August 25, 2026 • 41 mins
It’s rare that the downfall of an empire can be chalked up to the decisions of just one person. It’s even rarer, when the empire falls over the course of a year. That’s pretty much what happened with the Soviet Union when Mikhail Gorbachev dissolved it.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just a few
Cold War kids working out our ongoing fascination with the
Soviet Union.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
That's right, this is a man. It's been a long
time since we've done a two parter. I was trying
to remember the last time we did this.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Probably ADHD.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
Yeah, maybe I'm I'm weirdly excited by a two parter
for some reason.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Yeah, it is a little weird.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
It feels like less work, even though it's not.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
It's fun also to tackle something and like really understand
it even further.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
You know, No, I totally agree. Like smashing this into
a single forty five minute episode would have short shrifted it.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
I think you know what we did. We scored it
with a sickle and then smashed it down the middle
with the hammer.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Wow, look at you.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Yeah, so we are talking about the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics, the USSR for some reason, the CCCP in Russia,
Soviet Russia. I mean, how many times are we gonna
do Yakov Smirnoff in this episode?
Speaker 3 (01:19):
I'm gonna try not to do it once.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Yeah, well you do a better Yakov Smirtoff than me,
so I hope you will.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Although Brentson the very nicest time of the year.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
They so. Yeah. And in the I think the basically
nineteen ninety to the very beginning of nineteen ninety two,
this superpower, one of two superpowers in the world. The
way that the world was aligned was based on these
two superpowers. One of them just fell over and was
(01:50):
gone in the blink of an eye, like and really quickly. Yeah,
I mean, like just breathtaking lee fast it went way,
and not just the country, this superpower, but also the
Soviet Communism itself. It was just gone, Chuck.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Just yeah, gone gone, and the end of an ideal,
the end of a Cold war like it was. You know,
I can't think of anything that was bigger since the
end of World War two geopolitically, like this had to
be the biggest thing.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
I think, absolutely for sure. The best part about it though,
at least as far as the world was concerned. It
didn't take a nuclear World War three to make to
bring the Cold War and the bipolar I guess orientation
of the world to an end.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
Yeah, and it was a top down thing, like, it
wasn't an uprising, although as we'll see, like on the
Eastern Bloc, there were definitely some uprisings and things that
happened as a result, But the whole thing started as
a top down thing. Yeah, because of one because of
Michelle Gorbachev to Gorbachef always said Gorbachev.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
It was I always heard both throughout our youth.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
All right, great, so I'll just say both.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Gorby.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Yeah, that's right. It was because of a series of
decisions that he made to to not fully westernize the
Soviet Union, but to loosen the rain some, to get
a little capitalism in there, to get a little more transparency,
relaxed the reins on the you know, the hard fist
(03:32):
of the Soviet regime, to kind of just have a newer,
sort of softer Soviet Union moving forward. And boy, he
I don't know if he didn't fully think it through
or if it was just the domino effect was so fast.
I'm sure he was probably like wow, like I didn't
(03:53):
think this was going to happen.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Yeah, He's just standing there like looking guilty while the
whole room is just fallen down around him because he
touched something he wasn't supposed to kind.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Of, yeah, for sure. But it all sort of started
with these two major reforms that he set out to establish,
which was in Russian it would be paristroika and glasnot,
but to us that would be restructuring and transparency. And
I guess we should talk about the restructuring.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
First, Yeah, parastroika. One more thing I do want to
say about Gorby though, before we move on, is I
didn't see anything anywhere that suggested that this was secretly purposeful.
I think you're absolutely right. I think he was completely
taken off guard by the consequences of these pretty legitimate
(04:44):
and good ideas at the time, because Gorbachev inherited a
USSR that was in deep stagnation by the mid nineteen eighties, right, Yeah,
it was a planned economy and it had been moving
along in that direction for decades, but by this time,
by the eighties, it was just it was not in
(05:06):
good shape. And so, like you said, to kind of
like jump start the socialist economy, not replace it, but
jump started. He was willing to implement some Western style
free market ideas.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
Yeah, I mean, he was a very progressive guy for
Soviet Russia. You know. So it was a late eighties
where he launched this, Like we mentioned the first thing,
the restructuring or the Peristroika, and that was to sort
of that was sort of the economical political side of things,
to kind of loosen the grips a little bit, because
he was like the reality of what our ideals are
(05:43):
and what's really going on, Like there's a big gap there.
So he thought, maybe if we have this program of
like political renewal and maybe some ethics and morals being
introduced in a like systematically, then maybe we can prove
what's going on here. And that was what Peristroika was
supposed to be about.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Yeah, and gloucestons both of them together. But so that
planned economy, chuck, here's what Gorby inherited. So you have
the ruble, which was the official currency of the USSR.
It was not accepted or recognized outside of the USSR
or outside of the Eastern Bloc, i should say, outside
the Iron Curtain.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Yeah, big problem.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
It is a big problem. Number two, the Soviet government
was responsible for deciding how much of what any given
thing was made in any given year. Right, it wasn't
based on supply and demand. It was based on a
planned economy. They also set prices for those things. So
if you put all those things together, the Soviet economy
(06:44):
had no way of signaling who needed what, where and when,
and so there were shortages everywhere. There's lots of waste,
and there were very few businesses. All the businesses in
this planned economy were owned by the state. There were
very few of those businesses that didn't need to also
be propped up artificially because they were just losing money
(07:08):
left and right.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
Yeah, So, I mean, like you said that what he
inherited was in bad shape already. One of the reasons,
and you know, I remember this is something we had
heard a lot like growing up as gen xers, was
that the Soviets are trying to keep pace in the
Cold War, in the space race and everything else, and
they can't keep up that spending like we could there
(07:31):
in the West. And that was true. All that government
spending put a real dent in their their financial outlook.
The war and invasion of Afghanistan over a ten year
period from seventy nine to eighty nine was very costly. Yeah,
and then Chernobyl, I mean, we'll talk a little bit
about just the cost of like the I guess ethical
(07:53):
cost of the cover up and what that did to
dent their image like within the you know, Russia in
the Soviet Union. But it literally cost a lot of money,
like at least eighteen billion dollars, like nineteen eighty six
dollars to clean it up, to contain it. And that
was on top of everything else, like the straw that
broke the camel's back.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Yeah, that was a big deal for them, for sure.
Did you ever see that Chernobyl miniseriies with Jared I
can't remember his last Jared Harris. Yeah, one of the
finest actors of all time.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
I think, Yeah, you bet your butt I did. It
was outstanding, outstanding.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
I wish all miniseries were that good.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
Yeah, it was one of the best ones i'd seen.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Yeah, agreed. So again, Perishtroika is Gorby coming along and
being like, Okay, we're in big trouble. We need some
money fast, and we need to just make some adjustments.
So some of those adjustments were basically this was huge,
Like these were incredibly radical with the backdrop of the
of the Soviet economy, right, one was allowing companies from
(08:59):
outside the US to start up businesses in the USSR,
and they would be joint ventures, co owned by the
company and by the Soviet Union. Right yeah, So now
all of a sudden, you have new expertise, new ideas,
new innovations, high quality products coming in and a bunch
of money outside investment coming into the USSR. That's a
(09:21):
pretty good idea, right.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
Yeah, that was a good idea. As part of that,
he said, maybe we should also get like the locals involved,
so hand over some of the ownerships of some of
these state run enterprises that we've had, which is basically
all business from the government only owned by the government,
to a locally elected workers collective or a series of them.
