1922 - 1991: The Complete History Of The Soviet Union

in 1922 the Soviet Union was formed a new nation that would have a profound impact on the entire Globe it would emerge from the remnants of the Russian Empire after a long and bloody Civil War Russia in the aftermath of the bolic Revolution was a country in absolute turmoil a brutal and bloody Clash of arms trying to wipe out this new regime before it can take control of the country the Bolsheviks finally succeeded in about 1922 and then came the hard work of trying to create for the first time ever a new socialist country from

out of nowhere Vladimir Lenin had become the leader of the largest Nation on Earth and was now imposing his will Lenin won the war Lenin won the revolution Lenin's one of those amazing figures who really are decisive in history once's got to understand that Lenin was an autocratic character who really didn't want anyone to succeed him that's true of most autocratic characters in history but Lenin would have a successor who proved to be the most ruthless of all figures when dealing with both his own people and his foreign enemies they realized after the revolution that

the Soviet Union was surrounded by enemies didn't have a friend in the world they felt that way and they were probably right and the only defense was to build an enormous army with a lot of tanks and a lot of aircraft and a lot of ships which they did in the aftermath of World War II the Soviet Union emerged as a new Global superpower that matched the once Mighty Russian Empire of old all of us who were then young we were seeing great achievements by the Soviet Union they launched the Sputnik satellite fantastic scientific achievement

they put the first man into space Yuri gagari fantastic achievement and so people were saying they saw the Soviet Union as a genuine comparable competitor with the United States now a century from its formation the Soviet Union seems to define the whole of the 20th century [Music] in 1917 the romanof dynasty fell and Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks had managed to seize power in the Russian Revolution this new government signed the Treaty of breast lovk with the Central Powers bringing an end to Russian involvement in World War I but despite an end to the conflict

with foreign governments the battle for Russia itself would continue for years in the beginning it seemed fairly simple it seemed to be the Red Army which was an army of Soldiers with hardly any officers and the other Army is the white Army which you could say was an army of officers with hardly any soldiers who wanted to put Russia back to what it had been before the first world war and possibly continue that war to to a victory and then it got complicated for really the better part of two three years this struggle is taking

place for control of this vast and completely turbulent country at the same time other things are going on there is a famine there's a war going on between Russia and Poland at the same time and there are endless mutinies rebellions taking places notably the konat Mutiny where the sailors of the of the fleet rebel against the new bulit government so not only is the bulvik government fighting for its very survival but it's fighting against powerful and desperate forces all of whom have one goal and that is destroy it various National groups formed their own armies

the ukrainians uh the Georgians and and they all fought uh there was an anarchist Army which fought all sides sometimes allying with one so basically red and white with various other factions and of course from 1919 the Japanese the French the British uh and the Americans all thought they might intervene and save something from the situation so there were at least five or six foreign armies also mostly fighting the Bolsheviks uh and trying to help the whites uh but in the and giving up because the presence of foreign soldiers only made the Red Army stronger

could increase National feeling Among The Peasants and and the workers but while Lenin as the overall leader of the Bolshevik and Trotsky as the leader of the Red Army wound up victorious in the Russian Civil War it was another figure who truly established himself during the fighting Lon and try are now firmly in power the Cher is abolished in its place comes the ogpu or political police and to check on the ogpu there is Rob cream the workers and peasants inspection group whose Chief is one Joseph banovic J party name stallion Stalin was uh born

in Georgia one of the the national areas of of the Russian Empire he was uh the son of a Shoemaker uh and initially he was intended to go into the the church uh he attended a seminary he joined the Bolsheviks uh at a young age and he became known for his practical work uh working in the underground organizing uh bank robberies and and political demonstrations he was never he spent a few years abroad but he he was mainly an inside guy and in the course of the Civil War he became in charge of uh all

of the buvik cadres the organization and he developed a a patronage Network in that way so then he became obviously one of the potential successors to Lenin everyone underestimated him because he pretended to be not as clever as he was he pretended not to know foreign languages he pretended not to have read anything so they thought this is a useful gopher he'll do as a sort of Chief whip to get others into organization and when they uh founded a Central Committee they thought well what's the most boring job on a committee it's a secretary uh

but the point is uh that the secretary if they have enough personality and power and ruthlessness is a person who determines what the agenda is who is going to receive that agenda who's going to be notified at the meeting and who's going to be allowed to speak and who writes the notes and uh and so on so as a result of that right to the end of the Soviet Union the most powerful person was the first Secretary of the Central Committee not the president not the chairman and that was Stalin's doing one of Stalin's key

tasks in the Bolshevik party had been how the issue of the nationalities that made up the Russian Empire would be handled by this new regime you know his interest in the nationalities and the creation of the Soviet Union was that Lenin appointed him in 1911 1912 to be his nationalities expert and Starling went to Vienna and lived there for a few months and wrote his his his his paper on the nationalities question which him and Lenin worked out what to do with the nationalities you've got to understand that the Russian Empire was a multi-ethnic Empire

it contained something like a hundred tiny ethnic groups but obviously a handful of big ones the biggest them of course was the Russians themselves Orthodox Russians but then there were um Poes who were catholic fins who were Protestant Georgians who had their own church Aeries and and Chin who were Muslim so the big question um in the Russian Empire was how do we overthrow thear and how do we make how do we liberate these peoples the problem of national minorities had been a thorny one throughout Europe woodro Wilson decided the solution was to allow National

groups to self-determine themselves and create Nations if they wanted to Russia was a multinational Empire so so the problem was how to organize the different nationalities uh and Lenin decided that nationalities should have their own homelands that the Soviet Union would be socialist in content nationalist in form and so the republics were formed along these National lines so he'd retaken and reconquered Ukraine and Bellar Russia he'd retaken the Caucasus including Georgia Stalin's Homeland but he' lost the baltics states which became independent he'd lost Finland and he'd lost Poland so how does he manage the rest

of this Empire what does he do with these nationality because the Bolsheviks have supported their right to freedom and all of them have their own nationalist movements now and all of them would you know really like to be independent that was the big question what do we do what kind of new country do we create to keep these these territories within our new Soviet Bolshevik State and yet give them freedom and that's the million Ruble question in December of 1922 the solution that the Bolsheviks enacted was the creation of a federal system of republics known

as the USSR the name comes from the Union of Soviet Socialist republics it was a union of uh quazi independent nominally independent republics it was Soviet because the the political form was elected councils the Russian word for Council is Soviet it was socialist because the uh the state owned the means of production to begin with they had the Russian federal republic which still exists there was a Ukrainian Republic once they'd entered Ukrainian Independence which lasted until about 1920 and there was a Caucasian Republic which later split into Georgia Armenia aaban Central Asia was still uh

in chaos till 1924 and the present stands K kakan Tajikistan usbekistan Kyan they didn't really emerge until middle of the 1920s uh when they'd been pacified there were great differences between Lenin and Stalin about this new Union of socialist republics Lenin saw it as a decentralized system with each socialist republic having considerable power over their own Affairs Stalin saw it very differently he wanted it ruled from the center he wanted Russia as the dominant Force Moscow as the center of power and preferably himself running the thing it was quite surprising given that he himself was

Georgian at the same time as this new state was being established its leader was falling into a terrible state of health a series of Strokes would render Lenin unable to speak and a new leader would soon be needed one man had long been plotting for the position and he would eventually become one of the most powerful and feared figures in the whole world in January 1924 Vladimir Lenin died the battle for succession of leadership in the Soviet Union was now truly underway with one man Stalin determined to come out on top and then on January

21st 1924 the moon-faced balding dictator left the scene as abruptly as he had appeared he literally died overwork his funeral was a monstrous Affair hundreds of thousands chewed up in the streets in 25° below zero weather it seemed that everyone wanted to pay their last respects Stalin removed his Rivals systematically with Incredible Ingenuity and in such a way they didn't know it was happening Lenin's great fear I think was that Stalin would develop a personality cult a cult that had already developed around Lenin himself and in fact Salin EXP exped this he built up the

cult of Lenin when Lenin died he took charge of the funeral arrangements he wanted to have complete control of what happened to Lenin's Legacy it was Stalin who wanted Lenin's body to be embed much against the wishes of Lenin's Widow and once Lenin was dead this personality cult was transferred onto Stalin himself and this would become one of the Hallmarks of his entire Reign of Power in the Soviet Union Darin was was left as the sort of leading member of the leadership along with Trotsky and there were other there were other major figures um zenov

and KF and younger ones like bukar and as well and ROV who was who who were also key figures but the the leading two contenders were Stalin and Trotsky and even though it's always this is always presented as one of the great sort of struggles and it was an amazing thing that Stalin won this won this succession struggle actually he'd really already won it by the time Lenin died he was already the leading figure in the regime and you know somebody had to do something pretty radical to stop him he already controlled the Party Machine

and the party controlled the country so Trotsky was actually his ideal competitor trosky was very arrogant and so famous and so preeminent and so pleased with himself that he really believed that he didn't need to do much organizing and he would simply be given the leadership the first thing he did was to tell trosky he needed a rest and suggested that trosky go to the Caucasus and trosy who although a very powerful figure could be at times hysterical and have fainting fits and feel suddenly psychosomatically ill trosky consented and he went pheasant shooting and the

instructions Stalin sent to the locals was he is not to meet anybody he was not to receive any telegrams or letters so trosky missed Lenin's funeral and you know people who Miss funerals miss the will reading and miss the distribution of the spoils Stalin's Maneuvers during Lenin's funeral would be the beginning of the end for Leon trotsky's role in the newly formed USSR and the beginning of Stalin's radical plans for the nation Stalin zenov and KV Force trosky into Exile then Stalin overrules his two Associates and ends the New Economic Policy in its place come

three successive 5-year plans all designed to emphasize productive capacity especially heavy industry and power output from 1928 to 1941 Russia's industrial capacity Rises nearly 300% after the Civil War Lenin had promoted a policy of compromise economic compromise the New Economic Policy which allowed quite a lot of Market forces to delay communism because the country was so impoverished and of course in the Communist party there was a wide variety of views about which way they should go whether they should allow some some Mar some Market forces or whether they should have a strict communism with collectivization

but at the same time uh another big issue was industry and bazaars had begun to industrialize Russia in the 1890s but of course that had all been destroyed in the war and so now they look towards America the rising power and they saw this extraordinary industrial miracle that was happening in America um with mass production and they wanted it too but while the Soviet Union wanted to emulate the industrialization witnessed in countries like the United States of America it remained very wary of its precarious place in international Affairs well the bolik party which became the

