MOSCOW (AP) — With its brutality, technological achievements and rigid ideology, the Soviet Union loomed over the world like an immortal colossus.
It led humanity into space, detonated the most powerful nuclear weapon ever, and carried out bloody purges and brutal labor camps on its own citizens, while portraying itself as the vanguard of the enlightened revolution.
But his lifespan was shorter than that of the average human; Born 100 years ago, died days before his 69th birthday.
The Soviet Union inspired both loyalty and dismay among its 285 million citizens. The dichotomy was summed up by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who served with his notorious KGB security service.
“Anyone who does not regret the disappearance of the Soviet Union has no heart,” he said. “Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.”
On the centenary of the treaty that formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, The Associated Press covers the events of its rise and fall.
BRANCH
Five years after the overthrow of Russia’s tsarist government, four of the socialist republics that formed in the aftermath signed a treaty on December 30, 1922 to create the USSR: Ukraine; Belarus; Transcaucasia, which spread over Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan; and Russia, including the Old Empire’s possessions in Central Asia. The USSR, which later expanded to include Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, left the republics with their own governments and national languages, but all subservient to Moscow.
LENIN DIES
Vladimir Lenin, the first Soviet leader, was already in poor health when the USSR was formed and died a little over a year later. Josef Stalin outmaneuvered his rivals in the ensuing power struggle.
COLLECTIVISATION
Stalin processed private land ownership into state and collective farms. Resistance to collectivization and policy inefficiency exacerbated famines; The “Holodomor” in Ukraine from 1932-1933 killed an estimated 4 million people, with many calling it an outright genocide.
GREAT CLEANING
Driven by Stalin’s fear of rivals, in the 1930s Soviet authorities launched show trials of prominent figures who were alleged enemies of the state and carried out widespread arrests and executions, often based on little more than denunciations by neighbours. Estimates say as many as 1.2 million people died in 1937-38, the most intense period of the purge.
WWII
World War II inflicted immense suffering on the Soviet Union, but cemented its status as a superpower and swelled the hearts of its citizens with the conviction that their country was a virtuous and indomitable nation.
An estimated 27 million Soviets died. The Battle of Stalingrad was one of the bloodiest in history; Nazi and allied forces besieged Leningrad for over two years. The Red Army pushed back stubbornly, advancing slowly until it reached Berlin, ending the European theater of war.
The war absorbed Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia into the Soviet Union, as well as what later became Moldavia. Stalin used wartime conferences to demand a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, eventually drawing Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and East Germany behind the “Iron Curtain.”
STALIN DIES
Stalin’s death in 1953 was traumatic for the Soviets who revered him. Huge crowds gathered to pay their respects and more than 100 people reportedly died in the crowd. He left no designated successor, and the country’s leaders became embroiled in power struggles. Nikita Khrushchev strengthened his position at the top in 1955.
CHRUSHCHEV THAT
Khrushchev, formerly a loyal official, turned against his predecessor who was once firmly in power. In a speech to a Communist Party congress, he ranted for hours against Stalin’s brutality and the “cult of personality” he created. He later had Stalin’s body removed from the mausoleum on Red Square where Lenin’s body also lay.
The speech was a key point in what became known as the Khrushchev Thaw, a period of relaxed repression and censorship.
Khrushchev was impeached in 1964 by a vote by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, which was led by Leonid Brezhnev. He became the leader of the USSR.
SPACE RACE
The 1957 launch of Sputnik-1, the first artificial satellite, caused great concern in the United States about the Soviets’ technological advances. The US accelerated its space program, but four years later the USSR sent the first human into space, Yuri Gagarin. American Alan Shepard’s 15-minute suborbital flight the following month only emphasized the space divide.
CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
Perhaps the closest the world has ever come to full-blown nuclear war was the 1962 confrontation between the US and USSR over the presence in Cuba of Soviet nuclear missiles, which Khrushchev sent in response to US nuclear missiles that were in Turkey placed. The US ordered a naval blockade of the island and tensions ran high, but the Soviets agreed to withdraw the missiles in exchange for the removal of US missiles from Turkey. The positive offshoot was the establishment of a US-USSR hotline to facilitate crisis communication.
