2. Breakup of soviet union

This PPT explains the history of the Breakup of Soviet Union in nutshell.

1. Power Point Presentation By V. MURUGAN Assistant Professor of History, Vivekananda College, Tiruvedakam West, Madurai District.

2. Breakup of Soviet Union

3. The USSR The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. A federal Socialist State. Existed from 1922 – 1991. It was a union of multiple states. Latvia Russia Moldova Armenia Kazakhstan Kirgizstan Estonia Ukraine Republic of Georgia Tajikistan Turkmenistan Lithuania Belarus Azerbaijan Uzbekistan

4. Causes for the Breakup of the USSR Economic Causes Diverse Nature of Nationalities and People Religion and State Russification

5. Economic Causes In the mid-1980s Soviet leaders faced many problems. Production in the consumer and agricultural sectors was often inadequate. In the consumer and service sectors, a lack of investment resulted in black markets in some areas. Since the 1970s, the growth rate had slowed substantially. Economic development was no longer possible. The productivity of Soviet assets remained low. Product quality needed improvement.

6. Diverse Nature of Nationalities and People The major proportions of the population were Russians. There were also Ukrainians (16.9 percent), Uzbeks (3.8 percent) and many other nationalities. The Soviet Union still remains quite ethnically diverse. The Soviet Union consisted of a family of nations living harmoniously together. The seventy years of communist rule had failed to remove national ethnic differences.

7. Religion and State The state was separated from the church by the Decree of Council of People’s Commissars. Christianity and Islam had the most believers. Although there were many ethnic Jews in USSR The actual practice of Judaism was rare in Communist times. Two-thirds of the Soviet population had no religious beliefs.

8. Russification Soviet Union consisted of fifteen states speaking different languages. Russification used to denote the influence of Russian language on other Slavic languages. In the nineteenth century Russification intensified. Publications in technical and scientific journals were mostly in Russian language. This led to underdevelopment of modern technical and scientific terminology in Slavic languages. Further degrading their status.

9. The CPSU In 1917 the Social D emocratic W orkers’ Party (Bolsheviks) had 200000 members. Vladimir Lenin persuaded members to change the name of the organisation to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The Party Congress elected a 27 member Central Committee every year. Lenin decided this was too large to determine policy. In 1919 the party created a Politburo . This was made up of five members (increased to nine in 1925 and ten in 1930).

10. Its first members were Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, Lev Kamenev and Nikolai Krestinsky . There were over 700000 members of the CPSU in 1921. The CPSU was now all powerful and all other political parties were banned. It controlled the government . Headed by its Chairman - Prime Minister . It also appointed all local and national public officials, They had to be members of the party before they could be appointed to these posts.

11. Gradually power passed from the Politburo to the General Secretary. He controlled the appointment of party members to key jobs throughout the country. Joseph Stalin - became General Secretary in April, 1922 . Dominated the CPSU after the death of Vladimir Lenin in January, 1924. After Stalin, CPSU was headed by different leaders. But Russia, which was behind the “Iron Curtain”, was brought to the forefront by Mikail Gorbachev .

12. Mikhail Gorbachev Born on March 2, 1931 . Studied law at Moscow University . While a student Gorbachev joined Communist Party (CPSU). After leaving university, He became a full time official with Komsomol ( Communist Youth Organization ). In 1955 - appointed first secretary of the Komsomol Territorial Committee. By 960 he was the top Komsomol official. Gorbachev was elected by the Central Committee as General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985.

13. As party leader He immediately began forcing more conservative members of the Central Committee to resign. He replaced them with younger men who shared his vision of reform. In 1985 Gorbachev introduced a major campaign against corruption and alcoholism. He also spoke about the need for Perestroika ( Restructuring ) This heralded a series of liberalizing economic, political and cultural reforms. With the aim of making the Soviet economy more efficient.

14. The Soviet authoritarian structures made these reforms ineffective . There was shortage of goods in the shops. Gorbachev also announced changes to Soviet foreign policy. In 1987 he met with Ronald Reagan and signed the Immediate Nuclear Forces ( INF ) abolition treaty. He also made it clear he would no longer interfere in the domestic policies of other countries in Eastern Europe In1989 he announced the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan . In 1990 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize .

15. Glasnost Gorbachev introduced a number of political reforms under the name of glasnost . These included relaxing censorship and political repression, reducing the powers of the KGB (Soviet secret police) and democratization . Competitive elections were introduced for the posts of officials (by people within the Communist Party). Gorbachev’s attempts to create more political openness had the unexpected effect of re-awakening long suppressed nationalist and anti- Russian feelings. Nationalist feeling also took hold in other Soviet Republics such as Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. These nationalist movements were strengthened greatly by the declining Soviet economy.

16. Perestroika Gorbachev implemented economic reforms as part of his perestroika programme. He hoped that it would improve living standards and worker productivity. The law permitted private ownership of businesses in the services, manufacturing, and foreign-trade sectors. Gorbachev’s introduction of glasnost gave new freedoms to the people, such as a greater freedom of speech . The press became far less controlled . Thousands of political prisoners and many dissidents were released. By the late 1980s the process of openness and democratisation began to run out of control. Relaxation of censorship resulted in the Communist Party losing its grip on the media. The media began to expose severe social and economic problems which the Soviet government had long denied existed and covered up.

17. On April 25 - 26, 1986 the World’s worst nuclear power accident occurred at Chernobyl, in the former USSR (now Ukraine). The Chernobyl nuclear power plant had 4 reactors and while testing reactor number 4, many safety procedures were neglected. The chain reaction in the reactor became out of control and exploded . killing more than 30 people immediately. Resulted in high radiation levels in the surrounding area for more than 20 miles . the mishandling of the 1986 Chernobyl accident continued to cause a significant backlash against the Soviet leadership. Chernobyl accident

18. The very positive view of Soviet life which had long been presented to the public by the official media, was being rapidly dismantled. This began to undermine the faith of the public in the Soviet system. Gorbachev’s attempts to make the Soviet Union a more democratic country made him unpopular with conservatives still in positions of power. In August 1991 he survived a coup staged by hard-liners in the Communist Party. Gorbachev responded by dissolving the Central Committee . With the Soviet Union disintegrating into separate states, Gorbachev resigned from office on December 25, 1995.

19. Boris Yeltsin Yeltsin began his career as a construction worker . He joined the Communist Party in 1961. In 1985 he was chosen by Mikhail Gorbachev as Moscow party boss. In 1986 he was inducted into the party’s ruling Politburo. In Oct., 1987, however, he was ousted from his Moscow post After clashing with conservatives and criticizing Gorbachev’s reforms as inadequate. Attracting a large following as a populist advocate of radical reform. Yeltsin won (1989) election to the USSR’s Supreme Soviet (parliament) as an opposition member. In 1990, Yeltsin was elected as Russian President by the Supreme Soviet.

20. Boris Yeltsin definitely proved himself the most dynamic leader of Russia’s democratic forces. The leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus met at a hunting lodge near Minsk. They signed on December 8, 1991 , the Belovezh Agreement . Dissolving the Soviet Union and establishing a Commonwealth of Independent States. Later that month, the Crimson flag bearing the hammer and sickle was lowered at the Kremlin for the last time. The U.S.S.R. died quietly . 74 years after its founders had vowed Communism would triumph across the world.