Communist party was was split in its foreign policy th those on the left believed that a revolution in one country could not survive only by itself so they they believe that only a world revolution could bring real socialism so they they believe that Britain Germany France United States also needed to become socialist in order to make the revolution succeed uh and so part of the part policy was to uh organize and support foreign communist parties to undermine governments and to carry out this revolution but at the same time the Soviet Union needed to survive in

the world that existed so they were also engaging in diplomatic relations with these Powers trying to arrange uh trade deals so that they could borrow technology in order to develop their own economy so there was this two-prong policy on the one hand they were being nice to to capitalist countries and on the other hand they were trying to undermine them with their local communist parties the foreign policy you know changed and he was extremely um flexible with the foreign policy but the essential thing was just to strengthen the Soviet Union wherever possible by any means

possible and in that sense you know he was actually quite he was he was very radical internally he was incredibly murderous internally but out outside in foreign policy he was you know very much a traditional Statesman making alliances you know winning friends trying to win territory in order to make the USSR grade the early years of the Soviet Union both Lenin and Stalin after him really craved foreign recognition they wanted this new uh revolutionary state to be recognized by countries across the world one of the first Nations to enter into negotiations was Great Britain and

you get the Anglo Soviet trade agreement and then get diplomatic recognition happen soon after afterwards and eventually America itself in the early 1930s will recognize this new state and send an ambassador to Moscow and soon after that the Soviet Union is recognized by the League of Nations in 1934 this is a key moment for the Soviet Union at last it's been recognized as an official country on the world stage while the USSR would eventually be officially recognized on the world stage it continued to have extremely tense relationships with foreign powers but one of the ussr's

surprising opportunities for Industrial Development in this time was with the country it had been in direct conflict with just a few years prior during World War I Germany Germany after the first world war was a parah state it wasn't allowed to have an army wasn't allowed to have tanks or airplanes so it came to a ment with another prior State the Soviet Union and they developed submarines tanks and aircraft in uh various sites on the vulga well this was the first socialist country in the world so it was a a tremendous experiment in transforming an

economic system modernized the country to build hydroelectric dams to build the economy the Soviet economic Elite decided that centralized economic planning would be the most efficient way to mobilize resources so targets were set for every sector of the economy by the center uh and orders were given to all parts of the economy to fulfill their parts of the plan so initially they recognized they needed to build infrastructure and heavy Industries Transportation uh energy sector and machine manufacturing uh in order to provide the the capacity to then develop the economy further into uh consumer goods uh

and and and a broad based economy but everything was mobilized uh toward this this the plan and so Stalin in the end embraced the extreme leftist view of Communism which was collectivize eliminate all property but also to make this into a great power and to promote industrialization and the best way to do that was to collectivize the fields and the farms and then sell the grain abroad and buy Tech technology to industrialize the country and that was the policy he decided on so it was a radical policy and by 19 about 1928 he he decided

that that was the only way to go to make the Soviet Union a great power and to and to and to ensure the survival of the USSR and that was what he decided to do and he would do it at any cost the economic policy enacted by Joseph Stalin in the late 1920s would lead to a widescale famine across the whole of the USSR he did it by first of all introducing a policy of collective Farms they had been tried briefly in the 1920s and found that peasants didn't want to have their horses owned collectively

and rebelled against it and that was quickly abandoned and then he tried again in 1929 and this time it was organized with the help of the Red Army and it is said for the first time in Russian history peasants at all the meat they wanted to because rather than hand over their pigs and sheep and cows they just had an enormous feast and ate as much as they could one of both Lenin's policies and Stalin's policies was the destruction of the wealthy farming class the yman farmers if you like these are farmers who had quite

a lot of land and produced a lot of produce which they would then sell on this was deemed unacceptable to the bolik regime and they were to be liquidated and other Farmers the smaller peasant farmers were to be gathered into Collective farms and produce grain and supplies for the benefit of the state this was an absolute disaster because on the one hand Stalin had wiped out the one class of farmers that produced a surplus and there was no longer any incentive for the rest of the peasant Farmers to produce any food that was going to

be taken from them anyway what happens next is the Great Famine of the early 1930s the regime would not listen to signals from below they wouldn't listen to the fact that there was no seed to plant and they insisted on high quotas anyway uh and this led to an even worse harvest the next year with loss of life uh and Devastation mostly in Ukraine because this was the the main grain growing area uh but it would also affected parts of Southern Siberia and uh Eastern Russia as well so historians who have looked very closely at

this don't believe this was a deliberate attack on Ukrainian nationalism or Ukrainian Independence it was just a terribly tragic manifestation of of the of mistakes made in economic planning and an unwillingness to collect unbiased information but rather trying to uh believe the most Rosy predictions and reports rather than the actual reports records weren't kept properly but we know how many people died simply because of the census report that in 1937 there are about 12 million people missing from the population well they shot the people who took the sensus and they had a new census which

was faked and the problem with this famine was that there was a depression going on all over Europe and so on and there wasn't much demand for buying grain from the Soviet Union so the price wasn't good they had to sell more and more in order to finance their industrialization so that famine killed an enormous number of people between 10 million and perhaps 15 million because it happened not only to ukrainians it happened to russian Farmers uh there was a sort of insanity about it um the agriculture policy and the workers I think got party

workers got quite cynical they realized their job was to destroy so Vineyards were torn up and uh Farms destroyed uh animals destroyed the grain wasn't even stored properly it rotted in great Railway sidings so it was a form of Madness but it did solve one problem it got rid of the peasantry as as a force they were those who survive were cowed but it was not just the peasantry that was terrorized the very leadership of the government and the original bulvik revolutionaries would also be targeted he would take his old Bolshevik comrades many of whom

had helped him maneuver him into the position of absolute power and he would proceed to liquidate them in these show trials that took place in Moscow men like cev like zinovev were put on trial on trumped up charges and there was never any doubt that they were going to be found guilty and he really went through many of his old bck comrades they were put on trial they were found guilty and they they were executed was absolutely brutal these are also the years of the Great executions called yova in honor of Stalin's executioner n iov

how many people are permanently removed from circulation no one knows in some provinces as much as 4% of the population vanishes Kev and zinovev who helped Stalin seiz power are quickly disposed of to have been a friend of either one of them is now a crime for this and related activity well over half of the top communist leadership and thousands of lesser officials vanish as do most of the army officers well the show trials were U masterpieces of propaganda uh they were meant to be public displays of Crime and Punishment and they were carefully rehearsed

they were carefully prepared those that were sentenced in these trials their confessions were scripted hundreds of people were invited to witness them they were covered by the media and they were an attempt to prove to the people at large that there were enemies uh in the country and and that Stalin was doing a good job of finding them and rooting them out it was also a demonstration to foreign governments that the Soviet Union was was intent on on preserving its integrity and Stalin was helped by his chief of police at the time who was a

decadent poet and who had a lot to do with the theater and if you know the stanislowski method of acting which still survives today the sanaty method of acting is very destructive for the actor because it tells the actor you've got to be whoever you are and prisoners when arrested and interrogated were trained just as sanasi trained actors they were their trial rehearsed so when they appeared in court they would say yes I'm terribly guilty I've been a Japanese spy all my life and they would then of course make mistakes saying they'd met somebody in

a hotel which hadn't existed for 40 years a lot of foreigners are convinced quite influential foreigners historians like Christopher Hill Bernard Shaw people who you thought had more brains were convinced oh he says he's guilty he must be guilty a very few of y's victims are given trials some of the trials are remarkable for example several defendants are convicted of conspiring with trosky in 1936 in the hotel Bristol in Copenhagen an actual fact in 1936 the hotel was no longer in business next case in 1938 yov himself is purged together with many purged judges labor

camp operators and the like his basic plan was you know when he looked at when he looked at the Soviet Union he saw there was disloyalty in the party a lot of people wanted to get rid of him a lot of people weren't happy with his collectivization policy and the suffering of the peasants you know there was disloyalty in his own family and you know also the bosses had become like little princes running their own territories so he decided the way to deal with this was by Bloodshed by Terror quite deliberately and he launched a

great Terror in in 1935 36 in which over a million people basically innocent were executed this is also a time when there's a great expansion of the gulags these are these uh prison camps often in Far Far flung places in in uh Siberia mild from anywhere where political prisoners troublemakers or anyone deemed to be hostile to the regime would be sent off there often walking there under unspeakable conditions and they'd be simply locked away and they'd have to work they were forced labor camps they were fed uh very little food they were held in the

most primitive conditions uh you know in the depths of winter in Siberia it was freezing cold and millions maybe 1 and a half million 2 million people died in these camps but it meant that by the the end of the 1930s Stalin was absolute Master of the Soviet Union he had simply wiped out anyone who could challenge his leadership some 2,000 delegates who were at the 1934 uh Communist Party Congress two-thirds of them would would have lost their lives by the end of the great Terror so the leadership was disproportionately targeted but there are many

other victims as well other whole groups of victims were members of national minorities who who could be suspected of disloyalty in case of war came so there was a German minority uh in Russia that had been there for 200 years it was feared they would be disloyal so they were rounded up unexecuted uh polls living on the Borderlands between the Soviet Union and Poland it was feared that they would turn on the Soviet Union in case of a war so they were also targeted uh and victimized not for anything they did but just for the

the language that they spoke basically so it was a completely cynical thing it went on for about 18 months and then there were several incidents which even Stalin realized made it impossible to go on for instance there was a low temperature laboratory in Moscow and they'd arrested so many of the scientists that it was about to explode and destroy a large amount of the new Russian uh underground that was being built and so uh they decided to reverse things the little chief of police Nick kof had become a drunk completely drunk and stopping to turn

up for work and Stalin decided to get rid of him so the great Terror came to a fairly sudden end towards the end of 1938 and 1939 became a sort of Almost Paradise here in which you could write what you like you could walk the streets you could say what you like and nobody seemed to be bothered it didn't last long but it was an extraordinary period 1939 if you look at the books that were published then and you can see Stalin start relaxing after the great Terror he was in some ways morally exhausted it

maybe that he realized that it couldn't gone that he'd be left with no population to rule by the late 1930s the changing nature of Europe refocused Stalin and the ussr's attention on global rather than Internal [Music] Affairs the great hope at the outset of the buic reol Revolution was this would spread to other countries notably Germany which was seen as ripe for a b a similar sort of bolic Revolution but it didn't happen and events uh change rapidly in the 1930s Germany becomes the dominant power in Europe Hitler is the dominant personality in Europe and

