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Dec 24, 2021 · After 74 years, the Soviet Union was dissolved, breaking into 15 countries. But there's often been friction among the former Soviet republics, including the current confrontation between Russia ...
- Overview
- The political factor
- The economic factor
- The military factor
- Afghanistan
- The social factor
- The nuclear factor
On January 1, 1991, the Soviet Union was the largest country in the world, covering some 8,650,000 square miles (22,400,000 square km), nearly one-sixth of Earth’s land surface. Its population numbered more than 290 million, and 100 distinct nationalities lived within its borders. It also boasted an arsenal of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, ...
When Mikhail Gorbachev was named general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) on March 11, 1985, his primary domestic goals were to jump-start the moribund Soviet economy and to streamline the cumbersome government bureaucracy. When his initial attempts at reform failed to yield significant results, he instituted the policies...
By some measures, the Soviet economy was the world’s second largest in 1990, but shortages of consumer goods were routine and hoarding was commonplace. It was estimated that the Soviet black market economy was the equivalent of more than 10 percent of the country’s official GDP. Economic stagnation had hobbled the country for years, and the perestr...
It is a widely held belief that Soviet defense spending accelerated dramatically in response to the presidency of Ronald Reagan and proposals such as the Strategic Defense Initiative. In fact, the Soviet military budget had been trending upward since at least the early 1970s, but Western analysts were left with best guesses in regard to hard number...
In addition to budgetary matters, the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan (1979–89) was a key military factor in the breakup of the U.S.S.R. The Soviet army, lionized for its role in World War II and a vital tool in the repression of the Hungarian Revolution and Prague Spring, had waded into a quagmire in a region known as the Graveyard of Empires. A...
On January 31, 1990, McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in Moscow. The image of the Golden Arches in Pushkin Square seemed like a triumph of Western capitalism, and customers lined up around the block for their first taste of a Big Mac. But such a display was not uncommon in the final years of the Soviet Union; Muscovites queued just as long fo...
Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States teetered on the edge of mutual nuclear destruction. What few had considered, however, was that the Soviet Union would be brought down by an incident involving a civilian nuclear plant. Gorbachev had been in power for just over a year when, on April 26, 1986, the Unit 4 reactor at the C...
The Soviet Union had experienced internal stagnation and ethnic separatism. Although highly centralized until its final years, the country was made up of 15 top-level republics that served as the homelands for different ethnicities. Annexation of at least 3 of them by Soviet Union during the World War II was never fully recognized (Baltic ...
Sep 1, 2017 · The Soviet Union, or U.S.S.R., was made up of 15 countries in Eastern Europe and Asia and lasted from 1922 until its fall in 1991. The Soviet Union was the world’s first Marxist‑Communist ...
Apr 17, 2018 · After more than 40 years of the world seeming to teeter on the brink of a nuclear holocaust, the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States had ended.
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Dec 24, 2021 · Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev closes his resignation speech after delivering it at the Kremlin in Moscow on Dec. 25, 1991. After 74 years, the Soviet Union was dissolved, breaking into 15 countries. But there's often been friction among the former Soviet republics, including the current confrontation between Russia and Ukraine.
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Dec 25, 2021 · Just minutes earlier, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation in a live televised address to the nation, concluding 74 years of Soviet history. In his memoirs, Gorbachev, now ...
