Menu
History
Services
Major event#1In 1991 on Christmas Day, the Soviet Flag flew over the Kremlin in Moscow for the last time. Days earlier, representatives from the 11 Soviet republics met in Alma-Ata and announced that they would no longer be part of the Soviet Union. Now only one of its 15 republics, Georgia, remained. The Soviet Union had fallen, mainly because of a large number of radical reforms that Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev had implemented during his six years as the leader of the USSR. Gorbachev resigned from his job on December 25.
|
Major Event#2The Soviet state was born in 1917. That year, the revolutionary Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian czar. They established a socialist state in the territory that had once belonged to the Russian empire. In 1922, Russia joined its republics in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Vladimir Lenin was the first leader of this Soviet state. He was the Marxist revolutionary. It was ruled by the Communist Party, and they demanded the allegiance of every Russian citizen. After 1924, Joseph Stalin became the leader. The state exercised totalitarian control over the economy. The state controlled all industrial activity and established collective farms. It also controlled every aspect of political and social life. People who argued against Stalin’s policies were arrested and sent to labor camps or they were executed.
|
Major Event #3In March 1985, a longtime Communist Party politician named Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the USSR. He inherited a political structure that made reform difficult. .Gorbachev introduced two sets of policies that he hoped would help the USSR become a more prosperous, productive nation. He introduced glasnost, or political openness. Glasnost eliminated the of Stalin behavior of things like the banning of books and the secret police. He brought new freedoms to Soviet citizens. Political prisoners were released. Newspapers were free to print criticisms of the government. Parties other than the Communist Party could participate in elections.
|
Major Event #4
Gorbachev believed that the Soviet economy would benefit from better relationships with the rest of the world, especially the United States. President Reagan called the USSR the “Evil Empire” and launched a large military buildup, but Gorbachev vowed to get out of the arms race. He announced that he would withdraw Soviet troops from Afghanistan, where they had been fighting a war since 1979. He also reduced the Soviet military presence in the Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe. According to Gorbachev, the Eastern European alliances “crumbled like a dry saltine cracker in just a few months.” The first revolution of 1989 took place in Poland, where the non-Communist trade unionists in the Solidarity movement negotiated with the Communist government for freer elections. This action encouraged peaceful revolutions across Eastern Europe. |
Major Event #5
This atmosphere of possibility took hold in the Soviet Union. People were frustrated with the bad economy. Gorbachev’s hands-off approach to Soviet satellites also caused frustration and caused a series of independence movements in the republics on the USSR’s outlying areas. The Baltic states declared their independence from Moscow. Then, the Republic of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine broke away from the USSR and created the Commonwealth of Independent States. Weeks later, they were followed by eight of the nine remaining republics. Georgia was the last to join, two years later. The Soviet Union had fallen. |
Proudly powered by Weebly