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| Yalta & Potsdam conferences |
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1. These were the two most important peace conferences of World War II. The major powers at the conferences were the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union.
2. The conference at Yalta took place from February 4-11, 1945. Yalta is located on the southern coast of Ukraine. The "Big Three" at Yalta were US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Coming into the conference the Soviet Union held the strongest military position in Europe. They controlled Rumania, Bulgaria, and most of Poland and Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, and had moved within 100 miles of Berlin. |
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| 1. became the 33rd President of the United States upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945. Truman, who had only a high-school education and had been vice president for just 82 days before FDR's sudden death, inherited the monumental task of leading the United States through the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. Truman—who was, while in office, one of the least popular presidents in modern American history—won a surprising second term by defeating Republican Thomas Dewey in the election of 1948.The Cold War began under Truman's watch, as the president came to believe that he must take a hard stance to contain the expansionistic tendencies of the Soviet Union. The president's "Truman Doctrine" committed the United States to a policy of supporting foes of Communism everywhere in the world. Truman's failure to lead the United States to victory in the Korean War led to a severe decline in support for the president's policies among the American people. |
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| the political, military, and ideological barrier erected by the Soviet Union after World War II to seal off itself and its dependent eastern and central European allies from open contact with the West and other noncommunist areas. |
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| 1. On 12th March, 1947, Harry S. Truman, announced details to Congress of what eventually became known as the ________. In his speech he pledged American support for "free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures". This speech also included a request that Congress agree to give military and economic aid to Greece in its fight against communism. Truman asked for $400,000,000 for this aid programme. He also explained that he intended to send American military and economic advisers to countries whose political stability was threatened by communism. |
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| 1. From 1945 through 1947, the United States was already assisting European economic recovery with direct financial aid. Military assistance to Greece and Turkey was being given. The newly formed United Nations was providing humanitarian assistance. In January 1947, U. S. President Harry Truman appointed George Marshall, the architect of victory during WWII, to be Secretary of State. Writing in his diary on January 8, 1947, Truman said, “Marshall is the greatest man of World War II. He managed to get along with Roosevelt, the Congress, Churchill, the Navy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and he made a grand record in China. When I asked him to [be] my special envoy to China, he merely said, ‘Yes, Mr. President I'll go.’ No argument only patriotic action. And if any man was entitled to balk and ask for a rest, he was. We'll have a real State Department now.” In just a few months, State Department leadership under Marshall with expertise provided by George Kennan, William Clayton and others crafted the Marshall Plan concept, which George Marshall shared with the world in a speech on June 5, 1947 at Harvard. Officially known as the European Recovery Program (ERP), the Marshall Plan was intended to rebuild the economies and spirits of western Europe, primarily. Marshall was convinced the key to restoration of political stability lay in the revitalization of national economies. Further he saw political stability in Western Europe as a key to blunting the advances of communism in that region. |
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1. Post war Germany was divided into three sections--the Allied part was controlled by the United States, Great Britain and France and other part by the Soviet Union. The city of Berlin, although located in the eastern Soviet half, was also divided into four sectors --West Berlin occupied by Allied interests and East Berlin occupied by Soviets. In June 1948, the Soviet Union attempted to control all of Berlin by cutting surface traffic to and from the city of West Berlin. Starving out the population and cutting off their business was their method of gaining control. The Truman administration reacted with a continual daily airlift which brought much needed food and supplies into the city of West Berlin. This Airbridge to Berlin lasted until the end of September of 1949---although on May 12, 1949, the Soviet government yielded and lifted the blockade.
2. When the airlift began, there were only two airfields in Berlin; Tempelhof with one runway in the US sector and Gatow with one runway in the British sector. In 1945, when the Americans arrived in Berlin, Tempelhof's lone runway was sodded and had been used only for small aircraft and fighters during the latter stages of World War II. It was beautifully equipped with hangars and a large terminal building, but it was surrounded by high apartment buildings which required a 500 foot ceiling in thick weather. Before June 1948, US Army engineers had built a 12 foot thick rubber base runway and covered it with steel landing mats which was adequate for US military needs before the airlift. However, under the continuous pounding of heavy, loaded aircraft the steel landing mats started to break. Depressions in the runway began to form and soon a force of 225 men was kept busy working on the runway between plane landings in attempting to keep the field operational. In early July 1948, construction on a new runway at Tempelhof began without interrupting airlift traffic and during the same period the old runway was being constantly repaired. In late 1948, construction began on a third Tempelhof runway. |
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1. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was born shortly after World War II ended. At that time, large numbers of Soviet troops remained in Eastern Europe as occupation forces. Governments set up by these forces were pro-communist and have come to be called the Warsaw Pact countries. Besides the USSR, these countries include Bulgaria, Hungary, Rumania, Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany.
