had to turn themselves into military commanders, but also had to work with two groups who had little reason to trust them: former tsarist military officers and the peasant recruits who made up the bulk of the army.
The Bolsheviks' struggle to maintain themselves in the midst of breakdown and social collapse led to a bedrock insistence on party unity and discipline. The experience of power confirmed earlier party feelings about the need for a highly disciplined party organization. The Bolshevik strategy for dealing with the nationalities faced similar dilemmas. Lenin strongly believed in the economic rationality of belonging to a large political unit such as the tsarist empire. It was, of course, understandable that the smaller nationalities wanted independence: under tsarism, they had indeed been oppressed solely because of their nationality. But Lenin was confident that if the irritant of national oppression was removed, people would no longer need to see themselves primarily as Georgians or Uzbeks--instead, they would realize their "true" identity as members of the working class.
This thinking lay behind the reorganization of the tsarist empire into a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In 1922, a treaty was signed by the Russian Federation, Ukraine, the Transcaucasian Republic, and Belorussia.
Lenin died 1924, Stalin emerged in 1929.
Lenin died in 1924, one year after his stroke. Lack of a strong head was evident until the arrival of Stalin. While other leaders were busy giving speeches, Stalin used his position as general secretary of the party to work on the nuts and bolts of party rule: appointments and coordination of policy at all levels of the huge Soviet state.
By 1929, Stalin was in undisputed control, and in a position to give his own response to the dilemmas facing the party. He decided that certain key Bolshevik aims had to be maintained even if it meant the sacrifice of all others. These aims were rapid industrialization, unity in party and society, and vigilance against class enemies. To aid industrialization he created the collective farms and it was again the peasants who had to suffer. The unity of the party gave as a result the great purge of 1937-38 where millions of soviet citizents were executed or sent to forced labor camps.
The arts and literature had to follow the Socialist Realism. The Russian acronym for the Main Administration of Camps (GULAG) became known throughout the world because of the description by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of the camp system in The Gulag Archipelago (1973).
The interwar period.
The central foreign policy dilemma of the Soviet Union during the interwar years was how to respond to the rising power of Germany. This dilemma was an inheritance from the tsarist period, when the government had two options: be friendly to Germany in the hope that it would expand elsewhere, or join with Germany's enemies in the hope of preventing German expansion of any kind. In the end, the tsarist government had chosen the second option, which led to Russia's failure in World War I and the eventual collapse of tsarism itself.
After the civil wars came to an end, the Soviet Union pursued the course of rapprochement with Germany. Since both Germany and Soviet Russia were regarded almost as pariahs in the international system, there was ground for common interest. The Treaty of Rapallo (Apr. 16, 1922) formalized relations between the two countries and led to secret military collaboration. But the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s put an end to any further cooperation. Hitler's anticommunism and his open desire for expansion toward the east forced the Soviet Union to return to the second option of trying to isolate Germany.
World War II.
In the period between 1939 and 1941 the Soviet Union incorporated eastern Poland, the Baltic countries (Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania), Karelia, and Bessarabia. Most of this new territory had earlier been part of the tsarist empire. The Soviets had long felt that the small nations on their western borders could easily be used as anti-Soviet tools by the capitalist powers.
In 1931, Stalin justified the high tempo of economic growth by saying "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us." Exactly ten years later--22 months into WORLD WAR II--the Soviet Union was invaded by Nazi Germany. The crucial test of the Stalinist system had begun.
It did not begin auspiciously. When Hitler ordered his troops to cross the border on June 22, 1941, he achieved almost complete surprise. Stalin's intelligence failure was even more embarrassing than the case of Pearl Harbor later in the year, since land invasions should be harder to camouflage than air attacks. The German armies were able to cause enormous damage to the Soviet armed forces and to push deep into the country. Stalin's paranoia had led to decimation of the top ranks of the Red Army in 1937-38, and it took some time before effective leadership was restored to the Soviet armed forces.
Now that both Great Britain and the USSR were at war with Germany, there was little barrier to a real alliance. The United States joined them when it was forced into the war later in 1941. Through programs such as Lend Lease, the Western allies were able to give considerable material aid to the Soviets. The fight on the eastern front, where Hitler and Stalin met head-on, was many times more brutal and barbaric than in western Europe.
When the Germans failed to take Moscow in late 1941, they lost their chance for a quick end to the war. The turning point was the months-long battle at Stalingrad, a city on the Volga named for Stalin because he had won a victory there during the civil wars. Between the middle of 1942 and early 1943, Hitler continued to throw away some of his best troops in an attempt to take the city. The surrender of the German army at Stalingrad in February 1943 was the beginning of the end of the Third Reich.
