Global History & Geography 10 Course Pack The World Since 1945: The Post-War World THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION READINGS

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1 Name: Global History & Geography 10 Course Pack The World Since 1945: The Post-War World THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION READINGS What led to the collapse of the Soviet Union? Reading 31: Lech Walesa & Solidarity Weaken the USSR Reading 32: The Fall of the Berlin Wall, November 1989 Reading 33: Gorbachev s Policies Encourage Rebellion Reading 34: Boris Yeltsin and Russia s Transition to a Free Market Economy Directions for all Readings : Take Cornell Notes Reading 31: Lech Walesa & Solidarity Weaken the USSR Lech Walesa was born on September 29, 1943 in Popowo, Poland. After graduating from vocational school, he worked as a car mechanic at a machine center from 1961 to He served in the army for two years, rose to the rank of corporal, and in 1967 was employed in the Gdansk shipyards as an electrician. In 1969 he married Danuta Golos and they have eight children. During the clash in December 1970 between the workers and the government, he was one of the leaders of the shipyard workers and was briefly detained. In 1976, however, as a result of his activities as a shop steward, he was fired and had to earn his living by taking temporary jobs. In 1978 with other activists he began to organise free non-communist trade unions and took part in many actions on the sea coast. He was kept under surveillance by the state security service and frequently detained. In August 1980 he led the Gdansk shipyard strike which gave rise to a wave of strikes over much of the country with Walesa seen as the leader. The primary demands were for workers' rights. The authorities were forced to capitulate and to negotiate with Walesa the Gdansk Agreement of August 31, 1980, which gave the workers the right to strike and to organize their own independent union. The Catholic Church supported the movement, and in January 1981 Walesa was cordially received by Pope John Paul II in the Vatican. Walesa himself has always regarded his Catholicism as a source of strength and inspiration. In the years Walesa travelled to Italy, Japan, Sweden, France and Switzerland as guest of the International Labour Organization. In September 1981 he was elected Solidarity Chairman at the First National Solidarity Congress in Gdansk. The country's brief enjoyment of relative freedom ended in December 1981, when General Jaruzelski, fearing Soviet armed intervention among other considerations, imposed martial law, "suspended" Solidarity, arrested many of its leaders, and interned Walesa in a country house in a remote spot. In November 1982 Walesa was released and reinstated at the Gdansk shipyards. Although kept under surveillance, he managed to maintain lively contact with Solidarity leaders in the underground. While martial law was lifted in July 1983, many of the restrictions were continued in civil code. In October 1983 the announcement of Walesa's Nobel prize raised the spirits of the underground movement, but the award was attacked by the government press. The Jaruzelski regime became even more unpopular as economic conditions worsened, and it was finally forced to negotiate with Walesa and his Solidarity colleagues. The result was the holding of MHSHS History Dept. P. 1

2 parliamentary elections which, although limited, led to the establishment of a non-communist government. Under Mikhail Gorbachev the Soviet Union was no longer prepared to use military force to keep communist parties in satellite states in power. Walesa, now head of the revived Solidarity labour union, began a series of meetings with world leaders. In April 1990 at Solidarity's second national congress, Walesa was elected chairman with 77.5% of the votes. In December 1990 in a general ballot he was elected President of the Republic of Poland. He served until defeated in the election of November Walesa has been granted many honorary degrees from universities, including Harvard University and the University of Paris. Other honors include the Medal of Freedom (Philadelphia, U.S.A.); the Award of Free World (Norway); and the European Award of Human Rights. Reading 32: The Fall of the Berlin Wall Summary On August 13, 1961, the Communist government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) began to build a barbed wire and concrete "Antifascistischer Schutzwall," or "antifascist bulwark," between East and West Berlin. The official purpose of this Berlin Wall was to keep Western "fascists" from entering East Germany and undermining the socialist state, but it primarily served the objective of stemming mass defections from East to West. The Berlin Wall stood until November 9, 1989, when the head of the East German Communist Party announced that citizens of the GDR could cross the border whenever they pleased. That night, ecstatic crowds swarmed the wall. Some crossed freely into West Berlin, while others brought hammers and picks and began to chip away at the wall itself. To this day, the Berlin Wall remains one of the most powerful and enduring symbols of the Cold War. The Berlin Wall: The Partitioning of Berlin As World War II came to an end in 1945, a pair of Allied peace conferences at Yalta and Potsdam determined the fate of Germany s territories. They split the defeated nation into four allied occupation zones : The eastern part of the country went to the Soviet Union, while the western part went to the United States, Great Britain and (eventually) France. Even though Berlin was located entirely within the Soviet part of the country (it sat about 100 miles from the border between the eastern and western occupation zones), the Yalta and Potsdam agreements split the city into similar sectors. The Soviets took the eastern half, while the other Allies took the western. This four-way occupation of Berlin began in June The Berlin Wall: Blockade and Crisis The existence of West Berlin, a conspicuously capitalist city deep within communist East Germany, stuck like a bone in the Soviet throat, as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev put it. The Russians began maneuvering to drive the United States, Britain and France out of the city for good. In 1948, a Soviet blockade of West Berlin aimed to starve the western Allies out of the city. Instead of retreating, however, the United States and its allies supplied their sectors of the city from the air. This effort, known as the Berlin Airlift, lasted for more than a year and delivered more than 2.3 million tons of food, fuel and other goods to West Berlin. The Soviets called off the blockade in After a decade of relative calm, tensions flared again in For the next three years, the Soviets emboldened by the successful launch of the Sputnik satellite the year before and embarrassed by the seemingly endless flow of refugees from east to west (nearly 3 million since the end of the blockade, many of them young skilled workers such as doctors, teachers and engineers) blustered and made MHSHS History Dept. P. 2