Stalin recognizes this Stalin wanted to safeguard the Soviet Union as much as possible he regarded Hitler as his first enemy but he also regarded the Western democracies France and Britain and America as capitalist enemies who after all had intervene to try and destroy the Soviet Union in the in the Civil War so he was very suspicious of them perhaps more suspicious of them um at least I suppose he thought that the na Nazism a fascist movement opposed to Communism at least came from revolutionary popular roots and was run by a leader a single leader like

himself with whom he could do business and so as War became closer and the pressure Rose in Europe he needed to make a decision on sides Stalin's ultimate decision would be made behind closed doors when yakim Von ribbentrop the foreign minister of Nazi Germany headed to Moscow in August of 1939 to meet with his Soviet equivalent vaseslav Molotov a pack between the two Nations was being prepared in 1939 Stalin accepted that sooner or later he was going to have to fight Hitler but he did not believe that either it suited the Soviet Union for it

to happen soon uh or that the Soviet Union was ready to do so um he also saw the opportunity for territorial booty in Finland in Romania in Poland which he was happy to seize and Stalin convinced himself that he was offering Hitler such a good deal with um oil wheat and many other Commodities of which Germany was in desperate need that he was confident that it was going to be left to him Stalin and the Soviet Union to choose the moment at which he confronted Hitler in arms what he did not recognize was that his

timetable and Hitler's timetable might not mesh in the end Stalin's predictions about the timetable of the war in Europe would prove disastrously wrong in August 1939 it was publicly announced that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had signed a non-aggression PCT the news would cause shock waves around the world the lights began to burn all night in Moscow British and French military missions arrived to confer with the Soviet government so did German representatives and on August 21st 1939 the world was set on its Heels by the announcement of a treaty between the Russians and the

Germans in which they agreed not to fight each other here were the admitted Arch enemies in a state of apparent friendship it was too fantastic to make any sense it didn't when the news of the molotov ribbon trop pact was announced to the world the world was absolutely stunned this had all taken place in secret all the negotiations had taken place behind closed doors no one could quite believe in the west that Stalin would do a deal with his arch enemy Hitler but also inside the Soviet Union there was deep and profound shock that Hitler

who'd been presented by the regime as the ultimate monster suddenly Stalin was sitting down and doing a deal not just a deal but signing a non-aggression packed with him well Stalin and the Soviet leaders were very much afraid of of Hitler's intentions starting from when Hitler came to power in 1933 with an avowed anti-communist platform the one of the first things Hitler did was to Outlaw the German Communist party uh and imprison the German Communists it was starting in 1936 therefore the Soviet Union adopted a policy of support for popular fronts trying to Rally all

socialists and all moderates in popular fronts against fascism so they were very much trying to join an International Coalition uh to fight Nazism and to fight fascism from 1936 to 1939 uh Stalin was trying to join various collective security packs with Britain and with France uh but they were not letting him in uh and when Stalin was was uh excluded from the Munich agreements he began to feel that he was going to be excluded from any protection that collective security might give the Soviet Union so then they started negotiating on the other side uh for

some sort of PCT with with Hitler that would protect them many Communists in Western Europe and in the United States were deeply bewildered by um the molotov ronro pact um this was something completely unexpected something they could not reconcile were their enormously high ideals but in the end they did so they believed that the com and the Kremlin must know what they were doing and so they went along with it but it did extraordinary confusion in the minds of Western communist so it was a cynical thing to do to to suddenly announce that the Germans

were your friends and to start imprisoning people that you denounced fatla in their books and articles at Communist Party dictate and for two years of course this was official policy we collaborate with Hitler because at least he's fighting the capitalist West just over over a week after the molotov ribbon trop pack was announced Nazi Germany invaded the Western half of Poland marking the beginning of World War II only a couple of weeks later the Soviet Union took over the eastern half of Poland in exactly the way that the two Nations had secretly agreed part of

Poland passed over to the Soviet Union and the three independent Baltic states of Estonia Latvia and Lithuania were also handed over uh to the Soviet Union which gave them more space between them uh and the expanding German Reich which they hoped would help them if and when an invasion came he thought and he did he thought he'd get the Baltic states he'd get half of Poland and that half of Poland irritated him enormously because it was the half of Poland he had lost in 1920 when he was in charge of the war there and it

had been settled by polish officers uh so he took great care when he under the mil MTO ribon trop pack he was entitled to take over that part of Poland to slaughter 22,000 polish officers who were taken prisoners and in fact it made it much easier to cushion the eventual Nazi Nazi invasion the invasion of the Soviet Union itself would occur on the 22nd of June 1941 when operation Barbarosa was launched on Hitler's orders one of the most extraordinary stories of the second World War is that in Germany Stalin through communist sympathizers had the most

superb intelligence of any service of Any Nation in the western world and all his spies in Germany were telling him repeatedly that Hitler was going to attack him and they told him so with the utmost Authority with the best information and all of this information was getting through to Moscow and Stalin absolutely refused to believe it he'd been warned by Churchill himself had sent intelligence to Stalin saying that this is going to happen and most importantly he'd been warned by his spies in Tokyo notably Richard sge had told him not only that Hitler was going

to invade but he'd actually told him the exact date on which the uh invasion was going to take place Stalin refused to believe this and dismiss these accounts as fabricated and it meant that the Red Army was totally unprepared Hitler and Stalin read the same books one of them is clitz on War clitz fought with Napoleon realized Napoleon's mistake was to fight on two fronts in Spain and in Russia well Stalin concluded if Hitler's read this he knows I've read it I know you only fight on one front Hitler is busy fighting Britain and France

when he's finished with them then we can have a war but he's not going to attack me until he's finished with them and on that basis Stalin made one of the biggest mistakes he ever made when The Invasion came on the 22nd of June 1941 where the ver rolled over the Soviet Frontier on a massive 1,600 mile front millions of men tanks Machinery rolling over this stunned Stalin Stalin had no idea that Hitler was going to invade his country it came as a deep and profound shock Stalin's Behavior immediately in the aftermath of the invasion

of June 1941 was quite extraordinary he went into seclusion for days he many people afterwards thought believed that his comrades were going to kill him literally kill him murder him assassinate him execute him because he was alone responsible for this extraordinary crime this extraordinary Folly of allowing Germany a free pass almost into the Soviet Union with that Invasion and so all these frighten men around him who Stalin was expecting to kill him uh for the first few days they too were in chaos they too were bewildered they too couldn't think what to do and in

the end Stalin rallied Stalin came round Stalin began once again at first cautiously at first rather nervously to exercise his authority at first Stalin faced astonishing losses I think something like 6 million men were lost in the first in the first year of warfare and Hitler raced towards Moscow towards Leningrad into Ukraine towards HOV taking everything before him before the Russians started to sort of gather a proper resistance and started to fight back and stop them which they only managed to do in October 1941 outside Moscow but before then it looked like everything was collapsing

and Stalin himself said Lenin left us a state and we've screwed it up and for a second he doubted that whether he could do this and they came and got him and said his his henchmen came and got him and said we need you to take control and when that happened it was as if the mistake of of being of of being surprised by Hitler was forgiven and he was able to start with a clean State and he did but as the German Army moved ever closer towards Moscow in 1941 it seemed to many that

just two decades after its formation the Soviet Union was on the brink of [Music] annihilation in 1922 the Soviet Union was formed a new nation that would have a profound impact on the entire Globe it would emerge from the remnants of the Russian Empire after a long and bloody Civil War War Russia in the aftermath of the bulvik Revolution was a country in absolute turmoil a brutal and bloody Clash of arms trying to wipe out this new regime before it can take control of the country the Bolsheviks finally succeeded in about 1922 and then came

the hard work of trying to create for the first time ever a new socialist country from out of nowhere Vladimir Lenin had become the leader of the largest Nation on Earth and was now imposing his will Lenin won the war Lenin won the revolution Lenin's one of those amazing figures who really are decisive in history one's got to understand that Lenin was an autocratic character who really didn't want anyone to succeed him that's true of most autocratic characters in history but Lenin would have a successor who proved to be the most ruthless of all figures

when dealing with both his own people and his foreign enemies they realized after the revolution that the Soviet Union was surrounded by enemies didn't have a friend in the world they felt that way and they were probably right and the only defense was to build an enormous army with a lot of tanks and a lot of aircraft and a lot of ships which they did in the aftermath of World War II the Soviet Union emerged as a new Global superpower that matched the once Mighty Russian Empire of old all of us who were then young

we were seeing great achievements by the Soviet Union they launched the Sputnik satellite fantastic scientific achievement they put the first man into space Yuri gagari fantastic achievement and so people were saying they saw the Soviet Union as a genuine comparable competitor with the United States now a century from its formation the Soviet Union seems to define the whole of the 20th century [Music] [Music] on the 22nd of June 1941 Adolf Hitler launched operation Barbarosa a gargantuan military invasion of the Soviet Union the Eastern front of World War II had been opened and for a while

it looked as if the Soviet Union might be [Music] doomed the first days of and weeks and months of the German invasion of the Soviet Union were a military catastrophe but Russia was so vast and Russia's armies were so enormous that even though the Germans keep advancing and advancing that it's not enough as time went on the this Nazi war machine was stopped it was stopped in front of Leningrad it was stopped in front of Moscow and it was absolutely imperative for the Nazis to capture Moscow before winter began and it looked like they were

