Ten Minute History - The Decline and Dissolution of the Soviet Union (Short Documentary)

1953 and Joseph Stalin is dead starlings previous policies of purging those who disagreed with him created a climate of terror meaning his death left everyone feeling a bit nervous to say the least his most likely air was Lavrentiy Beria who ran the internal security forces which importantly included the secret police the MGB this wasn't to be the case since the other potential successors gyoji Malenkov Stalin's former deputy in viata Slav Molotov the Foreign Minister teamed up to remove him as a result in late 1953 he came down with a fatal case of being shocked so which one of these two would succeed Stalin it was neither since in late 1953 Nikita Khrushchev who was head of the Moscow branch of the Communist Party managed to climb to the top of the pile doing most part to the support of high-ranking officials and military leaders the most notable being Field Marshal Gorky Zhukov instead of doing what Stalin did in executing his rivals Khrushchev simply demoted or fired them as he would later due to Zhukov however he did follow Stalin's footsteps by holding the two highest offices in the USSR simultaneously the first was the General Secretary of the Communist Party who was in charge of party doctrine and importantly who would rise through its ranks the second was the premier of the Soviet Union a position which controlled the government itself an implementation of communist doctrine and importantly could give nice jobs with all sorts of benefits to his allies incidentally those who thought these bureaucratic jobs were collectively known as the nomenclature er and it was immensely corrupt so crews chopped surly Premiership was troubled and he wanted to implement sweeping changes to reform the USSR one issue was rioting throughout the system of labor prison counts better known in the West as the gulags these riots were repressed but over the following years many many prisoners were released back into society and they promptly told everyone how Warfel it all was he also partly to make himself more popular transferred control of Crimea from the Russian Authority to his native Ukrainian one in 1956 at the Communist Party Congress which was a nationwide meeting of high-ranking party members Khrushchev denounced Stalin in what is called the secret speech this criticized Stalin's use of repression and false trials his use of mass deportations and his attempt to create a cult of personality around himself the pledge was that the USSR and Soviet Communism in general would need to change if it was to survive which I should in a period known as de-stalinization this doesn't mean that the USSR was suddenly a free nation it wasn't and it still didn't tolerate dissent it was simply less likely to shoot you for it instead a person who now held what would deemed to be socially dangerous opinions would simply lose their jobs that were forcibly admitted to psychiatric hospitals so the 1950s and early 60s were a time of great change for the USSR and Khrushchev led several initiatives to enact such change he was in office when the USSR detonated its first hydrogen bomb a more powerful form of nuclear weapon and also when Sputnik the first artificial satellite was launched into orbit 1961 saw the greatest triumphs of the Soviet space program when the USSR became the first nation to achieve manned spaceflight after putting your Gagarin into orbit it should be noted that the Soviet space program was less about carrying satellites and men into space and more about testing rockets to see if they could carry the aforementioned hydrogen bombs to America where they would promptly explode Khrushchev also spearheaded agricultural reform in what was called the virgin land initiative he sought to harness technological advances to create a large belt of farmland these virgin lands were to be planted with the special crop corn which Khrushchev was a little bit obsessed with initially corn did very well but after some bad weather corn harvests were devastated and Khrushchev looked like an idiot with respect to foreign policy Khrushchev had to deal with many crises Khrushchev aimed for a policy of peaceful coexistence with the West because as far as he was concerned the march of progress would inevitably end with capitalism losing out to communism his aims were undermined however when a speech he gave on the matter included the famous line we will bury you which sounded a little bit like a threat in the Warsaw Pact made up of the USSR's communist puppet state uprisings against Soviet overlordship broke out in 1956 the most notable being in Hungary which were fiercely crushed 1961 was an especially troublesome year for Khrushchev there was the u2 crisis which saw America continue to fly reconnaissance missions over the USSR despite its protests it also saw the Berlin crisis where in US and Soviet tanks have a tense standoff for checkpoint charlie in the co occupied city leading to the construction of the Berlin Wall furthermore 1961 was the year of the sino-soviet split in which Chairman Mao and the People's Republic of China denounced the USSR and its leaders as traitors to the Communist cause of course the most famous event of Khrushchev's Premiership occurred in 1962 the Cuban Missile Crisis this was when he agreed to place nuclear weapons in Cuba at the request of Fidel Castro its new communist leader America was not happy with the idea of having hostile nuclear weapons so close and so brocaded Cuba as Soviet ships approached it looked like nuclear war was on the horizon but cooler heads prevailed in the ships back in the end it was agreed that the USSR would remove weapons from Cuba and in return the US would secretly remove nuclear weapons from some NATO States publicly it looked like the USSR had simply backed down though which may Khrushchev look weak and his reputation was badly damaged his reforms and the fact that he didn't consult other party members on policy was deeply unpopular and so in 1964 he was ousted from power and forced into retirement he did get to live though so that was nice he was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev who had less direct power than his predecessors and would consult other high-ranking party members Brezhnev became the general secretary in the Premiership went to his close ally Alexei Kosygin both of these men were unhappy with Khrushchev's previous liberalizing reformers and sought to undo many of them one means of