Transcript The End of An Era - White Plains Public Schools

The Collapse of the Soviet Union and
the End of the Cold War
 One
of the most dramatic changes of the
twentieth century was the collapse of
communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe (1989-1991), as well as the end of the
Cold War
 If the twentieth century, as a historical era,
began not with 1900 but the outbreak of
World War I in 1914, one can argue that it
ended not in 1999 or 2000, but in 1991, the
year the USSR ceased to exist
 The end of the Cold War came about because
of a combination of diplomatic negotiation,
the United States’ widening lead in the arms
race, increased unrest throughout Eastern
Europe, and the internal disintegration of the
Soviet Union
 The
collapse of the Soviet Union
and its East European satellites has
been a great blow to communist
movements worldwide
 Within two years, nine communist
regimes – including history’s first –
had ceased to exist
 The Soviet Union broke apart into
15 independent nations
 Communist governments continued
to exist, most notably in China,
Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea
 As a global force, however,
communism was greatly diminished
after 1991
 The
end of the Cold War has
brought about a tremendous shift in
the balance of global power
 The Cold War had been a condition
of bipolar equilibrium, in which
military and political might was
concentrated in the hands of two
superpowers
 From 1991, onward, the world has
been in the unprecedented
situation of having only one
superpower – the United States –
capable of diplomatic, strategic,
and economic action on a truly
global scale
 The
first thing to note about the
“communist world” during the 1980s is
that, by this time, there were several
communist “worlds”
 The Soviet Union, the oldest and largest
communist regime, was still paramount
 It also dominated the six nations of the
Warsaw Pact: Poland, Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and East
Germany
 Cuba remained an ally of the USSR, but
was an increasingly independent actor
 China, the world’s second largest center
of communism, rivaled the USSR and
was hostile to it
 The
1980s were a turbulent time for
the Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc
 Internationally, the period of détente
had come to an end in 1979, with the
USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan
 Another point of tension was the
Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua
(1979)
 The Soviets supported the
Sandinistas, while the United States
sponsored their enemies, the Contras
 The latest arms treaty between the
United States and the Soviet Union,
SALT II (1979), went unratified
 In
the Soviet Union itself, the political
system was corrupt, and the economy
was failing
 From the late 1970s until Leonid
Brezhnev’s death in 1982, and also
under the two leaders who followed
him until 1985, the USSR went through
a period of stagnation
 Shortages of consumer goods were
extreme
 An ever-increasing percentage of the
Soviet gross national product went
toward the arms race
 The war in Afghanistan was a
disappointing failure, killing thousands
of young Soviet soldiers all for nothing
 The
dissident movement – a community
of protestors, humanitarians, and
intellectuals that had formed during the
1970s – grew larger, louder, and more
determined during the 1980s
 Among the most famous of the Soviet
dissidents were writer Alexander
Solzhenitsyn (who had been expelled
from the country during the 1970s) and
the husband-and-wife team of physicist
Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner
 The
Eastern bloc became dangerously
restless during the 1980s
 It was in Poland, however, that Soviet rule
over Eastern Europe met its gravest
challenge
 In 1980, economic shortages and labor
disputes led to the creation of the trade
union Solidarity
 At first, Solidarity’s goal was simply to
improve the conditions of Poland’s working
class
 Very rapidly, under the leadership of Lech
Walesa, Solidarity became a political
movement as well as a trade union
 Joined
by intellectuals and Catholic clergy,
Solidarity became a focal point for protest and
outrage against the Soviet-backed communist
regime, as well as the USSR itself
 In December 1981, Poland’s communist regime
declared martial law
 This state of martial law remained in effect until
the end of the decade
 In the meantime, Walesa was arrested, and
Solidarity was driven underground
