History of the Soviet Union

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The history of the Soviet Union begins with the October Revolution of the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 under the leadership of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and ends with the Alma Ata Declaration on December 21, 1991 during Mikhail Gorbachev's term in office . The Soviet Union was under the rule of the communist unity party CPSU . At the time of its existence, the Soviet Union was the largest country in the world in terms of area.

Summary

Foundation phase

The history of the Soviet Union began with the October Revolution of November 7, 1917 . The Bolsheviks in Russia seized power and a little later founded the Russian SFSR , which initially comprised the whole of Soviet Russia . After several years of civil war between the Bolsheviks (the “Reds”) and the “ Whites ” (collective term for all opposing parties), the Soviet Union was formally proclaimed on December 30, 1922, a unitary state consisting of federal forms . After Lenin's death on January 21, 1924, Josef Stalin was his successor. He pushed the collectivization and industrialization of the country and secured his power through targeted terror against adversaries. One of several high terrorist phases lasted from autumn 1936 to the end of 1938 ( "Great Terror" ). In June 1937, the beginning of a "purge" in the Soviet armed forces became known. First, Mikhail Tukhachevsky ( Marshal of the Soviet Union and Deputy People's Commissar for Defense) and seven other generals were sentenced to death; By the end of 1938, around one in five military leaders (of whom there were around 178,000) had been arrested and sentenced. Arrests, show trials and judgments against the military continued until 1941; they considerably weakened the Red Army's ability to plan and act as well as its combat strength .

Second World War

The German-Soviet War began with the attack on the Soviet Union by the Wehrmacht on June 22, 1941 . The Soviet Union and the Western powers allied and defeated Germany (partly in cooperation) in a great military and industrial effort. On the night of May 9, 1945 (it is celebrated in Russia and some successor states of the USSR as " Victory Day ") the last fighting ended; the armed forces surrendered unconditionally to the four victorious powers .

Cold War

Long-lasting tensions soon began between Stalin, on the one hand, and the Western Allies, on the other. The Western Allies complained that Stalin was realizing an “iron curtain” across Europe. Stalin systematically installed satellite states in the Soviet Union's sphere of influence and brought local communist parties loyal to Moscow to government there. The decades-long Cold War began. It succeeded the Soviet Union with a massive military rearmament and modernization, the status of the United States of America evenly matched nuclear power and super power to win.

In June 1950, Stalin started the Korean War . The USSR supplied North Korea with arms, trained troops, dispatched advisors and hired Russian pilots, but did not officially enter the war. The People's Republic of China also did not officially take part, but instead declared the Chinese troops as "volunteer armies". On the other side, mainly US troops fought under the command of the United Nations . The Korean War is considered the first proxy war between East and West.

De-Stalinization and the Brezhnev era

Shortly after Stalin's death (March 5, 1953), the process of de-Stalinization began . However, this was initially not openly proclaimed and only with the now famous secret speech of Khrushchev on the XX. Party congress of the CPSU 1956 increased importance. In the course of this, the personality cult around Stalin was ended; De-Stalinization also took place in the other Eastern Bloc countries. This favored the popular uprising of June 17, 1953 in the GDR, protests in the People's Republic of Poland and the Hungarian uprising (October / November 1956). The Soviet Union ended both uprisings by military means.

In August 1961, Khrushchev approved the construction of the wall (which he and other decision-makers in the USSR had long opposed; see here ).

The period of reconstruction with relative stability was followed by the Brezhnev era from 1966 , which soon resulted in general stagnation. Arms projects (e.g. thousands of ICBMs) devoured considerable parts of the gross domestic product (see also here ). During the Vietnam War , the SU supported North Vietnam militarily against the USA. The Soviet manned lunar program - the counterpart to the US Apollo program - was not implemented.

The political, economic and social paralysis under Neo-Stalinism was exacerbated by the war in Afghanistan that began in late 1979 .

Glasnost and Perestroika

After decades of the obvious aging of the political elite and political thought of the Soviet Union (also known as gerontocracy ), the 54-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev was elected Secretary General in 1985. A political thaw began under the new head of the Communist Party (CPSU), which under the names " Perestroika " and " Glasnost " granted the country and its people more freedom. Gorbachev failed with his plan to reform the Soviet Union. Internal tensions and increasing economic problems led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union into fifteen individual republics in 1991 , which was initiated by a failed coup attempt by the conservative military against Gorbachev. As an official "continuation state", Russia took over the rights under international law and most of the international obligations of the Soviet Union.

Russian revolutions, establishment of Soviet power

Party badge of the CPSU
A signal shot from the Aurora opened the October Revolution in 1917.

The revolutionary unrest in tsarist Russia from 1905 to 1907 was directed against centuries of autocratic tsarist rule . With the basic state laws introduced by Emperor Nicholas II, however , the first Russian revolution became practically ineffective.

In the bourgeois February revolution of 1917 , workers' uprisings ended the 300-year Russian tsarist rule; Emperor Nicholas II abdicated and went into exile in Yekaterinburg . The tsar family was murdered in the Ipatiev house there on the night of July 17, 1918 .

The Provisional Government under Prince Lvov only lasted a few months. A double representation of the people was provided. On the one hand, this consisted of the Duma as parliament. On the other hand stood the Soviets as workers 'and soldiers' councils , which v. a. composed of social revolutionaries and communists. Under the slogan "All power to the Soviets" they wanted to continue the revolution and prevent the formation of a bourgeois parliamentary democracy .

Since Russia was at war against the German Empire and Austria-Hungary ( World War I ) at that time , the domestic political situation continued to destabilize. The attempts by the Minister of War and later chairman of the Provisional Government , Alexander Kerensky , to achieve a better negotiating position through a military offensive against the Central Powers failed. The leader of the Bolsheviks , Lenin , who returned from exile in Switzerland with the help of the German Empire , demanded, among other things, the immediate end of the war with his much-noticed and popular April theses .

With the military overthrow by the October Revolution on the night of October 25th, July / 7th November 1917 greg. the Provisional Government was overthrown by the Marxist-Communist Bolsheviks under Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Lenin proclaimed the Soviet Socialist Republic . It was led by the Politburo of the Communist Party and the Council of People's Commissars - the equivalent of a bourgeois government - under his leadership. The Duma was replaced by the Congress of People's Deputies , which was powerless against the party leadership and the councils.

Due to the position of the party, the Politburo was the most powerful body of party and state in the Soviet Union. It was established by resolution of the 8th Party Congress in March 1919. The most important members were in the Lenin period up to 1924: Lenin, Kamenew , Leon Trotsky , Krestinsky (only until 1921), Stalin , Bukharin (from 1920), Zinoviev (from 1921), Rykow (from 1922) and Tomsky (from 1922). Stalin, who initiated the Great Terror from 1936 to 1938, was the only politburo member to survive.

Important members of the government ( People's Commissars ) chaired by Lenin until 1924 were: Trotsky (Foreign Affairs, Defense), Rykov (Interior, Economy and Deputy Chairman), Dzerzhinsky (Interior, State Security, Cheka ), Krestinsky (Finances) and Chicherin (Exterior) . Rykow followed in 1924 as head of government (chairman).

Leon Trotsky , founder of the Red Army

The Social Democratic Workers' Party of Russia (SdAPR) was renamed the Communist Party of Russia (KPR (B) or RKP (b)) after the October Revolution in 1918 , was called the Communist All-Union Party (Bolsheviks) (WKP (b)) from 1925 and from 1952 Communist Party of the Soviet Union .

