HIST 102 #35 - Totalitarianism in the Soviet Union

To hello, welcome back to our lecture series for Western Civilization 102. We are talking about totalitarianism, and on our last lecture, you learned about what is happening in some of these fascist states, like, uh, Italy and Germany, and actually Spain. I didn't mention this, probably learned this as well, but Spain fell into the hands of a fascist government with a man named Francisco Franco. Um, so quite a lot of states in Europe are falling into this sort of government, this dictatorship that we see with this one ruler and a single party and government control of the economy and politics and no free will. Mass propaganda that you see here, that is a kind of an abstract or generalized term for totalitarianism.

So today, we'll focus on the Soviet Union. We know, of course, that the Soviets had fought alongside the Allies in World War One, with the United States, with Great Britain. And we also know, of course, that there was a revolution that took place in the Soviet Union, and we have it's called the Bolshevik Revolution, which will come to be known as communism. And it was developed by a man named Lenin. And there's only one-party rule in Russia since this, this Bolshevik Revolution that occurred during World War One, and that is the Communist Party. Um, Lenin, for example, will establish his New Economic Policy, or NEP, where peasants were allowed to sell their produce openly, and retail stores and industries that had less than 20 employees could be privately owned. But, okay, I'm gonna repeat that. Peasants were allowed to sell their goods, their produce openly. Retail stores or businesses, industries that had less than 20 employees could be privately owned. But heavy industry and banking and mining, still in government hands and under government control.

You also, of course, learned in previous lectures about Karl Marx and, uh, you know, socialism, and you learned about, uh, you know, the, the communist state, pretty much with Karl Marx and what he hoped to see in the future. Of course, we don't see this mass revolution that Marx had, um, forecasts. But we still, of course, see it, at least in Russia, that Russia will fall to communism, as will other countries, especially after World War II. Now, Lenin and the Communists will create, it's called the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics, not going to say that obviously again and over again, the USSR, or Russia, or the Soviet Union, everyone says differently with that. I had also mentioned that there had been a power struggle when Lenin died in 1924. And, uh, the victor in this power struggle was a man named Stalin. And Stalin will rule for quite a while. He will be in charge of Russia during World War II. He will actually stay in power after World War II is over. He is a contemporary to the United States presidents, for example, Franklin Roosevelt will meet with Stalin, Truman, Harry Truman, another president, in the 1950s, we'll meet with Truman with Stalin as well. So they're contemporaries to give you a kind of a United States time frame for Russia.

So, you know, Stalin had a Five-Year Plan. And his Five-Year Plan, he wanted to get the Soviet Union to industrialize and achieve economic superiority among other nations in Europe. And, uh, this Five-Year Plan stated how much of each industrial and agricultural commodity Russia would make. So how much wheat it would harvest, um, how much of a certain good or industry would be made. It also determined how much workers would make, what would be their salaries. And of course, the government would also determine what the price was. So when you'd go and buy something, the government is the one that said, this is how much you owe, this is what you're going to pay for this. He eliminated private farms and pushed people into what's called collective farms. Now, if you object, what if you're a very rich landowner in Russia and you're like, I don't think so, you know, this is my land, this is not government land, this is my land. Well, you were either killed or you were brought into labor camps, especially in Siberia, which is very north, very miserable, and brought into these labor camps. There were a group of people called the kulaks that were blamed for grain shortages. The government decided to eliminate them as a group of people. So basically, whoever is against Stalin, to erase private ownership of land, will be taken care of. They, uh, there's estimates, and there's different estimates, we'll probably never know exact numbers, but, um, millions of people will die in what some call the Great Purges of Stalin, where he, uh, around the mid-1930s, these Great Purges, anyone that opposed the government, say anyone that had been a Trotsky supporter, were either imprisoned, executed, or exiled to Siberia. Um, torture. Millions of people. By 1939, most everything was owned by the state, and education was being used as a tool of the revolution. In other words, mass propaganda is being used. And some estimates that Stalin killed over 20 million people in Russia during his reign.

So we'll go ahead and focus on the Soviet Union, and let's learn more about totalitarianism in the Soviet Union.

