Communism and the Cold War - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Communism and the Cold War

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Communism and the Cold War Early Soviet Union under communism Lenin comes to power by means of a disciplined hierarchical party, soon including what would become the KGB. – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Communism and the Cold War


1
Communism and the Cold War
2
Early Soviet Union under communism
  • Lenin comes to power by means of a disciplined
    hierarchical party, soon including what would
    become the KGB.
  • First four years, civil war with Czar supporters,
    aided by U.S.
  • 1921 Introduced the New Economic Policy
  • 1924 Lenin dies

3
The General Secretary emerges
  • Lenins testament
  • By 1927 Stalin emerges as most powerful figure
  • 1929 rejects NEP, begins forced industrialization
  • in the countryside, collectivization
  • millions starve
  • 1930s, purges and show trials
  • 100,000s executed, maybe 5 million died in gulag

4
Trotsky and Kamenev disappear
5
Great Patriotic War
  • USSR was probably most responsible for Allied
    victory
  • also suffered the most--over 20 million died

6
(Relative) thaw
  • 1953 Stalin dies
  • 1956 Krushchev gives secret speech denouncing
    Stalin and the cult of personality
  • reorients economy more towards consumer goods,
    housing

7
COLD WAR
8
Post war period
  • expanded soviet sphere--in defiance of Yalta
    Accord
  • --buffer or expansionism?

9
iron curtain
10
US response
  • 1947 Truman announces that US will aid any
    country resisting outside pressures
  • lesson learned from appeasing Hitler
  • Marshall Plan
  • US provides 13 billion to western Europe (then
    Japan, Korea, and Taiwan) to rebuild

11
Cold War intensifies
  • 1948 Berlin blockade and airlift
  • 1949 Soviets test the atomic bomb
  • China goes communist
  • America goes McCarthyite

12
China--since 1949
  • 1958-60 Great Leap Forward
  • Mao orders collectivization, backyard foundaries
  • 20-30 million die through starvation
  • 1962 break with Soviet Union obvious
  • 1966-76 Cultural Revolution
  • universities close, Red Guards run amok,
    counter-revolutionaries killed
  • 1978 period of (economic) liberalization begins
    under Deng Xiaoping

13
Proxy wars
  • minor conflicts around the world
  • http//www.learner.org/channel/courses/worldhistor
    y/unit_video_22-2.html
  • Major troop deployments
  • 1950-53 Korea
  • 1965-73 Vietnam
  • 1979-89 Afghanistan

14
Close call for World War III
  • Cuban missile crisis 1962

15
The big surprise
  • The end of European communism
  • 1970s and 80s religious and cultural dissent
  • failing economies
  • Reagans role?

16
New blood at the Kremlin
  • 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev becomes General Secretary
  • initiates reforms--glasnost and perestroika
  • 1988 allows contested elections within the
    Communist Party

17
Movement in Eastern Europe
  • 1980s rise of Solidarity--suppressed
  • 1988 illegal Solidarity shipworkers, with
    encouragement from the Pope, go on strike
  • 1989 Polish Communist party (and Gorbachev)
    allows Solidarity to compete in national
    elections
  • Solidarity victory

18
East Germany
  • Very little reform--the Stasi
  • Gorbachev calls for change in East Germany
  • East German tourists go through Hungary to
    Austria--at first a few, then 10,000s
  • Berlin Wall is torn down
  • 1990 Germany reunified

19
Back in USSR
  • 1991 hardliners in the military wage a coup
    against Gorbachev, coup fails
  • Communist Party is abolished in Russia
  • Soviet Union is dissolved by decree
  • CIS is formed

20
12 new nation states
21
Russia--backsliding under Putin since 2000?
  • nostalgia for good old days, and Chinese model
  • increasing control over media--especially TV
  • arrest of oligarchs on trumped up
    charges--Khodorkovsky
  • using Chechen war to make governorships
    appointed, not elected

22
continuing revolutions
  • color revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and
    Kyrgistan
  • http//news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4459224.st
    m

23
Who is left among Communists?
  • 5 countries
  • China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, Cuba
  • And several post Communist societies have changed
    little

24
In China . . .
  • 1989--crackdown at Tiananmen Square
  • in 1990s, some signs of loosening up
  • local contested elections
  • more freedom to criticize local governments
  • 1000s of NGOs allowed to organize
  • on the other hand, since 1999 Falun Gong
    outlawed, etc.
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