Oct 30 2024 49 mins
In our Season finale of the historic year that was 1991, we look at the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Soviet Union itself.
It began in a bloody revolution that saw the execution of not only Czar Nicholas the second but also his entire family including his young daughters. In the 69 years it officially existed and in the five years before that after the Russian Revolution, it saw its revolution spread to many other countries and its own power spread across 11 time zones, and all across Eurasia. It became a world , nuclear Super Power in parity with the United States militarily. However, it never had any kind of real economic strength and it had all the weaknesses of a command economy.
That was what eventually brought it down. It had seen Lenin, a bloodthirsty dictator in Joseph Stalin, a wily, constantly experimenting in economics and Agriculture and cabinet shuffling leader in Nikita Khrushchev, the cunning, pragmatic, and cautions 20 year rule of Leonid Brezhnev, and then a succession of two old, relatively ill, and brief Presidents in Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko before a young, vibrant, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985.
Gorbachev would serve 6 years and try and reform, and save his country. It would be the reforms he let loose that would bring his country its first taste of political and economic freedom. Once it was tasted that freedom, it could not be turned back and Gorbachev, ever the committed Communist, continued to try and manage it all without totally overhauling the system.
In that he failed. On Christmas Day, 1991, he resigned the Presidency of the Soviet Union and the once proud hammer and sickle flag of the USSR was taken down from over the Kremlin and the flag of the Russian Federation was flown in its place. The Soviet Union, began in blood shed, and revolution, vanished quietly in the night with a phone call to the President of the country it had been at Cold War with for nearly half a century.
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