(09:45):
And so that meant that you could have private business
in the Soviet Union for the first time. And then
the other one was, you know, you mentioned that they
they had like quotas for companies, they didn't look at
at market corrections like supply and demand to indicate how
they should run stuff. They said, all right, maybe we
should allow businesses to, like, you know, instead of having
(10:05):
shortfalls of stuff that we really need, maybe they should
fulfill beyond the quotas for a change. And you know,
you got to make the amount set by the quota,
but beyond that you could continue making that stuff that
there's demand for it for sure.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Okay, so these are very radical ideas. But had he
just gone with Peristroika, my money is on Perestroika alone
would not have torn down the USSR. I think it
was a combination, and probably more than anything, it was
really Glasnost that did it. The problems with Peristroika were
(10:41):
immediately apparent. There were by investing more power into the
the the republics that all made up the Soviet Union. Yeah,
they started to withhold tax payments that were supposed to
go to the central government. Right, they were kind of
a little bit emboldened. I guess by that little extra
(11:02):
power they were given. Yeah, for sure, some of the
ministers who would run these places for the government were
now running them kind of like as private citizens, and
they started looting industry however they could. It just immediately started.
And then the old quota system was what they had
in place of supplying demand. But no one under the
(11:26):
Soviet regime had any idea what other stuff you could
use for supplying demand. Plus the ruble was still artificially controlled,
so they didn't have any market signals. Nobody knew what
the heck was going on at this point.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Yeah, I mean it was all brand new, like and
we'll talk about this later, but you know, you can't
just flick a switch overnight and say, all of a sudden,
we're a more free market economy and let's just see
how that works, because it had been so long, right
and so you know, entwined in the government's iron fist.
It was just a mess. And so the economy started
(12:00):
just going bananas in all sorts of weird ways, and
the government tried to rein that in by spending a
lot to try and outmaneuver all the weird things that
were happening, and it was just a big mess kind
of right off the bat.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Yes, so it was a mess, but the Soviet Union's
economy was already a mess, and I don't think just
Peristroika would have done what happened. It took glass Nos
in my opinion, to bring down the Soviet Union? Should
we keep going? Are you kidding me?
Speaker 3 (12:30):
With a cliffhanger like that?
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Okay?
Speaker 3 (12:34):
Oh man, I was like, we're taking a message break,
and you're.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Like, hey man, you convinced me immediately.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
Yeah, that's a great cliffhanger. We're going to come back
and explain what Glassnos was right after this, all right,
(13:05):
Josh T's Glasnost, and that was the second part of
the one two punch to try and introduce a new
style of government in the Soviet Union. And this, you know,
calls for this kind of started coming after the Chernobyl
cover up in eighty six, and the whole idea behind
Glasnost was more transparency. Like I said, that's what the
(13:26):
word means, so relax some of this you know, very
notorious state censorship of everything. And so once that was done,
all these social ills that plagued the Soviet Union started
to be exposed a little bit in the media, so
you know, like mass famine, the gulags, you know, Soviet
(13:50):
history basically kind of being realized for the first time
and displayed for people to make their own like judgments on.
It was a good idea, but again, once those fladgates
were open, it was turned out to not be a
very good idea.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Yes, so I believe Gorbachev was a true believer in
the idea that the Soviet Union needed greater freedom of
speech and greater freedom of the press. I think you
truly believed that this was also calculated politically as well.
And his position was, Okay, if I can have an
open conversation with the Soviet people about the need for
(14:30):
reforms and all the stuff we need to implement because
of these problems we have, they're going to support my
policies and plans and me And by doing that I
will be I will pull the levers of power away
from the conservatives who have managed to hang on to
power and keep things as they were, stagnated in trouble
(14:51):
by that censorship, by the silence, silencing of critics, by
intimidation and actual violence. If I get people talking openly
about the problems, then we can have real change. So
it was politically calculated, even though he did almost certainly
actually believe that it needed to happen too.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
Yeah, for sure. But the thing is, like what you
were saying was the conservatives had managed to hang on
to that power by keeping things as they were, which
wasn't great, but it was stable in a way like
it wasn't It wasn't chaos, it was highly controlled, and
that's the way they liked it. So to disrupt that
system was. You know, it's a pretty bold move. He himself.
(15:37):
He was part of the what was known as the Nomenclatura,
which was the sort of the upper echelon of Soviet society.
It's like the elite bureaucrats, and they had perks that
other people didn't have. Obviously. They had like you know, estates,
and they had nicer cars and things like that. And
that was not a part of the Communist experiment, the
(15:57):
communist idea or this idea of social equality. And I
think he had spent so much time in his career
in the nomenclature that he really was out of touch
with what was going on for the average sort of
day to day life of the average Soviet.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Yeah, so he knew enough to know that they were
suffering and weren't fully aware of why, but he had
no idea of just how much they're suffering. Was promoting
a desire for real, real change, Yeah, not even like
small incremental change or even semi big change like he
was proposing, but sweeping change essentially, And that's what he
(16:38):
found out once he opened up Glass nost And it
wasn't immediately adopted. I think the press actually kind of
hung back for a little while at first, like is
this trap are you trying to Are we going to
be arrested? And he was like yeah, I think he
said at some point like there's no subject that's off
the table. Everything is open for discussion, And very quickly
(16:58):
the press started to do with their posted to do.
They began reporting on the ills of Soviet society.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
Yeah, I mean it was crazy thing to do, looking back, yes,
they you know, because all of a sudden, the media
is writing about food shortages and writing about the rampant
alcoholism and the pollution and the mortality rates. We'll get
to some stats later on, but the second tier sort
of position of women in Russian and Soviet society, state crimes,
(17:30):
A lot of that was like under Stalin's rule obviously,
but you know, that stuff was still going on, and
so all of these sort of you know, true believers,
and as you'll see, like especially in Mother Russia, the
Eastern Bloc sort of had other ideas, but especially in
Mother Russia, like this is something they really believed in
and they had never received this information. So it was
(17:52):
easy if you were, you know, in the United States
or in the West, to be like they have no
idea what's going on in their own country because everything
is being censored. But they really didn't. And you know,
it's if you're living in a smaller town or a
village and you're looking around, you might see some ills,
but if you're reading about how everything is great, then
(18:14):
it's gonna you know, slant your opinion of it all.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
Yeah, and even more than that, as we'll talk about
it in a little while, a lot of Soviets identities
were rooted in the Soviet experiment that now had been
exposed as being based on torture and executions and the
starvation of millions and millions of peasants. You know, like, yeah,
that it shook them to their core. It wasn't just
(18:39):
like a loss of faith in their government. It was
a loss of faith in their own themselves, I guess
in some cases.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
Yeah, for sure. And you know, like I mentioned, especially
in Russia because that was sort of the center of
the Soviet Union. But once this happened in these formally
independent satellite states, like you said earlier, I think he
really underestimated how ready they all were to really break
free and sort of rise up. And you know, there
(19:09):
were some deep seated like ancient hostilities and rivalries among
some of these Soviet states that were forced to be
together because they were part of the Soviet Union. And
you know, a good example you found was the ethnic
Albanians and the Serbs. They had hated each other since
the fourteenth century, since the Battle of the Field of Blackbirds,
(19:30):
but as a part of the Soviet Union, they were,
you know, supposed to be fellow countrymen. So as soon
as they got the chance to hate each other again,
they did, And that's why there was so much fighting
in the Balkans, like for basically all throughout the nineties
once this happened, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Because the Soviets no longer forced them together and they
were like, okay, it's on, let's start committing atrocities, and
they all did. The other thing that really kind of
happened with class nos was the like the exposure of
Western media, Western pop culture, Like this was not something
(20:06):
that people had in the in the USSR had like
really been exposed to at this point. Did you ever
see that documentary where somebody was smuggling like Chuck Norris
movies into I think Bulgaria or something like that, and
they credited like these bootleg American movies is essentially like
(20:28):
creating like unrest among the youth and leading eventually to revolution.
Speaker 3 (20:33):
No, because they were like, Wow, there's a guy like
Chuck Norris in the world that we don't know about.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Yeah, essentially Chuck Norris Rambo. Like they went crazy for it.
