Chapter 66: Social Upheaval - 'Civil Rights' and the Collapse of Communism Part Two: The Cold War and the Soviet Union's Collapse It had become apparent to Britain and America before the end of the Second World War that the Soviet Union had no intention of sticking to earlier pledges to install democratic governments in the territories it had occupied in Eastern Europe as a result of the collapse of the Nazi state. These suspicions were confirmed when one-party systems were instituted in all the eastern European countries directly under Soviet control, and the basic principles of Marxism were implemented to the letter: private property was for the greatest part outlawed and all market institutions became state controlled. The Berlin Blockade The division of Germany between the Soviets and the Western democratic powers became the focal point of the conflict which was to erupt between these two ideological systems: the erection of the wall around the divided city of Berlin and the erection of fortifications along the borders of all Communist controlled countries facing onto the West, became symbols of the post war divide. Eventually, rising tensions led to the Soviets attempting to drive the Allied powers out of Berlin by closing all road and rail access to the Western-controlled part of the city, which was deep inside Communist-controlled territory. The West responded by supplying the city by air in a round the clock operation which became known as the Berlin airlift. In many ways, Berlin symbolized what happened to the entire Eastern Europe after the end of the war: under a totalitarian dictatorship with full state control of all aspects of life, a long line of walls and fortifications were built to cut off these countries from all contact with the west. The wall built in Berlin, sometimes cutting through buildings and dividing streets in half, symbolized the division. The erection of the physical divisions along the borders of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and around West Berlin led the British wartime leader, Winston Churchill, to make his famous remark that during the war the Allies had "slaughtered the wrong pig".
The Cold War PHYSICALLY DIVIDES EUROPE While democratic governments were restored in almost all of Western Europe (except in Spain and Portugal). Eastern Europe was plunged into a protracted period of one-party rule which involved the suppression of all dissidents. Even the Allied controlled part of Germany was eventually given self rule under a democratic government (with the only restriction on political activity in Germany being on parties which supported, or were deemed by the state to support, National Socialism - an exclusion which is still in force) and thus the basis was laid for a 50-year standoff which became known as the Cold War between the Communist Soviet Empire and the Capitalist democratic West under the leadership of the United States. NATO and the Warsaw Pact SQUARE UP In April 1949, the United States, Canada, and ten Western European nations arranged a guarantee of mutual defense and assistance in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, known as NATO. In response to this, the Soviet Union banded its Eastern European satellites together into an organization which became known as the Warsaw Pact in 1955: this Pact would only last as long as the Soviet Union itself, and folded early in the 1990s. ANTI-COMMUNIST REBELLIONS ERUPT in Eastern Europe The Communists did not have a completely free ride in establishing their dictatorships in the Eastern European countries: there were violent uprisings against Soviet rule in East Germany in 1953; and in Poland and Hungary in 1956 (the latter two uprisings were marked by a strong anti-Jewish outburst, in reaction to the large number of Jews in the Communist administrations). Also in 1968, a largely peaceful rebellion took place in Czechoslovakia, known as the Prague Spring: these uprisings were put down with brute force, and did not re-occur while the Soviet Empire still held together.
Conflict in the Third World Despite much posturing and many threatening actions undertaken by both sides over the next fifty years, the much-feared Third World War between the Soviets and the United States never came about. Although the Soviet Union and America themselves never actually came to trading blows, their proxies throughout the world did: in Korea (1953); in Vietnam (1967); in Latin America (over a large number of years) and in Africa (also over a large number of years). The Korean War In June 1950, when South Korea was invaded by the forces of Communist North Korea, the Americans announced that they would intervene to assist the South Koreans. In November 1950, the Chinese Communists officially entered the war, and a hot war between an American led United Nations task force and the Red Chinese then followed. The war ended in 1953, with North and South Korea's borders returning to their original jump-off positions: by the end of the 20th century this Korean division had still not been solved. Cuban Missile Crisis BRINGS WORLD TO BRINK OF NUCLEAR WAR
In 1962, the much feared clash between the USA and the USSR did almost take place: when the Soviets provided Cuban bases with offensive missiles, the American president John Kennedy demanded their withdrawal. After a highly tension-packed standoff which saw both sides ready for armed conflict, the Soviets yielded and withdrew the missiles. Vietnam WAR ENDS IN AMERICAN DISASTER The origin of the Vietnam conflict lay in the division of that country between Communist Vietnamese in the North and Nationalist Vietnamese in the South of that country: once again the competing sides had the support of the Communists - this time the Chinese - and the United States respectively. In 1956, the South declared itself an independent republic: in retaliation, the North organized an army, the Vietcong, to start a guerrilla war against the South. By 1965, the South Vietnamese had appealed for, and received, direct military aid from America: by 1968, the United States had sent in a huge army 550,000 strong - with a significant number being Black troops. Despite an overwhelming material advantage and massive saturation bombing of North Vietnam, the American troops were unable to make any major headway against the Vietcong. Military discipline began to decline, with sections of the American army - Black and White - becoming famous for their open drug abuse and other reprehensible behavior.