going to achieve this they captured um notably the towns of uh Vima and Brians these are very close to Moscow and this happened shortly before the winter set in and it looked very likely that they would seize Moscow as well but Stalin ordered that Moscow was to be held at all costs he saw that this was the great prize for Hitler and he was determined to ensure that Hitler did not capture Moscow and so you have this incred rible counterdefense of the capital city it's hard to think of any single occasion when another nation has

successfully invaded Russia and and clung to even the Mongols couldn't get any further than the forests and the bogs and Napoleon of course made some terrible mistakes with the weather reports Hitler made the same mistake and it said Russia is a very easy country to get into but an impossible country to get out of so that was a part of it there was just unlimited Manpower this was the first time they had a genuine enemy they'd had false enemies that Stalin invented now they had a real one amazing achievement of the war was in in

the first four months or so of the war to evacuate heavy industry from Ukraine uh which was the city of kov especially which was going to be under attack moved hundreds and hundreds of kilometers to Safe Haven behind the urals and within a matter of months for example the kov tra Factory was up and running producing tanks despite the disruption how it was done this is is a miracle heavy industry just dismantled put on trains moved to the eurs re-erected and working and then they produced tanks that were actually Superior to German tanks at t72

which I think still rolls about today which bounced shells just bounc off them the Soviet Union is not the hollow shell that Hitler convinced himself that it was before launched operation Barbarosa this is a vast fantastically powerful fantastically motiva country and society which can do things that we have never dreamed of and so those German generals who had not been frightened by the British or the French or the poles suddenly they feel this sense around the heart they feel these Russians this is something far more formidable far more frightening than anything we've hither to had

to face and as those winter battles began around Moscow in the autumn and winter in October and November of 1941 even though Hitler was far from admitting it most of the smartest people in the Inner Circle of the Third Reich realized that that terrifying IR hand of defeat was staring them in the face in order to help guarantee eventual Victory the Soviet Union quickly made a new alliance with the Western powers that had once treated it with enormous suspicion an alliance of pragmatism was formed once they met together in in in August 1942 Churchill went

over to see Stalin and Stalin was actually at the greatest crisis of the of the war looked like he was going to lose the whole South the oil field Stalingrad and the Caucasus Churchill arrived and they made they made a sort of deal they they became kind of they respected each other and Churchill told them that they weren't going to do an invasion of Europe an invasion of France yet but that they would ultimately but for the moment they had to build trust among themselves and so the three of them met at Teran for the

first time in 1943 there they really began to to build a sort of a sort of Rapport between the three of them particularly Roosevelt and and Stalin and they agreed on enough to proceed with the war and to win the war they decided on a conditional surrender and the future shape of what Europe would look like here the chief Executives of Britain and the United States met for the first time with Marshall Stalin they reaffirmed their country's determination to work together in the war and in the peace to follow the battles that the Soviet Union

fought on the Eastern Front were on an almost unimaginable scale and would turn the tide in favor of this new alliance these battles inside the Soviet Union were on a scale that had never been seen before in the history of warfare these huge Titanic struggles to struggle for Leningrad the struggle for Stalingrad the massive tank battle the greatest tank battle in history that took place at KK the death toll in these battles were absolutely enormous millions and millions of Soviet soldiers would lose their lives on these battlefields it was a people's War this the people's

Homeland was being invaded and so they resisted there were partisan groups behind Nazi lines everybody whether or not they had been victimized by the pures or not or liked Solen or didn't they wanted to defend the Homeland tremendous numbers of victims a whole generation of young men was was lost to the Soviet Union and and economic destruction the the burning of fields of of of factories tremendous losses in the beginning of 1945 when it was clear that the Allies were going to win the war The Big Three Stalin Churchill and Roosevelt met at Yalta to

thrash out a new world order they were to decide really what was to happen to the world once Nazi Germany had been defeated the three parties reach a firm Accord on Military and political points coordinated plans are made for great new blows against Germany from all directions reaffirming the resolve of the United Nations to cooperate fully after the war Roosevelt Churchill and Stalin reach agreement on the foundations of European peace Germany shall be disarmed German militarism and Nazism will be destroyed just over two months after the yta conference Soviet forces reached Berlin and raised the

victory Banner Over the rag only a few hundred yards away Adolf Hitler had committed suicide in the fura bunker the European theater of World War II had come to a decisive end but the battle lines of the Cold War were already being [Music] drawn in July 1945 the potam conference began the leaders of the Victorious Allied countries met in Germany which had unconditionally surrendered just 9 weeks earlier it would be the last time Stalin ever left the Soviet Union Stalin and the Soviet Union emerged from the war both weak and very powerful weak in the

sense that huge sways of the Soviet Union had been totally destroyed by the German Army but powerful in the sense that the Red Army had steamrolled into Eastern Europe and that Stalin now controlled many of the territories he'd always coveted this placed him in a very very powerful position Germany itself was to be split into two separate parts the Soviets Stalin was going to control the east of Germany and the Western allies Britain France and America were to control the Western sector of Germany and they were going to do likewise for Berlin good progress at

the Berlin Conference reparation settled boundaries adjusted peoples relocated new problems will still arise tomorrow but today we have an international organization to work them out so that problems do not become conflicts the big three changes but the big three goes on a president dies another a takes his place a prime minister leaves the conference to stand a free election and by the choice of his people a new prime minister returns to his seat but the conference goes [Music] on a promise made at Teran and reaffirmed in Berlin is kept on schedule [Music] the battles of

World War II still continued in the Pacific and the Soviet Union formerly declared war on Japan but it would not be long before they surrendered following the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Allies were now fully victorious in World War II but things ended very differently for the big three Roosevelt died before the end of the war Stalin was now stronger than ever and Churchill feared the Soviet Union's power over Europe Churchill came out of the second world war a very bitter man because he felt that the only national leader who'

emerged from the struggle with exactly what he wanted was Stalin and Stalin had got his prizes in the Pacific uh with the sakaran islands and um and access to um Pacific ports and of course you'd sees most of Eastern Europe and Churchill's frustration and bitterness and so he instructed the British Chiefs of Staff to draw up a plan which was code named Unthinkable for the recapture of Poland from the Red Army by 42 American and British divisions with the aid absurdly of the rump of the verar and this document which is still in Britain's National

Archive amazing document I forget it runs to about 150 Pages detailed description of exactly how this was to be done but the Chiefs of Staff they used the word hazardous 23 times to describe it because they said if the Russians want General War they are in a position to have it they knew that the Red Army was incomparably stronger than the Western Allied armies and of course they also knew that the British and American armies that their soldiers had the slightest desire to fight the Russians they've been told the Russians Were Heroes for the last

four years so the whole idea was obviously absurd but the unthinkable plan which is one of the most riveting postcript of the second world war that it was a reflection of how absolutely appalled Cel felt by the spectacle of the Soviet Union coming out of the war having seized Eastern Europe Stalin was always determined that all the country countries that he occupied with the Red Army would become somehow become Soviet um satellite States and he said you know whatever we discuss with the westerners the old rule will be true you know who Whoever has their

army there will install their own system and that's what happened so very quickly he installed a system through all those countries you know Poland Hungary Czechoslovakia Bulgaria Romania and Yugoslavia first all became people's democracies later he the there was a rift with Tito in in Yugoslavia but basically he remained in control of this kind of huge part of Eastern Europe in 1946 Churchill would voice his concerns publicly with his famous Iron Curtain Speech from stetin in the Baltic to tries in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the continent behind that line lie all

the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe Warsaw Berlin Prague Vienna Budapest Belgrade Bucharest and sopia all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere one of the key moment Ms in the postwar period came in the spring of 1946 when Winston Churchill no longer prime minister at this point traveled to America and with uh President Truman He went to Fulton Missouri and made his famous Iron Curtain Speech he says from stetin in the Baltic to triest on the Adriatic an iron curtain has

descended over Europe now remember at this time the Western allies wanted to try and retain their alliance with Stalin they were hoping that this military Alliance that had worked so well during the war could be continued into this post-war period but Churchill realizes that everything has changed that Stalin is no longer a reliable Ally and so he makes this speech it's an explosive speech it sends shock waves around the world because Truman Atley and England they're trying to maintain this Alliance and Churchill has effectively lobbed a stick of dynamite into this well Churchill speech acknowledged

what was already happening that Communist governments were taking over in in one country after another there was a lot of Suspicion between the East and the West so the Cold War didn't begin all at once it was a series of Maneuvers and then responses a big factor in the in the hardening of the Cold War was the Marshall Plan inaugurated by the United States which pledged millions and millions of dollars to rebuild Europe uh they offered Marshall Plan Aid to the east European countries as a way to entice them to come over to the side

of of of the west but also knowing that that Stalin wouldn't let them accept that so it was Stalin saw the Marshall Plan as a direct attack on the autonomy of of the Soviet Union and that led to further repercussions the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in response then the Warsaw paack Alliance in response to that so there was a gradual closing down of of contacts between east and west an in gradual increase in fear and suspicion the Soviet Union would launch the molotov plan as a response to the Marshall Plan and propaganda

films were dispersed in retaliation to the actions of the United States in Washington the Marshall Plan is announced an aid program for the world no for America's capitalist Truman's new budget 2 and a half billion for social welfare 21 billion for armaments economic and political enslavement of foreign countries hunger and unemployment in their own count that's the real Marshall Plan the stock exchange the headquarters of the true masters of America here sit the Americans who run the opinion [Music] factories well the next thing is to decide whether to make war on the allies and they

have the atom bomb and he has not and so the most important thing is to get an atom bomb barrier supervised the atom project brilliantly absolutely brilliantly it's one of the most extraordinary things he found all the materials in Germany the Bismuth the uranium that he needed got it all shipped he built special cities uh to build it in he gave the scientists luxurious Villas and there was a little book in which the reward s were listed if the atom bomb worked what they would get a nice car a house Country Cottage and so on