2. Because of the threat posed by the large numbers of Soviet troops along the border of West Germany, 15 Western nations formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or as it's sometimes called, the Atlantic Alliance, in 1949. The member nations agreed that an attack on any one of them would be considered an attack against all. Since that time, five U.S. presidents have affirmed the United State's commitment to the Atlantic Alliance, a commitment based on important, common interests among the member nations. |
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| 1. The Warsaw Pact is the name commonly given to the treaty between Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union, which was signed in Poland in 1955 and was officially called 'The Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance'. Although this rather cute title sounds more like the agreement which you and your friend have about sending cards to each other on Valentine's Day, it was actually a military treaty, which bound its signatories to come to the aid of the others, should any one of them be the victim of foreign aggression. |
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| 1. The term "brinkmanship" was originally coined by United States Secretary of State John Foster Dulles during the height of the Cold War. The term came from the political Hungarian theory of pushing the military to the brink of war in order to convince another nation to follow your demands. In an article written in Life Magazine, Dulles defined his policy of brinkmanship as "The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art." During the Cold War, this was used as a ducky policy by the United States to coerce the Soviet Union into backing down militarily. |
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| 1. Many Americans reacted with disbelief and fear when the Soviet Union launched the world's first man-made satellite into orbit on 4 October 1957: the Soviets—supposedly well behind the United States technologically, militarily, and economically—had managed to beat the Americans into space. Eisenhower, often portrayed as having been caught off guard by Sputnik, noted that it came as a "distinct surprise," but what really shocked him was "the intensity of public concern." Democrats pounced on Sputnik as an issue of national defense. Democratic senator Henry Jackson of Washington described the launch as a "devastating blow to the prestige of the United States as the leader of the scientific and technical world." Some U.S. scientists who had worked for the air force or on the army's missile projects thought the feat unimpressive; still others, including celebrated rocket scientist Wernher von |
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1. Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-Tung), the son of a peasant farmer, was born in Chaochan, China, in 1893. He became a Marxist while working as a library assistant at Peking University and served in the revolutionary army during the 1911 Chinese Revolution.
2. Inspired by the Russian Revolution the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was established in Shanghai by Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao in June 1921. Early members included Mao, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De and Lin Biao. Following instructions from the Comintern members also joined the Kuomintang.
3. Over the next few years Mao, Zhu De and Zhou Enlai adapted the ideas ofLenin who had successfully achieved a revolution in Russia. They argued that in Asia it was important to concentrate on the countryside rather than the towns, in order to create a revolutionary elite. |
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1. On 25 June 1950, the young Cold War suddenly turned hot, bloody and expensive. Within a few days, North Korea's invasion of South Korea brought about a United Nations' "police action" against the aggressors. That immediately produced heavy military and naval involvement by the United States. While there were no illusions that the task would be easy, nobody expected that this violent conflict would continue for more than three years.
2. Throughout the summer of 1950, the U.S. and the other involved United Nations' states scrambled to contain North Korea's fast-moving army, assemble the forces necessary to defeat it and simultaneously begin to respond to what was seen as a global military challenge from the Communist world.
3. Though America's Armed Forces had suffered from several years' of punishing fiscal constraints, the end of World War II just five years earlier had left a vast potential for recovery. U.S. materiel reserves held large quantities of relatively modern ships, aircraft, military equipment and production capacity that could be reactivated in a fraction of the time necessary to build them anew. More importantly, the organized Reserve forces included tens of thousands of trained people, whose World War II experiences remained reasonably fresh and relevant. |
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| . To justify his support for South Vietnam, President Dwight Eisenhower and Vice-President Richard Nixon put forward the 'domino theory. It was argued that if the first domino is knocked over then the rest topple in turn. Applying this to South-east Asia he argued that if South Vietnam was taken by communists, then the other countries in the region such as Loas, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia and Indonesia, would follow. |
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| The Vietnam War was the prolonged struggle between nationalist forces attempting to unify the country of Vietnam under a communist government and the United States (with the aid of the South Vietnamese) attempting to prevent the spread of communism. Engaged in a war that many viewed as having no way to win, U.S. leaders lost the American public's support for the war. Since the end of the war, the Vietnam War has become a benchmark for what not to do in all future U.S. foreign conflicts. |
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a. Fidel Castro, the illegitimate son of a successful Creole sugar plantation owner, was born in Cuba in 1926. He was a rebellious boy and at the age of thirteen helped to organize a strike of sugar workers on his father's plantation.