And they also now saw the Western view of their
country and their culture, and they were like, wow, this's
maybe you are pretty backwards. We don't have anybody like that.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
Well, I mean, you know, and I'm not saying this
in jest because you know how much I love Billy Joel,
but that I think it was a couple of concerts
he did in the Soviet Union. Yeah, that was a
really really big deal, Like no Western artists had ever
performed there, And yeah, I think that made a big difference,
you know, as far as opening people's eyes to to
(21:16):
Western culture.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Yeah, I think Metallica did too.
Speaker 3 (21:20):
Oh did they later obviously, yeah, a little.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
Later, but you know, it might have been before the
fall of the Soviet Union, but probably right around the
time ALF. I mean, once they found out that ALF
was on TV, They're like, it's it is over for
Communist Russia.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
Well, the big thing that really allowed the satellite states
outside of Russia itself to really, I guess I feel
like they had a real chance at uprising was when
Gorbachev renounced the Brezhnev doctrine, which was the doctrine that said, Hey,
we're going to defend everybody here, We're going to defend
(22:00):
socialism with this massive army. We're all together, The Soviet
Bloc is is one, and we will all defend each other,
sort of like a NATO thing m And in its place,
Gorbachev was like, you know, you guys, pursue your own
reforms and you know, govern government with the support of
the people, like all these satellite states. And again just
(22:22):
the pedal to the metal that happened after that, and
once they knew that they didn't have Moscow's military support,
like removing that show of force that was kind of
holding everything together. So once that went away, it just
started to grumble.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Yeah, now I think you've created a really good cliffhanger. No,
so what do you say, should we take our second
break here?
Speaker 3 (22:45):
Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Okay, we're going to do that, guys.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Chuck just agree, Okay, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
So where we last left off was when Gorbachef abandoned
the Brezhnev doctrine that said we're going to show up
with our military if there's any unrest in any of
the satellite states or republics. And without that show of force,
that was probably, like you said before the break, the
(23:29):
thing that really kind of gave rise or gave support
to these nationalist movements. And each time one of the
like the satellite states. So we're focusing now on satellite states.
We should differentiate. So there were fifteen republics in the USSR.
It included like Latvia, Estonia, Turkmenistan, a bunch of others,
(23:53):
and then there were satellite states. There were ostensibly independent
countries like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, poll In, Albania, few others. Those
are considered satellite states. And you put all of them together.
So you have the USSR with the fifteen republics and
the satellite states. Now you have the Eastern Bloc and
all that's behind what they called the Iron Curtain. That
(24:14):
whole portion of the world was turned in on itself,
had turned its back on the rest of the world,
and was focused on its own socialists experiment. Aside from
helping out other countries that wanted to try their own
socialists experiments, which is why there was secret fighting in
like Nicaragua and why Cuba had missiles, nuclear missiles aimed
(24:35):
at the United States. For the most part, though, the
Eastern Bloc paid attention to itself and kept the rest
of the world.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
Out, that's right, and kept them in. But once there
was freedom of movement and travel from behind the Iron Curtain,
this was like a really really key to the weakening
of the Union. And they were like, you know what's
really nice is is Budapest And that's just you know,
a handful of hours by train into Austria. So all
(25:02):
of a sudden you had tens of thousands of East
Germans defecting. Most people wanted to stay in like in
their houses, so like people want to live where they
have their have lived their whole lives, right, So it
wasn't like everybody left like citizens of other Soviet republics.
East Germans, most of them wanted to stay in their homes,
but they wanted things to be different. So as soon
(25:23):
as sort of the door was open politically, and all
of a sudden you could vote for different candidates, like
those candidates completely swept every election that happened.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Yeah, Poland was the first one. It's also probably the
best example of them all because being in the Eastern Bloc,
there was one party. When you went to vote, you
voted for one party, and that was the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union. Even if you had an independent country,
the Communists had your country, your government on lockdown, right.
(25:57):
And at one point, as part of like this series
of decisions that just took this rolling snowball and just
turned it into an avalanche, was Gorbachev saying, no longer
are alternative party's outlawed. We can have other parties. And
that first started in Poland with the Solidarity Party, which
(26:20):
had been a trade union for a decade or so
and had turned into a populist, anti authoritarian party. And
now that it was possible for Solidarity to run against
the Communists, like you said, the board was just totally
swept by then.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
Wasn't that like Villenza? Yeah? I remember, I mean all
this stuff was on the news, but I was in
late high school into early college, and that wasn't you know,
I wasn't paying attention like I do. You know, as
you get older, I think the same as most people.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
You didn't have a Solidarity Party T shirt in the
It looked like a Smirnoff label.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
But I remember, you know, all of this stuff was
in the background, always on the news. But yeah, once
the Solidarity Party had a chance to run, it was
it was a sort of partially free election because what
they did was they said, all right, you can have
a new party, but it's not just for one hundred
percent of the available seats. The solid Solidarity Party can
have thirty five, like up to thirty five percent of
(27:21):
the seats in there, you know, the Polish equivalent of
the House of Representatives or the House of Commons. The
other sixty five percent were still reserved for the Communist Party,
so they would still hold on to power. And then
they outside a newly created Senate, so one hundred newly
created Senate seats, and Solidarity won ninety nine out of
the hundred Senate seats. The one independent that won later
(27:44):
switched to Solidarity, and they completely obviously filled the thirty
five percent allotment that they were well allotted in the House,
and the Communists were so unpopular they didn't even get
all the votes they needed to fill the other.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Six Yeah, Yeah, so Solidarity showed the rest of the
world like, like we have been under the communist thumb,
the Soviet thumb. We don't want that. Not only do
we want to be independent, we don't want to be
communists anymore. Yeah, and they weren't after that. I mean,
once Solidarity came into power, Poland very quickly was like,
(28:22):
we're not associated with them anymore. Everybody, come on over
to Poland. We have amazing sausages and all sorts of
other good things that you'll find out when you get here.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
That's right, But we're please, no jokes. We've heard about
all that stuff, but yeah, leave those at home.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Right. Our submarines do not have screen doors on them.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
That's right. I've never understood that. I've always been to
look that up on why that was a thing.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Oh, because if you like, once its submerged, all the
water would come through the screen door.
Speaker 3 (28:55):
Now I remember jokes about Polish people. I never knew
the background to that.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
I think they just got picked one of those things
where it's like, so this group has all the jokes
against them, so then you start to just think they're
all stupid, so that just begets more jokes against them.
I think it's like.
Speaker 3 (29:11):
Detroit, Yes, exactly, I'm just kidding, Detroit. We love you.
So the Berlin Wall comes down, obviously, that was a
big deal. Germany was reunified, you know, sort of been
a model of the West, and that was just like
that was less than a year after the Polish elections
(29:32):
of nineteen eighty nine, so like things were really happening
at a fast clip. The leader of Bulgaria retired, the
Czechoslovak government was replaced. The only place, kind of shockingly
that you had a bloody revolution was in Romania and
chou Chesq.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Yeah, took that happened in a few months in nineteen
eighty nine. All of that, all of those satellite states
just COMMUNI fell. So, I mean, I can't. I wish
i'd been a little older. I remember when the Berlin
Wall fell, and I was like, Mom, we gotta go,
We gotta get on a bread, we have to get there.
This is amazing. She wanted to so bad, but she
(30:13):
just we didn't.
Speaker 3 (30:15):
You're like, I've always wanted to see East Germany exactly,
and this is our only chance.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Yeah, but I wish I had been a little bit
older so it could be so I could have paid
attention to this, because I can't imagine what it was
like paying attention to this over just these few months
from the time that Poland's elections were held in June
to the end of nineteen eighty nine, like just country
after countries, communist regimes fell, and like you said, only
(30:41):
Romania's turned bloody, and you can pretty much fully blame
the Chesky regime for starting it. They started essentially, Yeah,
he was.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
The remaining dictator there, Nikolai Chochescu and his wife Elena,
who was also appointed in a high office by her husband,
so they were, you know, they were a power couple,
I guess. But they had mass protests breaking out, and
Chouceescu went to the military and he said kill them,
(31:14):
fire on these unarmed civilians. And he thought that would
have been like, all right, we're gonna quash this really quick.