3 threats, while the Allies resisted. Summits, conferences and other negotiations came and went without resolution. Meanwhile, the flood of refugees continued. In June 1961, some 19,000 people left the GDR through Berlin. The following month, 30,000 fled. In the first 11 days of August, 16,000 East Germans crossed the border into West Berlin, and on August 12 some 2,400 followed the largest number of defectors ever to leave East Germany in a single day. The Berlin Wall: Building the Wall That night, Premier Khrushchev gave the East German government permission to stop the flow of emigrants by closing its border for good. In just two weeks, the East German army, police force and volunteer construction workers had completed a makeshift barbed wire and concrete block wall the Berlin Wall that divided one side of the city from the other. Before the wall was built, Berliners on both sides of the city could move around fairly freely: They crossed the East-West border to work, to shop, to go to the theater and the movies. Trains and subway lines carried passengers back and forth. After the wall was built, it became impossible to get from East to West Berlin except through one of three checkpoints: at Helmstedt ( Checkpoint Alpha in American military parlance), at Dreilinden ( Checkpoint Bravo ) and in the center of Berlin at Friedrichstrasse ( Checkpoint Charlie ). (Eventually, the GDR built 12 checkpoints along the wall.) At each of the checkpoints, East German soldiers screened diplomats and other officials before they were allowed to enter or leave. Except under special circumstances, travelers from East and West Berlin were rarely allowed across the border. The Berlin Wall: The construction of the Berlin Wall did stop the flood of refugees from East to West, and it did defuse the crisis over Berlin. (Though he was not happy about it, President Kennedy conceded that a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war. ) Over time, East German officials replaced the makeshift wall with one that was sturdier and more difficult to scale. A 12-foot-tall, 4-foot-wide mass of reinforced concrete was topped with an enormous pipe that made climbing over nearly impossible. Behind the wall on the East German side was a so-called Death Strip : a gauntlet of soft sand (to show footprints), floodlights, vicious dogs, trip-wire machine guns and patrolling soldiers with orders to shoot escapees on sight. In all, at least 171 people were killed trying to get over, under or around the Berlin Wall. Escape from East Germany was not impossible, however: From 1961 until the wall came down in 1989, more than 5,000 East Germans (including some 600 border guards) managed to cross the border by jumping out of windows adjacent to the wall, climbing over the barbed wire, flying in hot air balloons, crawling through the sewers and driving through unfortified parts of the wall at high speeds. The Berlin Wall: The Fall of the Wall On November 9, 1989, as the Cold War began to thaw across Eastern Europe, the spokesman for East Berlin s Communist Party announced a change in his city s relations with the West. Starting at midnight that day, he said, citizens of the GDR were free to cross the country s borders. East and West Berliners flocked to the wall, drinking beer and champagne and chanting Tor auf! ( Open the gate! ). At midnight, they flooded through the checkpoints. More than 2 million people from East Berlin visited West Berlin that weekend to participate in a celebration that was, one journalist wrote, the greatest street party in the history of the world. People used hammers and picks to knock away chunks of the wall they became known as mauerspechte, or wall woodpeckers while cranes and bulldozers pulled down section after section. Soon the wall was gone and Berlin was united for the first time since Only today, one Berliner spray-painted on a piece of the wall, is the war really over. MHSHS History Dept. P. 3