b. Both his parents were illiterate but they were determined that their children should receive a good education and Fidel was sent to a Jesuit boarding school. Although he disliked the strict discipline of the school, Fidel soon showed that he was extremely intelligent. However, except for history, he preferred sports to academic subjects. Fidel was good at running, soccer and baseball, and in 1944 was awarded the prize as Cuba's best all-round school athlete.
c. After he had finished his education Castro became a lawyer in Havana. As he tended to take the cases of poor people who could not afford to pay him, Castro was constantly short of money. Castro's experience as a lawyer made him extremely critical of the great inequalities in wealth that existed in Cuba. Like many other Cubans, Castro resented the wealth and power of the American businessmen who appeared to control the country.
d. In 1947 Castro joined the Cuban People's Party. He was attracted to this new party's campaign against corruption, injustice, poverty, unemployment and low wages. The Cuban People's Party accused government ministers of taking bribes and running the country for the benefit of the large United States corporations that had factories and offices in Cuba. |
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1. Shortly after his inauguration, Kennedy permitted a band of Cuban exiles, already armed and trained, to invade their homeland. The attempt to overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro was a failure. Soon thereafter, the Soviet Union renewed its campaign against West Berlin. Kennedy replied by reinforcing the Berlin garrison and increasing the Nation's military strength, including new efforts in outer space. Confronted by this reaction, Moscow, after the erection of the Berlin Wall, relaxed its pressure in central Europe.
2. Instead, the Russians now sought to install nuclear missiles in Cuba. When this was discovered by air reconnaissance in October 1962, Kennedy imposed a quarantine on all offensive weapons bound for Cuba. While the world trembled on the brink of nuclear war, the Russians backed down and agreed to take the missiles away. The American response to the Cuban crisis evidently persuaded Moscow of the futility of nuclear blackmail.
a. Kennedy now contended that both sides had a vital interest in stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and slowing the arms race--a contention which led to the test ban treaty of 1963. The months after the Cuban crisis showed significant progress toward his goal of "a world of law and free choice, banishing the world of war and coercion." His administration thus saw the beginning of new hope for both the equal rights of Americans and the peace of the world. |
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1. Khrushchev remained active in the Communist Party and in 1925 was employed as party secretary of the Petrovsko-Mariinsk. Lazar Kaganovich, the general-secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, was impressed with Khrushchev and invited him to accompany him to the 14th Party Congress in Moscow. With the support of Kaganovich, Khrushchev made steady progress in the party hierarchy. In 1938 Khrushchev became secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party and was employed by Joseph Stalin to carry out the Great Purge in the Ukraine. The following year he became a full member of the Politburo.
2. Khrushchev was aware that he had to be very careful in his dealings with Stalin: "Even though I agreed with Stalin completely, I knew I had to watch my step in answering him. One of Stalin's favourite tricks was to provoke you into making a statement - or even agreeing with a statement - which showed your true feelings about someone else. It was perfectly clear to me that Stalin and Beria were very close. To what extent this friendship was sincere, I couldn't say, but I knew it was no accident that Beria had been Stalin's choice for Yezhov's replacement."
3. Khrushchev also worked closely with Lavrenti Beria. "Beria and I started to see each other frequently at Stalin's. At first I liked him. We had friendly chats and even joked together quite a lot, but gradually his political complexion came clearly into focus. I was shocked by his sinister, two-faced, scheming hypocrisy."
4. After the invasion of Poland in 1940 Khrushchev was given the responsibility of suppressing the Polish and Ukrainian nationalists. When the German Army invaded the Soviet Union in June, 1941, Khrushchev arranged the evacuation of much of the region's industry. During the Second World War Khrushchev granted the rank lieutenant general, and was given the task of organizing guerrilla warfare in the Ukraine against the Germans. |
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1. The Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest the world ever came to nuclear war. The United States armed forces were at their highest state of readiness ever and Soviet field commanders in Cuba were prepared to use battlefield nuclear weapons to defend the island if it was invaded. Luckily, thanks to the bravery of two men,President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev, war was averted.
