Soviet Union - Command Economy, Five-Year Plans, Collectivization

Soviet Union

Table of Contents

Introduction
The Russian Revolution
- Late tsarist Russia
- The February Revolution
- Lenin and the Bolsheviks
- The Bolshevik coup
- The Bolshevik dictatorship
- Brest-Litovsk
- “War Communism”
- The Civil War and the creation of the U.S.S.R.
- The Communist International
- Culture and religion under communism
- Foreign policy
- The communist regime in crisis: 1920–21
- Lenin’s disillusionment
- The struggle for succession
The U.S.S.R. from the death of Lenin to the death of Stalin
- The NEP and the defeat of the Left
- Toward the “second Revolution”: 1927–30
- The Party versus the peasants
- Industrialization, 1929–34
- Internal, 1930–37
- Foreign policy, 1928–40
- Into the war: 1940–45
- Postwar
The U.S.S.R. from 1953 to 1991
- The Khrushchev era
  - The transition
  - The 20th Party Congress and after
  - Nationality policy
  - The cultural Thaw
  - Economic problems
  - Khrushchev’s fall
- The Brezhnev era
  - Collective leadership
  - Economic policy
  - Cultural retrenchment
  - Nationality policy
  - Foreign policy
- The Interregnum: Andropov and Chernenko
- The Gorbachev era
  - Gorbachev’s succession
  - Economic and social reforms
  - Political restructuring
  - Economic policy
  - Foreign policy
  - The attempted coup

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The economic stagnation of the late Brezhnev era was the result of various factors: the exhaustion of easily available resources, especially raw materials, and the growing structural imbalance of the economy due to the distorting effects of the incentive system, which paralyzed initiative and dissuaded people from doing an honest day’s work. Under perestroika the economy moved from stagnation to crisis, and this deepened as time passed. Hence the policies of perestroika must carry much of the blame for the economic catastrophe that resulted. Gorbachev admitted in 1988 that the first two years had been wasted since he was unaware ...(100 of 33818 words)

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