 However, throughout the 1980s, the Polish
resistance agitated against the communist regime
and the Soviet Union
 Over the course of the decade, Solidarity’s illegal
activities made it increasingly difficult for the USSR
to maintain control over Eastern Europe
 China
was much more fortunate than the
Soviet Union
 China underwent a painful modernization
process under Mao Tse-tung
 Mao’s death in 1976 led to great changes
 In 1978, after a power struggle, Deng
Xiaoping came to power in China, having
defeated the so-called Gang of Four (which
included Mao’s widow, Jiang Qing)
 Like Mao, Deng was a modernizer
 He instituted a “four modernizations”
program, focusing on industry, agriculture,
technology, and national defense
 However,
while Mao had been idealistic,
inflexible, and revolutionary, Deng was
pragmatic, willing to compromise, and
gradual
 Although a communist, Deng was more
concerned with China’s well-being and
growing strength than he was with absolute
commitment to abstract Marxist ideals
 Famously, he commented that whether a cat
is black or white makes no difference, as
long as it catches mice
 In opposition to Mao’s militant
anticapitalism, Deng allowed limited freemarket reform in China
 Under
the slogan, “create wealth for the
people,” Deng permitted private
enterprise, small business, and limited
capitalist exchange
 Economically, the result was clear: China
experienced a fabulous economic growth
throughout the 1980s
 Wages and standards of living improved
considerably
 There was, however, a social and cultural
effect as well
 With greater wealth came the desire for
greater freedom
 This was a luxury even Deng was not
prepared to allow
 When
student members of pro-democracy
movement gathered at Tiananmen Square in
1989, Deng order the army in to stop the
protests
 In
March 1985, Soviet communism was on
the threshold of major changes
 That month, Mikhail Gorbachev, a young,
dynamic, reform-minded politician,
became leader of the USSR
 His assumption of power followed the
long, stagnant Brezhnev period, as well as
two and a half years of gerontocracy (rule
by the old), when elderly and dull senior
members of the Communist Party had
taken control of the government
 Gorbachev inherited a Soviet Union in
crisis
 The economy was worsening and the
political system was riddled with
corruption and apathy
 The
deadly accident at the nuclear reactor in
Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986, demonstrated
clearly the inefficiency of the Soviet system
 The Afghan War raged on
 Unrest in Eastern Europe was worsening
 And the Soviet Union was falling behind in
the arms race
 At
home, Gorbachev’s response to all these
problems was to attempt a thorough reform
of the Soviet system
 In his famous policy of perestroika
(“restructuring”), Gorbachev tried to
strengthen the Soviet economy
 He emphasized local control over central
planning
 He allowed limited free enterprise and
loosened rules regarding private property
 He set into place some of the foundations of
a free-market economy
 In many ways, much of perestroika was
similar to what Deng Xiaoping was doing in
China during the 1980s
 The
major difference was that, while
economic liberalization led to prosperity in
China, it did not do so in the USSR
 This was largely due to ingrained inefficiency
in the Soviet system, dating back to the
Stalin period
 It also had to do with the fact that Deng
dealt better with conservative opposition in
China than Gorbachev did in the Soviet Union
 Another
difference between Gorbachev’s
liberalization and Deng’s was that
Gorbachev allowed political and cultural
liberalization at the same time
 Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost (“openness”)
provided for greater freedom of the press
and media, frank discussion of the Soviet
Union’s clouded past (especially the Stalin
period), public criticism of contemporary
problems, and exposure of political
corruption or workplace abuses
 Gorbachev’s hope was that glasnost, greater
social and cultural freedom, would motivate
the Soviet population to carry out
perestroika in the political and economic
spheres
 To
the rest of the world, Gorbachev turned a
friendly face
 Realizing that the USSR could not continue to
compete with the United States in the arms
race, Gorbachev sought to reduce tensions
between the superpowers
 To Western leaders such as Reagan and
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,
Gorbachev portrayed himself as (in