The Red Army - initially the Red Workers 'and Peasants' Army - was officially set up by a resolution of the Council of People's Commissars on January 15, 1918 (July). It emerged from the Red Guard associations put together in March 1917 . Leon Trotsky, People's Commissar for Military Affairs from 1918 to 1924, is considered the founder of the Red Army. The founding day was February 23, 1918, the day when the first soldiers were recruited. The name originated during the Russian Civil War when the opponents were called the White Army .

The army was initially a volunteer army with no ranks and no badges. Trotsky revised this as early as 1918. The first commander-in-chief was General Jukums Vācietis , and many officers of the Imperial Russian Army also served in high positions. The envisaged goal was to raise an army of 700,000 soldiers by the end of 1918.

In 1919 the post of political commissar was introduced to the companies or squadrons on the orders of the Revolutionary War Council . Political commissioners came from within the party .

Fraternization scene: Russian and German soldiers celebrate the end of the war on the Eastern Front.

The peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk was negotiated towards the end of the First World War as a separate peace on the Russian side by Leon Trotsky and signed on March 3, 1918 in the city of Brest-Litovsk . Contracting parties were on the one hand the Central Powers (German Empire, Austria-Hungary , Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria ) and on the other hand Soviet Russia. The treaty had considerable disadvantages for Soviet Russia, but the Bolsheviks were able to consolidate their still weak power inside the country. It was the prerequisite for victory in the civil war that followed.

Civil war

After the October Revolution, a civil war developed across Russia that lasted until the end of 1920. Several armies fought each other: the Ukrainian army, under the command of Symon Petlyura , joined by marauding peasant gangs; the Red Army, which also included numerous Ukrainian units; the White Army , which strove for a counter-revolution , with numerous Cossacks and independent units such as the Makhnovshchina , founded by Nestor Makhno .

Foreign powers also intervened in the Russian civil war: Japan , Germany and a number of other states supported the White Guard troops against the Soviets with arms and material deliveries as well as intervention troops.

The main theaters of war were in the Ukraine , in the Don region and the Kuban region against the Don Cossacks, in Bessarabia , in Siberia against the White Army under Admiral Kolchak , in the Finnish Civil War and in the Baltic states .

After a long and devastating civil war for the weakened country, the main forces of the military resistance under the former Tsarist generals Kolchak , Denikin and Yudenitsch were finally defeated by the Soviets. After Poland gained state independence in 1918 and conquered large parts of what is now Ukraine and Belarus in a three-year war against Soviet Russia , the Baltic states and Finland also gained independence through the civil war.

A total of around 770,000 soldiers were killed on all sides in the battle. Around 700,000 more combatants died from epidemics during the war . Between 100,000 and 400,000 civilians lost their lives to attacks by both the Red and White Armies. Around eight million people fell victim to the civil war through chaos, struggle, famine and epidemics.

The Kronstadt sailors' uprising in February / March 1921 was directed against the government of Soviet Russia. His motto was "All power to the Soviets - no power of the party" . The sailors, disappointed by the Bolsheviks, holed up on the Kotlin Island off Petrograd . They could not get their demands through and the uprising was put down.

Hammer and sickle on a red background - symbol of communist parties

Lenin, the undisputed intellectual leader of the Communist Party of Russia (Bolsheviks) and the strategic head of the revolution, formulated the guidelines for building a communist state after the transition from war communism - as a suppression of counterrevolution - to communism. With his decree on the land at the beginning of the October Revolution he took over the demands of the peasants for the expropriation of the aristocratic landowners. He sought to put the already existing concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat into practice as the rule of the working class under the leadership of a centralized cadre party . Lenin coined the catchy formula " Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country " and stated that the next strategic goal was the rapid establishment of a modern industrial state.

After the civil war, the Communist Party gave up its intention to fight all capitalist states. The goal of " world revolution " was postponed until the final collapse of the capitalist economy.

Stalin's doctrine of 'building socialism in one country ' - in the Soviet Union, the 'fatherland of all working people' - took precedence. The Comintern was given the task of taking care of the subordination of the other communist parties in the world.

Origin of the Soviet Union

Petsamo within the borders from 1920 to 1944 (green: ceded in 1940, red: ceded in 1947)
Borders of Latvia and Estonia after the Peace of Dorpat and the Peace of Riga (1921) and later territorial losses
Poland after the Polish-Soviet War
Far Eastern Republic

Border regulations

On December 6, 1917, the Russian Grand Duchy of Finland declared itself independent. The Bolshevik Russia recognized the independence of Finland in January 1918th In the course of the civil war, Finnish troops also unsuccessfully wanted to conquer East Karelia for Greater Finland during the eastern campaign . After British interventions, Russia and Finland signed a peace and border treaty through the Peace of Dorpat in 1920 . Finland was also awarded the Petsamo area with access to the North Sea , which had to be ceded again to the USSR in 1944.

Poland did not accept its eastern border, the Curzon Line , which had been established by the Supreme Council of the Allied Powers, and attacked the Soviet state, weakened by the civil war. After his victory in the Polish-Soviet War under Marshal Józef Piłsudskis , Poland's eastern border was set about 250 km east of the Curzon Line in the Peace of Riga in 1921.

In the 1921 Treaty of Kars , the border between Turkey and the Soviet republics of the Armenian SSR , Azerbaijani SSR and Georgian SSR was regulated. In 1922 these three Soviet republics merged to form the Transcaucasian SFSR . After Armenia gained independence in 1991, it declared the Kars Treaty to be invalid.

The territories of the Russian governorate of Bessarabia , which fell to Russia after the 8th Russo-Turkish War in 1812 and by the Berlin Treaty of 1878, declared themselves independent as the Moldovan Democratic Republic in December 1917 and joined as an Autonomous Republic in April 1918 Romania. In the Treaty of Versailles this then in 1920 became international law effective. In 1940 the USSR reoccupied these areas.

The Far Eastern Republic from Lake Baikal to Kamchatka was founded in 1920 as a buffer state against Japan . After the Red Army recaptured this area, the area rejoined Russia and thus the Soviet Union in November 1922. North Sakhalin remained under Japanese occupation until 1925.

Establishment of the Soviet Union

The revolution had quickly spread from Russia to the surrounding countries of the Russian sphere of influence . There, too, strong communist forces - supported by the Russian Bolsheviks - had come to power and had proclaimed Soviet Socialist Republics (SSR). On December 30, 1922, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR), the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR) and the Transcaucasian Federal Soviet Socialist Republic merged to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

The capital, in the RSFSR so far the starting point of the Petrograd revolution , became Moscow .

The Soviet Union received its first constitution in 1924, the classic model of a "council republic " being the communist soviet constitution of 1917/18, while the later constitutions of the USSR brought the council system more and more into line with parliamentarism .

The Soviet republics

In 1924 the Russian colonies of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan , and in 1929 Tajikistan, became the Soviet republics.

The 15 Union Republics after 1956

On December 5, 1936, the Transcaucasian SFSR as a union of the Armenian SSR , Azerbaijani SSR and Georgian SSR was dissolved and its previous republics became union republics in the USSR.

At the same time, on December 5, 1936, the previously autonomous Kyrgyz ASSR and the Kazakh ASSR as part of the Russian SFSR became the Kyrgyz SSR and Kazakh SSR , i.e. independent Union republics.

1940 followed the occupation of the Baltic republics of Estonia , Latvia and Lithuania as well as Moldova and the Finnish part of Karelia , which became union states as Estonian SSR , Latvian SSR , Lithuanian SSR , Moldovan SSR and Karelo-Finnish SSR .

However, Karelia lost its status as a Union Republic in 1956 and was reintegrated into the Russian SFSR as the Autonomous SSR Karelia .