and the punishment they would get if it didn't work shooting so there was a great reason to get that atomic bomb working and it did and once he had the atomic bomb then the question was what to do next and perhaps fortunately for us the Chinese Revolution happened and for Stalin it was more important to help that and start the Korean War than to attack the West again but um certainly in his mind was why stop at Berlin why not go to the Atlantic the battle lines of the Cold War that was developing across the

globe took another dramatic turn when the Communists under ma Tung were finally victorious in the Chinese Civil War now two of the world's great former Empires were under communist Rule and the first true proxy battle of the Cold War would take place in [Music] Korea there is no margin for error when the chips are down when the bullets and projectiles that fly overhead are real a situation soon to come in the summer of 1950 thousands of miles away on the other side of the Pacific trouble was being fermented North Koreans plotted by the Communists were

massing strength for a war against the democratic government of Korea a war which threatened the Peace of all Nations 1953 would prove a pivotal year the Korean War would end in a stalemate and Joseph Stalin's rule over the Soviet Union came to a dramatic close on the 5th of March 1953 the Soviet Union announced that its Leader Joseph Stalin had died Salin is dead the kremlin's coold stone walls the Eerie face of Moscow a howling wind and snow adding to the somber picture is the description accompanying the announcement that the most powerful dictator in history

has come to the inevitable end the Scramble for power is the next chapter there were no immediate indications of who would succeed Stalin Molotov or malanov their names fitted into the patent of the struggle for Stalin's mantle as did the name of barrier as this news reel went to print the word had not yet come from Moscow but Stalin's life was history Intrigue ruthless ambition absolute power rather like with lennin there was no kind of obvious successor to Stalin and Stalin like lennin believed he was indispensable and no one could succeed him and that was

to a certain extent true CU just as just as there was never another Lenin there was never another Stalin but what Left Behind were a bunch of terrified appara who were used to being under Stalin's thumb the the leading successor it seemed was going to be malen kof who was a rather fat young and ruthless appara who who' served Stalin and done some a lot of Dirty Work Christof was much more Dynamic and no one thought he would succeed Stalin least of all Stalin because he was coarse semi literate um a Ruffian badly educated and

therefore could never be an ideologist but it didn't matter because he seized power and he destroyed the the really the most powerful person in the government after Stalin's death who was lenti barrier long- serving secret police chief and overseer of the nuclear project to get a nuclear bomb which he'd successfully done so he arrested him had him shot had all his people shot and really ended the period of kind of brazen Terror in the the leadership so there was a competition Kush was one of these people who appeared to be a clown and one of

things reasons that Stalin liked him he he posed no threat he did as he was told he was a fellow student of Stalin's wife he said all the right things he did all the right things in the war he was quite effective he only put one foot wrong his son was going to be executed for shooting another officer but managed to fly a plane into Germany in time was captured uh and uh got back into Russia by by escaping and kusov went on his knees to S and said spare my son and Stalin refused I

don't think Kusa ever forgave Stalin for the shooting of his son and that may be one of the motives for his anti- Stalin speech it may be personal but anyway that 20th party Congress which shook the entire communist World when they admitted that Stalin was a criminal and they themselves had all dance to his tune uh that was a very brave thing to do but it did actually establish HOV in power because it meant he could get rid of his enemies he didn't shoot them molto was made ambassador to out of Mongolia malinov I think

was put in charge of a electric power station in Siberia not very nice punishments but better than death I suppose Nikita kristof's shocking 1956 speech in which he denounced the The Cult of Personality that had formed around Stalin would be a major contributor to the sinos Soviet split but although relations with the other great communist world power were now soured krof would also soon earn major political victories for the Soviet Union and on October 4th 1957 a world stirring event took place a man made Celestial body for the first time in history overcame terrestrial gravity

and flew into space during the early to mid 50s the Americans had been developing their space program and they were they announced that they were soon to launch a satellite into space this was a huge moment and a huge Triumph but what did the Soviets do they had been developing their own satellite as well and they got got their first this was Chris Jeff's great Triumph was to launch Sputnik before the Americans it was a public relations coup the space race was one example of a great Soviet success story the economy was improving after the

war but it wasn't running on all cylinders at this time but but the Space Race began as a quazi arms race uh knowing that the Americans were trying to build Rockets uh the Soviet Union mobilized all of its resources into launching a satellite and then to launching a man into space uh so that they could be the first so when they're able to mobilize all resources toward this one goal and they had brilliant scientists they also had scientists who had been Germans who had been gone over to the the Soviet Union they had tremendous brain

power and and tremendous technological capability uh and with all the resources at their disposal they were able to be the first into space the launch of the Sputnik satellite generated frenzied attention around the world but at the same time an arms race was in full effect and acts of Espionage were at extraordinary levels on both sides a crisis point was reached when pilot Francis Gary po was took off from pesar in Pakistan in 1960 and his U2 spy plane was brought down by Soviet air defenses secret reconnaissance of Russia by highflying American new2 jets ended

when one was downed deep in Soviet territory its pilot Francis Powers was made the subject of a showcase trial power's family was in the courtroom as Russia began massive exploitation of this propaganda windfall power's conviction was inevitable and the U2 Affair became kof's pretext to torpedo the Paris Summit conference so in September of 1959 Krush had met Eisenhower at Camp David in America and the two men had agreed to meet again in Paris in the following spring and this was Julie to go ahead but something intervenes in the meantime something that causes a crisis in

relations between the Soviet Union and the United States and this is the shooting down of a U2 spy plane piloted by Gary Powers chov gave a personal order to his air defenses to shoot down an American U2 spy plane over Soviet airspace for three or four years American planes have been intruding over Russian airspace freely very high altitude and the Russians had no Fighters or missiles that could reach them by 1960 they did and he thought and who can blame him that for the Americans to spend a supply plane flying over their airspace on May

the 1st May Day the most sacred day in the in the Soviet um buic calendar uh to fly over his airspace was a deliberate insult and so gave the order to shoot it down Chris job played his cards very skillfully and ruthlessly that initially he announced the shoot shooting down the plane but he did not admit that he captured its pilot major Gary PS and so the Americans got themselves deeper and deeper into a tissue of lies about this being a weather plane and so on so forth and only two days later the christov revealed

that they had major Gary Powers and announced triumphantly to the world and our cameras are better than the American cameras that we found on the U2 so the humiliation was terrific this thrs relations between the two countries into absolute crisis Christ storms off back to Moscow he won't have anything more to do with these talks and he cancels the intended visit of Eisenhower to Moscow Eisenhower is very disappointed he was really looking forward to going but this is cancelled and relations between the two countries descend once more into crisis the U2 incident was eventually resolved

by an exchange of Gary Powers for a Soviet spy named Rudolf Abel who'd been captured in the United States the technological War would continue though and the Soviets struck another Victory when they launched the first man into space in 1961 Yuri Gagarin the space race became incredibly public competition between the two superpowers as to who could could display their technology their sophistication their ambition in a new realm space and that was really what the space race was about and why both both countries put massive amounts into sending people into space and competing in that way

and of course you know the Soviet propaganda machine made all the cosmonauts into massive Heroes just as the Western American propaganda machine made made their astronauts into huge Heroes and I certainly think for a while the public was pretty fascinated probably in both both worlds gagaran was an a pilot and he was very well trained and he was extraordinary Fearless man and he became like a film star Idol an international thing so the gagaran squares not only in Russia but you find them all over Africa it had an enormous effect on on the American psyche

of course again a Triumph for the Soviet Union it just demonstrates their capabilities what they've achieved in this space program and it's a humiliation for the Americans who publicly congratulate the Soviets but in private they're seething what do they do one of the first things they do is they form NASA they are determined to regain the upper hand in the Space Race the achievement by the USSR of orbiting a man and returning him safely to ground is an outstanding technical accomplishment we congratulate the Soviet scientists and Engineers who made this feat possible the exploration of

our solar system is an ambition which we at all mankind share with the Soviet Union and this is an important step toward that goal our own Mercury man and space program is directed toward that same end the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the new decade seemed at first to be an era of unbridled success for the Soviet Union with their dramatic lead in the Space Race but huge crime IES in both Europe and North America were just over the horizon the early 1960s would prove to be the height of Cold War tensions

both in Europe and in the US a Communist Revolution had taken place just off America's borders in Cuba and the Bay of Pigs invasion intended to overthrow this new government of Fidel Castro had failed and in Berlin where the Allies had converged after their victory in World War II the Iron Curtain was becoming a literal wall krov exercised absolute control over the Eastern block but at the same time he was very susceptible to pressure and one must remember in the late 1950s and early 1960s first of all China was ascendant as a Ral for the

leadership of the Socialist World a more more and more especially in the early 1960s the Chinese of Mong were publicly denouncing kov as betraying socialism so he had that pressure and he also had pressure for example the East German leadership who were constantly urging him to take a much tougher line with the West one of the key troubles in East Germany in the late 50s and the very early 60s was the flood of East Germans who were crossing the border into West Germany and this had as it Nexus was taking place in Berlin where it

was relatively easy for East Germans who wanted to move on who wanted to get on in life to cross the frontier Christof saw this as a very real problem you know several million Germans had poured over into West Germany leaving the East German State and so what did he do he sanctioned Walter ulri the leader of East Germany to build the Berlin Wall this effectively put a stop to the massive immigration taking place from e Germany into the west but it also was a PR disaster it did not look good to have to build a

wall to keep your own people in the East Germans don't seem to have guards enough to plug every hole when a soldier's attention is diverted by others a hole is cut in the bared wire and kush's face is slapped again [Music] not long after the Berlin Wall was constructed another flash point in the Cold War emerged when it was revealed to the world that the Soviet Union had placed nuclear weapons on the territory of newly communist Cuba the world watched with baited breath as the two superpowers faced off the Cuban Missile Crisis is is a

hugely complicated episode and and historians are still uncovering archives and and and trying to understand what exactly happened I think Castro played an important role in this at least Kush blames Castro for goting him into uh sending missiles to protect Cuba against uh another United States Invasion uh the Soviet Union miscalculated the United States response to the presence of these missiles they didn't realize that they had been found out so there was a real d during these two weeks in October that the world would go up in a nuclear war because of of of this