But the military was like, bro, that's we're not into that.
And so they defected just like a few days after
he ordered them to fire upon them. Not only did
they not do that, they defected to the protester side,
and he and Elena saw their riding on the wall
(31:35):
and they're like, we need to get the heck out
of here. But the military caught them technically had a
military tribunal. It was pretty short form though, and they
were found guilty and executed by firing squad.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
Yeah, and strung upside down by their ankles for public viewing.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
Yeah, harsh stuff.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
There was a rumor too, do you remember hearing this
thatches sort of thatchescus were fed to dogs. Yeah, after
they were dead, And that is a rumor. From what
I can tell, it did not happen. But the reason
that rumor came about is twofold one Chilchsky was very famous,
especially in Romania, for having appointed his favorite labrador as
(32:15):
a general. Yeah, so there's a dog theme with that.
And then he was blamed specifically for the terrible problem
with feral packs of dogs what used to be family
dogs roaming Romania at times, like killing children and stuff.
Right Like, it was a bad problem, and the reason
why it existed was because he had ordered a bunch
(32:37):
of villages bulldozed so he could build these new agritechnical centers.
And then after he bulldozed them, and before he could
build the centers, he just kind of lost interest in it,
moved on, and so a lot of people lost their homes,
so did a lot of dogs. And that's where they
got their feral dog problem from. Yeah, and then I
remember this. I will never forget it. This wasn't like
(33:00):
a jog my memory. I think about this joke every
I don't know, a year and a half. I would say,
Dennis Miller, Yeah, do you remember that?
Speaker 3 (33:09):
I do.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
I was.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
I thought Dennis Miller was very, very funny when he
was the SNL news guy.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Yeah, not bad, but he was never funnier than when
he was on Monday Night football.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
Oh god, yeah, what was the chowcheska joke? So?
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Yeah, on Weekend Update on Sarah Live, like a couple
weeks after the chutchscues were executed and the rumor was
that they were fed to the dog, Dennis Miller said
that Purina had released a new product, puppy Chuchescu.
Speaker 3 (33:39):
Yeah, you remember that one.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
What happened next?
Speaker 3 (33:43):
Well, I mean, this is the end of nineteen eighty nine, basically,
and the only communist state still left west of the
Soviet Union was Albania. And you know, Gorbacheff could have
like stepped in. He had a very non interventionalist way
about him. I think he knew also that like the
(34:05):
genie was out of the bottle and like trying to
bottle it back up as impossible and resuming the Cold
War again is a bad idea, so he stayed out
of it. And you know, it felt, like you said,
in just a handful of months, like right before the
world's eyes.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Right, and so far we're talking just satellite states already independent,
ostensibly independent nations took their independence back in nineteen eighty nine.
The USSR is still together, and Gorbatrov is not pushing
for it to break up. He's kind of trying to
figure out how to balance these reforms he just introduced
(34:42):
with keeping the USSR together, and it proves impossible for him.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
Yeah, I mean, he sees what's happening all around, and
you know, he abandoned communism. Basically he voluntarily devolved power,
which again, just all these year later, it looks like
a crazy thing to do, but just seating all that
power when all they had ever known and all the
West had ever known was just just how powerful the
(35:09):
Soviet Union was and controlling everything, and to just loosen
the knot on all of that was just really a
pretty wacky, wacky thing. To do.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Yeah, I mean, especially unilatterally, I don't know quite enough
about modern Russian history to know who else, like who
his advisors and aids were. Yeah, yeah, So it basically
just seems like this is Gorbachev doing it himself. And
I'm sure he did have help, but in the end,
it was Gorbachev doing this himself, Like this wasn't some
(35:40):
coalition with other people, Like he was the head of
the Soviet the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the CPSU,
the ruling body of the entire Eastern Bloc at one
point up until very recently. He used this position as
the head of the CPSU to do all the CPSU.
(36:02):
It was as simple as that. And what's that happened?
If you don't have the party who is pushing everybody
around and censoring everything, if they don't exist anymore, now,
it's a free for all. And that was what he
did at the I think the end of nineteen ninety.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
Yeah, he created a what we would think of as
the House of reps in their Congress of People's Deputies
that was, you know, mostly kind of fairly elected, at
least compared to what it had been. He ended like
we said earlier, you know, he opened it up to
other political parties, which is just going to completely weaken
the grip of communism by virtue of doing that. And
(36:40):
then he created an office of president. He appointed himself president,
so it's not like he was elected, but this was
in March of nineteen ninety and it was a brand
new office. And you know that was that was a
big deal to have like an eventual elected president.
Speaker 2 (36:56):
It was. And the reason why he did that is
because he dissolved the Communist Party, so he couldn't be
the head of the USSR because he was the head
of the Communist Party if the Communist Party didn't exist anymore.
So now he's like I call president of the USSR.
He also introduced elections, so each of the fifteen republics
(37:17):
had what's called the Supreme Soviet, which was their own parliament,
and he said, hey, guys, why don't you start having
free elections with alternative parties legalized, and well, let's see
what happens. I'm gorbie, I'm pretty sure that the USSR
is going to want to stay together. And I hope
you didn't put any money on that, because he would
(37:37):
have lost big time.
Speaker 3 (37:39):
Yeah, and you know, we already covered kind of what
Poland kicked off. The Baltics really helped set a tone
as well. Pretty much immediately Lithuania said all right, six
we're seceding. We're not a part of the USSR anymore.
There's a March of nineteen ninety. Very quickly after lot
(38:00):
Via and Estonia said yeah, we're going to secede to
the Georgians did the Armenians did. And these were you know,
kind of small time as far as the might of
the Soviet Union, like they could have still had a
Soviet Union after this, even with these I guess secessionists.
(38:20):
But it was really Ukraine, Like Ukraine was and is
a very big and powerful country and just second after Russia.
And so that is a that's why you know, after Ukraine,
I think they held a referendum in ninety percent of
the voters voted for independence, and after Ukraine left, the
writing was really on the wall. But that's also why
(38:42):
if you just want some modern context of why Putin
has why Ukraine means so much to him personally, it
is because Putin is of the old you know, as
we'll see later, when he came into power it was
on a wave of nostalgia for the old days, and
Ukraine leaving was a real big thorn in his side
(39:04):
and just the side of sort of their history, the
Soviet history.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
Yeah, he said publicly that it's ridiculous Estonia is an
independent country. Like he does not see these as independent countries.
He sees them as republics of the Soviet Union that
should be brought back together with Russia. Right, And that's
what happened. I mean, this is so nineteen eighty nine
you saw the satellite states break out of the Eastern Bloc,
and then now nineteen ninety to nineteen ninety one, now
(39:30):
it's happening with republics like actual the actual Soviet Union
is starting to break up because the republic states are
now saying we're independent, we're not part of the USSR anymore.
And now now everyone's looking to Russia, which, being a
Cold War kid, I always basically used Russia and the
Soviet Union as interchangeable. But Russia was a republic of
(39:54):
the Soviet Union, far and away the most powerful one.
That's where the seat of Soviet government was. But it
was still a republic just like Latvia and Estonia and
so now everybody's like, Okay, what are you going to do?
You guys are going to try to carry on as
your own kind of Soviet Union, You're going to start
World War three? What's going on next? And I say,
chuck that we end this episode here.
Speaker 3 (40:16):
Yeah, it's the end of part one, everybody, And as
per tradition, we don't do listener mails at the end
of a part one. I think we just say, you know,
tune in on Thursday.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
Right, Yeah, we go out and stunned silence.
Speaker 3 (40:32):
I feel like, don't do we usually say anything? It's
been so long. Aren't you the one that handles this?