New Economic Policy (NEP)

The New Economic Policy was announced by Lenin in March 1921 at the Xth Congress of the Russian Communist Party. It replaced the economic policy of war communism and represented an attempt to improve the productivity of farmers by supporting private initiative in agriculture. The peasants were allowed to sell the products that remained to them in excess of the delivery target in free trade at free market prices. The period of the NEP ended in 1927 with the XV. Party congress of the CPSU .

Beginning of the Stalin era from 1922 to 1930

1922 General Secretary Stalin, 1924 Lenin's death

Lenin, who was in poor health, fell seriously ill in 1922, marked by strokes, and had to largely withdraw from operational management. His advice and instructions, given from his sickbed, were largely followed by top officials until 1923. He viewed with concern the incipient struggle between Stalinists and Trotskyists for his successor.

Josef Stalin was promoted to general secretary of the party on April 3, 1922 and, practically unnoticed by the top functionaries, had built up a network of devoted followers, which secured him control over the party apparatus. In this function he succeeded in isolating the sick Lenin almost completely from the party. He controlled access to the party leader and his correspondence. Lenin's letter with the urgent warning and demand to the party to replace Stalin as general secretary (in historical research this document is also known as “Lenin's political testament”) did not reach its addressees in time. The terminally ill Lenin spoke out against a "leader" Stalin, because he considered him unsuitable.

Rapallo, Berlin and Litvinov Protocol

Rapallo: Chancellor Joseph Wirth (2nd from left), Foreign Commissioner Tschitscherin (2nd from right)

The Treaty of Rapallo was signed on April 16, 1922 between the German Reich and the Russian Federal Socialist Soviet Republic , it was signed by the Foreign Ministers of the German Reich Walther Rathenau and the Soviet Union Georgi Tschitscherin . The treaty normalized the diplomatic and economic relations of the two states, which wanted to break through their international isolation with it. Both states waived reparations for war damage. In addition, a military cooperation between Germany and the Soviet Union was established, whereupon a secret flying school of the Reichswehr was established in Lipetsk in 1925 , which was operated until September 1933.

The Berlin Treaty was a friendship treaty signed on April 24, 1926 between the Weimar Republic and the USSR. It was the continuation of the Rapallo Treaty to further improve cooperation even after the Locarno Treaties with the West. The treaty contained agreements on trade and the existing military cooperation between the Reichswehr and the Red Army.

In order to ensure collective security in Europe, 51 states signed the Briand-Kellogg Pact in 1928/29 to outlaw war. An initiative by the Soviet Foreign Commissioner Litvinov led to the early entry into force of the pact in the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries through the Litvinov Protocol of February 9, 1929.

Stalin's power consolidation 1924 to 1930

Lenin's death on January 21, 1924 led to a bitter succession battle, in which party general secretary Stalin prevailed against Trotsky. Stalin consolidated his power through targeted terror from 1925 to 1928 against his adversaries and anyone suspected of sympathizing with them. The change of power in the party's powerful Politburo took place at the end of 1930.

Forced collectivization and terror until 1940

After Joseph Stalin had secured his political power until the end of 1930, the phase of increasing political isolation of his former and potential opponents began.

At the end of 1939, only those supporters of Stalin who were devoted in every respect were left in the Politburo: Molotov, Kalinin, Voroshilov, Kaganowitsch, Andreyev , Mikoyan , Zhdanov and, from the Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev . Stalin was now the absolute dictator who only consulted other bodies for the sake of form.

Head of government was Molotov from 1930 to 1941, as Foreign Commissioner Litvinov (1930-1939). Voroshilov continued to function as defense commissioner. There has been frequent change in the area of ​​home affairs and security; Genrich Jagoda (1934–1936), Jeschow (1936–1937) and finally Beria (from 1938) were the heads of the NKVD , the central organ of domestic political exercise of power and violence. The Gosplan - responsible for the central planning of economic life - was directed by Vosnesensky from 1938 .

From 1928 the state economy was subjected to five-year plans, industrialization and infrastructure, especially in the Asian part of the country, advanced. The Gosplan Economic Planning Committee was responsible for creating the five-year plan . The chairmen of Gosplan were members of the respective governments of the USSR.

A radical reorganization of agriculture also began in the late 1920s. Instead of the traditional obshchina , the village soviet was to emerge, which, in close association with the new large socialist enterprises, be it collective farms or sovkhozs , turned the village social structure upside down. The Bolsheviks did not shy away from using economic, physical and psychological violence. The forced collectivization went hand in hand with the forced industrialization of the Soviet Union in the course of the " Great Turnaround " . The exact motives for collectivization are controversial in science.

One trigger for the forced collectivization were the difficulties of the state buyers in meeting the grain demand through a procurement campaign in the winter of 1927/28. The New Economic Policy , which was oriented towards compromise towards the farmers , was replaced by a policy of intensified forced evacuation ("extraordinary measures"), which were supposed to bring additional grain into the state stockpiles. The now notorious Article 107 of the RSFSR's Criminal Code, which was intended to combat speculation , was also used.

Between June 1928 and July 1932, more than 61% of the farms were transferred to collective farms by force and violence. Nearly complete collectivization was enforced on the Lower Volga and in the North Caucasus by the early 1930s. The main sufferers of this development were the so-called middle peasants, who were counted among the kulaks and defamed. Because of their actual or alleged resistance to the coercive policy, the Soviet rulers persecuted them with extreme severity. Often the accusation of being a kulak was enough to be deported. The deculakization accompanying collectivization claimed the lives of around 530,000 to 600,000 people. The agriculture of the USSR collapsed as a result of collectivization and deculakization. This was the central cause of the Holodomor , an epoch-making famine with around five to seven million deaths.

Since 1935, Stalin escalated the persecution and deportation of citizens who apparently or actually stood in the way of the system. The Stalinist purges had already started in the 1920s and culminated in the " Great Terror " from 1936 to 1938, which was systematically directed against people who allegedly conspired against Stalin. The purges also included show trials such as E.g. the Moscow trials where confessions were extracted under torture. Whole peoples of the Soviet Union, ethnic minorities, were deported to labor camps ( gulag ). “ Kulaks ”, priests and monks, church laypeople, large parts of the military leadership, leading members of the party and even relatives of the victims were convicted, deported and murdered.

It is estimated that up to 2.5 million people were temporarily imprisoned and that over a million people died in the so-called Gulag camps .

In 1936, in the midst of this period of terror, a democratic and humane constitution was drawn up, the so-called Stalin constitution . However, the government largely evaded the constitutional rules.

The efforts of the Soviet Union to shape security policy through the Rapallo and Briand-Kellogg Pact were continued in the 1930s by Foreign Commissioner Litvinov . In 1934, the German-Polish non-aggression agreement directed against the USSR led to a change in foreign policy. The fascist threat forced the Soviet Union to adapt. The USSR became a member of the League of Nations in 1934 . The United States (1933), Romania and Czechoslovakia (1934) recognized the USSR. Bilateral non-aggression treaties were signed with Poland , Estonia , Latvia and Finland , and assistance agreements with France and Czechoslovakia (1935). In the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) the Soviet Union (besides Mexico) was the only significant ally for Madrid. In the International Brigades , Soviet volunteers fought alongside French and other foreigners against the Franquists .

To the upheaval in 1938/39 with the annexation of Austria to Germany, the Munich Agreement in 1938 and the de facto annexation of the Czech Republic in March 1939, the war of Japan against China , the steel pact Germany / Italy, the threatened three-power pact Germany / Italy / Japan and the cooperation of Germany, Hungary , Romania and Bulgaria , the leadership of the Soviet Union reacted with a radical U-turn in security policy.

In China , the Moscow-controlled Communist Party of China (CCP) was initially completely wiped out in 1927 by the national revolutionary Kuomintang movement under the Moscow-trained Chiang Kai-shek . After the Soviet-Chinese border war in 1929, the USSR came to terms with the Kuomintang to combat the Japanese advance into Manchuria . However, this did not prevent the Soviet Union from coming to an understanding with the Japanese about the Trans-Siberian Railway and about the sale of the East China Railway to Manchukuo .