2. In 1962, the Soviet Union was desperately behind the United States in the arms race. Soviet missiles were only powerful enough to be launched against Europe but U.S. missiles were capable of striking the entire Soviet Union. In late April 1962, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev conceived the idea of placing intermediate-range missiles in Cuba. A deployment in Cuba would double the Soviet strategic arsenal and provide a real deterrent to a potential U.S. attack against the Soviet Union.
3. Meanwhile, Fidel Castro was looking for a way to defend his island nation from an attack by the U.S. Ever since the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, Castro felt a second attack was inevitable. Consequently, he approved of Khrushchev's plan to place missiles on the island. In the summer of 1962 the Soviet Union worked quickly and secretly to build its missile installations in Cuba |
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1. The Western democracies and the Soviet Union discussed the progress of World War II and the nature of the postwar settlement at conferences in Tehran (1943), Yalta (February 1945), and Potsdam (July-August 1945). After the war, disputes between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies, particularly over the Soviet takeover of East European states, led Winston Churchill to warn in 1946 that an "iron curtain" was descending through the middle of Europe. For his part, Joseph Stalin deepened the estrangement between the United States and the Soviet Union when he asserted in 1946 that World War II was an unavoidable and inevitable consequence of "capitalist imperialism" and implied that such a war might reoccur.
2. The Cold War was a period of East-West competition, tension, and conflict short of full-scale war, characterized by mutual perceptions of hostile intention between military-political alliances or blocs. There were real wars, sometimes called "proxy wars" because they were fought by Soviet allies rather than the USSR itself -- along with competition for influence in the Third World, and a major superpower arms race.
3. After Stalin's death, East-West relations went through phases of alternating relaxation and confrontation, including a cooperative phase during the 1960s and another, termed dtente, during the 1970s. A final phase during the late 1980s and early 1990s was hailed by President Mikhail Gorbachev, and especially by the president of the new post-Communist Russian republic, Boris Yeltsin, as well as by President George Bush, as beginning a partnership between the two states that could address many global problems. |
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1. The Sino- Soviet split began in the late 1950's and became a major diplomatic conflict between the People's Republic of China (PRC) whose leader was Mao Zedong and the USSR whose leader at that time was Joseph Stalin.
2. During the 1950's China worked with a large number of Soviet advisers who encouraged the Chinese leaders to follow the Russian model of development with an emphasis on heavy industry funded by taxes and levies from the peasantry whilst making consumer goods a low priority.
3. When Stalin died in 1953, Mao felt he was now the senior leader and was resentful when the new Soviet leaders Malenkov and Khrushchev did not recognise this. Mao had ignored many of Stalin's requests but he had respected him as a world leader. In 1956 Khrushchev denounced Stalin during his Secret Speech and although Mao didn't react publicly he was infuriated. |
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1. Elected to the House of Representative, Nixon was invited to join the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) where he became involved in its campaign against subversion. In 1947 the HUAC began its investigation into the entertainment industry and was responsible for the blacklisting of 320 artists.
2. J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation provided Nixon with information on members of theCommunist Party. Nixon soon emerged as the most skillful members of the House of Un-American Activities Committee and played an important role in the interrogation of Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers. This led to the successful prosecution of Alger Hiss, Harry Gold, David Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg andJulius Rosenberg.
3. These cases brought Nixon to the attention of the public and in 1952 Dwight Eisenhower chose him as his running mate in the presidential election of 1952. During the campaign Nixon was accused of receiving $18,235 from private citizens. In a television speech he accounted for the money and Eisenhower allowed him to remain on the team.