4 The reunification of East and West Germany was made official on October 3, 1990, almost one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Reading 33: Gorbachev s Policies Encourage Rebellion In December of 1991, as the world watched in amazement, the Soviet Union disintegrated into fifteen separate countries. Its collapse was hailed by the west as a victory for freedom, a triumph of democracy over totalitarianism, and evidence of the superiority of capitalism over socialism. The United States rejoiced as its enemy was brought to its knees, thereby ending the Cold War which had hovered over these two superpowers since the end of World War II. Indeed, the breakup of the Soviet Union transformed the entire world political situation, leading to a complete reformulation of political, economic and military alliances all over the globe. What led to this monumental historical event? In fact, the answer is a very complex one, and can only be arrived at with an understanding of the peculiar composition and history of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was built on approximately the same territory as the Russian Empire which it succeeded. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the newly-formed government developed a philosophy of socialism with the eventual and gradual transition to Communism. The state which the Bolsheviks created was intended to overcome national differences to create one state based on a centralized economical and political system. This state, which was built on a Communist ideology, was eventually transformed into a totalitarian state, in which the Communist leadership had complete control over the country. However, this project of creating a unified, centralized socialist state proved problematic for several reasons. First, the Soviets underestimated the degree to which the non-russian ethnic groups in the country (which comprised more than fifty percent of the total population of the Soviet Union) would resist assimilation into a Russian-ized State. Second, their economic planning failed to meet the needs of the State, which was caught up in a vicious arms race with the United States. This led to gradual economic decline, eventually necessitating the need for reform. Finally, the ideology of Communism, which the Soviet Government worked to instill in the hearts and minds of its population, never took firm root, and eventually lost whatever influence it had originally carried. By the time of the 1985 rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union s last leader, the country was in a situation of severe economic and political problems which sorely needed to be addressed and overcome. Recognizing this, Gorbachev introduced a two-tiered policy of reform. On one level, he initiated a policy of glasnost, or freedom of speech. On the other level, he began a program of economic reform known as perestroika, or rebuilding. What Gorbachev did not realize was that by giving people complete freedom of expression, he was unleashing emotions and political feelings that had been pent up for decades, and which proved to be extremely powerful when brought out into the open. Moreover, his policy of economic reform did not have the immediate results he had hoped for and had publicly predicted. The Soviet people consequently used their newly allotted freedom of speech to criticize Gorbachev for his failure to improve the economy. The disintegration of the Soviet Union began on the outskirts, in the non-russian areas. The first region to produce mass, organized dissent was the Baltic region, where, in 1987, the government of Estonia demanded autonomy. This move was later followed by similar moves in Lithuania and Latvia, the other two Baltic republics. The nationalist movements in the Baltics constituted a strong challenge to Gorbachev s policy of glasnost. He did not want to crack down too severely on the participants in these movements, yet at the same time, it became increasingly evident that allowing them to run their course would spell disaster for the Soviet Union, which would completely collapse if all of the outer-republics were to demand independence. After the initiative from Estonia, similar movements sprang up all over the former Soviet Union. In the south of the Soviet Union, a movement developed inside the Armenian-populated region of Nagorno-Karabagh, in the Republic of Azerbaijan. The Armenian population of this region demanded that they be granted the right to join the Republic of Armenia, with whose population they were ethnically linked. Massive demonstrations were held in Armenia in solidarity with those in MHSHS History Dept. P. 4

5 Nagorno-Karabagh. The Gorbachev government refused to allow the population of Nagorno- Karabagh to leave, and the situation developed into a violent territorial dispute, eventually degenerating into an all-out war which continues until the present day. This trickle turned into a river--nationalist movements emerged in Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Byelorussia, and the Central Asian republics. The power of the Central Government was considerably weakened by these movements; they could no longer rely on the cooperation of Government figures in the republics. Finally, the situation came to a head in August of In a last-ditch effort to save the Soviet Union, which was floundering under the impact of the political movements which had emerged since the implementation of Gorbachev s glasnost, a group of hard-line Communists organized a coup d etat, that became known as the August Coup. They kidnapped Gorbachev, and then, on August 19 of 1991, they announced on state television that Gorbachev was very ill and would no longer be able to govern. The country went into an uproar. Massive protests were staged in Moscow, Leningrad, and many of the other major cities of the Soviet Union. When the coup organizers tried to bring in the military to quell the protestors, the soldiers themselves rebelled, saying that they could not fire on their fellow countrymen. It is during these days of the coup that Boris Yeltsin rose to power. His speeches from atop tanks inspired the military to back down and the people to continue protesting. After three days of massive protest, the coup organizers surrendered, realizing that without the cooperation of the military, they did not have the power to overcome the power of the entire population of the country. After the failed coup attempt, it was only a few months until the Soviet Union completely collapsed. Both the government and the people realized that there was no way to turn back the clock; the massive demonstrations of the August Coup had demonstrated that the population would accept nothing less than democracy. Gorbachev conceded power, realizing that he could no longer contain the power of the population. On December 25, 1991, he resigned. By January of 1992, by popular demand, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. In its place, a new entity was formed. It was called the Commonwealth of Independent Republics, and was composed of most of the independent countries of the former Soviet Union. While the member countries had complete political independence, they were linked to other Commonwealth countries by economic, and, in some cases, military ties. Now that the Soviet Union, with its centralized political and economic system, has ceased to exist, the fifteen newly formed independent countries which emerged in its aftermath are faced with an overwhelming task. They must develop their economies, reorganize their political systems, and, in many cases, settle bitter territorial disputes. A number of wars have developed on the peripheries of the former Soviet Union. Additionally, the entire region is suffering a period of severe economic hardship. However, despite the many hardships facing the region, bold steps are being taken toward democratization, reorganization, and rebuilding in most of the countries of the former Soviet Union. Reading 34: Boris Yeltsin and Russia s Transition to a Market Economy Boris Yeltsin was elected President of Russia in June, 1991, in the first direct presidential election in Russian history. In October, as Russia was about to become independent of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union was about to break apart, Yeltsin announced that Russia would proceed with marketoriented reform similar to Poland's, known as "shock therapy." MHSHS History Dept. P. 5

