CBSE Class 12 Political Science

The Cold War and the second world

After the Second World War the world divided into two camps, one led by the United States and one led by the Soviet Union. The rivalry between them, which never became a direct war between the two, is the Cold War, and the world it produced is called bipolar because power was concentrated in two centres. Each superpower led a bloc: the capitalist, liberal-democratic "first world" gathered round the United States and the NATO alliance, and the socialist "second world" gathered round the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet Union was the second superpower, and its collapse in 1991 ended the bipolar world.

The Soviet system

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) came out of the Russian Revolution of 1917, when the Bolsheviks under Lenin overthrew the Tsarist order and then the short-lived provisional government. The union itself was formed in 1922. It was built on the ideas of socialism and Marx's criticism of capitalism, and it set out to be an egalitarian society with no private ownership of the means of production.

The main features of the system were these.

• The Communist Party was the only party allowed. It controlled every institution, and there was no real opposition, free press or independent trade union.
• The state owned the land, factories and other productive property, so the whole economy was planned by the state through five-year plans rather than driven by markets.
• The state provided a minimum standard of living: subsidised food, housing, health care, education and jobs for nearly everyone, and there was almost no unemployment.
• Industry grew very fast after the Revolution, and the USSR became a major industrial and military power, with nuclear weapons, a large army and an advanced space programme.
• It was a union of fifteen republics, of which Russia was by far the largest and most powerful, and Russians held a dominant place in the party and the government.

The USSR also built a bloc of its own. The countries of Eastern Europe that the Soviet army had reached at the end of the war came under communist governments with Soviet backing. They were tied to Moscow by the Warsaw Pact, a military alliance set up in 1955 in answer to NATO, and by the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), an economic grouping. Together these countries, with the USSR, are what people meant by the "Eastern bloc" or the second world.

Weaknesses of the system

Underneath the achievements there were serious problems, and they became worse from the 1970s.

• The bureaucracy and the single party had become rigid and authoritarian. People had little say, ordinary citizens could not criticise the government, and the leadership was old and slow to change.
• The planned economy was inefficient. Heavy industry and weapons took priority, while consumer goods were scarce, queues were common and the quality of what was made was poor.
• The arms race with the United States took a very large share of resources, which the Soviet economy, much smaller than America's, could not afford for long.
• The Soviet Union fell behind the West in technology and in the output of its farms, and it relied on importing grain. Growth stagnated through the late 1970s and the 1980s.
• The invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 turned into a costly war that Soviet troops could not win, and the war drained money and morale.
• The standard of living in the Western bloc was visibly higher, and as people in the East learned more about it, their attachment to the system weakened.
• The disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in 1986 showed how badly the system handled failures, since the authorities were slow and secretive in telling people what had happened.
• Nationalist feeling in several republics, particularly the Baltic republics, Ukraine and Georgia, was never fully removed by the party's control.

Mikhail Gorbachev and his reforms

Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985. He was convinced that the system had to be reformed if it was to survive and that the Soviet Union had to catch up with the West, so he started a programme of change on three main lines.

Perestroika

Perestroika means restructuring. It brought a first degree of decentralisation and market elements into the economy, since managers were given more freedom and some private enterprise and joint ventures with foreign firms were allowed.

Glasnost

Glasnost means openness. The press and public discussion were freed to some extent, past crimes and failures could be discussed, and people could criticise officials without being punished as they would have been before.

Political change

Political reform followed, including competitive elections to a new Congress of People's Deputies in 1989 and a weakening of the Communist Party's guaranteed monopoly of power.

Foreign policy

In foreign policy Gorbachev sought to end the confrontation with the West. He negotiated arms-reduction agreements with the United States, and he withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan, which was completed in early 1989. He also made it clear that the Soviet Union would not use force to keep communist governments in power in Eastern Europe.

Events in Eastern Europe

That last decision had large effects. In 1989 popular movements overturned the communist governments of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and other Eastern European countries, mostly without the Soviet army stepping in. The Berlin Wall, which had divided the city since 1961, was opened on 9 November 1989 and was then pulled down. East and West Germany were united on 3 October 1990, and Germany became a single state again, now a member of NATO. The Warsaw Pact itself was dissolved in 1991.

What the reforms led to

Gorbachev wanted to preserve a reformed socialist system and the union. The reforms, however, released pressures that he could not control. Glasnost let people say openly how much they disliked the system, and demands for more independence grew among the republics. The economic reforms did not produce quick improvements, and in some respects they caused shortages and disruption, so dissatisfaction increased rather than fell. Hardliners in the party and the army, who thought he was destroying the Soviet state, opposed him, while others thought he was going too slowly.