Hello. Today we're going to talk about totalitarianism in the Soviet Union. Communist totalitarianism is similar to fascist totalitarianism in the sense that both of these methods use total control over their societies. But fascist totalitarianism is on the far right wing of the political spectrum, whereas communist totalitarianism, like that used in the Soviet Union, is on the far left wing. So although they share certain characteristics in common, they're two different political phenomena.

Now, but for the Soviet Union, was actually created. Russia had a long tradition of very strong rulers, like Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great. These rulers were extremely powerful and tried to concentrate and centralize their power. For example, Ivan the Terrible was the first of the Tsars to create a secret police force back in the 1500s. Peter the Great used his immense population and labor force to build an entirely new city out of swamp area on the coastline. And so you've got these leaders who really are trying to exert their power at home and also to try and exert their power abroad. Catherine the Great, who was actually German, used her ties to the rest of Europe to try and solidify Russia's control over its empire and to try and expand her territorial control. Now, when Russia was governed by powerful rulers, it tended to be thriving and prosperous as an empire. But when it was governed by weak rulers, it tended to be invaded, it was subject to economic turmoil and political unrest. And that phenomenon really made strong rulers preferable and even, you know, acceptable to the Russian public.

Now, Russia's emperors were known as Tsars, and that term comes from the word Caesar, indicating a very powerful imperial ruler. And I think that's appropriate because the Tsars were supposed to be powerful imperial rulers. There were some who were weak, but the ones who were preferred and the ones who were more successful were extremely powerful and weren't afraid to wield their power.

Now, Nicholas II was one of Russia's weaker Tsars. He dragged Russia into the 1904 Russo-Japanese War, the war between Russia and Japan. And the reason that he wanted to join this war was he felt that they would be able to win quickly and decisively, you know, and get out without too many losses and with, you know, substantial gains. And so he felt that this would kind of unite the country behind him, would would raise morale of the Russian public and of the people who were, you know, kind of against him and kind of discontented. Unfortunately, Russia lost that war, and so the public was demoralized even more than they already had been before entering the war.

Now, a similar phenomenon happened 10 years later with World War One. Nicholas II got Russia involved in World War One, um, through the alliance system that existed in Europe at the time. And of course, you know, that caused many peasants to be conscripted to go to their deaths, you know, on the battlefield. And that was very unpopular with the majority of the public. And so Tsar Nicholas II became even more unpopular. It was no surprise that the Tsar's leadership was challenged then by peasant rebellions in the early 20th century, and the Tsar Nicholas II was ultimately deposed in 1917. He was removed from the throne.

Now, among the groups that were competing to take over rural Russia were a number of communist factions. You know, it essentially started out as a peasant rebellion, a peasant revolution. But anytime you have the the leading power taken out of the scene, you're going to have something called a power vacuum, and they're going to be different groups and individuals competing to see who can get in and take power, who can take control. So in a sense, it's almost like a political free-for-all when you have a revolution of this nature.

Now, among these communist groups that were in these peasant rebellions, you had groups like the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks, the Trotskyites. And so even though they were all communists, they had subtle differences between them. They pursued, you know, slightly different programs and had slightly different goals.

Now, because you had so many groups competing for power, you know, competing to replace Nicholas II, a civil war more raged in Russia from 1918 to 1920. So even though you had gotten rid of the Tsarist regime in 1917, there was really no government to replace it immediately. And the two groups that kind of emerged in this civil war were essentially the Reds and the Whites. The Reds were called the Reds because there were the different communist groups. Now, they didn't always get along with each other, sometimes they fought against each other, but in general, the Reds were against the other side. The other side were the Whites, and generally White refers to monarchists. So, for example, even in Latin America, there are groups that are called the White Hand or the White Something Else, and generally those white groups want to have some kind of monarchy, some kind of, you know, right-of-center political structure. And so the White Russians, as they became called, were those Russians who wanted a reformed monarchy. They didn't want to go back to the old powerful Tsar, but they wanted some kinds of limits on the monarch's power, but they didn't want to completely get rid of the monarch.