Second World War

Molotov signs the German-Soviet border and friendship treaty
Standing: Ribbentrop and Stalin

German-Soviet non-aggression pact and its consequences

On May 3, 1939, the previous foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov , was replaced as a Jew, the target of continued German attacks, and the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (Prime Minister) Vyacheslav Molotov also took on foreign policy tasks. This initiated a general change of course in the security policy of the Soviet Union.

On August 24, 1939, Foreign Ministers Molotov for the Soviet Union and Joachim von Ribbentrop for the German Reich signed the Hitler-Stalin Pact as a direct harbinger of the Second World War . In the secret additional protocol - the USSR denied this until 1988 - mutual areas of interest in Poland and Romania and, as zones of influence of the Soviet Union, for Estonia , Latvia and Lithuania were agreed between the contracting parties.

On September 1, 1939, Germany began the invasion of Poland . During the attack on Poland on September 17, 1939, the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland by the Red Army took place. According to the non-aggression pact, German and Soviet troops met on the mutually agreed Curzon Line . The last Polish troops surrendered on October 6th. As a result of the attack on Poland , units of the Soviet NKVD murdered tens of thousands of Polish prisoners of war in the Katyn massacre in 1940 .

On November 30, 1939, the Soviet Union began the Winter War by invading Finland . The Soviet Union was then excluded from the League of Nations . A military conflict with the Western powers was barely prevented. In the Battle of Kollaa , Finland successfully resisted from December 1939 to March 1940, when the Soviet troops broke through the positions of the Finns. On March 13, 1940, the parties ended the war with the Moscow Peace Treaty .

Finland remained independent, but had to cede smaller parts of its national territory to the Soviet Union. Together with the already Russian territory in Karelia, the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic was established.

The three Baltic states in the Soviet zone of influence quickly lost their independence - between June 15 and 17, 1940. They became part of the USSR in July 1940 as the Soviet Republics.

After an ultimatum from the Soviet Union on June 26, 1940 and subsequent military occupation , Romania ceded not only Bessarabia (now Moldova and Ukraine ), but also northern Bukovina .

On 12/13. In September 1940 Foreign Commissioner Molotov visited Berlin and tried to expand the Soviet zone of influence to the Balkans . Adolf Hitler refused, however. The mutual deliveries of machines and grain agreed in the non-aggression pact were specified. These deliveries were made until June 22, 1941.

In the event of a German attack on the Soviet Union, the latter concluded the Japanese-Soviet Neutrality Pact with the Japanese Empire on April 13, 1941 for five years .

"Great Patriotic War"

From the perspective of the National Socialist leadership, the war against the Soviet Union was not only a war of conquest in search of “ living space in the East ”, but also a war of annihilation against the population. For the National Socialist ideologues, Russians , Ukrainians , Belarusians etc. were “ Slavic subhumans ”. Nazi leaders such as Alfred Rosenberg or Heinrich Himmler had worked out plans for how the conquered Soviet territory should be administered and exploited. The General Plan Ost and the Heinrich Program intended the decimation of the Slavic peoples by 30 million, the resettlement of a large part of the population to Siberia , the oppression of the rest as well as the economic exploitation of the country and, with the skimming of the grain yields, deliberately the starvation of millions (→  Hunger Plan ).

The Soviet Union, on the other hand, had to wage a defensive war. From the Soviet point of view, the so-called Great Patriotic War began on June 22, 1941 with the German invasion of the USSR . A State Defense Committee of the USSR , chaired by Stalin, was established. Initially the German Wehrmacht achieved great successes; Belarus was conquered within a few weeks. In some regions, the Wehrmacht was greeted by the civilian population in a friendly way, because they hoped to be liberated from communist rule. These hopes were soon dashed, however, because the Nazi regime installed a civil administration ( see Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories and Hinrich Lohse and Erich Koch ), which ruthlessly subjugated the population.

A month after the attack of the German Reich on the Soviet Union invaded on August 24, 1941, the Soviet Union and Great Britain the neutral Iran . The Soviet Union occupied the north and Great Britain the south of the country.

The Russian campaign 1941/1942

Despite great initial successes up to 1941, the Wehrmacht was unable to complete the battle for Moscow successfully. With the Leningrad blockade from September 1941 to January 1944 the intention was to systematically starve the Leningrad population. In 1942 the Wehrmacht again conquered large areas, especially in the south of the USSR. From the end of 1942 to the beginning of 1943, the victory of the Red Army and the turning point in World War II emerged in the Battle of Stalingrad . By 1945, the Red Army first liberated their country and then other countries in Eastern , Central and Southeastern Europe from German occupation.

The German occupation had dire consequences for the population and the economy of the Soviet Union. Wehrmacht , SS and the police raged among the population of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic Soviet Republics and killed around 10 million civilians, often under the pretext of "fighting partisans " or "fighting gangs". Several million people were under the worst conditions as forced laborers to Germany deported . Especially the Russian, Ukrainian, Baltic and Belarusian Jews were under German occupation shot or in death camps , like Auschwitz or Treblinka deported (→  Einsatzgruppen , Holocaust , Crimes of the Wehrmacht , the history of Jews in the Soviet Union ). In some cases Russian, Ukrainian or Belarusian collaborators also took part in the shootings.

The war on both sides destroyed around 1,700 cities and around 70,000 villages as well as around 1,000 churches and 500 synagogues ( scorched earth tactics ).

On April 5, 1945, the USSR announced that it would no longer extend the Japanese-Soviet Neutrality Pact of 1941. The contract would have expired on April 25, 1946. On August 8, 1945, as agreed with the other two main allies at the Yalta Conference , it entered the war against Japan. First, Japanese-occupied areas in China were conquered. On August 18, three days after the capitulation of Japan , Soviet troops occupied the Kuril archipelago . In 1946 the islands became Soviet territory .

The Soviet Union has the greatest number of victims of World War II. The information on the number of victims varies considerably. In the Ploetz history of the Second World War , the military losses are estimated at 13.6 million and civilian casualties at 7 million, i.e. around 10% of the population. Milton Leitenberg writes of over 40 million fatalities, including around 25 million civilians. This number would correspond to around a fifth of the Soviet population.

Of the 2,562,000 Jewish refugees from the areas occupied by Germany between 1935 and 1941, 1,930,000 or 75.3 percent found a new home in the Soviet Union. Of the total of four million Jews who lived in the German-occupied area of ​​the Soviet Union in the spring of 1941, around three million were killed.

Deportations during the war

Ethnic groups who were accused of collaborating with the enemy were deported to sparsely populated areas of Kazakhstan. These groups included more than 80 percent of the Germans in the Soviet Union , the Crimean Tatars , the Chechens , the Ingush , the Karachay , the Balkars , the Kalmyks and the Meshes . Were driven further Greeks (see Greek minority in the Soviet Union ), Bulgarians and Armenians from the Crimea and Turkish Meskhetians and Kurds from Caucasus. A total of three million people were systematically displaced.

Allied war conferences with the Soviet Union

v. l. No. Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill in Tehran

Cold War period

The Cold War began with the end of World War II. In 1945 the Soviet Union became a member of the UN and veto power in the Security Council . Although it withdrew from occupied Iran in 1946 , it brought the Eastern Bloc states as well as Mongolia and northern Korea under its control by 1948 , which led to the division of the Korean Peninsula (analogous to the division of Germany ) and finally to the establishment of North Korea on September 9, 1948 led. The USSR also provided assistance in the Chinese Civil War and in the industrialization of China ( Great Leap Forward ) and in its intervention in the Korean War ( proxy war ).