6 From Russia's parliament, Yeltsin received one year of special powers: the ability to issue laws by decree for the purpose of remaking Russia's economy. Members of parliament felt close to Yeltsin for his having stood against the recent coup attempt by the Soviet Union's Communist Party hardliners - - Yeltsin remembered for having stood atop a tank in Moscow. The method of remaking of Russia's economy has been described as "shock therapy," which refers to a sudden privatization of Russia 225,000 or so state-owned businesses, a sudden release of price and currency controls, withdrawal of state subsidies, and sudden trade liberalization. Yeltsin had assembled a team of economists devoted to free-market economics. They were admirers of the U.S. economist Milton Friedman and referred to in Moscow as the "Chicago Boys." In his book, Superpower Illusions, the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock, writes that shock therapy "ignored the fact that there was no legitimate capital in the country." He describes the result: "Communist Party officials, senior military and KGB officer, and other privileged insiders join the criminals who had been running a black market steal what they could, as fast as they could." The Soviet Union was sailing into free enterprise without people who had a lot of experience with decision-making in a free market economy. Almost no Soviet employees or managers had such experience. Also, laws that fit a free enterprise system were not in place. It was to be described as like building a house with no plumbing. A gradual approach might have been better, what Matlock describes as "first freeing up trade and small business, with generous loans available to entrepreneurs as well as arrest and prosecution of the criminals who preyed on small businesses. Heavy industry, rail and air transport, and communications could have remained temporarily under state ownership, as corporations required to compete with state-owned corporations." In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein writes of the effect of the shock doctrine's disconnection with public opinion -- that lack of democracy resulting from Yeltsin's dictatorial powers. Klein writes. Like the Polish supporters of Solidarity, 67 percent of Russians told pollsters in 1992 they believed workers' cooperatives were the most equitable way to privatize the assets of the Communist state, and 79 percent said they considered maintaining full employment to be a core function of government. Yeltsin promised difficulty for approximately six months but that then recovery would come and Russia would become a great economic power -- the fourth largest in the world. According to Klein, "After only one year, shock therapy had taken a devastating toll. Inflation had reduced the value of Russia's currency. "[M]illions of middle-class Russians had lost their life savings...abrupt cuts to subsidies meant millions of workers had not been paid in months. The average Russian consumed 40 percent less in 1992 than in The government moved to control inflation through austerity. To fight inflation, interest rates were raised and massive cuts in state welfare spending were made. By mid-1993 from 39 to 49 percent of the population was living in poverty. Buying dried up, and by the mid-1990s the economy was depressed. In 1998, Russia's economy suffered more with a financial crash, triggered by the financial crisis that began in Asia in According to statistics by Russia's government, the economic decline in terms of Gross Domestic Product was more severe than that suffered by the in the United States in the Great Depression of the 1930s. According to the World Health Organization s statistics, alcohol-related deaths in Russia increased 60 percent in the 1990s, and deaths from infectious and parasitic diseases increased 100 percent, "mainly because medicines were no longer affordable to the poor." Vowing to change Russia s economy to a free market economy endorsed by liberalization and privatization, Yeltsin was elected to a second term in He remained President until December MHSHS History Dept. P. 6

7 31, 1999 when he stepped down to let Vladimir Putin take his place. Boris Yeltsin died from a number of health problems in Moscow on April 23, MHSHS History Dept. P. 7