After that, although many bloody battles remained to be fought, the Red Army moved inexorably toward Berlin. In May 1945 the Soviet flag flew over the ruins of the German Reichstag building in the German capital, while American and Soviet armies met at the Elbe River. At the request of the United States and Great Britain, the Soviets also joined the war against Japan after the defeat of Germany. They had just enough time to fight some hard battles with the Japanese army before the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to Japan's surrender.
According to Stalin, the war showed that national diversity in the Soviet Union was no longer the source of weakness that it had been for tsarism. Yet his own suspicious vindictiveness was revealed nowhere more clearly than in relations with the national minorities. Toward the end of the war, Stalin decided that some Soviet nationalities had collaborated with the Germans, and so he simply deported whole nations such as the Crimean Tatars (see TATAR) out of their homelands to other parts of the USSR. Chauvinistic propaganda extolling the Russian people became ubiquitous; scarcely-veiled anti-Semitism became more and more noticeable in press campaigns. Winston Churchill's phrase the IRON CURTAIN was an appropriate one to describe Stalin's policy of cutting the USSR and its satellites off from the rest of the world.
After the sufferings of the war, the Soviets felt justified in insisting on friendly governments in Eastern Europe. In practice, this meant installing Soviet-style regimes in all the Eastern European countries under Red Army control (with the exception of Austria). By 1948, diversity in Eastern Europe had been replaced by uniformity and complete Soviet control. The only exception was Yugoslavia, which was also the only country where a Communist party had come to power without the direct help of the Red Army. Tito, the leader of the Yugoslav Communists, successfully defied Stalin and asserted his independence.
In the last years of his life the negative aspects of Stalin's character became even more pronounced. The "cult of personality" glorifying the Soviet leader, which had begun in earnest in the late 1930s, reached new heights in the postwar years. Stalin was continually praised as the father of peoples, the wise teacher of mankind, and the greatest genius of all times and places. In a final outburst of paranoia, he became convinced that his own doctors (who were mainly Jewish) were plotting to poison him (an episode known as the Doctors' Plot). Luckily for these doctors and probably for many of the political leaders close to him, Stalin died suddenly in March 1953.
De-Stalinization.
De-Stalinization began as soon as Stalin breathed his last. The first sign was the announcement that the Doctor's Plot had been a frame-up. In June 1953 came the arrest of Lavrenti Beria, the secret police chief who had been as much feared by the political elite as he was by ordinary citizens. Beria was tried in secret and executed.
De-Stalinization had explosive potential for the struggles within the Soviet leadership, because all the top leaders had been deeply implicated in Stalin's crimes. The person to use the weapon of de-Stalinization most skillfully was Nikita S. Khrushchev, the new secretary of the party. Combining a personal hatred of Stalin with a bold sense of political tactics, Khrushchev denounced Stalin as a tyrannical criminal in a closed speech at the 20th Party Congress in 1956. This so-called Secret Speech quickly became known throughout the world and marked a turning-point in the world Communist movement. Matching deeds to words, Khrushchev was also responsible for the liberation of millions of prisoners from the swollen labor-camp system. The return of so many victims of Stalin's terror permanently changed Soviet society. Khrushchev's support for the Castro regime in Cuba led to the CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS (1962), a confrontation with the United States in which the Soviets were forced to back down.
The party oligarchy that dismissed Khrushchev replaced him with Leonid Brezhnev. Brezhnev is said to have been chosen as a compromise candidate who got along with people and whose main passions were dominoes and hunting. But he showed unexpected political skills, and by the mid-1970s his opponents had been unceremoniously removed from the top elite and a mini-Brezhnev personality cult was in full swing.
The start of the DETENTE
he combination of rationalization and control also characterized Brezhnev's policy of DETENTE. Brezhnev's aims were to regularize relations with the United States and to obtain needed economic benefits from world trade, but not open up Soviet society so much that there was a risk of losing social or economic control. Despite a flurry of summit meetings with U. S. Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter, Brezhnev carried on the competition with the West in the Third World begun by Khrushchev. Soviet activities in the developing countries provoked great concern in the United States, but from today's perspective what stands out is the Soviet Union's increasing marginalization in global economic and political structures.