During the Cold War, the Soviet Foreign Ministers Vyshinsky and Molotov consistently advocated a foreign policy of strength. Even in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev times, this great power policy was pursued by the long-serving Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko (1957–1985).

The Berlin blockade of 1948 and the successful detonation of the first Soviet atomic bomb as part of the Soviet atomic bomb project of 1949 intensified the Cold War.

Domestic politics

The generalissimo Stalin (from 1945) was still the absolute dictator and leader of the Politburo, with Khrushchev as one of his closest confidants. In 1952 Stalin increased the Politburo to 25 members in order to initiate a rejuvenation of the political leadership. He remained head of government until his death.

Even after the Second World War, the Soviet Union experienced a gloomy period of terror, although the terror never achieved the dimensions it had in the years from 1936 to 1940. The rule of the communist unity party CPSU was secured internally. In the Leningrad affair , Stalin got rid of his supposed rivals from the Leningrad party office, including Voznesensky, with the help of fabricated allegations . Dissidents have been banned or placed under house arrest.

Simple party members, top functionaries as well as deserving artists were caught in the system of permanent insecurity and fear, reprisals, arrests and deportations. Central Committee Secretary Zhdanov , who set up the two-camp theory , described writers such as Akhmatova and Pasternak , directors such as Eisenstein and composers such as Prokofiev and Shostakovich as the "droolers of the West". The anti-Zionist campaign against Stalin's " rootless cosmopolitans " and Zionists culminated in the discovery of the so-called " doctors' plot ".

The Gulags - so-called “labor reform camps” in a comprehensive system of repression - were under the administration of the Interior Ministry until the end of the Soviet Union . Up to 10 million people were in the penal and forced labor camps.

Relations with China became more difficult after Stalin's death and Beijing and Moscow broke up after the Cuban Missile Crisis . This was a severe blow to the Soviet leadership, which was keen to maintain the leadership role in world communism. In addition, Beijing turned to the USA with Nixon's visit to China, shifting the geopolitical balance, which seemed to be turning after the American defeat in the Vietnam War , to the disadvantage of Moscow.

Domestically, the Soviet Union suffered from the weaknesses of the communist planned economy and the associated bureaucracy , which only permitted a weak economic life: an industrial worker in the city earned an average of 600 to 800 rubles , but a kilogram of butter cost 68 rubles, a pair of medium-quality shoes 200.

The economic weakening of the Soviet Union was intensified considerably by the arms race in the arms race between East and West. The efforts of the USSR to compete with the NATO states on the same level in military armament despite its considerably lower economic strength put a considerable strain on the Soviet economy and led to conflicts in the party and state leadership with regard to the economic priorities such as heavy industry, light industry, Agricultural production or consumer goods industry.

Foreign policy

The Eastern Bloc states included the Soviet Union and the dependent satellite states Poland , GDR , Czechoslovakia , Hungary and Bulgaria as well as Romania and Albania in some or at times . In principle, it was hardly possible to take a decisive measure by an Eastern Bloc state without consulting the Soviet Union. The Iron Curtain - as Churchill put it - soon fell.

In the conferences in Moscow, Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam, the Soviet Union, USA and Great Britain had informally agreed their areas of interest for the European states. For Romania (90%) and Bulgaria (75%), the Soviet Union had been granted a predominant influence. For Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland and Czechoslovakia, the influence should be balanced; a predominantly western influence was agreed for Greece. But things turned out differently: The Red Army enforced communist-ruled people 's republics in the states it occupied .

The greatest tension between East and West was divided Germany. In the Soviet occupation zone in 1946, in the course of the forced unification of the SPD and KPD to form the SED, the communists quickly prevailed.

The Berlin blockade shook the already disturbed relationship between the powers. Soviet troops blocked the roads between the three Western Occupation Zones and West Berlin (they all ran through the Soviet Occupation Zone ) from June 24, 1948 to May 12, 1949. This was declared by the USSR as a reaction to the currency reform of the Western Zones . The Western powers defied this first Berlin crisis by supplying West Berlin with food, energy and other goods by means of an airlift ( Berlin Airlift ). This blockade was a high point of the Cold War. Stalin did not succeed in getting West Berlin into power. West Berlin (then under Mayor Ernst Reuter , later under Willy Brandt and others ) has since been a symbol of successful resistance against the imperial policy of the Soviet Union.

The founding of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic in 1949 manifested the Iron Curtain .

Josef Stalin on a GDR postage stamp

On March 10, 1952, Stalin offered the Western powers (France, Great Britain, USA) negotiations on the reunification and neutralization of Germany in the so-called Stalin Notes . Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and the Western powers rejected the diplomatic note as a disruptive maneuver and as a hindrance to the West's integration of the Federal Republic.

After Stalin's death (March 1953) there was a wave of strikes, demonstrations and protests in the days around June 17, 1953 because of the rise in labor standards in the GDR . The Soviet authorities reacted by declaring a state of emergency . Soviet troops advancing into Berlin violently suppressed the popular uprising .

In 1955, Foreign Minister Molotov and Deputy Prime Minister Mikoyan negotiated with Austria (Federal Chancellor Julius Raab , Vice Chancellor Adolf Schärf , Foreign Minister Leopold Figl and State Secretary Bruno Kreisky ), which, like Germany , had been divided into four occupation zones at the end of the war in 1945 . When Austria and the victorious powers signed the Austrian State Treaty on May 15, 1955 , Austria regained full sovereignty on July 27, 1955 (see also the time of occupation in Austria ). However, it had to make a commitment to neutrality beforehand in the Moscow Memorandum .

The Council for Mutual Economic Aid (Comecon) was founded in Moscow in 1949 as a socialist counterweight to the Marshall Plan and the OECD . It was intended to strengthen economic power as well as specialization and division of labor in the Comecon countries. In addition to the Soviet Union, this also included Albania , Bulgaria , Poland , Romania , Czechoslovakia , Hungary and, from 1950, the GDR. Cuba , Mongolia and Vietnam later also became members.

Troop strength of the Warsaw Pact and NATO member states in Europe, 1973

In the next decades the world was marked by the duel between the superpowers USA and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union relied on the Warsaw Pact , which consisted of the satellite states won in World War II (Albania until 1968, Bulgaria, GDR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and partly Romania). The pact was concluded in Warsaw in 1955 in the form of bilateral agreements on friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance (VFZ) . The military alliance was under the leadership of the Soviet Union. Stalin's policy resulted in a number of politico-military alliances in the “capitalist camp”. The defense pacts of NATO (1949), SEATO (1954) and CENTO (1955) were created.

The Soviet Union suffered a setback on the road to world communism when in 1948 Yugoslavia claimed to want to go its own way to socialism , which essentially provided for a certain degree of self-administration by the factories. This Titoism brought the country into opposition to the Soviet hegemony and in 1948 led to the break between Stalin and the self-confident former partisan leader Josip Broz Tito . From 1949 to 1953, Titoism was a reason for the CPSU to continue persecuting so-called “deviants”, “heretics” and nationalist currents in the Eastern Bloc states. In the course of the de-Stalinization after Stalin's death, normal relations with the Soviet Union came back under Nikita Khrushchev , but Yugoslavia remained a non-aligned state .

In China, with Soviet help, but entirely on their own, the Communists under Mao Tse-tung won . Until 1949, however, the Soviet Union still maintained diplomatic relations with the opposing national China under Chiang Kaischek . The new People's Republic of China was recognized the day after it was founded on October 1, 1949. Mao was promptly invited to Moscow by Stalin, and on February 14, 1950 a friendship and assistance agreement was signed. The Soviet Union waived all previous rights over the ports of Port Arthur / Lüshunkou and Dairen / Dalian and on the east Chinese railway . The USSR took a long time to fulfill its treaty agreements until 1952 and 1955, respectively. Problems of mutual interest regarding Mongolia and East Turkestan / Xinjiang remained open. The relationship between the two states was fraught with conflict.