Speaker 2 (40:36):
Yeah? Yeah, I know. But it's fun watching.
Speaker 3 (40:39):
So thank you everybody, and we'll be back with part
two of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
That was great, But don't forget to tell them what
our email addresses.
Speaker 3 (40:48):
Oh do we have to do that?
Speaker 2 (40:50):
We usually do?
Speaker 3 (40:51):
All right?
Speaker 2 (40:52):
What is it?
Speaker 3 (40:52):
I Heart Stuff podcast at iHeartMedia dot com, iHeartRadio, iHeartRadio.
I see I never say it. This is your job.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
You did great?
Speaker 3 (41:01):
All right, we'll see everyone Thursday.
Speaker 1 (41:06):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just a few
Cold War kids working out our ongoing fascination with the
Soviet Union.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
That's right, this is a man. It's been a long
time since we've done a two parter. I was trying
to remember the last time we did this.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Probably ADHD.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
Yeah, maybe I'm I'm weirdly excited by a two parter
for some reason.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Yeah, it is a little weird.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
It feels like less work, even though it's not.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
It's fun also to tackle something and like really understand
it even further.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
You know, No, I totally agree. Like smashing this into
a single forty five minute episode would have short shrifted it.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
I think you know what we did. We scored it
with a sickle and then smashed it down the middle
with the hammer.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Wow, look at you.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Yeah, so we are talking about the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics, the USSR for some reason, the CCCP in Russia,
Soviet Russia. I mean, how many times are we gonna
do Yakov Smirnoff in this episode?
Speaker 3 (01:19):
I'm gonna try not to do it once.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Yeah, well you do a better Yakov Smirtoff than me,
so I hope you will.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Although Brentson the very nicest time of the year.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
They so. Yeah. And in the I think the basically
nineteen ninety to the very beginning of nineteen ninety two,
this superpower, one of two superpowers in the world. The
way that the world was aligned was based on these
two superpowers. One of them just fell over and was
(01:50):
gone in the blink of an eye, like and really quickly. Yeah,
I mean, like just breathtaking lee fast it went way,
and not just the country, this superpower, but also the
Soviet Communism itself. It was just gone, Chuck.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Just yeah, gone gone, and the end of an ideal,
the end of a Cold war like it was. You know,
I can't think of anything that was bigger since the
end of World War two geopolitically, like this had to
be the biggest thing.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
I think, absolutely for sure. The best part about it though,
at least as far as the world was concerned. It
didn't take a nuclear World War three to make to
bring the Cold War and the bipolar I guess orientation
of the world to an end.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
Yeah, and it was a top down thing, like, it
wasn't an uprising, although as we'll see, like on the
Eastern Bloc, there were definitely some uprisings and things that
happened as a result, But the whole thing started as
a top down thing. Yeah, because of one because of
Michelle Gorbachev to Gorbachef always said Gorbachev.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
It was I always heard both throughout our youth.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
All right, great, so I'll just say both.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Gorby.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Yeah, that's right. It was because of a series of
decisions that he made to to not fully westernize the
Soviet Union, but to loosen the rain some, to get
a little capitalism in there, to get a little more transparency,
relaxed the reins on the you know, the hard fist
(03:32):
of the Soviet regime, to kind of just have a newer,
sort of softer Soviet Union moving forward. And boy, he
I don't know if he didn't fully think it through
or if it was just the domino effect was so fast.
I'm sure he was probably like wow, like I didn't
(03:53):
think this was going to happen.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Yeah, He's just standing there like looking guilty while the
whole room is just fallen down around him because he
touched something he wasn't supposed to kind.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Of, yeah, for sure. But it all sort of started
with these two major reforms that he set out to establish,
which was in Russian it would be paristroika and glasnot,
but to us that would be restructuring and transparency. And
I guess we should talk about the restructuring.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
First, Yeah, parastroika. One more thing I do want to
say about Gorby though, before we move on, is I
didn't see anything anywhere that suggested that this was secretly purposeful.
I think you're absolutely right. I think he was completely
taken off guard by the consequences of these pretty legitimate
(04:44):
and good ideas at the time, because Gorbachev inherited a
USSR that was in deep stagnation by the mid nineteen eighties, right, Yeah,
it was a planned economy and it had been moving
along in that direction for decades, but by this time,
by the eighties, it was just it was not in
(05:06):
good shape. And so, like you said, to kind of
like jump start the socialist economy, not replace it, but
jump started. He was willing to implement some Western style
free market ideas.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
Yeah, I mean, he was a very progressive guy for
Soviet Russia. You know. So it was a late eighties
where he launched this, Like we mentioned the first thing,
the restructuring or the Peristroika, and that was to sort
of that was sort of the economical political side of things,
to kind of loosen the grips a little bit, because
he was like the reality of what our ideals are
(05:43):
and what's really going on, Like there's a big gap there.
So he thought, maybe if we have this program of
like political renewal and maybe some ethics and morals being
introduced in a like systematically, then maybe we can prove
what's going on here. And that was what Peristroika was
supposed to be about.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Yeah, and gloucestons both of them together. But so that
planned economy, chuck, here's what Gorby inherited. So you have
the ruble, which was the official currency of the USSR.
It was not accepted or recognized outside of the USSR
or outside of the Eastern Bloc, i should say, outside
the Iron Curtain.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Yeah, big problem.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
It is a big problem. Number two, the Soviet government
was responsible for deciding how much of what any given
thing was made in any given year. Right, it wasn't
based on supply and demand. It was based on a
planned economy. They also set prices for those things. So
if you put all those things together, the Soviet economy
(06:44):
had no way of signaling who needed what, where and when,
and so there were shortages everywhere. There's lots of waste,
and there were very few businesses. All the businesses in
this planned economy were owned by the state. There were
very few of those businesses that didn't need to also
be propped up artificially because they were just losing money
(07:08):
left and right.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
Yeah, So, I mean, like you said that what he
inherited was in bad shape already. One of the reasons,
and you know, I remember this is something we had
heard a lot like growing up as gen xers, was
that the Soviets are trying to keep pace in the
Cold War, in the space race and everything else, and
they can't keep up that spending like we could there
(07:31):
in the West. And that was true. All that government
spending put a real dent in their their financial outlook.
The war and invasion of Afghanistan over a ten year
period from seventy nine to eighty nine was very costly. Yeah,
and then Chernobyl, I mean, we'll talk a little bit
about just the cost of like the I guess ethical
(07:53):
cost of the cover up and what that did to
dent their image like within the you know, Russia in
the Soviet Union. But it literally cost a lot of money,
like at least eighteen billion dollars, like nineteen eighty six
dollars to clean it up, to contain it. And that
was on top of everything else, like the straw that
broke the camel's back.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Yeah, that was a big deal for them, for sure.
Did you ever see that Chernobyl miniseriies with Jared I
can't remember his last Jared Harris. Yeah, one of the
finest actors of all time.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
I think, Yeah, you bet your butt I did. It
was outstanding, outstanding.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
I wish all miniseries were that good.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
Yeah, it was one of the best ones i'd seen.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Yeah, agreed. So again, Perishtroika is Gorby coming along and
being like, Okay, we're in big trouble. We need some
money fast, and we need to just make some adjustments.
So some of those adjustments were basically this was huge,
Like these were incredibly radical with the backdrop of the
of the Soviet economy, right, one was allowing companies from
(08:59):
outside the US to start up businesses in the USSR,
and they would be joint ventures, co owned by the
company and by the Soviet Union. Right yeah, So now
all of a sudden, you have new expertise, new ideas,
new innovations, high quality products coming in and a bunch
of money outside investment coming into the USSR. That's a
(09:21):
pretty good idea, right.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
Yeah, that was a good idea. As part of that,
he said, maybe we should also get like the locals involved,
so hand over some of the ownerships of some of
these state run enterprises that we've had, which is basically
all business from the government only owned by the government,
to a locally elected workers collective or a series of them.