Thatcher’s words), “a man one can do
business with”
 For the first time since 1979, relations
between the Soviet Union and the West
cooled rather than heated
A
diplomatic breakthrough came in 1987,
when Reagan and Gorbachev negotiated the
Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF)
Treaty, which removed short- and
intermediate-range nuclear weapons from
Europe
 Moreover, Gorbachev began to loosen the
Soviet Union’s grip on Eastern Europe
 Gorbachev’s stance toward Eastern Europe
gained him a great deal of approval in the
West, and contributed to his being awarded
the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990
 However, it also weakened the USSR
militarily and diplomatically
 With
regard to the Warsaw Pact nations of
Eastern Europe, Gorbachev chose to allow
them to go their separate paths
 In a famous joke, the Soviet foreign minister
stated that the USSR was replacing the
Brezhnev Doctrine (which declared the right
of the Soviets to intervene in East European
affairs) with the “Sinatra Doctrine,” according
to which each East European country could
“do it ‘My Way’”
 When dissident movements in East European
nations began to press for greater freedom in
1988 and 1989, Gorbachev informed East
European communist leaders that the Soviet
Union would not go to the financial expense
or take the political risk of supporting them
militarily, in the event of crisis
 In
Poland, Solidarity, which had emerged
from underground in 1988, was made legal in
1989
 That summer, Solidarity was allowed to take
part in nationwide elections, winning a huge
victory and bringing a noncommunist
leadership to power
 The Hungarian Communist Party opened the
country’s borders to the West, then voted
itself out of existence
 November
1989 was the great climax
 In Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution,” Vaclav
Havel’s dissident movement, Civic Forum, swept to
power
 Bulgaria’s communist leadership resigned
 Most striking of all, however, the East German
Communist Party, the strongest and most hard-line
in Eastern Europe, collapsed
 In December, Romania’s communist leader, Nicolae
Ceausescu, was executed, in one of the few violent
episodes involved with the collapse of East
European communism
 Later, in October 1990, the map of Europe would
be dramatically redrawn by the unification of
Germany, brought about principally by the efforts
of West Germany’s chancellor, Helmut Kohl
 With
Eastern Europe gone, the Soviet
Union now had its own problems to
cope with
 Popular discontent with Gorbachev
was growing in 1990 and 1991, as the
economy failed to improve
 Non-Russian parts of the Soviet Union
were now agitating openly for their
freedom
 Liberal politicians, such as Boris
Yeltsin, began to oppose Gorbachev,
calling for greater reforms and a
complete break with communism
 From
the other end of the political
spectrum, conservative, hard-line
communist elements with the government
were plotting against Gorbachev
 Finally, in August 1991, the hard-line
communists struck
 They staged a three-day coup, placing
Gorbachev under house arrest and
attempting to take over the government
 Thanks to popular resistance and the bold
leadership of Boris Yeltsin, who called for
citizens to oppose the coup, the takeover
failed
 Gorbachev was brought back to power,
but only for a few months
 Unlike
in Eastern Europe, where “revolution from
below” spurred the collapse of communist regimes,
in the USSR it was the political leaders who acted
as the architects of the country’s demise
 During the fall and early winter, the various
republics of the USSR, including Russia itself,
decided to go their separate ways, and Gorbachev
was too weak to stop them
 In
early December 1991, Yeltsin (President of
the Russian Republic) and the leaders of the
Ukraine and Belarus declared the formation
of a new, post-Soviet confederation, the
Commonwealth of Independent States
 In effect, this declaration made the USSR
irrelevant
 Leaders
of the former republics of the Soviet
Union, with the exception of Estonia, Latvia,
Lithuania, and Georgia chose to form the
Commonwealth of Independent States as a
way to maintain ties and attempt a smooth
transition from Soviet rule
 Bowing
to the inevitable, on December 25,
1991, Gorbachev resigned as leader of the
Soviet Union
 At the same time, he declared an end to the
USSR itself
 Soviet Communism, whose birth in 1917 had
been one of the major events of the early
twentieth century, did not live to see the
twenty-first