So between the Civil War from 1918 to 1920 and this fighting between the Reds and the Whites, finally, you had one group that emerged victorious, and that group was a communist faction known as the Bolsheviks. Now, the Bolsheviks declared the end of Tsarist Russia and the birth of a new nation, a new form of government. That new nation was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, also known as the USSR. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is also known as the Soviet Union. And so the Soviet Union really officially is born in 1922. And when that new nation is born, one of the first things you have to do is to try and figure out where is it going, what kind of political structure is it going to have, what kind of civil liberties are its citizens going to have, what kind of economy is it going to have, what's the economic structure going to be, how is it going to trade with other nations? You know, it's not as simple as just having a revolution and declaring independence. You have to then create the new nation.

Now, of course, the new Soviet Union had to have some kind of structure, and the new structure that was decided upon was a federal structure, at least in name. A federal structure is a structure where you have a national government and you have local governments, and they are more or less equally balanced in power. For example, the United States was the first federally structured nation to exist. Our national government and our states share power, they are balanced more or less equally. And so even though they sometimes come into conflict, they also cooperate. Now, there are other forms of government that you can have. For example, a unitary system would require you to have a strong, powerful central government and weak local governments. And a confederate form of government has a very weak national government and powerful states. But the Russians decided that they were going to have a federal structure.

Now, the reason that I said earlier that this was federal in name only is that really what happened was that Lenin may have had plans for this to be a federal structure. He may have planned along with the Bolsheviks for the local governments to have more power. But that never actually happened. It was never truly a federal form of government in any way. So even though the Soviet Constitution originally said that it was a federal form of government, it certainly was not in reality.

Now, this form of government also divided up the nation into administrative units or local governments, and those units were called republics. So the new Soviet Union consisted of 15 republics. One of those republics was Russia. So the former Tsarist Russia actually becomes one part, the biggest part, but one part of the Soviet Union. And the most important branch of the new Soviet government was a group called the State Planning Committee. Now, normally, when we talk about branches of government and agencies that are important, you know, we tend to think, oh, well, the executive branch, the legislative branch, the judicial branch, or we might even think about the Department of Finance or that some kind of Department of Foreign Policy or Department of Defense. But in the Soviet Union's case, it was a new communist nation, and with a communist system, you have a different kind of economy. You have something that's called a centrally planned economy or a command market. Found that because everything in the economy is planned from the central headquarters, everything is commanded from the top down. In a capitalist economy, like we have in the United States and Western Europe and even Eastern Europe now, we have capitalist economies, and capitalist economies are guided by free market and supply and demand. If there's a demand for a product, someone is going to produce it so that they can make money. And if there's a demand for a product that can't be produced, the price of that product is going to go up because so many people are demanding it. But in a command market, in a centrally planned economy, every decision about production is made from the central headquarters, and it doesn't matter if there's a greater demand for a product, it doesn't matter if there's no demand for a product, that product is still going to be produced according to the plan. And it's usually a long-term plan, like a Five-Year Plan. So the State Planning Committee became the most important agency of this new Soviet government.

Now, the bureaucracy was enormous in this new Soviet government because you can imagine if the government does everything, if the government controls the entire economy and is responsible for regulating everything, if there's no private enterprise, no Bob's shoe store, no Alice's florist shop, if there's no private property and no private enterprise, then you have to have a big bureaucracy, you have to have a big government to do everything that it needs to do. And so the Soviet bureaucracy became enormous over time.

Now, in this new Soviet Union, you had different leaders over time, and each of those leaders was a totalitarian leader, but they each put their own different spin on Soviet totalitarianism. They each ruled with a different agenda, with a different plan, and a different program. The first of those leaders was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Lenin had been the leader of the Bolsheviks and of course, he was the leader of the Bolsheviks during the revolution and when the Tsar was deposed in 1917 and throughout the Civil War, and he emerged as the leader of the new Soviet Union when it was declared. Now, Lenin was in power until his death in 1924. And one of the things that he became known for was his theory of imperialism. Lenin said that in an effort to try and delay the inevitable downfall of capitalism in the western nations, that industrialized nations like Western European nations, the United States, had used colonialism to try and stop revolutions in their country. He, he said these advanced industrialized nations invested all their surplus profits in underdeveloped nations, mainly those nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America at the time, because of course, we're talking about the early 20th century. And he said that these advanced industrialized nations of Europe and the United States, that they took raw materials from Asia, Africa, and Latin America and turned them into manufactured goods that they could then sell back to poor countries at a high profit. So, for example, a western nation like Germany might buy a raw material like tin from Russia, or perhaps nickel from Cuba, and they might take that product and then produce something that's more sophisticated, something that requires manufacturing, and then sell that manufactured product at a very high price back to Russia or back to Cuba. And so the idea that Lenin had was that this, um, this unequal terms of trade was something that the advanced industrialized nations of the West had really intentionally created, and that they were trying to exploit the less developed nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. And so instead of having workers and elites in the advanced nations in conflict, as you might expect in a typical Marxist communist model, instead everyone in the advanced nations unites together and exploits all the workers in the less developed countries in what we might call the Third World or the developing nations. And in this system, there would be a few elite countries that would be dominating the economy, and many more poor countries that would essentially be the worker countries.