(09:45):
And so that meant that you could have private business
in the Soviet Union for the first time. And then
the other one was, you know, you mentioned that they
they had like quotas for companies, they didn't look at
at market corrections like supply and demand to indicate how
they should run stuff. They said, all right, maybe we
should allow businesses to, like, you know, instead of having
(10:05):
shortfalls of stuff that we really need, maybe they should
fulfill beyond the quotas for a change. And you know,
you got to make the amount set by the quota,
but beyond that you could continue making that stuff that
there's demand for it for sure.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Okay, so these are very radical ideas. But had he
just gone with Peristroika, my money is on Perestroika alone
would not have torn down the USSR. I think it
was a combination, and probably more than anything, it was
really Glasnost that did it. The problems with Peristroika were
(10:41):
immediately apparent. There were by investing more power into the
the the republics that all made up the Soviet Union. Yeah,
they started to withhold tax payments that were supposed to
go to the central government. Right, they were kind of
a little bit emboldened. I guess by that little extra
(11:02):
power they were given. Yeah, for sure, some of the
ministers who would run these places for the government were
now running them kind of like as private citizens, and
they started looting industry however they could. It just immediately started.
And then the old quota system was what they had
in place of supplying demand. But no one under the
(11:26):
Soviet regime had any idea what other stuff you could
use for supplying demand. Plus the ruble was still artificially controlled,
so they didn't have any market signals. Nobody knew what
the heck was going on at this point.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Yeah, I mean it was all brand new, like and
we'll talk about this later, but you know, you can't
just flick a switch overnight and say, all of a sudden,
we're a more free market economy and let's just see
how that works, because it had been so long, right
and so you know, entwined in the government's iron fist.
It was just a mess. And so the economy started
(12:00):
just going bananas in all sorts of weird ways, and
the government tried to rein that in by spending a
lot to try and outmaneuver all the weird things that
were happening, and it was just a big mess kind
of right off the bat.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Yes, so it was a mess, but the Soviet Union's
economy was already a mess, and I don't think just
Peristroika would have done what happened. It took glass Nos
in my opinion, to bring down the Soviet Union? Should
we keep going? Are you kidding me?
Speaker 3 (12:30):
With a cliffhanger like that?
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Okay?
Speaker 3 (12:34):
Oh man, I was like, we're taking a message break,
and you're.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Like, hey man, you convinced me immediately.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
Yeah, that's a great cliffhanger. We're going to come back
and explain what Glassnos was right after this, all right,
(13:05):
Josh T's Glasnost, and that was the second part of
the one two punch to try and introduce a new
style of government in the Soviet Union. And this, you know,
calls for this kind of started coming after the Chernobyl
cover up in eighty six, and the whole idea behind
Glasnost was more transparency. Like I said, that's what the
(13:26):
word means, so relax some of this you know, very
notorious state censorship of everything. And so once that was done,
all these social ills that plagued the Soviet Union started
to be exposed a little bit in the media, so
you know, like mass famine, the gulags, you know, Soviet
(13:50):
history basically kind of being realized for the first time
and displayed for people to make their own like judgments on.
It was a good idea, but again, once those fladgates
were open, it was turned out to not be a
very good idea.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Yes, so I believe Gorbachev was a true believer in
the idea that the Soviet Union needed greater freedom of
speech and greater freedom of the press. I think you
truly believed that this was also calculated politically as well.
And his position was, Okay, if I can have an
open conversation with the Soviet people about the need for
(14:30):
reforms and all the stuff we need to implement because
of these problems we have, they're going to support my
policies and plans and me And by doing that I
will be I will pull the levers of power away
from the conservatives who have managed to hang on to
power and keep things as they were, stagnated in trouble
(14:51):
by that censorship, by the silence, silencing of critics, by
intimidation and actual violence. If I get people talking openly
about the problems, then we can have real change. So
it was politically calculated, even though he did almost certainly
actually believe that it needed to happen too.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
Yeah, for sure. But the thing is, like what you
were saying was the conservatives had managed to hang on
to that power by keeping things as they were, which
wasn't great, but it was stable in a way like
it wasn't It wasn't chaos, it was highly controlled, and
that's the way they liked it. So to disrupt that
system was. You know, it's a pretty bold move. He himself.
(15:37):
He was part of the what was known as the Nomenclatura,
which was the sort of the upper echelon of Soviet society.
It's like the elite bureaucrats, and they had perks that
other people didn't have. Obviously. They had like you know, estates,
and they had nicer cars and things like that. And
that was not a part of the Communist experiment, the
(15:57):
communist idea or this idea of social equality. And I
think he had spent so much time in his career
in the nomenclature that he really was out of touch
with what was going on for the average sort of
day to day life of the average Soviet.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Yeah, so he knew enough to know that they were
suffering and weren't fully aware of why, but he had
no idea of just how much they're suffering. Was promoting
a desire for real, real change, Yeah, not even like
small incremental change or even semi big change like he
was proposing, but sweeping change essentially, And that's what he
(16:38):
found out once he opened up Glass nost And it
wasn't immediately adopted. I think the press actually kind of
hung back for a little while at first, like is
this trap are you trying to Are we going to
be arrested? And he was like yeah, I think he
said at some point like there's no subject that's off
the table. Everything is open for discussion, And very quickly
(16:58):
the press started to do with their posted to do.
They began reporting on the ills of Soviet society.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
Yeah, I mean it was crazy thing to do, looking back, yes,
they you know, because all of a sudden, the media
is writing about food shortages and writing about the rampant
alcoholism and the pollution and the mortality rates. We'll get
to some stats later on, but the second tier sort
of position of women in Russian and Soviet society, state crimes,
(17:30):
A lot of that was like under Stalin's rule obviously,
but you know, that stuff was still going on, and
so all of these sort of you know, true believers,
and as you'll see, like especially in Mother Russia, the
Eastern Bloc sort of had other ideas, but especially in
Mother Russia, like this is something they really believed in
and they had never received this information. So it was
(17:52):
easy if you were, you know, in the United States
or in the West, to be like they have no
idea what's going on in their own country because everything
is being censored. But they really didn't. And you know,
it's if you're living in a smaller town or a
village and you're looking around, you might see some ills,
but if you're reading about how everything is great, then
(18:14):
it's gonna you know, slant your opinion of it all.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
Yeah, and even more than that, as we'll talk about
it in a little while, a lot of Soviets identities
were rooted in the Soviet experiment that now had been
exposed as being based on torture and executions and the
starvation of millions and millions of peasants. You know, like, yeah,
that it shook them to their core. It wasn't just
(18:39):
like a loss of faith in their government. It was
a loss of faith in their own themselves, I guess
in some cases.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
Yeah, for sure. And you know, like I mentioned, especially
in Russia because that was sort of the center of
the Soviet Union. But once this happened in these formally
independent satellite states, like you said earlier, I think he
really underestimated how ready they all were to really break
free and sort of rise up. And you know, there
(19:09):
were some deep seated like ancient hostilities and rivalries among
some of these Soviet states that were forced to be
together because they were part of the Soviet Union. And
you know, a good example you found was the ethnic
Albanians and the Serbs. They had hated each other since
the fourteenth century, since the Battle of the Field of Blackbirds,
(19:30):
but as a part of the Soviet Union, they were,
you know, supposed to be fellow countrymen. So as soon
as they got the chance to hate each other again,
they did, And that's why there was so much fighting
in the Balkans, like for basically all throughout the nineties
once this happened, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Because the Soviets no longer forced them together and they
were like, okay, it's on, let's start committing atrocities, and
they all did. The other thing that really kind of
happened with class nos was the like the exposure of
Western media, Western pop culture, Like this was not something
(20:06):
that people had in the in the USSR had like
really been exposed to at this point. Did you ever
see that documentary where somebody was smuggling like Chuck Norris
movies into I think Bulgaria or something like that, and
they credited like these bootleg American movies is essentially like
(20:28):
creating like unrest among the youth and leading eventually to revolution.