1953–1964: Khrushchev era

After Stalin's death (March 1953) Nikita Khrushchev became First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ( CPSU ) in June 1953 and in 1958 also head of government as the successor to Georgi Malenkov (1953–1955) and Nikolai Bulganin . He thus reunited (like Stalin from 1941 to 1953) the highest party office of the CPSU with the most powerful state office as prime minister in one person. Formal head of state as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet was Voroshilov from 1953 to 1960 and Leonid Brezhnev from 1960 to 1964 .

Political leadership until 1964

On the XX. At the CPSU party congress in February 1956, Khrushchev initiated de-Stalinization and more liberal party politics with his five-hour secret speech “ On the personality cult and its consequences ”. He wanted to gain room for maneuver for a cautious reform policy. This was a turning point in the history of the Soviet Union. Parts of the speech were soon published in the USSR as well.

This was followed by partial amnesties for prisoners imprisoned as forced laborers under Stalin , initially a substantive discussion about the further development in the parties and societies of the Eastern Bloc, the ending and condemnation of the personality cult , the partial investigation of Stalinist crimes, a reduction in censorship and a first political course towards peaceful Coexistence .

In 1957 a clear majority of the Politburo members tried unsuccessfully to overthrow Khrushchev. However, a majority in the party's hastily convened Central Committee supported Khrushchev. It dismissed Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganowitsch and Saburow from their party offices. Bulganin remained prime minister for a year until Khrushchev took over the post in 1958.

Khrushchev (right) with Vice President Richard Nixon just before their kitchen debate in July 1959

The principle of the peaceful coexistence of states with different social systems states that the decision between capitalism and socialism should be made in peaceful competition between the two systems, i.e. excluding the armed conflict between them. On the XX. At the CPSU party congress, Khrushchev said: " The Leninist principle of peaceful coexistence between states with different social structures was and remains the general line in our country's foreign policy ". The party congress approved this general line of foreign policy.

In relation to the USA, too, the Soviet Union represented the principle of this peaceful coexistence of systems and proclaimed the goal of defeating capitalism primarily on the economic level by means of competition between systems . From September 15 to 27, 1959, Khrushchev was the first Soviet head of government to visit the United States at the invitation of Dwight D. Eisenhower .

Because of the course of the Soviet Union towards peaceful coexistence , u. a. the Communist Party of the PRC from the CPSU, a split between the communist parties that persisted until the fall of the Soviet Union.

Despite a policy of de-Stalinization and peaceful coexistence, the satellite states of the Soviet Union could not act as they pleased. With the Hungarian Revolution who tried Hungary in October and November 1956 to free themselves from Soviet oppression. Hungary's Prime Minister Imre Nagy called for parliamentary democracy and Hungary's neutrality. The counter-revolution , so called by the Warsaw Pact states, was bloody ended by the invasion of the Red Army. Nagy, Defense Minister Pál Maléter and another 350 people were also convicted and executed in the USSR. His successor, János Kádár , as General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party and Prime Minister, followed a course that was strictly loyal to Moscow in terms of foreign policy, but carried out domestic reforms.

The drifting apart of East and West intensified. Around 2.6 million people left the GDR between 1949 and 1961. This emigration threatened the economic strength of the GDR and thus also that of the Eastern bloc states.

At his repeated insistence, the Chairman of the State Council of the GDR, Walter Ulbricht , received approval from Khrushchev to seal off the Berlin sector border as an effective blocking measure. With the construction of the Berlin Wall in the GDR on August 13, 1961, the east-west division was reinforced.

In May 1962, the USSR began to Cuba secretly with nuclear warheads equipped on SS-4 medium-range missiles and 40,000 soldiers of the Soviet Army to station.

The USA discovered the first missile deployments. US President John F. Kennedy ordered a naval blockade for Soviet ships carrying armaments to Cuba and called on Khrushchev to withdraw the missiles from Cuba. Initially, he did not accept the blockade. A world war loomed. Khrushchev finally gave in and agreed to remove the missiles. In return, the United States declared: No invasion of Cuba. They also promised to withdraw their nuclear weapons from Turkey, which probably never happened.

After the expansion of heavy industry had clear priority during the Stalin era, also due to the war, electrification and the expansion of the chemical industry were now promoted. At the same time, Khrushchev attached great importance to increasing the productivity of agriculture considerably.

Until 1957, the Soviet economy was strictly centralized and structured according to branches . There were very special line ministries such as B. for radio electronics , aviation technology , wood industry , light engineering . The Gosplan tried a centralized steering over the five-year plans. In 1957, Khrushchev initiated an economic and administrative reform that stood out from the previous organizational principles of the party. Initially, around 100 economic administrative districts with national economic councils were formed ( Sownarchos ). In 1962 the number of districts was limited to 47. Khrushchev ordered that the party functionaries not only give basic instructions and control, but also participate directly in the administration of the state - especially in agricultural production. The party officials were overwhelmed. Failures now fell directly back on the party. A gigantic twenty year plan was drawn up. These reforms failed and led to the overthrow of Khrushchev. His successors withdrew the reforms.

Voting Khrushchev

In 1964, as a result of the failed agricultural and economic policy, the disrupted relations with the People's Republic of China , the defeat against Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis and due to his loss of power in the party , Khrushchev was resigned from his posts as first secretary of the party and prime minister of the USSR of the Central Committee (ZK ) removed from the party. Michail Suslow and Leonid Brezhnev , but also Alexei Kosygin , Anastas Mikojan and Dimitri Polyanski led on October 14, 1964 a. a. with the criticism of the party reform, the changed party statute and the agricultural policy brought about its overthrow. While in 1957 Khrushchev had the Malenkov-Molotov group voted out with the help of the Central Committee, this time the majority of his opponents used the same method: The Central Committee was called to a special session and the majority of the unprepared Khrushchev was forced to resign.

The murderous mass terror of the Stalin era ended. The greater part of the political prisoners was released, although several hundreds of thousands of prisoners remained. Most of the Siberian prison camps were closed. A judicial reform abolished clan liability and allowed defense in criminal trials.

The Stalindictatorship was followed by a more collective state and party leadership. The Central Committee was again involved in the decisions. A number of crimes of the Stalin era were exposed and the power of the secret service was reduced. The personality cult was restricted. Liberalization tendencies became apparent in the art and literature business.

In working life since 1956 - administratively restricted - the possibility of free choice of job had been given. On the other hand, through the so-called Parasite Law of the RSFSR, “work-shy elements” could be sent into exile by the work collective for up to 5 years.

The Khrushchev era also saw the spectacular successes of Soviet space travel. In 1957, Sputnik 1 was the first satellite to fly into space, and in 1961 Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet citizen, was the first person in space.

The system had been modernized overall but not liberalized.

1964–1985: Brezhnev and his successors

Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev

After Khrushchev's fall, Leonid Brezhnev became first secretary and from 1966 general secretary of the CPSU. For a short time there was again collective leadership in the Politburo. Brezhnev soon prevailed over Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin and Head of State Nikolai Podgorny in terms of power politics . He replaced Podgorny in 1977 as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and thus as head of state.