Now, Lenin espoused his principles in an essay that he wrote in 1902 called "What Is To Be Done?" And one of the things that he did in "What Is To Be Done?" was that he established the idea that you need an intellectual vanguard to lead the way. That you need this small group of professional revolutionaries to really tell the illiterate masses what's going on and to lead them to revolution. And he felt that that was really important because you needed to have, kind of, this sense of international communism. He felt that if you could have a revolution in Russia, that then you could also have revolutions in other nations, that the workers of Russia would unite with the workers of Asian nations, African nations, Latin American nations, and all the workers would be united against the bourgeoisie, or the middle class, the capitalist elite of those societies. So in a sense, Lenin didn't really believe in nationalism, he believed in internationalism. And so his idea was that all the national boundaries we have that unite Germans against French, against British, against Americans, that those would fall away, and that instead the workers of all those nations would unite together. And the elites of all those nations were already united together. Lenin argued that the elites are already working together, so the workers must unite across national boundaries to combat the power of the elites.

Now, Lenin died in 1924, and after Lenin's death, there was a power struggle between the different candidates for, uh, for the Soviet Premiership. You had people like Stalin, Trotsky, and Ovieve, Kamenev, Bukharin, who are all competing to try and and take over, to try and be selected by the Soviet Central Committee as the leader of the Soviet Union. And Joseph Stalin, although that actually was not his name, Joseph Stalin assumed that name because it meant Man of Steel. Joseph Stalin, the Man of Steel, and Kirov competed for an assembly election to become Secretary General of the Soviet Union, and Kirov won by a landslide. So Stalin burned the votes, he burned the ballots, and declared himself the winner. So you've already got from the very beginning someone who takes power illegitimately and illegally, who declares himself the winner even though he has not won an election. And over the next few months, he had thousands, actually, or more than a thousand of the delegates who had voted in the election, he had them killed in faked accidents to punish the traitors who had not voted for him. And then shortly after, Kirov was killed by the NKVD, by the secret police of the Soviet Union. All of this was orchestrated by Stalin.

Now, Stalin feared rivals, and he feared losing power. And in fact, we almost might say that he was quite paranoid about losing power. And so he was also fearful of losing power to the Soviet military. He was fearful of a military coup, that the military would take over, and that Stalin would not be able to, you know, to, to maintain control, that he would have to struggle with the military leaders. And so Stalin also, in addition to purging the the electors of the assembly, he also purged his military, 40,000 officers. Now, that's a bad idea for any national leader because if you remove the leadership of your military, you're going to have a weaker and less effective military. But Stalin was so paranoid about competition for military leaders that he felt that he needed to get rid of those military officers more than he needed to maintain a healthy and well-structured military.

Now, after reinventing himself as the Man of Steel, Stalin had to purge those who had known him in the past because of course, they would be able to recognize him and to reveal to others, you know, that he was not always this Man of Steel. And so Stalin actually had his first wife and her family killed. His second wife, he had committed to an insane asylum where she lived out the rest of her life. And the fact that you've got someone who's willing to go to these lengths shows you that this is truly a totalitarian ruler who believes in total control.