Speaker 3 (20:33):
No, because they were like, Wow, there's a guy like
Chuck Norris in the world that we don't know about.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Yeah, essentially Chuck Norris Rambo. Like they went crazy for it.
And they also now saw the Western view of their
country and their culture, and they were like, wow, this's
maybe you are pretty backwards. We don't have anybody like that.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
Well, I mean, you know, and I'm not saying this
in jest because you know how much I love Billy Joel,
but that I think it was a couple of concerts
he did in the Soviet Union. Yeah, that was a
really really big deal, Like no Western artists had ever
performed there, And yeah, I think that made a big difference,
you know, as far as opening people's eyes to to
(21:16):
Western culture.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Yeah, I think Metallica did too.
Speaker 3 (21:20):
Oh did they later obviously, yeah, a little.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
Later, but you know, it might have been before the
fall of the Soviet Union, but probably right around the
time ALF. I mean, once they found out that ALF
was on TV, They're like, it's it is over for
Communist Russia.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
Well, the big thing that really allowed the satellite states
outside of Russia itself to really, I guess I feel
like they had a real chance at uprising was when
Gorbachev renounced the Brezhnev doctrine, which was the doctrine that said, Hey,
we're going to defend everybody here, We're going to defend
(22:00):
socialism with this massive army. We're all together, The Soviet
Bloc is is one, and we will all defend each other,
sort of like a NATO thing m And in its place,
Gorbachev was like, you know, you guys, pursue your own
reforms and you know, govern government with the support of
the people, like all these satellite states. And again just
(22:22):
the pedal to the metal that happened after that, and
once they knew that they didn't have Moscow's military support,
like removing that show of force that was kind of
holding everything together. So once that went away, it just
started to grumble.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Yeah, now I think you've created a really good cliffhanger. No,
so what do you say, should we take our second
break here?
Speaker 3 (22:45):
Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Okay, we're going to do that, guys.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Chuck just agree, Okay, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
So where we last left off was when Gorbachef abandoned
the Brezhnev doctrine that said we're going to show up
with our military if there's any unrest in any of
the satellite states or republics. And without that show of force,
that was probably, like you said before the break, the
(23:29):
thing that really kind of gave rise or gave support
to these nationalist movements. And each time one of the
like the satellite states. So we're focusing now on satellite states.
We should differentiate. So there were fifteen republics in the USSR.
It included like Latvia, Estonia, Turkmenistan, a bunch of others,
(23:53):
and then there were satellite states. There were ostensibly independent
countries like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, poll In, Albania, few others. Those
are considered satellite states. And you put all of them together.
So you have the USSR with the fifteen republics and
the satellite states. Now you have the Eastern Bloc and
all that's behind what they called the Iron Curtain. That
(24:14):
whole portion of the world was turned in on itself,
had turned its back on the rest of the world,
and was focused on its own socialists experiment. Aside from
helping out other countries that wanted to try their own
socialists experiments, which is why there was secret fighting in
like Nicaragua and why Cuba had missiles, nuclear missiles aimed
(24:35):
at the United States. For the most part, though, the
Eastern Bloc paid attention to itself and kept the rest
of the world.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
Out, that's right, and kept them in. But once there
was freedom of movement and travel from behind the Iron Curtain,
this was like a really really key to the weakening
of the Union. And they were like, you know what's
really nice is is Budapest And that's just you know,
a handful of hours by train into Austria. So all
(25:02):
of a sudden you had tens of thousands of East
Germans defecting. Most people wanted to stay in like in
their houses, so like people want to live where they
have their have lived their whole lives, right, So it
wasn't like everybody left like citizens of other Soviet republics.
East Germans, most of them wanted to stay in their homes,
but they wanted things to be different. So as soon
(25:23):
as sort of the door was open politically, and all
of a sudden you could vote for different candidates, like
those candidates completely swept every election that happened.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Yeah, Poland was the first one. It's also probably the
best example of them all because being in the Eastern Bloc,
there was one party. When you went to vote, you
voted for one party, and that was the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union. Even if you had an independent country,
the Communists had your country, your government on lockdown, right.
(25:57):
And at one point, as part of like this series
of decisions that just took this rolling snowball and just
turned it into an avalanche, was Gorbachev saying, no longer
are alternative party's outlawed. We can have other parties. And
that first started in Poland with the Solidarity Party, which
(26:20):
had been a trade union for a decade or so
and had turned into a populist, anti authoritarian party. And
now that it was possible for Solidarity to run against
the Communists, like you said, the board was just totally
swept by then.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
Wasn't that like Villenza? Yeah? I remember, I mean all
this stuff was on the news, but I was in
late high school into early college, and that wasn't you know,
I wasn't paying attention like I do. You know, as
you get older, I think the same as most people.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
You didn't have a Solidarity Party T shirt in the
It looked like a Smirnoff label.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
But I remember, you know, all of this stuff was
in the background, always on the news. But yeah, once
the Solidarity Party had a chance to run, it was
it was a sort of partially free election because what
they did was they said, all right, you can have
a new party, but it's not just for one hundred
percent of the available seats. The solid Solidarity Party can
have thirty five, like up to thirty five percent of
(27:21):
the seats in there, you know, the Polish equivalent of
the House of Representatives or the House of Commons. The
other sixty five percent were still reserved for the Communist Party,
so they would still hold on to power. And then
they outside a newly created Senate, so one hundred newly
created Senate seats, and Solidarity won ninety nine out of
the hundred Senate seats. The one independent that won later
(27:44):
switched to Solidarity, and they completely obviously filled the thirty
five percent allotment that they were well allotted in the House,
and the Communists were so unpopular they didn't even get
all the votes they needed to fill the other.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Six Yeah, Yeah, so Solidarity showed the rest of the
world like, like we have been under the communist thumb,
the Soviet thumb. We don't want that. Not only do
we want to be independent, we don't want to be
communists anymore. Yeah, and they weren't after that. I mean,
once Solidarity came into power, Poland very quickly was like,
(28:22):
we're not associated with them anymore. Everybody, come on over
to Poland. We have amazing sausages and all sorts of
other good things that you'll find out when you get here.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
That's right, But we're please, no jokes. We've heard about
all that stuff, but yeah, leave those at home.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Right. Our submarines do not have screen doors on them.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
That's right. I've never understood that. I've always been to
look that up on why that was a thing.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Oh, because if you like, once its submerged, all the
water would come through the screen door.
Speaker 3 (28:55):
Now I remember jokes about Polish people. I never knew
the background to that.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
I think they just got picked one of those things
where it's like, so this group has all the jokes
against them, so then you start to just think they're
all stupid, so that just begets more jokes against them.
I think it's like.
Speaker 3 (29:11):
Detroit, Yes, exactly, I'm just kidding, Detroit. We love you.
So the Berlin Wall comes down, obviously, that was a
big deal. Germany was reunified, you know, sort of been
a model of the West, and that was just like
that was less than a year after the Polish elections
(29:32):
of nineteen eighty nine, so like things were really happening
at a fast clip. The leader of Bulgaria retired, the
Czechoslovak government was replaced. The only place, kind of shockingly
that you had a bloody revolution was in Romania and
chou Chesq.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Yeah, took that happened in a few months in nineteen
eighty nine. All of that, all of those satellite states
just COMMUNI fell. So, I mean, I can't. I wish
i'd been a little older. I remember when the Berlin
Wall fell, and I was like, Mom, we gotta go,
We gotta get on a bread, we have to get there.
This is amazing. She wanted to so bad, but she
(30:13):
just we didn't.