RELAXATION
In the Brezhnev years, Washington and Moscow were engaged in the so-called “detente” period, during which several arms treaties were signed, trade relations improved and the Apollo-Soyuz spacecraft docked, the first joint mission into space. That ended after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Brezhnev died in 1982, and relations withered under successors Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, who were in poor health and died after less than 15 months in office.
AFGHANISTAN WAR
Despite Afghanistan’s reputation as “the graveyard of the rich”, in 1979 the Soviets sent troops to assassinate the country’s leader and install a docile successor. The fighting lasted nearly ten years. Soviet troops – 115,000 at the height of the war – were battered by resistance fighters accustomed to the rugged terrain. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev began a withdrawal in 1987 and completed it in 1989. More than 14,000 Red Army troops died in the conflict that tarnished the image of Soviet military superiority.
STAGNATION
“They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” This sarcastic phrase became popular in the Brezhnev era when the economy was reeling from low and even negative growth. The rigidity of central planning was seen as a major cause, along with high defense spending.
GORBACHIEV RISES
The gloomy numbness that set in in the late 1970s dissipated when Gorbachev was elected leader of the Communist Party after Chernenko’s death. Handsome, a relative youth of 54 and accompanied by his fashionable wife, Raisa, Gorbachev brought a strong human touch to a stark and opaque government, sparking enthusiasm in the West dubbed “Gorbymania”. Within months he was campaigning to end economic and political stagnation, using “glasnost” or openness to pursue the goal of “perestroika”: restructuring.
He signed two historic arms deals with the US, released political prisoners, allowed open debate, multi-candidate elections, and freedom of travel, and ended religious oppression.
But the powers he unleashed soon escaped his control. Long-suppressed ethnic tensions flared into strife in areas such as the South Caucasus. Strikes and labor unrest followed price hikes and shortages of consumer goods so severe that even Moscow flagships were bare.
Chernobyl
Gorbachev’s position in the West was undermined when in 1986 a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, spewing radioactive fallout over much of Europe for a week. Despite Gorbachev’s vaunted glasnost, the Soviets did not inform the outside world, or even their own citizens, of the disaster for two days. They allowed a major May Day event in Kyiv despite elevated radiation levels.
THE BERLIN WALL FALLS
Although the USSR had sent troops in 1956 and 1968 to crush uprisings in the satellite states of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, it did not intervene as democratization and waves of dissent spread through the Eastern Bloc countries in 1989. East Germany opened the doorway to West Germany: Jubilant protesters swarmed into the Berlin Wall that had closed off the city’s Soviet sector since 1961, and smashed it off.
ATTEMPT A COUP
The Soviet premier, defense minister, KGB head, and other top officials, alarmed by growing separatism and economic problems, placed Gorbachev under house arrest at his vacation dacha on August 19, 1991, and ordered a cessation of all political activity. Tanks and troops grounded through the streets of Moscow, but crowds gathered to defy them. Russian President Boris Yeltsin mounted a tank outside the parliament building to denounce the coup plotters. The attempt failed in three days, and Gorbachev returned to Moscow, albeit with his power severely weakened.
TO COLLAPSE
Over the next four months, the USSR disintegrated in the slow drama of a glacier calving as several republics, including Ukraine, declared independence. Yeltsin banned Communist Party activities in Russia.
The leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed an agreement in early December stating that the Soviet Union would cease to exist. On December 25, Gorbachev resigned and the flag of the USSR was lowered from the Kremlin.
It’s still debated what felled the behemoth: its repressive ways, poor decisions by sick leaders, adherence to an arguably unfeasible ideology—all of which could have played a role.
Thirty years later, analyst Dmitri Trenin, then director of the Carnegie Center in Moscow, told The Associated Press: “The collapse of the Soviet Union was one of those events in history that are believed to be unthinkable until they become inevitable. .”