Now, Stalin had a platform. Just like Lenin believed in international communism and his theory of imperialism, Stalin believed in something called socialism in one country. Stalin said, you know, Lenin wasted his time on internationalizing communism, and it never really went anywhere. Stalin said, instead of wasting resources on trying to internationalize communism, you really need to focus on communism at his home. He said, you know, the Russian Revolution, you know, was an inspiration for revolutions in the West, but it just didn't take hold. And so what they really needed to do was to focus on trying to have socialism as a step towards communism in the Soviet Union. And he said that, in fact, many European countries, instead of jumping on the bandwagon and having communist revolutions, many European countries were, you know, just zealously anti-communist, which was true in many European countries during the 20s and 30s. You had fascist parties, and of course, democratic parties too, that emerged that resented communism, that felt that communism was not the wave of the future, and that you needed to go in a different direction. So Stalin introduced the policy of developing socialism within the Soviet Union and solving domestic problems. He said that what they really needed to do was to focus on developing heavy industry in the Soviet Union because when the Soviet Revolution had happened, there was no industry, or very minimal industry. That the Soviet Union was not an industrialized nation. And that may have been one of the problems with trying to have a successful communist government because Karl Marx had always said that you have to have industrialization as a step before you have a communist revolution and a communist government. So after instituting heavy industry and manufacturing, Stalin felt that he could really use that to push Russia, or the Soviet Union, up to the development levels of the West, so that the Soviet Union would be competitive with European nations and with the United States, and competitive, you know, economically, competitively, politically, and to become a world power, a global power that would be just as important as the other great powers.

Now, Stalin reversed a lot of Marx's and Lenin's ideas of the state withering away. Karl Marx had said that once you have all the wealth redistributed amongst everyone, everyone will have what they need, and everyone will be happy, so you won't need a government, you won't need a police force, you won't need law and order, you won't need prisons, and the government or the state will just wither away. And Stalin said that in order to to really succeed, that you needed to to put that idea on hold. He said, you know, sure, that's a great idea in the long term, eventually for the state to wither away, but he said there are too many remnants of capitalism that are stopping that to happen, that are stopping communism in the Soviet Union from developing properly. And so he felt that you needed to make the government even more powerful, not less powerful and withering away, but even more powerful. And so the, you know, other leaders that came after Stalin had differing ideas about that, and they at least attempted to base their actions on on some kind of related Marxist theory. But Stalin essentially just used communist ideology as a justification for his political motives. So you could argue that Stalin was the least communist of all the communist leaders and was the most totalitarian of all the communist leaders. But in his view, he was really just trying to push Russia up to the development level of the advanced West without evolving gradually over time.

Now, in 1928, Stalin instituted the first of the Five-Year Plans that the Soviet Union became known for. With this first Five-Year Plan, he forced collectives and industrialization. He had huge agricultural farms where you'd have groups of people that would be farming together instead of having individual family farms. He created huge factories where men and women would go to work, and the children be put off in some separate place where they would be taken care of and fed. And so it was an enormous kind of communal collective effort to try and industrialize both industry and industrialize agriculture.

Now, by 1932, Stalin had another rival that he feared, or at least he perceived the head of arrival. Stalin was afraid of the kulaks. The kulaks were the fairly wealthy farmers in the Ukraine. And the Ukraine was the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. That's where most of the grain was produced, it's where most of the food came from. And so Stalin started to realize that maybe this wealth that was coming from the Ukraine could give these kulaks or farmers more political power. Now, you know, that idea was never really proven, but Stalin didn't need proof, he believed it anyway. And so Stalin decided to control the Ukraine. He decided to control it with an artificial famine. So Stalin increased the grain quotas, the amount of grain that the kulak farmers had to send to the central headquarters in in Moscow. He increased that quota to 44% of their grain. And when he increased that, that quota, you know, what he started doing was to really try and minimize the amount of grain that would be left in the Ukraine. He increased the quotas, then he increased them again, then he increased them again and again until he knew that he had created a famine, that he knew that millions of people were starving in the Ukraine. People resorted to very extreme methods of survival. People were, you know, were digging up corpses from graveyards, they were eating shoes made of leather, they were eating dirt, they were doing anything they could simply to survive. Some people with large numbers of children actually killed and ate some of the children so that the rest of the children and they could survive. So it was a very harsh time and a very, a very sorrowful time for the Ukrainians. And that's one of the reasons why the Ukraine still holds, you know, such harsh feelings towards Russia and why they were always so bitter towards the rule of the Soviet Union.

