Fall of the Soviet Union and beginning of the new Russia
Within the scope of this research, we will assess the change in lives of ordinary people that occurred when the Soviet Union dissolved and Russia set up as an independent country. The Soviet Union was created in October 1917 by a small but devoted band of revolutionaries whose beliefs and goals were shaped by the writings of Karl Marx. Marx (1818-1883) considered the Industrial Revolution to be an era of increasing social and economic injustice, and he was opposed to the accumulation of wealth by capitalist means. For more than seventy years, Soviet Union was expanding its influence on the neighboring regions, simultaneously establishing totalitarian regime on its own territory. After careful examination of different changes that took place after fall of the Soviet Union, it is apparent that while new Russian reality has many unpleasant issues, it is still more preferable to the ordinary people than living in the environment of total oppression and no freedom. (Brown 114)
A broad-based anti-Soviet movement began in all the Warsaw Pact countries in October 1989, and Gorbachev (then president of the Soviet Union) allowed it to grow. Perhaps he underestimated the force of nationalism and the popular disregard for Soviet authority in these countries, but he was determined that Warsaw Pact Communists had to win the support of their own people to maintain power, without Soviet assistance. Gorbachev regarded the Warsaw Pact as expendable because the strategic dividends that the USSR received from control of these countries were not worth the cost of the subsidies they received from the USSR in the era of perestroika. By late October, Hungary and East Germany were caught up in the move away from the Soviet external empire. (Daniels 70)
Gorbachev received criticism from the reform wing of the party, which wanted him to step up the pace of domestic reform within the USSR, and also from the anti-reform wing of the party, which sought to maintain the political, social, and economic privileges of party membership. Although party membership peaked at 19 million in the Gorbachev era, several million members who were frustrated by the slow pace of reform resigned from the party. (Daniels 75) The anti-reform faction of the party made its position clear as early as March 1988, when a letter from a Leningrad chemistry teacher was published in Sovetskaya Rossiya. The author, Nina Andreeva, claimed to speak for many party members who were unhappy with the move toward reform. She criticized the reevaluations of the Soviet past that characterized much of the press, and she implied that the attacks on Stalin’s legacy were particularly unpatriotic. She attacked the spirit of reform and complained about “militant cosmopolitanism” (a term used in anti-Semitic contexts during the Stalin period). (Pozner 45)
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