4. Adlai Stevenson was chosen as the Democratic Party candidate for the 1952 presidential election. It was one of the dirtiest in history with Nixon, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, leading the attack on Stevenson. Speaking in Indiana, Nixon described Stevenson as a man with a "PhD from Dean Acheson's cowardly college of Communist containment." In an attempt to link Stevenson with the Soviet spy ring he added: "Somebody had to testify for Alger Hiss, but you don't have to elect him President of the United States." |
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| 1. Leonid Ilich Brezhnev, was born at Kamenskoye, Ukraine. A Soviet statesman and Communist Party official, Brezhnev was, in effect, the leader of the Soviet Union for 18 years. Having been a land surveyor in the 1920s, Brezhnev became a full member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1931 and studied at the Dniprodzerzhinsk Metallurgical Institute. After graduating (1935), he worked as an engineer and director of a technical school and also held a variety of local party posts; his career flourished under Stalin's regime, and by 1939 he had become secretary of the regional party committee of Dnipropetrovsk. During World War II Brezhnev served as a political commissar in the Red Army, advancing in rank until he became a major general (1943) and head of the political commissars on the Ukrainian front. After the war he again held posts as chief of several regional party committees in Ukraine. In 1950 he was sent to Moldavia as first secretary of the Moldavian Communist Party with the task of sovietizing the Romanian population of that recently conquered territory. In 1952 he advanced to become a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU and a candidate member of the Politburo. When Stalin died (March 1953), Brezhnev lost his posts on the Central Committee and in the Politburo and had to accept the position of deputy head of the political department of the Ministry of Defense with the rank of lieutenant general. But in 1954 Nikita Khrushchev, who had gained full power in Moscow, made Brezhnev second secretary of the Kazakstan Communist Party (1954), in which capacity he vigorously implemented Khrushchev's ambitious Virgin and Idle Lands Campaign in Kazakstan. Brezhnev was soon promoted to first secretary of the Kazakstan Communist Party (1955), and in 1956 he was reelected to his posts on the CPSU Central Committee and in the Politburo. A year later, after he had loyally worked against the "antiparty group" that attempted to remove Khrushchev, Brezhnev was made a full member of the Politburo, and in 1960 he became chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. In July 1964 he resigned that post to become Khrushchev's assistant as second secretary of the Central Committee, by which time he was considered Khrushchev's heir apparent as party leader. Three months later, however, Brezhnev helped lead the coalition that forced Khrushchev from power, and, in the division of spoils that followed, Brezhnev became first secretary (after 1966, general secretary) of the CPSU (Oct. 15, 1964). Following a brief period of "collective leadership" with Premier Aleksey Kosygin, Brezhnev emerged as the dominant figure. |
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| 1. During the course of the Cold War, tensions rose and fell many times. One period of relaxation developed in the early 1970s and became known as "Détente," a French word meaning "release of tensions." It was hoped that the new relationship would herald a permanent improvement in relations between the U.S. and Soviet Union, but differences in outlook led to an increasing number of conflicts. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 effectively closed that chapter of the Cold War. The activities of President Ronald Reagan returned tensions to a fever pitch. |
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1. The Prague Spring of 1968 is the term used for the brief period of time when the government of Czechoslovakia led byAlexander Dubček seemingly wanted to democratise the nation and lessen the stranglehold Moscow had on the nation’s affairs. The Prague Spring ended with a Soviet invasion, the removal of Alexander Dubček as party leader and an end to reform within Czechoslovakia.
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3. The first signs that all was not well in Czechoslovakia occurred in May 1966 when there were complaints that theSoviet Union was exploiting the people. This developed when people in Slovakia complained about the government in Prague imposing its rules on the Slovaks and overriding local autonomy. A weak economy exacerbated the situation and none of the reforms that were introduced worked. The workers remained in poor housing and led the most basic of lifestyles. The same occurred in rural Czechoslovakia where farmers had to follow Party lines with regards to cultivation and innovation was frowned on
5. In June 1967, there was open criticism of Antonin Novotný, Party Leader, at the Writers’ Union Congress. In October 1967, students demonstrated against Novotný and early in 1968 he was replaced as First Secretary of the Party by Alexander Dubček. He had not courted leadership of the anti-Novotný movement but as the man who had handed in a long list of complaints against him (September 1967), Dubček was the obvious choice. |
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1. The Soviet war in Afghanistan was a nine-year proxy war during the Cold war involving the Soviet Union, supporting the Marxist-Leninistgovernment of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan[17] against the Afghan Mujahideen guerrilla movement and foreign "Arab–Afghan" volunteers. The mujahideen received unofficial military and/or financial support from a variety of countries including the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, Israel, Indonesia and China. The Afghan government, with the Soviet Union as its ally, received different aid from the government of India under Indira Gandhi.
2. The initial Soviet deployment of the 40th Army in Afghanistan began on December 24, 1979 under Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.[18] The finaltroop withdrawal started on May 15, 1988, and ended on February 15, 1989 under the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Due to the interminable nature of the war, the conflict in Afghanistan has sometimes been referred to as the "Soviet Union's Vietnam War" or "the Bear |
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1. Ronald Reagan, the son of John Reagan and Nellie Wilson, was born above the general store in Tampico, Illinois, on 6th February, 1911. Later the family moved to Dixon, a small town a hundred miles west of Chicago. His father became a partner in a shoe store. He held left of centre political views and bravely spoke out against the activities of the Ku Klux Klan.