Now, in 1939, Stalin was aware of Hitler's plan to invade Poland as well. And so Stalin wanted to have his division of the spoils as well. And so Stalin and Hitler secretly agreed to divide up Poland. And in return for that deal, Stalin took ten thousand to twenty thousand, we're not really sure how many, of the Polish officers from the POW camps, um, during World War II, and killed them in secret. And so Stalin and Hitler are actually, you know, working together initially at the beginning of World War II. Then in 1940, Stalin sees the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and in Estonia, while Hitler invaded France. So it was really kind of a two-pronged effort with Hitler and Stalin being allies, at least for a short time. And Stalin expected that the rest of Western Europe would fall to Hitler, and that he would have a strong ally. But then in 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. When Hitler started sending troops, massing them at the Soviet border, waiting to invade the Soviet Union and violate the secret pact that Stalin and Hitler had, Stalin couldn't believe it. When Stalin's intelligence officers contacted him and said, you know, there these troops are massing at the border, we need to do something to repel them, we need to have some kind of defensive operation, Stalin actually had one of the officers shot because he didn't believe it. And he refused to to believe the information for three days. And even after he started to believe it, he really wasn't sure what to do about it. He simply couldn't believe that anyone would dare go against him and would dare violate that pact. Even though we are talking about Hitler, so you might expect that Stalin would be somewhat suspicious of Hitler since Hitler had lied in the past and was trying to dominate Western Europe, but Stalin was was very fearful and paranoid and didn't even want to think that someone might try and challenge his rule.

Now, after World War II, you have the division of Germany between the Soviet Union and the United States, Britain, and France. And one of the things that happened was that with that division of Germany and the division of Berlin, that you had a lot of people who were in the East who were under communist rule, who were subject to rationing, who had really a failing economy, and they could see that there was prosperity in the West. And so you started to have a lot of people from Communist East Berlin fleeing into capitalist West Berlin. And of course, once they could get into capitalist West Berlin, then they would be able to get out into the rest of Western Europe because even though Berlin was in East Germany, the Allies had to have access to West Berlin. And so there was an access route through Communist East Germany into capitalist West Berlin.

Now, because you had so many people starting to defect in the years after the war, people who wanted economic prosperity, people who wanted political freedoms, one of the things that happened was that Stalin felt he needed to put a a cork in that bottleneck. He wanted to stop the leaking of defectors. And so in 1948, Stalin instituted the Berlin Blockade. He put a blockade around the entire city of Berlin, not just the communist half, but the entire city. Now, the United States and its Western allies could have gone to war with Stalin, they could have started World War III, but they knew that the publics of Europe and the United States didn't want that. They weren't ready for another global war. And so instead, the United States and Britain cooperated in something called the Berlin Airlift. Planes would take off from the United States with American agricultural products and other resources, and they would land in Britain, and then be reloaded onto smaller planes where they would then fly over the blockade and into Berlin, so that the people of Berlin would not be starved into submission by Stalin. So at the end of that Berlin Blockade, you know, Stalin gave up after a few months. But later on, after Stalin had died in 1953, the issue of Berlin's division would come up again. In 1961, under a different Soviet Premier, the Berlin Wall would be erected again for the same reason, to stop this flow of defectors from the Communist East to the Democratic and capitalist West.

