Communism and the Cold War

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Communism and the Cold War
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Early Soviet Union under communism

• Lenin comes to power by means of a disciplined
  hierarchical party, soon including what would
  become the KGB.
• First four years, civil war with Czar supporters,
  aided by U.S.
• 1921 Introduced the New Economic Policy
• 1924 Lenin dies

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The General Secretary emerges

• Lenins testament
• By 1927 Stalin emerges as most powerful figure
• 1929 rejects NEP, begins forced industrialization
• in the countryside, collectivization
• millions starve
• 1930s, purges and show trials
• 100,000s executed, maybe 5 million died in gulag

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Trotsky and Kamenev disappear
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Great Patriotic War

• USSR was probably most responsible for Allied
  victory
• also suffered the most--over 20 million died

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(Relative) thaw

• 1953 Stalin dies
• 1956 Krushchev gives secret speech denouncing
  Stalin and the cult of personality
• reorients economy more towards consumer goods,
  housing

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COLD WAR
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Post war period

• expanded soviet sphere--in defiance of Yalta
  Accord
• --buffer or expansionism?

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iron curtain
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US response

• 1947 Truman announces that US will aid any
  country resisting outside pressures
• lesson learned from appeasing Hitler
• Marshall Plan
• US provides 13 billion to western Europe (then
  Japan, Korea, and Taiwan) to rebuild

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Cold War intensifies

• 1948 Berlin blockade and airlift
• 1949 Soviets test the atomic bomb
• China goes communist
• America goes McCarthyite

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China--since 1949

• 1958-60 Great Leap Forward
• Mao orders collectivization, backyard foundaries
• 20-30 million die through starvation
• 1962 break with Soviet Union obvious
• 1966-76 Cultural Revolution
• universities close, Red Guards run amok,
  counter-revolutionaries killed
• 1978 period of (economic) liberalization begins
  under Deng Xiaoping

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Proxy wars

• minor conflicts around the world
• http//www.learner.org/channel/courses/worldhistor
  y/unit_video_22-2.html
• Major troop deployments
• 1950-53 Korea
• 1965-73 Vietnam
• 1979-89 Afghanistan

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Close call for World War III

• Cuban missile crisis 1962

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The big surprise

• The end of European communism
• 1970s and 80s religious and cultural dissent
• failing economies
• Reagans role?

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New blood at the Kremlin

• 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev becomes General Secretary
• initiates reforms--glasnost and perestroika
• 1988 allows contested elections within the
  Communist Party

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Movement in Eastern Europe

• 1980s rise of Solidarity--suppressed
• 1988 illegal Solidarity shipworkers, with
  encouragement from the Pope, go on strike
• 1989 Polish Communist party (and Gorbachev)
  allows Solidarity to compete in national
  elections
• Solidarity victory

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East Germany

• Very little reform--the Stasi
• Gorbachev calls for change in East Germany
• East German tourists go through Hungary to
  Austria--at first a few, then 10,000s
• Berlin Wall is torn down
• 1990 Germany reunified

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Back in USSR

• 1991 hardliners in the military wage a coup
  against Gorbachev, coup fails
• Communist Party is abolished in Russia
• Soviet Union is dissolved by decree
• CIS is formed

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12 new nation states
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Russia--backsliding under Putin since 2000?

• nostalgia for good old days, and Chinese model
• increasing control over media--especially TV
• arrest of oligarchs on trumped up
  charges--Khodorkovsky
• using Chechen war to make governorships
  appointed, not elected

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continuing revolutions

• color revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and
  Kyrgistan
• http//news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4459224.st
  m

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Who is left among Communists?

• 5 countries
• China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, Cuba
• And several post Communist societies have changed
  little

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In China . . .

• 1989--crackdown at Tiananmen Square
• in 1990s, some signs of loosening up
• local contested elections
• more freedom to criticize local governments
• 1000s of NGOs allowed to organize
• on the other hand, since 1999 Falun Gong
  outlawed, etc.