2. During the Great Depression his father was forced to close down his shoe store. He found a new job as a result of the New Deal. This resulted in both father and son becoming passionate supporters of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democratic Party.
3. At high school Reagan developed a strong interest in sport and in 1928 won an athletic scholarship which enabled him to gain a place at Eureka College. Reagan studied economics and sociology but it was as a football player and swimmer that he excelled. After leaving college Reagan was able to find work as a sports announcer for the Davenport radio station, WOC. In 1933 Reagan moved to the WHO radio station in Des Moines and over the next four years became one of the most popular sports commentators in the region. In 1937 Reagan moved to California and after a screen test with Warner Brothers was given a seven-year contract. |
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1. Gorbachev studied for a second degree at the Stavropol Agricultural Institute (1964-67) and in 1970 was appointed First Secretary for Stavropol Territory. His work in this post impressed Yuri Andropov, who was at that time the head of the Committee for State Security (KGB). Andropov now used his considerable influence to promote Gorbachev's career.
2. In 1971 Gorbachev became a member of Communist Party Central Committee. He later moved to Moscow where he became the Secretary of Agriculture. In 1980 Gorbachev became the youngest member of thePolitburo and within four years had become deputy to Konstantin Chernenko.
3. On the death of Chernenko in 1985 Gorbachev was elected by the Central Committee as General Secretary of the Communist Party. As party leader he immediately began forcing more conservative members of the Central Committee to resign. He replaced them with younger men who shared his vision of reform.
4. In 1985 Gorbachev introduced a major campaign against corruption and alcoholism. He also spoke about the need for Perestroika (Restructuring) and this heralded a series of liberalizing economic, political and cultural reforms which had the aim of making the Soviet economy more efficient.
5. Gorbachev introduced policies with the intention of establishing a market economy by encouraging the private ownership of Soviet industry and agriculture. However, the Soviet authoritarian structures ensured these reforms were ineffective and there were shortages of goods available in shops.
6. Gorbachev also announced changes to Soviet foreign policy. In 1987 he met with Ronald Reagan and signed the Immediate Nuclear Forces (INF) abolition treaty. He also made it clear he would no longer interfere in the domestic policies of other countries in Eastern Europe and in 1989 announced the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan. The following year he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. |
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1. "Perestroika" (restructuring) and "glasnost" (openness) were Mikhail Gorbachev's watchwords for the renovation of the Soviet body politic and society that he pursued as general secretary of the Communist Party from 1985 until 1991. Neither term was new to Soviet rhetoric. Stalin occasionally had used them as had his successors. The word glasnost actually appeared in Article 9 of the 1977 Soviet Constitution although without any practical application. Both terms can be found in Gorbachev's speeches and writings as early as the mid-1970s. But it was in a speech of December 1984, four months before his elevation to the general secretaryship, where Gorbachev first identified them -- and a third term, "uskorenie" (acceleration) -- as key themes. Uskorenie, with its unfortunate connotations of working faster, fell by the wayside, but perestroika and glasnost gained in importance and substance after 1986.
2. By 1987, Gorbachev was acknowledging that perestroika was a word with many meanings, but "the one which expresses its essence most accurately ... is revolution," since the "qualitatively new" and radical changes which the Soviet Union required constituted a "revolutionary task." Substantively, it was to mean in the political sphere the introduction of genuinely contested elections for new political institutions (e.g., the Congress of People's Deputies), enhancement of the governing role of the soviets, and other measures to promote democratization of the Communist Party and the entire political system. Economically, it referred to the legalization of cooperatives and other semi-private business ventures, the demonopolization and liberalization of price controls, and the election of enterprise managers by the labor collective.
3. Glasnost was what the British political scientist, Archie Brown, called "a facilitating concept" that enabled writers and journalists to push beyond limits that even Gorbachev and his most liberal-minded deputies, Aleksandr Yakovlev and Eduard Shevardnadze, anticipated or approved. Rather than a gift from above, it came to mean in practice a right asserted from below, analogous to freedom of speech and publication. This radical expansion of meaning eventually proved disastrous to Gorbachev and his agenda for change. In promoting glasnost, Gorbachev assumed that it would enhance perestroika. But as the country became overwhelmed by the avalanche of reports about burgeoning criminality as well as revelations of state crimes of the past ("retrospective glasnost"), glasnost effectively undermined public confidence in the ability of the state to lead society to the promised land of prosperity or even arrest its descent into poverty and chaos. |
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| Who created these Flash Cards? |
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