Now, as after you have Stalin dying in 1953, and we're really not sure what he died of, it may have been poisoning, it may have been natural causes, there are different debates over that. But after Stalin died in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev came to power. Now, you might notice that some of these Soviet leaders, there's a couple of years of gaps in between them, and the reason for that is that they don't have regularly scheduled elections. Is that in the Soviet Union, you had a time period where the Central Committee would have to meet, they would have to decide who was the best potential candidate, and so it might take some time to choose who was going to be the new Soviet Premier, the new leader of the Soviet Union. But when Nikita Khrushchev was chosen, Nikita Khrushchev decided to go against Stalin's ideas. He initiated something called the de-Stalinization program. De-Stalinization meant that instead of concentrating power and making more centralized power in the hands of the executive, in the hands of the, the national headquarters in Moscow, that you would decentralize that power, you know, give more local regions more decision-making power. So Khrushchev, in a sense, is doing what Stalin did. He's reversing. Lenin was more decentralized, Stalin centralized. You get back to Khrushchev, you go back towards decentralization, more like Lenin. And so with this decentralization program, Khrushchev created 100 economic zones in the Soviet Union, so that instead of all the decisions being made in Moscow by the State Planning Committee, you'd let some local areas have more decision-making power. Now, it certainly wasn't a capitalist economy, but at least it wasn't as tightly centralized and concentrated as it had been under Stalin. And so this idea of of decentralizing power, you know, this is, is more of a truly Marxist kind of idea than Stalin's totalitarianism. Of course, that does that doesn't mean that Khrushchev was a soft leader, or that he was democratic by any means. For example, in 1961, Stalin, I'm sorry, Khrushchev was the person who was responsible for erecting the Berlin Wall almost overnight, and for putting guards along the border to shoot defectors. So this idea of institutionalizing and creating a structure to divide East and West, Khrushchev felt very strongly about that, and he wanted to preserve the Communist East.

Khrushchev also became very powerful in his stance about Cuban missiles. One of the things that happened in 1962 was that U.S. intelligence forces found that there were nuclear missiles from the Soviet Union being stored in Cuba. And in fact, Fidel Castro, the dictator of Cuba, knew about these these missiles, but he didn't know actually how many there were. He was surprised later to find that the Soviets had even lied to him about the number of nuclear-headed warheads on the missiles that were in Cuba. So Khrushchev arranges to put nuclear, uh, warheads in Cuba, which is just, you know, a few miles off the coast of Florida, you know, 60 to 90 miles off the coast of Florida. You know, you have these missiles, and that is dangerously close to the United States. The United States simply could not tolerate that. I mean, it was too much of a threat to have these missiles at our back door. I mean, it was nuclear annihilation just a step away. And so once President John F. Kennedy found out about these missiles, he called Khrushchev on it, you know, he told him that he knew about these missiles and they must be removed. So essentially, what happened was that they were at a stalemate. Khrushchev was making demands, Kennedy was making demands, and there was the potential for World War III to erupt. So for 13 days in October of 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis went on. And of course, the American public and the Soviet public knew nothing about it at the time. They didn't know that they were on the brink of Armageddon. But Kennedy and Khrushchev were in contact, you know, negotiating, you know, trying to essentially make the other one back down. And eventually, Khrushchev backed down. Now, that reinforced the American idea that you have to be tough with the Soviets, and it led to the end of Khrushchev's career just two years later. Nikita Khrushchev was ousted from power in the Soviet Union because he had been seen as being too weak with the Americans, and particularly with such a young president as John F. Kennedy.

Now, after Khrushchev, you have Leonid Brezhnev. And Brezhnev again reverses course. Brezhnev decides to go back to more the Stalinist approach. And Brezhnev said that previous leaders had been far too optimistic in, um, in trying to create the perfect communist state. He said that the evils of capitalism, like religion, private property, people wanting to acquire wealth that's their own as individuals, the idea of individualism, that all of these things would take much longer to get rid of, that they were really anti-socialist capitalist evils, and that you had to kind of get those out of society over time. And he said that these factors were dwindling away, that they were going away over time. But that while they were still in existence, the Party, the Communist power party, needed to remain in full power, that they needed to reconcentrate their power like they had under Stalin until communism truly developed. So they went back to a strict rule like they had under Stalin.

Next, you have Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko. They really don't have any kind of programs. Essentially, they were people who were quite a bit older, you know, they were elderly gentlemen. They were really chosen because the Central Committee couldn't find anyone, they couldn't agree on anyone to become the new Soviet Premier. So they put Yuri Andropov in, and he died unexpectedly just a few months later. So they put Konstantin Chernenko in, and he died soon after. And so once they were gone, by that time, the Central Committee did have a candidate. That candidate was Mikhail Gorbachev. Mikhail Gorbachev came in with his own programs, and again, it was almost like you had gone full cycle. You'd been swinging back and forth between the different leaders, and with Mikhail Gorbachev, you go back to more of the truly Leninist ideas, more decentralization.

