The Shortest History of the Soviet Union: 7

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Meanwhile, Gorbachev’s reforms were slow to bear fruit and did more to hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union than to help it. A loosening of controls over the Soviet people emboldened independence movements in the Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe.

I think I’ve encountered most of this stuff in this book before, but it’s nice to work through a lot of it in this concisely formatted way. It’s basically pre-revolutionary context, revolution, Lenin, Stalin, WW2, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and collapse. I still struggle to organize this history in my head well in a way that I could hold a substantive conversation on it. But I find this history very interesting. Most of my remarks from here on will move unsystematically through the book, largely by way of excerpts. Political revolution in Poland in 1989 sparked other, mostly peaceful revolutions across Eastern European states and led to the toppling of the Berlin Wall. By the end of 1989, the USSR had come apart at the seams. Throughout all the original fifteen republics of the countries that made up the USSR, you will find many vestiges of this experiment in communism: statues of the leaders such as Lenin and Stalin (although decommunisation policies in countries such as Ukraine, for example, have caused many statues and other images of both men to be removed and destroyed); monuments extolling the patriotic glory of Mother Russia; buildings in both Stalinist and Soviet Modernism styles, many now in a state of decay; artistic works such as bas relief, mosaics and paintings glorifying the workers, family units, and military personnel; and other remnants of the era including museums, especially the Stalin Museum in Gori, Stalin’s birthplace in Georgia, that tries hard but fails to be unbiased and not venerate the tyrannical leader. The U.S.S.R. A nation that arrived in the world accidentally, and departed unexpectedly. Over a century after the Russian Revolution, the tumultuous history of the Soviet Union continues to fascinate us and influence global politics. Soviet Russia arrived in the world accidentally and departed unexpectedly. More than a hundred years after the Russian Revolution, the tumultuous history of the Soviet Union continues to fascinate us and influence global politics.

The Ukrainian famine—known as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and “to inflict death”—by one estimate claimed the lives of 3.9 million people, about 13 percent of the population. One of the great virtues of such short histories is that they emphasise what specialists may regard as the bleeding obvious – but it is the obvious truths often buried in detail that bear restating.’ —Owen Matthews, The Spectator

Gorbachev thought that he had secured verbal assurances from German foreign minister Kohl and US secretary of state James Baker that US-led NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe in the wake of the unravelling of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, not even into a newly unified Germany. Perhaps he had, but Gorbachev should have remembered never to trust the capitalists – and, as a lawyer, he should have known that you get your assurances in writing. By October 1990, the former German Democratic Republic was absorbed into the Federal Republic of Germany and became, ipso facto, a part of NATO.”Stalin eliminated all likely opposition to his leadership by terrorizing Communist Party officials and the public through his secret police. BROWSE OUR BLOG POSTS FEATURING COUNTRIES OF THE FORMER USSR SEE MORE MONUMENTS & ARCHITECTURE FROM THE FORMER SOVIET UNION