doing this was to enforce stricter standards on the Warsaw Pact the most notable being Czechoslovakia who had recently relaxed their censorship laws this was unacceptable and so with the assistance of some other members of the Warsaw Pact the USSR invaded and put an end to any reforms there this sort of intervention in other communist states form the backbone of Soviet foreign policy known as the Brezhnev Doctrine under Brezhnev the USSR famously entered a period of economic stagnation there are many reasons for this the first was that prices were fixed by the central government meaning that prices can be adjusted to prevent losses another was that corruption was rampant something which Brezhnev was happy to ignore economic stagnation led to my old social turmoil as many in the USSR became fed up with worsening living conditions some men such as Andrew Sakharov became outspoken critics of the government in particular the USSR's military and nuclear policies another was Alexander Solzhenitsyn whose most famous work the Gulag Archipelago was published in the West and detailed life in the gulag had condemned the communist party for its role in said system Solzhenitsyn was kicked out of the USSR in 1974 and Sakharov was exiled to Gorky here so economic stagnation dominated the Brezhnev Ihram was exacerbated by the high levels of military spending which was supposed to keep the USSR in line with the USA by this point both sides had amassed giant nuclear arsenals and so they tried to calm the situation by pursuing a policy called a taunt this was where both sides would actively improve relations with each other and reduce their nuclear arsenals which was done by the 1969 salt 1 treaty in the 1975 Helsinki Accords the tante came to an end though in 1979 when Brezhnev ordered the invasion of Afghanistan to prop up the failing communist government there long story short it was an expensive ten-year disaster Brezhnev wouldn't live to see the end of the war in Afghanistan he died in 1982 was replaced by Yuri Andropov the head of the KGB and rip-offs all relations with the USA in its President Ronald Reagan deteriorate since both took a hard line towards the other Andropov died in 1984 and was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko as the general secretary geneco continued the same policies but would only be an office for 13 months and he died in 1985 the reasons why these men died so quickly after taking office was simple they were old in fact their successor Mikhail Gorbachev was the only Soviet leader who was actually born in the Soviet Union ie after 1922 so Gorbachev was desperate to undo the economic stagnation of the previous decades which had seen the US economy grow to twice the size of the Soviets the USSR still had the second largest economy in the world though but slow growth meant maintaining its international position was unsustainable for the first three years of his Premiership Gorbachev instituted several reform packages to kick-start the Soviet economy and secure the USSR's future these were perestroika meaning restructuring glasnost meaning openness and demócratas axiom meaning democratization these combined were designed to make the USSR more economically decentralized less censored and allowed for some limited elections involving non-communists ultimately this was supposed to reform the USSR so that it would stay together and grow stronger but fun fact no openness for the press led to many Soviet citizens finding out just how much worse off they were than the capitalist counterparts and were made aware of any incompetencies in the government one example was made public in April 1986 when a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploded what really shocked the soviet population was that they didn't hear about it for two weeks meaning that the government was happy to censor disasters democratization gave a potential voice to all of this newfound discontent in almost universally when communist candidates running against non communist independence they lost so 1989 was a major year for Gorbachev in the soviet union gorbachev denounced repression and permitted free elections within the warsaw pact which led to its collapse in the end of the communist governments there within a couple of years back in the USSR nationalism a dissatisfaction with communism destabilize the country massively one-party rule was formally ended and soon after this our March the 11th 1990 Lithuania declared itself to be independent and others to cled their intention to leave as well democratic reforms were quickly implemented which opened the way to presidential elections in the numerous national territories within the USSR 1990 also saw the rise of Boris Yeltsin who would publicly quit the Communist Party in announced Gorbachev's leadership in June of 1991 Russia held its first ever presidential election in which Yeltsin won many leading communists were horrified by this and so led by Gennady and I if they launched a coup on August 19th to overthrow the government and restore the Communist Party to full power it was defied in the coup lasted only two days Latvia and Estonia declared themselves independent during the turmoil in three days after the coup Gorbachev disbanded the Communist Party by the 1st of December these nations had declared their independence and on the 21st the Almer at our protocol was signed declaring the dissolution of the Soviet Union on the 25th Gorbachev resigned as the president of the USSR and on the next day the new government of the Russian Federation led by Yeltsin took over its duties thus ending the Soviet project and beginning the long transition to a capitalist economy nor the trials that came with it I hope you enjoyed this episode and thank you for watching and a special thanks to James Bissonnette sol invictus and dante of Livonia for supporting the channel if you'd like to learn more about the dissolution of the Soviet Union there are some book recommendations in the description below you

Channel: History Matters

Views: 3,469,673

Keywords: Ten, Minute, History, 10, Animated, Documentary, Short, education, educational, USSR, Soviet Union, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Andropov, Chernenko, Breakup, Dissolution, Cold War, USA, Collapse, Russia, 1961, Crisis, Sino-Soviet Split, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Boris, Yeltsin, Coup, 1990, 1991, 1989, Poland, Warsaw Pact

Id: Pqt3U48MFcY

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 22 2018