When Brezhnev finally died in late 1982, there was a widespread feeling that radical reforms were necessary. The next two party leaders--Yuri ANDROPOV and Konstantin Chernenko--only lasted about a year each. Not until spring 1985 was the fate of the party and the country put into the hands of a young and dynamic leader with a strong reform agenda: Mikhail Gorbachev.
The Perstroika of Gorbachev.
Gorbachev's prescription for the ills of the Soviet system was what he called PERESTROIKA (restructuring). The perestroika program was based on a now-or-never feeling that time was running out for the Soviet Union: it either had to make good on the promises of socialism or sink into the status of a disregarded third-class power. Perestroika's most dramatic component was glasnost (openness). Glasnost is related to the Russian word for voice, and indeed the aim of glasnost was to give Soviet society back its voice--in the expectation of hearing constructive criticism. Gorbachev's economic aims were less bold: they combined elements of Brezhnev-style rationalization with innovative elements such as the legalization of cooperatives, which in essence were small private businesses.
Continued predictions in the West that perestroika was slowing down seemed confirmed in the fall of 1987 when the most outspoken defender of radical reform, Boris YELTSIN, was dropped from the top leadership amidst a chorus of old-style political abuse. But by 1988, there was no mistaking the reality of Gorbachev's reforms. Glasnost went ahead at full speed, revealing not only the crimes of the Stalin era but the full horrifying dimensions of the contemporary crisis. Gorbachev moved on with plans to create a genuinely effective national legislature. The new rules of political life were startlingly demonstrated when Yeltsin returned from disgrace and was elected to the legislature despite (or rather because of) the opposition of the party establishment. Sakharov and many other outspoken critics were also elected.
In spring 1991 Gorbachev changed course as he came to realize that his only chance to preserve the union was to work with the leaders of the republics and not against them. For many loyal members of the party and the security forces, as well as managers of industry and collective farms, the country as they had known it was on the point of falling apart. The last stand of the old guard was an attempted coup in August 1991. It was easy for the plotters to take over the central government, but they found it impossible to topple Yeltsin and the Russian Federation government. The coup collapsed within days, and the Communist party was outlawed.
The last coup of august 1991.
In spring 1991 Gorbachev changed course as he came to realize that his only chance to preserve the union was to work with the leaders of the republics and not against them. For many loyal members of the party and the security forces, as well as managers of industry and collective farms, the country as they had known it was on the point of falling apart. The last stand of the old guard was an attempted coup in August 1991. It was easy for the plotters to take over the central government, but they found it impossible to topple Yeltsin and the Russian Federation government. The coup collapsed within days, and the Communist party was outlawed.
The fate of the August 1991 coup showed how little vitality was left in the Soviet Union's central government, and it was not long before appropriate conclusions were drawn. In another, quieter coup in December, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus declared that a COMMONWEALTH OF INDEPENDENT STATES would replace the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. This declaration only ratified the reality of republican independence. Gorbachev bowed to the inevitable and resigned at the end of the year. The 74-year old history of the Soviet Union had come to an end. But Russia and its allies is still here, and Yeltsin president on september 1999.In december 1999 Yeltsin resignd which improved democracy as stated Gorbachev. It is thanks to Yeltsin that capitalism kept improving in Russia. Towards end of march 2000, Vladimir Putin, who had been prime minister of Yeltsin, became president with a majority of votes against the comunist party contender. Putin, in a speach, promessed to fight corruption with the aid of his comrads from the disolved KGB.
The Virgin and Child Under an Apple Tree
Cranach, Lucas, I.
This work by Lucas Cranach the Elder, one of the most important
painters of the German Renaissance, was once seen as a portrait of
Princess Sibylle of Cleves, bride of Johann-Friedrich of Saxony.
Famed for her beauty, she was well known at the court of the Elector
of Saxony, Friedrich the Wise. But the painting is more likely to
represent Cranach's perception of ideal female beauty than a concrete
individual. Such female types were often to be found in Cranach's
work from the second half of the 16th century: oval faces with sharp
chins, slightly slanting eyes and a small mouth. The artist skilfully
combined red and green tones and outlined the gold jewellery, curls
of hair, details of the costume and elegant hat with a whimsical,
winding line. A landscape opens up beyond the dark curtain, perhaps
the depiction of some real location.
.The Virgin and Child Under an Apple Tree
Cranach, Lucas, I.
Oil on canvas. 87x59 cm
Germany. 1520s - 1530s
Provenance: 1851
.The Virgin and Child Under an Apple Tree
Cranach, Lucas, I.
Oil on canvas. 87x59 cm
Germany. 1520s - 1530s
Provenance: 1851