The de-Stalinization initiated by Khrushchev was hardly pursued any more, the designation of Stalinism as the “period of the personality cult” was now even described as un-Marxist and incorrect. Further reforms that Khrushchev had begun in the party and state were partially withdrawn or completely abandoned, instead the leadership orientated itself again on the principles and traditions of Stalinism ( cf. Neo-Stalinism ). The freedom of expression was again severely restricted, in which one dissident writers such as Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel arrested. Political crime laws have also been tightened. Attempts were also made to present Stalin in a more positive light by highlighting his great "heroic deeds" during the Second World War. Gorbachev judged the development from 1967: "The spirit of the reforms visibly evaporated." "The stagnation began" with centralism , nomenclature and command economy .

The Brezhnev period was characterized by clear signs of stagnation among a very aging and conservative political leadership. It was mockingly called the "Golden Age of Stagnation". By 1980 the average age of the Politburo members was over 70 years of age.

Prague Spring, Brezhnev Doctrine

The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia under its First Secretary Alexander Dubček endeavored in the spring of 1968 for a liberalization and democratization program, for "socialism with a human face" in Czechoslovakia . This reform movement of the Prague Spring was overthrown by political intervention by the “Warsaw Five” - Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and GDR - as well as direct military intervention (“invasion”) by the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Poland and Hungary.

The actions took place within the framework of the Brezhnev Doctrine , announced on November 12, 1968 , which postulated a limited sovereignty for the Warsaw Pact states with the thesis: “ The sovereignty of the individual states finds its limit in the interests of the socialist community. "

  • The first Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) took place in Helsinki in 1973 on the initiative of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact . Participants were 35 countries: the USA , Canada , the Soviet Union and all European countries with the exception of Albania .
  • The Helsinki Final Act was signed in 1975. In it, agreements were made on human rights, cooperation in business, science, technology and the environment, security issues and questions relating to cooperation in humanitarian matters. The successful goal of the CSCE was to help the Eastern and Western blocs in Europe to come to terms with one another in an orderly manner.
  • The human rights regulations, which were underestimated by the Comecon countries , formed the basis for the work of many Eastern European dissidents and human rights organizations and thus the basis for increasing liberalization in the Eastern Bloc countries.
  • The Moscow Treaty of 1970 between the USSR and the Federal Republic of Germany ensured relaxation in Central Europe and the like within the framework of the new Ostpolitik . a. by recognizing the Oder-Neisse line as the western border with Poland.
  • The SALT treaties (treaties on nuclear arms limitation ) were negotiated from 1969 to 1979. SALT I were signed in 1972 by US President Richard Nixon and Brezhnev in Moscow.
  • The 1972 ABM Treaty (Anti-Ballistic Missiles) between the USA and the USSR to limit missile defense systems was a result of the SALT negotiations.
  • Also SALT II was with the signatures of US President Jimmy Carter in 1979 and graduated Brezhnev.

The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979 put a temporary end to the détente process. SALT II was therefore no longer ratified by the USA.

Afghan war

In 1978 the Communist Democratic People's Party of Afghanistan (DVPA) took power in Afghanistan. However, around 30 mujahideen groups put up bitter and successful resistance.

In December 1979, therefore, at Babrak Karmal's request, Soviet troops marched into Afghanistan . The Afghan war turned into a debacle and also contributed to the decline of the Soviet Union. In 1980 the Olympic Games in Moscow were therefore boycotted by many Western countries.

After the withdrawal of the Soviet troops in 1989, the situation of the communists in the country deteriorated and they disappeared from the political scene after the Taliban came to power .

Yuri Andropov

Brezhnev's successor was Yuri Andropov for 1982-1984 . Andropov's previous activity as KGB chief was marked by the repression of the Prague Spring, the intended destruction of the Soviet dissident movement with members such as Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and a leading role in the invasion of Afghanistan. But as head of state he endeavored to revive Soviet politics internally and externally. In this context, his meeting with the American student Samantha Smith became famous .

On November 12, 1982, at the age of 68, despite his serious health, he was elected General Secretary of the CPSU . On June 16, 1983, Andropov was also chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. In the meantime, the doctors noted diabetes , high blood pressure and chronic kidney failure . In the last six months of his life, Andropov stopped going to public meetings. He died in Moscow after only 15 months in reign.

Konstantin Chernenko

In 1984, at the age of 72, Konstantin Chernenko became general secretary of the CPSU ; at that time he was suffering from asthma and was seriously ill. Like his predecessor, Yuri Andropov, Chernenko was Secretary General and Head of State only for a short time. He died after a thirteen month term. Chernenko is the last Soviet statesman to be buried on the Kremlin wall in Moscow .

1985–1991: Gorbachev's era

Mikhail S. Gorbachev

Reforms through glasnost and perestroika

With the election of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev as leader of the Communist Party in 1985, the reform forces prevailed. Under his leadership, the cautious reformer Nikolai Ryschkow served as prime minister from 1985 to 1991 .

The fact that at the beginning of the Gorbachev era in April 1986 in Yakutia for the first time in an ethnic case for legal equality was overshadowed by the Chernobyl disaster .

Gorbachev succeeded in rejuvenating the outdated Politburo in quick succession. Important members were Saikow , Slunkow , the reformers Vadim Medvedev and Jakowlew and from 1989/90 Kryuchkov and Janajew , who took part in an unsuccessful coup attempt against Gorbachev in 1991 . In the beginning there were 11 full members, at the end 24 members; the body lost power and importance. Boris Yeltsin accused Gorbachev in 1991 of having mostly proposed the new members himself.

The head of government was Ryschkow until 1991 , who was then replaced by the colorless, former finance minister Valentin Pavlov . The Georgian Eduard Shevardnadze , who gave up as a reformer in 1990, acted as an important foreign minister . From 1987 to 1991 Marshal Yasov was Minister of Defense until he came up with the idea of ​​a coup. The later putschist Vladimir Kryuchkov headed the KGB .

Little by little, Gorbachev's policies of glasnost (transparency) and perestroika (transformation) exposed the economic and political crisis. The population, too, was now increasingly openly criticizing the system, which, like paper money, no longer believed in and during which food was difficult to obtain and rationed. The nomenklatura , however, was initially convinced to be able to keep control of the development through active participation. However, it was eventually overwhelmed by the momentum of development.

Foreign policy

During this time, foreign policy was essentially carried out by Gorbachev and the Foreign Minister from 1985 to 1990 Eduard Shevardnadze .

Reagan (right) and Gorbachev sign the INF Treaty in the White House in 1987.
Summit in Malta, 1989
Bush and Gorbachev in conversation

After the Geneva Summit Conference (1985) , the meeting in Reykjavík in October 1986 , the visit to Moscow by US Secretary of State George P. Shultz in April 1987 and Gorbachev's state visit to Washington, DC in December 1987 , the return visit lasted until April 1988 of the US President Ronald Reagan in Moscow, decisive steps between the USSR and the USA for nuclear disarmament and for relaxation between the great powers are initiated (→  INF Treaty ).

In Malta (July 1989) and Washington (May 1990) this dialogue between US President George Bush Sr. and Gorbachev continued and supplemented with economic questions and the USSR - initially for the time being - included in the talks of the G-7 countries (Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Canada, USA).

The successful CSCE successor negotiations in 1989 also led to an improvement in relations between the participating states from Europe and North America.

In October 1988, Gorbachev announced in the so-called Sinatra Doctrine that the Soviet Union was giving up the Brezhnev Doctrine and allowed the Eastern European states to introduce more democracy. Already during his appointment as president, on the occasion of the funeral of his predecessor, Gorbachev had informed the heads of state of the Eastern European states that he would not practice the Brezhnev doctrine. The new freedoms led to a series of mostly peaceful revolutions in 1989 in Eastern Europe. They ended the Cold War , with which the “ Iron Curtain ” fell, and made German reunification possible , the formal results of which the USSR played a key role.

The Soviet-Afghan War that began in 1979 ended in 1989 with the withdrawal of the troops.