tension the greatest crisis between the Soviet Union and the United States and indeed I think one of the great crises of the entire Cold War this was sparked by America placing missiles its own missiles on Italian and Turkish soil in retaliation Kristof wanted to replace Soviet missiles on Cuban territory very close to the United States thus began a standoff Kennedy said that this was totally unacceptable to have these missiles so close to the United States Chris said it was totally unacceptable for the Americans to have missiles on Italian and Turkish territory the world at this

point is in deep crisis we are very very close to a nuclear war being declared and it is only through wiser Council wiser heads prevail a deal is done between the two powers that enables them to back down Chris you know the Cuban Missile Crisis as a way to break the impass that he felt the sort of stagnation that he felt was was taking place in the Rivalry between the two superpowers he thought that if he he needed to do something to to up the ante and he he he'd convinced himself that you know taking

a risk a gamble would would turn the whole course of the Cold War and he'd seen a hint of it when in 1956 during the seers crisis he'd threatened that if Britain France and Israel didn't withdraw from Egypt he would use nuclear weapons and it's a moment that's often forgotten and America had forced them to withdraw so he saw that as evidence that nuclear brinksmanship really worked and so what better way to break the impass and to overcome American power and wealth than to place weapons right in America's backyard and to defend a new fraternal

revolution in Cuba and so that's why he did it he was also a member you know one of the World War II generation like all the Soviet leaders and they were actually very very afraid of war they'd seen what war did even conventional war and so you know he thought he' win that point call on the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union on a point of order [Applause] why then this jerk this uh stoe of American imperialism here who is speaking before you he is touching upon questions which uh are obviously

not procedural ones and the president who is sympathizing with these colonialist and Colonial domination obviously is not stopping him he had a quality of an actx I'm taking off your shoe and banging it in the United Nations does get attention and uh in the Cuba Cuban Missile Crisis I think he won uh it was very cunning very risky but we were more frighten than they were uh I remember I was a student at the time and I seriously thought in Cambridge this might be my last day on Earth with the Missile Crisis and Kennedy uh

holding out but in fact uh uh Kush had a bargaining chip and he was willing to take those armed Rockets away if America withdrew its Rockets from turkey that wasn't made public at at the time but uh it's clear there was a bargain and the Soviet Union won it they they had no Atomic weapons near their borders as a result that was one of kush's great achievements it was very risky but I don't think anyone in Russia held it against him and despite all these expensive intelligence services in the west nobody fully understood that when

krof threatened to bury us all when krof was telling Western ambassadors that he' ear marked 20 nuclear weapons for Britain and he was confident that would be enough that all of this it was boasting of an almost deranged kind and christov thought he was playing a brilliant hand and christov thought rightly that he was frightening the west but what he failed to see was that he very very nearly overdid it because he frightened the West too much they Retreat to Moscow Russian ships steam out from Cuban ports with their decks loaded with missiles the Soviet

are withdrawing under pressure from the new world it's one of the last chapters in the offensive threat from Cuba that led the United States to throw a quarantine around that island and forced the Russians to dismantle their medium-range rocket installations us planes and picket ships have counted 42 rockets on Russian bound ships but still unresolved is the question of the jet bombers in Cuba Castro claims they belong to him and that he will not give them up the US insists the Russians must remove them before the quarantine will be lifted the headlines in the Soviet

newspapers said the Soviet Union has saved the world uh by the deal that it made with the United States so they took all the credit for easing this tension uh and that's what the Soviet readers saw that this was a victory uh for Soviet diplomacy the following is the text of President Kennedy's statement of noon I welcome chairman kav's statesmanlike decision to stop building bases in Cuba dismantling offensive weapons returning them to the Soviet Union under un verification this is an important and constructive contribution to peace both the US President John F Kennedy and the

first Secretary of the Soviet Union Nikita Kristof would not have much longer in office after the deescalation of tensions from the Cuban Missile Crisis JFK was infamously assassinated in November 1963 and Kristof would be maneuvered from Power the following year it was soon to be the era of Lenard breev in the Soviet Union [Music] in 1922 the Soviet Union was formed a new nation that would have a profound impact on the entire Globe it would emerge from the remnants of the Russian Empire after a long and bloody Civil War Russia in the aftermath of the

bvic Revolution was a country in absolute turmoil a brutal and bloody Clash of arms trying to wipe out this new regime before it can take control of the country the Bolsheviks finally succeeded in about 1922 and then came the hard work of trying to create for the first time ever a new socialist country from out of nowhere Vladimir Lenin had become the leader of the largest Nation on Earth and was now imposing his will Lenin won the war Lenin won the revolution Lenin's one of those amazing f who really are decisive in history once's got

to understand that Lenin was an autocratic character who really didn't want anyone to succeed him that's true of most autocratic characters in history but Lenin would have a successor who proved to be the most ruthless of all figures when dealing with both his own people and his foreign enemies they realized after the revolution that the Soviet Union was surrounded by enemies didn't have a friend in the world they felt that way way and they were probably right and the only defense was to build an enormous army with a lot of tanks and a lot of

aircraft and a lot of ships which they did in the aftermath of World War II the Soviet Union emerged as a new Global superpower that match the once Mighty Russian Empire of old all of us who were then young we were saying great achievements by the Soviet Union they launched the Sputnik satellite fantastic scientific achievement they put the first man into space Yuri gagari fantastic achievement and so people were saying they saw the Soviet Union as a genuine comparable competitor with the United States now a century from its formation the Soviet Union seems to define

the whole of the 20th century [Music] [Music] in October 1964 Nikita kof was about to be removed from Power whilst on vacation in pitsunda on the Black Sea he grew suspicious of activities developing in Moscow and he immediately flew back to the capital city upon arrival he was forced to step down as leader of the Soviet Union [Music] the official Russian announcement said he resigned the red say ill health prompted kop to step down observers say that his abortive Feud with red China that broke apart the front of Monolithic communism was the real reason a

man who clawed and fought his way to the top woed leaders like Nasser of the neutralist Nations kof probably made his greatest impact on a strangely fascinated world when he came to the United Nations assembly and 1960 and attempted to purge Secretary General Doug hamash He piled shock upon shock when he and the Soviet delegation rudely interrupted speeches by Western [Applause] delegates the Soviet leadership overthrew Kristof they called him in and they denounced him and they sacked him from all his positions and the reason they did it was because of really because of his kind

of arrogance his despera ISM his completely ill-thought out Adventure what sealed kush's fate was his interference with Agriculture and his hairbrain scheme to imitate the Americans by growing lots of Maze and in order to do that Wrecking existing crops so there was serious food shortages in the shops and serious discontent that was more important to the party than anything else there had already been a number of Rights by workers who were dissatisfied and that was the decision to get rid of him forces began to conspire against him and leading those forces was Leonid BNF who

sees that maybe now is the moment to act that maybe this is the moment where he can get his hands on the levers of power the crowds that once cheered krof wildly were left in the dark as to just what went on when the Central Committee met to act on his retirement and to name Leonid BNF as the new leader of the Party by Lei kosan took the job of Premier rnf has lately been considered kof's air apparent but the question remains as to whether he had anything to do with hurrying his boss's departure christop

is on holiday he's summoned back to Moscow and the poit bureau led by BNF denounce Kristof they criticize him for everything he's done and they say they want him to step down from Power this will not be a coup quite as brutally as Stalin might have done it he's allowed to resign but it is the end of kristof's Reign of Power now Leonid BNF is the man at the helm you know they voted him out they didn't execute him they didn't imprison him they just retired him in the meeting he said you know whatever else

happens my one achievement has been that no one's going to be shot now I'm just going to retire and so it happened and breth became the next leader B was a a pair of safe hands a man with a good military record he just wanted to keep the apparatus going as it had in the past to appoint suitable first secretaries and uh heads of Soviets and so on and who allowed a fair amount of corruption his own family was horrifically corrupt his daughter Galina was a a nightmare but um that corruption was a sort of

lubrication for the party and under under bnff everything had a had a price rajn is known among Western diplomats as the red and the gray FL a man who is expected to continue peaceful coexistence with the West while trying to heal the breach with [Music] China it had been indicated that brf would be K successor on his death but no Spectre of death or disgrace marred the scene of kof's 70th birthday party last spring he seemed to and the world the Communist sphere at his feet and his power over 220 million Soviet citizens seemed impregnable

now For Better or Worse the kof era has come to a close BNF was a generation younger than than kusov uh and he had been a real beneficiary of of Soviet higher education of of Soviet Social Mobility so born in a working-class family he got a degree in in engineering and and became a practicing engineer in the 1930s joined joined the Communist Party served in military as as a party official so he had some practical knowledge of the economy and he wasn't ideological the way the early bolix had been uh the party was was the

Soviet Union was the only thing that he knew so he had worked his way up into the party uh you can see his face in the great kitchen debate between kof and Nixon grnf is standing there just behind kof so he was a a trusty Aid at the time and so was one of the the the leaders at the time of kof's dismissal along with Alexa kosan the two of them came to power together brv soon eclipsed kosan but initially it was a dual leadership and he was a bluff good-natured pleasure-loving quite capable appara who'd

been chosen by Stalin and promoted who'd played a part in the arrest of barrier and served kristov quite loyally until the end but it gradually became a stagnant period for the Soviet Union no reforms were really succeeded and the Soviet Union needed reform unlike Christof who'd attempted to decentralize the economy to give more power to the regions BNF wanted to do exactly the opposite he was much more in the mold of Stalin he wanted to bring everything back to the center to bring power back to Moscow and to bring power back to himself one can

see at this point the Soviet Union is reverting much more to the model that have been created by Joseph Stalin the re of has seen to be one historian has called it uh that he made a little deal uh with the Soviet people that he promised them economic Prosperity which included because the the the Communist economy was so inefficient it included increasing tolerance for a shadow economy for some black marketing some private Enterprise the government turned a blind eye to that in exchange for political loyalty and most of the people made this bargain and and

agreed not to be in opposition to the government what bref wanted to achieve was a parity in terms of weapons between the Soviet Union and America and he begins injecting vast sums of money into military expenditure at one point some 12% of GDP is being spent on the missile program inside the Soviet Union remarkably he does achieve a parity by the 70s the Soviet Union has an equivalent number of warheads to the United States the world thinks that it's business as usual and it's just a change of leader in the eyes of the world the