Ultimately, the presence of American troops and the use of napalm bombing and other weapons turned a majority of Vietnamese against the foreigners and the South: when the American troops withdrew in 1973. They had to all intents been beaten, the first war to be lost by America. The North Vietnamese captured all of the South in 1975. African STATES USED AS FRONTS In Africa the Communists once again had considerably more success than the Americans in creating allies. Openly and massively supporting (with arms and troops) all the anti-colonial Black liberation movements, the Soviets managed to outsmart the Americans time and time again with an aggressive foreign policy which saw great swathes of that continent fall under Soviet influence. The Soviets also played a major racial card by supporting the Black liberation movements in South Africa and Rhodesia. This included the use of tens of thousands of Cuban troops in Angola to ward off South African incursions into that country during the 1970s and 1980s. Although the Americans covertly helped some anti-Communist Black guerrillas in Angola, using the South Africans as a supply line, they refused to aid South Africa or Rhodesia itself, not wanting to associate itself with the two White governments. SOVIET INVASION OF Afghanistan, 1979, BECOMES RUSSIA'S VIETNAM In 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and started a major racial clash in the region: the Soviets were forced to deploy only White Russian troops after it discovered that its Mongol and other troops from the non-White regions of the Soviet Union started defecting to the Muslim Afghan resistance - which, unsurprisingly, was supplied by the United States through Pakistan and India. The war in Afghanistan proved highly costly and unpopular in the Soviet Union itself and eventually the Soviets withdrew, leaving the country embroiled in its own civil war. It was this invasion which would precipitate the fall of the Soviet Union: the inability of the Soviet Army to rely on any but its White Russian troops in the conflict exposed the searing racial and ethnic divisions which would later give rise to the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The Fall of the Soviet Empire When the Communist Party chose Mikhail Gorbachev as its new leader in 1985, it had little idea of what he would do: he immediately launched a campaign aimed at transforming Soviet society, called perestroika ("restructuring") and glasnost' ("openness"). This included political reforms: by 1989, other candidates apart from Communist Party endorsed ones, were allowed to participate in elections for the Supreme Soviet parliament. Gorbachev withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan and signed agreements with American president George Bush to end production of chemical weapons and make substantial cuts in nuclear weapons. Finally in 1990, the Soviet Communist Party surrendered its hold on total power which Trotsky had taken in 1918, and allowed other political parties the freedom to operate.
Communist Eastern Europe Falls The Soviet Union then also refused to intervene in a wave of reforms which swept through Eastern Europe: the Communist governments in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia were ousted; Communist East Germany dissolved and became part of the Federal Republic of Germany. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia also became independent in this wave of liberation from direct Soviet control. However, many of the former Communist governments managed to adapt, and by changing their parties' names and exploiting the real problems in converting from state socialism to free market enterprise, in many cases managed to stay in power. Communist Counter Coup ATTEMPTED IN RUSSIA A desperate attempt by Communist hard-liners in 1991 to launch a coup against Gorbachev and his reforms failed, and pro-reformers under the former Communist Boris Yeltsin emerged as the new government of the day. On December 21, 1991, the USSR formally ceased to exist, splitting up into 11 distinct ethnic and racially separate units: - Armenia, Azerbaijan, Byelorussia (renamed Belarus), Kazakhstan, Kirghiziya (renamed Kyrgyzstan), Moldavia (renamed Moldova), Russia, Tadzhikistan (renamed Tajikistan), Turkmenia (renamed Turkmenistan), Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. They all agreed to form the loosely defined Commonwealth of Independent States. Gorbachev resigned on 25 December 1991 and the Soviet parliament acknowledged the dissolution of the USSR on 26 December 1991.
Above left: Soviet army tanks in Moscow during the attempted Communist counter coup against the reform process initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev, 1991. The coup failed due to indecisive leadership on the part of the plotters and a strong popular resistance led by recently elected Russian Republic president Boris Yeltsin. Above right: The last Soviet parliament meets, 26 December 1991, to vote itself out of existence. It was a fait accompli - hence almost none of the delegates even bothered to attend, as visible in this photograph.
This breakup did not all go peacefully: in December 1994, Russian troops invaded the republic of Chechnya in southern Russia, which had declared its independence from the Russian Federation in November 1991. After a devastating war which killed more than 30,000 people, the war ended in a Russian withdrawal in March 1996. Economic Hardship FOLLOWS COMMUNIST COLLAPSE The history of Russia since the fall of the USSR has been one of extreme economic hardship, coupled with the creation of an elite of extremely rich-capitalists who were able to exploit the sudden privatization of much of the state by buying up many enterprises at rock-bottom prices. A disproportionately large number of the new elite in Russia were Jewish: something which caused yet another resurgence in support for anti-Jewish parties in the country, most notably in the strangely named, but overtly anti-Jewish, Liberal Democratic Party, which won nearly 20 per cent of the popular vote in elections in the mid 1990s. The economic hardship of Russia in the 1990s also created an increase in support for the once discredited Communist Party: it became once again one of the largest parties in the Russian parliament.
HARDLINE Russian Rebellion, 1993 In addition to these developments, Russia has also been rocked by political instability, with the most dramatic scenes occurring in 1993 when Yeltsin dismissed the parliament after it refused to give in to certain of his decrees: hard-liners holed themselves up inside the parliament building, only being forced to surrender when Russian tanks and soldiers opened fire on the building, provoking a furious gunfight. Russia's Large White Population Despite these problems, the population of the territories known as the USSR at the time of its dissolution was some 250 million - of this number, fully 190 million are racially classifiable as White, making Western Russia and the new states situated to the east of Poland and to the west of the Ural mountains, one of the largest concentration of Whites anywhere on the planet. Chapter 66, Part One: Black Power: The Civil Rights Movement All material (c) copyright Ostara Publications, 1999. Re-use for commercial purposes strictly forbidden. |