Dissolution of the Soviet Union

During the attempted coup in 1991, also known as the August coup in Moscow , the State Committee for the State of Emergency , a group of CPSU officials, temporarily removed President Gorbachev and attempted to take control of the country. Although the coup attempt failed in just three days and Gorbachev was reinstated, the event accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union .

On March 11, 1990, Lithuania first declared their independence from the USSR, followed by Estonia and Latvia on August 20 and 21, 1990 . This was followed by April 9, 1991 Georgia , on 24, 25, 27 and 31 August 1991 Ukraine , Belarus , Moldova and Kyrgyzstan , on 1, 9 and 21 September 1991 Uzbekistan , Tajikistan and Armenia , on 18 . and October 27, 1991 Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan and on December 16, 1991 Kazakhstan . The Russian SFSR , which had already proclaimed its sovereignty in June 1990 but not its independence, declared the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, which facilitated the transition of the external relations of the old Soviet Union to the newly formed Russian Federation.

Boris Yeltsin, who was elected President of Russia in the country's first democratic presidential election on June 12, 1991, took control of the media and key ministries. Gradually, he dismantled and ousted President Gorbachev, who resigned as President of the USSR on December 25, 1991 and handed over the duties of office to Yeltsin as President of the Russian Federation . Symbolically, at 19:32 Moscow time, the hammer and sickle flag of the Soviet Union, which had been waving over the Moscow Kremlin since 1917, was brought down and the white-blue-red flag of Russia was raised.

Finally, on December 26, 1991 , the Supreme Soviet resolved to dissolve the Soviet Union as a subject of international law . The rights and obligations of the Soviet Union under international law were taken over by the Russian Federation - under Yeltsin's leadership - as the continuation state of the USSR ( état continuateur ), which is identical to the RSFSR under international law , whereby the Soviet seat on the UN Security Council also fell to Russia. With the expiration of December 31, 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. A later declaration of nullity by the Russian Duma on March 15, 1996, which was requested by the KPRF and obtained a majority, had no consequences.

There remained the now 15 sovereign states of the Union. The Commonwealth of Independent States was founded on December 8, 1991 by an agreement between the heads of state of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus and the accession of eight other successor states to the Soviet Union - Armenia , Azerbaijan , Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan , Moldova , Tajikistan and Uzbekistan . In 1993 Georgia also joined the CIS.

After the turn of the millennium, the CIS clearly lost its importance. Turkmenistan has only been an associate member since 2005. Georgia de facto left the CIS in 2008. From 2008 to 2014 Ukraine saw itself only as a participating state and not a member state ; on March 19, 2014, she announced her resignation. According to Article 9 of the CIS Statute, a resignation will take effect 12 months after it has been announced in writing to the depositary of the Statute (Belarus).

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Boris Meissner , Origin, Development and Ideological Foundations of the Soviet Federal State , in: Friedrich-Christian Schroeder, Boris Meissner (Ed.), Federal State and Nationality Law in the Soviet Union , Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1974, pp. 9–68, here p 45 .
  2. ^ Andreas Zimmermann, State succession in international law treaties: at the same time a contribution to the possibilities and limits of international law codification , Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law , Springer, 2000, ISBN 3-540-66140-9 , pp. 85 ff. ( 91 f. )
  3. Peter Pernthaler , Allgemeine Staatslehre und Verfassungslehre , second, completely revised edition, Springer, Vienna / New York 1996, § 59 ( p. 187 ).
  4. a b Hildermeier, 1998, p. 378.
  5. Hildermeier, 1998, p. 379.
  6. Hildermeier, 1998, p. 389, table 9.
  7. Manfred Hildermeier : The Soviet Union 1917–1991 (= Oldenbourg floor plan of history, vol. 31), 2nd edition, Oldenbourg, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-486-58327-4 , p. 38 f.
  8. Wolfgang Zank: Stille Vernichtung , Zeit Online , December 3, 2008.
  9. ^ History of the Second World War . P. 81, Ploetz, Würzburg 1960.
  10. Milton Leitenberg: Death in Wars and Conflicts in the 20th Century ( Memento of the original from June 15, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / pacs.einaudi.cornell.edu
  11. Ilja Altman : Victims of hatred. The Holocaust in the USSR 1941–1945. With a foreword by Hans-Heinrich Nolte . Muster-Schmidt-Verlag, Gleichen / Zurich 2008, p. 7 u. 47.
  12. On the expulsions see Jörg Baberowski : Der Rote Terror. The history of Stalinism , Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-421-05486-X , p. 237.
  13. Full text of the speech
  14. Despite the postulate of secrecy, the speech was sent to local party authorities and communist parties abroad and published in the USA on June 4, 1956 ( The Khrushchev's Secret Speech. On the Personality Cult and Its Consequences. Speech by the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee the XXth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, February 25, 1956. Dietz, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-320-01544-3 ).
  15. ^ From: Wolfgang Leonhard , Die Dreispaltung des Marxismus. Origin and Development of Soviet Marxism, Maoism & Reform Communism , Düsseldorf / Vienna 1979, p. 252.
  16. ^ From: Wolfgang Leonhard, Die Dreispaltung des Marxismus. Origin and Development of Soviet Marxism, Maoism & Reform Communism , Düsseldorf / Vienna 1979, pp. 251–256.
  17. Michail Gorbatschow: Recollections , Siedler, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-88680-524-7 , pp. 123 f., 126, 144.
  18. ^ Ed A. Hewett, Victor H. Winston: Milestones in Glasnost and Perestroyka: Politics and People, Volume 2 , Brookings Institution Press, 2010 ISBN 9780815719144
  19. Jump up Leokadia Drobizheva, Rose Gottemoeller, Catherine McArdle Kelleher, Lee Walker: Ethnic Conflict in the Post-Soviet World: Case Studies and Analysis: Case Studies and Analysis , Routledge, 2015, ISBN 9781317470991 , p. 166
  20. ^ "There is enough food" , Spiegel, December 24, 1990; "Consumers richly stocked with worthless ruble bills are hoarding absurd supplies in anticipation of even worse times."
  21. Russia against the Soviet Union , Die Zeit, November 23, 1990; "It is no longer worth selling food for the worthless rubble of paper that is no longer money, which is why more and more food is rotting"
  22. Ulrich Schmid: "Nobody believed in the system anymore" (Minute 19)
  23. Jump up earlier , Spiegel, March 15, 1990
  24. Tagesschau from December 25, 1991 on YouTube
  25. END OF THE SOVIET UNION; The Soviet State, Born of a Dream, Dies. Retrieved March 3, 2010 .
  26. Ross. Gaz dated January 21, 1992, German translation by Theodor Schweisfurth , Staatensukzession , p. 67.
  27. Manfred Hildermeier: The Soviet Union 1917–1991. Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-486-58327-4 , p. 99.
  28. After predominantly representation in the research literature, such as after the Research Center for Eastern Europe at the University of Bremen and the German Society for Eastern European Studies (PDF; 260 kB), this event occurred on December 25, 1991; individual sources also mention December 31, 1991, such as B. Klaus Körner, "The Red Danger": anti-communist propaganda in the Federal Republic 1950-2000 , Konkret Literatur, 2003, ISBN 3-89458-215-4 , p. 13, or Richard Schmidt, University of Politics Munich, magazine for politics , Volume 41. Ed. By Adolf Grabowsky, C. Heymann, 1994, ISBN 3-452-22812-6 , p. 289.
  29. Printed matter 13/4404 of April 19, 1996 by the German Federal Government with an answer to a request from Klaus Dieter Reichardt to annul the dissolution of the USSR by the Russian State Duma.
  30. Устав Содружества Независимых Государств . CIS statute.