Cold War continued unchanged but what we could not see then but we can see now is that all this time the enormous strain upon the Soviet economy of maintaining this Empire and the stupendous Armed Forces at Colossal cost that all the time the Soviet Union is creaking and cracking under these enormous [Music] trains since 1954 every American president has offered support to the people of South Vietnam we have helped to build and we have helped to defend thus over many years we have made a national pledge to help South Vietnam defend its independence and I

intend to keep that promise in 1965 president Lyndon Baines Johnson followed up on his promise and ordered US troops to intervene directly in Vietnam one of the great proxy battles of the Cold War had begun [Music] the Vietnam War affected the Soviet Union more in in the sense of the Soviet Union's relations with China than just with the United States so that the Vietnam War was kind of a triangular communist uh Enterprise between China the North Vietnamese uh and the Soviet Union the Soviet Union really didn't want the North Vietnamese to invade the South because

that was going to destabilize the region but they felt it was the Chinese who were urging them on so initially the Soviet Union was not vocally opposed to the invasion of Vietnam and and the war in Vietnam but once it happened they were certainly willing to use the propaganda points of an imperialist War being waged by the United States in Vietnam with the Vietnam War um all he had to do was Supply missiles and laugh as the Americans lost it because he knew perfectly well that there was no way in which you could win a

war when you supporting a corrupt regime in the South and you had a dedicated regime in the north which had armaments from the Soviet Union armaments from China and didn't care how many people it lost Vietnam was a strange phenomenon because you know America poured in forces in there and was never actually defeated but it lost the will to win which is always decisive in a war partly it was a Vietnamese nationalistic Uprising against foreign control that started against the French and it continued against the Americans and their regime in the South partly it was

a proxy war between the superpowers American troops were there Russian advisers armed the Vietnamese in massive quantities but the Vietnamese were thought by the Americans to be completely under Soviet control but in fact they did they fought the War they wanted to fight and were quite recalcitrant in in taking orders from the Kremlin but you know it was it was America's first great [Music] iation but just as America was becoming embroiled in Vietnam the Soviet Union was facing its own battle in Europe in the 1950s uprisings have been crushed in Poland and Hungary but a

new crisis was emerging in Czechoslovakia under the rule of Alexander dubek the Prague spring had begun [Music] the Prague spring was an attempt in Czechoslovakia by czechoslovak communist leaders to find a different path towards communism they called it socialism with a human face uh and in fact all the East European countries were somewhat different from one another and not all following a lockstep to the party line uh so certain deviations were allowed but brna felt that there was a danger to socialism itself by these reforms in Czechoslovakia uh and so he invoked what became known

as the BNF doctrine that any threat to socialist power in one socialist country should be combed by all of them another version of the brf doctrine is what we have we hold and so rather than let the reformed Communists succeed in Czechoslovakia he created the pretense to send Warsaw pack troops into the country to put down this reform Russia's purpose in continuing to keep such large powerful and mobile forces in Czechoslovakia has been in effect to put a pistol to Mr Dub's head there is plenty of evidence that for his own part Mr dub intends

to go on resisting the pressures and is prepared if necessary to get his head shot off but there is now a question mark over the continuing loyalty of enough members of czechoslovakia's communist party's presidium to give Mr dub the support he needs to say no to the Russians or the demands they will make when the talks begin the Prague spring this Uprising in Prague against Soviet rule is a real challenge for brn how on Earth is he going to deal with this his initial response is to try and do a deal with Alexander dubek but

it quickly becomes apparent that this is impossible and under pressure from the poit bureau he decides to send in the tanks and send in the troops and then you have the brutal crushing of this uprising in in which thousands of Soviet soldiers will crush and fight against dug's civilians never again in the cold war did either Soviet Union or the United States attempt to interfere in each other's recognized spheres of influence the Americans who'd already stood by amid terrible blood bars in the Polish shipyards amid the 1956 Hungarian Uprising 1968 when was the U rising

in Prague the Prague spring that once again the Americans did nothing and the Russians were left free to crush that whereas again while all that was going on in Vietnam although of course the Soviet Union provided terrific material Aid to Vietnam at no time did the Soviet Union think of directly intervening in the Vietnam War so never again was there such a dangerous moment when either side attempted to infringe each other spheres of influence the first two and a half Decades of the Cold War had been filled with revolutionary uprisings and proxy battles all across

the globe but as the 1970s began a surprising period of day tant emerged where more direct relations between the Western world and the Communist world were established in China with Cho and Li President Nixon begins a dialogue which marks an historic change in American policy a political realist the president knows that communication with China is indispensable to his Grand Design the result of a long careful planning of a vision for peace born long ago the thrust for peace leads to the Soviet Union the president will not be dissuaded by the days of hard negotiation ahead

the opportunity to reduce World tension is at hand and he achieves a breakthrough with agreements environment space medicine and a trade pact creating new jobs for Americans but most significant of all a treaty to limit [Music] [Applause] [Music] arms with the significant decrease in tensions in the Cold War Leonid breev focused on the domestic challenges that faed the Soviet Union the Hallmark I think of rf's uh economic policies were the 5e plans he liked these 5year plans in the early' 70s saw a big increase in the consumer goods that were being produced by the Soviet

Union something of an economic Miracle took place in these years and uh even the West were surprised at how the Soviet economy was performing but it wouldn't last the Soviet economy was too reliant on natural resources on oil on gas and the whole thing would begin to stagnate and we're soon going to enter what Orbach would later call the era of stagnation so there was certainly stagnation politically in the Soviet Union under brf uh fewer and fewer freedoms were allowed writers were censored people self-censored themselves rather than risk getting into trouble the economy actually was

not so stagnant and continued to grow we think of the Russ of period is a period where a Soviet consumer public actually came of age people were aware of of fashion and able to choose what they wanted to buy but overall there was a sense that it wasn't progressing as fast as it could and this was reinforced by the stability of of the leadership who were getting older and older uh and not really allowing any new blood to come in so there was a sense uh that the whole thing was was grinding uh to a

slow halt there were all sorts of holes in the system that made it possible to live under bridgeff so although it was stagnation that the country made no big progress in GDP or in facilities there were loopholes and so while the kremin looks unchanged and in the eyes of the world some people thought the Cold War was going to go on indefinitely some people still thought that the Soviet Union might emerge as the economic Victor so self-confidence in the west was not nearly as high as one might expect and it is quite extraordinary that were

all those expensive Ive intelligence services in Britain in the United States and everywhere else that the understanding of the fundamental weakness the Soviet Union which was getting worse and worse all the time and that far from the danger to the west Western Trav that the gap between the economic attainments of the West and the Soviet Union is widening relentlessly um and yet none of this was understood in the west at the time in 197 9 after a long period of deant tensions in the Cold War suddenly Rose once again with the Soviet Union's invasion of

Afghanistan brf was very worried that the Soviet Union was losing its influence in the countries on the edge of its borders and one of these was Afghanistan the communist government of Afghanistan was under withering attack from the Afghan maaden and so BNF decides to send in Soviet troops and tanks and forces to try and prop up this Communist Regime the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was part of the Soviet effort to project itself as an alternative to capitalism uh in the eyes of of the third world so they were always trying to promote Liberation movements Independence

movements 1978 a a communist government took power in Afghanistan there was internal fighting the first government was overthrown a second communist government came to power they appealed to the Soviet Union for help against their enemies uh and so the Soviet Union agreed to send in troops to help keep them in power the plan was really controlled or or proposed by andropov who was the head of the KGB and was the most clever and interesting person in the leadership and really the most talented he believed it could be done easily just by chopping off the head

of the of the leader who was a communist who' turned against rf's uh the kremlin's own candidate executed him and taken power they didn't trust this guy who was called hullah Amin and so they began to fear that Amin would turn against them and actually embrace the Americans all the Chinese and so you know they decided to replace him and so in the end they sent in Special Forces with an army what they didn't expect was a massive islamist Rebellion U that would be backed by the Americans many people compare the Soviet engagement in Afghanistan

with the United States in Vietnam they got sucked in uh without realizing what they were getting into without an exit strategy many many young Soviet men died LED rise to a movement among mothers trying to uh stop men from being drafted uh so it it it severely weakened the government uh in in the eyes of its own population Afghanistan was one of the decisive strategic mistakes of the last phase of the Soviet Union before its collapse and it was the same story as with a lot of American wars that they got nowhere and they were

made fools of by their own clients Afghanistan and their casualties were appalling and the bungling the military bungling was fantastic but the United States could afford its mistakes in the Cold War and the Soviet Union couldn't so you had this extraordinary situation there as this terrible 10year War went on and there's this drain of casualties which was desperately unpopular at home because people saw these body bags coming home and coming home and as the Americans and the CIA of course who were arming the madin the resistance movement that the price that here was the Soviet

Union already creaking and groaning and on the edge of on the edge of an abyss and you can argue that it was Afghanistan that pushed it over the edge that was a major mistake Russians in the 19th century knew very well although they took over most of central Asia and they would have liked to take over British India that you leave Afghanistan alone nobody has ever successful y dealt with a Afghanistan since Alexander the Great invaded it everyone has had to retreat even the Mongols couldn't stick it uh the British Army in the 1840s which

just had one blind person staggering out the rest of the army dead was an example and the Russians knew this and uh yet that was a major mistake to think that they could somehow take it over 3 years into what would be a near decade long conf lict in Afghanistan the Soviet Union would lose its longtime leader Lenard breev bref dies and he's succeeded by Yuri andropov his former head of the KGB who'd been so ruthless in crushing internal descent but andropov is simply IL equipped to deal with the financial crisis that are facing the