Now, Gorbachev said that he never intended to end communism, he just wanted to make it work better. And so Gorbachev introduced two programs: Glasnost and Perestroika. Glasnost means openness, and with Glasnost, you're making the government more transparent, letting people see what goes on behind closed doors, letting people participate more. That sounds a lot like democracy. So even though Mikhail Gorbachev never said, I'm going to democratize the Soviet Union, in a sense, that's what was happening. And with Perestroika, Perestroika means economic restructuring. Well, Gorbachev never said, I'm going to abandon the command market and the centrally planned economy and embrace capitalism and free trade and supply and demand, but that's what he was doing. He was ushering those political and economic mechanisms in bit by bit.

Now, the problem is that if you do that at the same time, you're going to have a lot of upheaval. Back in 1979, China realized that their command market wasn't working. They'd been trying since 1949, and the communist economic model just didn't work. And so they thought, what we'll do is we'll try to use the capitalist economy, but not the democratic political institutions. So if you maintain a dictatorship, you can change your economy, and even though it creates great hardship, you still have troops, you know, to to crush any kind of protest, you can instill, you know, oppress people, you still don't have to give them any civil liberties. But in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev didn't do that. He wanted to have both democracy and capitalism at the same time. And I'm not saying democracy and capitalism are bad in any way, but if you give people the freedom to protest and to say that they're unhappy, and then you also create an economic situation where they don't have what they need, where maybe they're out of a job that they've had their entire lives, where they don't have this cradle-to-grave social welfare system to rely on, then they are going to protest. They're going to take to the streets. In a dictatorship, they're afraid to, but in a democracy, they will make their demands known.

So under this new Gorbachev program of Perestroika and Glasnost, you have a lot of very positive changes coming to the Soviet Union, but it's so much change that it results in a dramatic upheaval. And people aren't willing to wait 10 years for things to settle down, they want things to improve now. And once they have the ability to protest and to demand changes, they're going to do it. So democracy and capitalism, they couldn't be successful, and eventually they proved to be successful in the new post-Soviet era, but they brought down the end of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union started to decline as people started to complain, people started to want changes, people said, you know, we're tired of this command market, we're tired of the communist rule, we want a new form of government, we want to break free. And so essentially, what happened was that from about 1989 to 1991, you have the breakup of the Soviet Empire. By 1991, these Soviet republics have now become independent nation-states. And so today, Russia exists, but Russia is simply one independent nation-state, and you have the other republics of the Soviet Union that are independent nation-states as well.

Now, they've maintained certain trade ties, certain foreign policy ties. For example, Russia is the leading member in something called The Commonwealth of Independent States. The CIS is a commonwealth, kind of like the British Commonwealth. It's a voluntary association of nations that have traditional and historical and cultural ties. And so they still trade together, they still have ambassadors in each other's nations. They don't have to, but they choose to. And so you still have a lot of connection there between the former Soviet republics, between Russia and these other nations, but it's not forced. They're not under totalitarian rule. They can choose their own leaders, they can have their own elections. So, for example, you might wonder why didn't talk about Soviet leaders like Boris Yeltsin or Vladimir Putin. That's because they are not Soviet leaders. Boris Yeltsin became the leader of the new Russia, and Vladimir Putin succeeded Yeltsin. So they were never Soviet Premiers. The last Soviet Premier was Mikhail Gorbachev.

But I think that you can see that there are different twists on totalitarianism that you can go in different directions with it. And so while there might be, you know, certain common characteristics to total control, total political and economic control, that you can have variations, as we've seen from the leaders between Lenin and Gorbachev. And you can see that there are commonalities between Lenin and Gorbachev. And so in a sense, we almost come full cycle over the 20th century. Thank you.

All right. Now, as we move forward on our upcoming lecture, we will focus on World War II. For actually, our next few lectures, we'll focus on World War II from 1939. Of course, we'll, we'll take the beginning, the first half of World War II, and then of course, we will continue on toward the, the last few years of World War II and end in the year 1945 for another upcoming lecture. So when we come back, we'll learn about World War II from 1939 to 1942. Until next time.