Soviet Union bv's successor was andropov who who he chose himself but he himself was already too ill from kidney failure to really do the reforms that were necessary now to make industry in the economy work to rethink the Soviet communist system and to reinvigorate it and he very quickly deteriorated his successor should have been gorbachov who was the young and intelligent and upand cominging younger leader and who was a prote of andropov but instead chenko who once had been an executioner for Stalin and really was a sort of known as The Silent One he already

never said anything he was just a sort of non- entity he too was dying so he came to leadership for a very short period uh and the joke at the time uh because both BNF and and chenko were not really mobile uh brv was seen to be immobile and chenko seemed to be moving around so they said the trouble with brn was he was running on batteries but shenko had transistors uh and could get around people believed that that Treno would be giving broadcasts from his office but it was really a hospital room made up

to look like uh an administrative office the manner of the collapse of the Soviet Union was extraordinary in that um it's almost as if the physical collapses of successful leaders mirrored the collapse of the whole edifice and all these very old charred discredited men in the Kremlin one by one attempting to seize the Reigns of power and then proving completely unable to exercise them and collapsing and being removed to their tombs um and it was symbolic Constantine chernenko who is so old so infirm and so almost scile that when he gives a eulogy at androp

of's funeral he can hardly speak the words it's clear he's not going to last long and within another year he's also dead and this is the moment of change this is the moment where a young younger man Mikel gorbachov comes to power on a promise to transform the Soviet Union gorbachov was an extraordinary man to have reached the Summits of power in the Kremlin that he was capable of recognizing failure of recognizing what had gone wrong or recognizing the need for radical change whereas for years the Soviet Union had being governed by people who were

still clinging desperately to the past and struggling at all cost to avoid the humiliation of um public defeat GB of course it comes from Russian word gorba which means bent and the Russian proverb is that the only the grave will straighten the bent uh so people laughed when he came in with a name like that his idea was that um as everyone was being dishonest even he couldn't find out the truth you had to release the the journalism let the newspapers expose s and he allowed complaints and Scandals to be aired on newspapers and then

on on on television and so on so people found out more about what was actually happening in the country and the public came around to his side when it became clear that some sort of campaign was being mounted against uh the corrupt and and the rich and of course what wrecked it was the Chernobyl accident on the 26th of April 1986 the Chernobyl nuclear power plant went into meltdown and an enormous cloud of radioactive contamination was released well Chernobyl happened early on in gorbachov's Period of rule uh and was a key mistake uh in in

that period because when it happened they reverted to their old habits of secrecy and and denial which led to much greater loss of life and more damage than otherwise would have been necessary and also created more suspicion toward the Soviet Union among Western Europeans who are were disposed to be think positively uh this was a period of eurocommunism and of Germany's OS politique trying to make make deals with the Soviet Union and this was kind of a throwback uh to the bad old days so it was a domestic disaster an international disaster in health terms

but also a very bad signal for what the Soviet Union was becoming the White House says Mr Reagan's attempts to discuss the situation with Mr gorbachov personally have been ignored by the Kremlin for 4 days not very much they're usually a little close mou about than reception would you rather hear more from Mr gof yes I think it would be helpful gorbachov had spoken of glasnost he'd spoken of openness of a more open media and the first instinct is to go back to the old Soviet way of doing things to hide everything to cover everything

up and this was a disaster because the Western media had already picked up from very early on the uh increased levels of radiation they knew something disastrous had happened at this nuclear reactor but gorbachov tries to hide it and this proved the limits of his policy of glasnost gorbachov in the end uh used this to his advantage to him it was proof that the old system was so dangerous you could have made half of Russia uninhabitable if those reactors had melted into the ground the Western Ukraine would be strictly for the animals it proved to

to the Russian public there was no point having the traditional secrecy that you had to have openness and the Very fact that foreigners knew about it and Russians heard about it from foreign broadcasts and then they found out in 1985 the final leader of the Soviet Union came to power mik gorbachov the name gorbachov is really synonymous with perista this was his great idea he wanted to reform the system he wanted to bring an element of of the markets into the system he could see that the Soviet economy was simply not functioning it was Mond

he was going to revitalize it was going to be a renaissance to the economy I think gorbachov is misunderstood by everyone everyone nowadays thinks that he was in the west anyway that he was a sort of anti-communist um liberal Democrat rather like one of our leaders but in fact it was very different he was a leninist he believed in communism he believed in the Soviet Union and he wanted to reform it to make it to make it stronger to make it work better to make it to make it more formidable what in fact happened was

he had very attractive features in terms of his openness and his his smile and his ability to go and walkabouts and he immediately impressed the Western leaders but in the Soviet Union himself he really attempted an an insane plethora of reforms that undermined the whole the whole empire and in some ways his Ambitions were hubristic if not arrogant he thought he could do it he hadn't really thought through the nature of the Soviet Union and the nature of the leninist system he tried to reform the economy the power politics and ultimately the the nature of

the Union itself in other words the empire all at the same time and no one had attempted that before and with good reason because each of those reforms was an colossal reform that could have destroyed the Soviet Union in it on its own we can all see today um that he was something very remarkable and he broke with the past but I remember so well when the first reports of gorbach from our correspondents in Moscow and some imaginative correspondents did see that gbop was something quite new and quite special I met him and he was

an extraordinary man and I do hope that history will pay him the tribute that is is due because he was the one who broke the mold but for us who lived almost all our lives and the shadow of the Cold War it was almost impossible to believe that the whole edifice the whole structure around which we lived was suddenly changing and that um the Soviet Union and Russia as we'd known it was suddenly tottering so we were very slow some of us and governments to realize the nature of the change gorbachov wanted an end to

the Cold War he wanted an end to the arms race but this was very difficult when during Reagan's first term as president of the United States Reagan spoke of the evil empire he was very antagonistic uh towards the Soviet Union but this began to change I think he saw in Mikel gorbachov somebody could do business with and they eventually sat down and they began to discuss the reduction in weaponry and I think really it was the personal relationship between these two men and also with Margaret saer and gorbachov that it was a a a coming

together of personalities that enabled the Cold War and the arms race to come to an end General Secretary gorbachov if you seek peace if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe if you seek liberalization come here to this gate Mr garbach Open this [Applause] [Music] [Applause] gate Mr gorbachov Mr gorbachov teared down this [Applause] Waller not long after Ronald Reagan's famous speech at the Brandenburg gate one of the great symbols of the Cold War the Berlin Wall would finally form [Applause] the Berlin Wall had been a success in the sense that it

it stopped East Germany becoming depopulated but it hadn't made it much more prosperous I it had a limited uh uh Prosperity because it produced better Goods than any other East European country but even so uh the desire to to get across that war was very very great and in fact when goov thought about he clearly realized there was no enormous advantage AG to the Soviet Union in having Germany divided he perhaps made a mistake he should have insisted that Germany be permanently neutral never be allowed to join NATO if it was reunited that would have

reassured a lot of people but it was a way of making gorbachov extremely popular in Germany but of course he didn't realize that he had to be popular at home in Russia and um the problem with gorbachov is all that he's been adored abroad and LED at home there were people within the party who opposed his reforms they opposed it because they they believed in a different kind of Communism or they opposed it because they were going to lose their positions of privilege a lot of backsliding and a lot of opposition so that's when he

decided 1988 to launch democratization opening up the Communist Party to elections hoping that that a re rejuvenated party would decisively defeat the Old Guard uh and provide support within the party for his policies of Reform and so starting 1988 there were elections for party committees uh and people started to join the the party in drose because suddenly the party was becoming very interesting there you know important things are being discussed they were being discussed openly so there was a real ferment 1988 1989 uh as a result of his democratization but unfortunately it awakened sentiments in

Eastern Europe that suddenly the countries of Eastern Europe East Germany Poland Hungary they sniffed at Freedom here and we began to get unrest protests against the Soviet Union and this began in Poland where we have the first semi-free elections and we have solidarity under the charismatic leadership of Le feno with his walrus mustache storming to victory in this election this is a a huge shock for not just for Poland and the Soviet Union but for the whole of Eastern Europe suddenly a whole new way of doing things becomes apparent we see the first cracks in

the entire Soviet system 1989 proved to be the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union its forces finally left Afghanistan and political uprisings could not be stopped either among the warsa pack countries or within the Soviet Union itself the economy completely failed gorbachov and the Communist part party lost all authority and the 15 republics particularly those that had joined the Soviet Union very late particularly the Baltic republics the three baltics Estonia Lithuania lvia pushed for for freedom and for the breakup of the Soviet Union and in in August 91 there was an attempted coup

by his own effectively by his own government which from which he was only rescued by yelson and that was really the death the death now the Soviet Union and of gulov if you go back to it its Beginnings the hopeful replacement of of of an autocratic Zar with a Democratic Socialist Republic and it it failed to do that uh the question is did it fail because a socialist economy was inherently incapable of providing prosperity and development for the people or was it badly run was it uh did it descend into corruption it was a strong

military force it it was decisive in defeating Hitler and I think that's today one of the the enduring sources of Pride for Russians in the Russian Federation is the victory that they had over Hitler and that became that that happened because of of the strong support of of the people but it was also known for its repression uh for the numbers of victims for its inhumanity and and the mendous costs of this this experiment the final dissolution of the Soviet Union happened in a forest hunting lodge on the Polish border with a lot of vodka

consumed that they they recognized it couldn't go on that they might as well split up and try and remain friends and then go back to Moscow and announce that the Soviet Union no longer existed gorbachov resigned himself to the fact that the Soviet Union was finished it was no more on the 25th of December 1991 he resigns of as Soviet president and as commander-in-chief on the following day the Supreme Soviet vote the Soviet Union out of existence it will stagger on for a couple more days but it comes to an end on the 31st of

December 1991 the USSR is no more broke apart into its constituent Parts laia Lithuania Estonia had already voted for Independence Georgia became independent all the 15 Union republics that had been part of the Union all went their separate ways as independent republics the Central Asian republics probably didn't really want to be independent but but they really had no alternative because there was no Soviet Union and so all all the parts of the machine if you like fell fell to pieces at the same time simultaneously and Russia emerged as an independent Republic as did the other

15 republics the constituent republics of the Soviet Union which Lenin and Stalin had designed never to become independent never to S sucede well now they all became independent at the same time and the Soviet Union was no more [Music] a [Music] l