Speaker 3 (30:15):
You're like, I've always wanted to see East Germany exactly,
and this is our only chance.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Yeah, but I wish I had been a little bit
older so it could be so I could have paid
attention to this, because I can't imagine what it was
like paying attention to this over just these few months
from the time that Poland's elections were held in June
to the end of nineteen eighty nine, like just country
after countries, communist regimes fell, and like you said, only
(30:41):
Romania's turned bloody, and you can pretty much fully blame
the Chesky regime for starting it. They started essentially, Yeah,
he was.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
The remaining dictator there, Nikolai Chochescu and his wife Elena,
who was also appointed in a high office by her husband,
so they were, you know, they were a power couple,
I guess. But they had mass protests breaking out, and
Chouceescu went to the military and he said kill them,
(31:14):
fire on these unarmed civilians. And he thought that would
have been like, all right, we're gonna quash this really quick.
But the military was like, bro, that's we're not into that.
And so they defected just like a few days after
he ordered them to fire upon them. Not only did
they not do that, they defected to the protester side,
and he and Elena saw their riding on the wall
(31:35):
and they're like, we need to get the heck out
of here. But the military caught them technically had a
military tribunal. It was pretty short form though, and they
were found guilty and executed by firing squad.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
Yeah, and strung upside down by their ankles for public viewing.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
Yeah, harsh stuff.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
There was a rumor too, do you remember hearing this
thatches sort of thatchescus were fed to dogs. Yeah, after
they were dead, And that is a rumor. From what
I can tell, it did not happen. But the reason
that rumor came about is twofold one Chilchsky was very famous,
especially in Romania, for having appointed his favorite labrador as
(32:15):
a general. Yeah, so there's a dog theme with that.
And then he was blamed specifically for the terrible problem
with feral packs of dogs what used to be family
dogs roaming Romania at times, like killing children and stuff.
Right Like, it was a bad problem, and the reason
why it existed was because he had ordered a bunch
(32:37):
of villages bulldozed so he could build these new agritechnical centers.
And then after he bulldozed them, and before he could
build the centers, he just kind of lost interest in it,
moved on, and so a lot of people lost their homes,
so did a lot of dogs. And that's where they
got their feral dog problem from. Yeah, and then I
remember this. I will never forget it. This wasn't like
(33:00):
a jog my memory. I think about this joke every
I don't know, a year and a half. I would say,
Dennis Miller, Yeah, do you remember that?
Speaker 3 (33:09):
I do.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
I was.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
I thought Dennis Miller was very, very funny when he
was the SNL news guy.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Yeah, not bad, but he was never funnier than when
he was on Monday Night football.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
Oh god, yeah, what was the chowcheska joke? So?
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Yeah, on Weekend Update on Sarah Live, like a couple
weeks after the chutchscues were executed and the rumor was
that they were fed to the dog, Dennis Miller said
that Purina had released a new product, puppy Chuchescu.
Speaker 3 (33:39):
Yeah, you remember that one.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
What happened next?
Speaker 3 (33:43):
Well, I mean, this is the end of nineteen eighty nine, basically,
and the only communist state still left west of the
Soviet Union was Albania. And you know, Gorbacheff could have
like stepped in. He had a very non interventionalist way
about him. I think he knew also that like the
(34:05):
genie was out of the bottle and like trying to
bottle it back up as impossible and resuming the Cold
War again is a bad idea, so he stayed out
of it. And you know, it felt, like you said,
in just a handful of months, like right before the
world's eyes.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Right, and so far we're talking just satellite states already independent,
ostensibly independent nations took their independence back in nineteen eighty nine.
The USSR is still together, and Gorbatrov is not pushing
for it to break up. He's kind of trying to
figure out how to balance these reforms he just introduced
(34:42):
with keeping the USSR together, and it proves impossible for him.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
Yeah, I mean, he sees what's happening all around, and
you know, he abandoned communism. Basically he voluntarily devolved power,
which again, just all these year later, it looks like
a crazy thing to do, but just seating all that
power when all they had ever known and all the
West had ever known was just just how powerful the
(35:09):
Soviet Union was and controlling everything, and to just loosen
the knot on all of that was just really a
pretty wacky, wacky thing. To do.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Yeah, I mean, especially unilatterally, I don't know quite enough
about modern Russian history to know who else, like who
his advisors and aids were. Yeah, yeah, So it basically
just seems like this is Gorbachev doing it himself. And
I'm sure he did have help, but in the end,
it was Gorbachev doing this himself, Like this wasn't some
(35:40):
coalition with other people, Like he was the head of
the Soviet the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the CPSU,
the ruling body of the entire Eastern Bloc at one
point up until very recently. He used this position as
the head of the CPSU to do all the CPSU.
(36:02):
It was as simple as that. And what's that happened?
If you don't have the party who is pushing everybody
around and censoring everything, if they don't exist anymore, now,
it's a free for all. And that was what he
did at the I think the end of nineteen ninety.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
Yeah, he created a what we would think of as
the House of reps in their Congress of People's Deputies
that was, you know, mostly kind of fairly elected, at
least compared to what it had been. He ended like
we said earlier, you know, he opened it up to
other political parties, which is just going to completely weaken
the grip of communism by virtue of doing that. And
(36:40):
then he created an office of president. He appointed himself president,
so it's not like he was elected, but this was
in March of nineteen ninety and it was a brand
new office. And you know that was that was a
big deal to have like an eventual elected president.
Speaker 2 (36:56):
It was. And the reason why he did that is
because he dissolved the Communist Party, so he couldn't be
the head of the USSR because he was the head
of the Communist Party if the Communist Party didn't exist anymore.
So now he's like I call president of the USSR.
He also introduced elections, so each of the fifteen republics
(37:17):
had what's called the Supreme Soviet, which was their own parliament,
and he said, hey, guys, why don't you start having
free elections with alternative parties legalized, and well, let's see
what happens. I'm gorbie, I'm pretty sure that the USSR
is going to want to stay together. And I hope
you didn't put any money on that, because he would
(37:37):
have lost big time.
Speaker 3 (37:39):
Yeah, and you know, we already covered kind of what
Poland kicked off. The Baltics really helped set a tone
as well. Pretty much immediately Lithuania said all right, six
we're seceding. We're not a part of the USSR anymore.
There's a March of nineteen ninety. Very quickly after lot
(38:00):
Via and Estonia said yeah, we're going to secede to
the Georgians did the Armenians did. And these were you know,
kind of small time as far as the might of
the Soviet Union, like they could have still had a
Soviet Union after this, even with these I guess secessionists.
(38:20):
But it was really Ukraine, Like Ukraine was and is
a very big and powerful country and just second after Russia.
And so that is a that's why you know, after Ukraine,
I think they held a referendum in ninety percent of
the voters voted for independence, and after Ukraine left, the
writing was really on the wall. But that's also why
(38:42):
if you just want some modern context of why Putin
has why Ukraine means so much to him personally, it
is because Putin is of the old you know, as
we'll see later, when he came into power it was
on a wave of nostalgia for the old days, and
Ukraine leaving was a real big thorn in his side
(39:04):
and just the side of sort of their history, the
Soviet history.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
Yeah, he said publicly that it's ridiculous Estonia is an
independent country. Like he does not see these as independent countries.
He sees them as republics of the Soviet Union that
should be brought back together with Russia. Right, And that's
what happened. I mean, this is so nineteen eighty nine
you saw the satellite states break out of the Eastern Bloc,
and then now nineteen ninety to nineteen ninety one, now
(39:30):
it's happening with republics like actual the actual Soviet Union
is starting to break up because the republic states are
now saying we're independent, we're not part of the USSR anymore.
And now now everyone's looking to Russia, which, being a
Cold War kid, I always basically used Russia and the
Soviet Union as interchangeable. But Russia was a republic of
(39:54):
the Soviet Union, far and away the most powerful one.
That's where the seat of Soviet government was. But it
was still a republic just like Latvia and Estonia and
so now everybody's like, Okay, what are you going to do?
You guys are going to try to carry on as
your own kind of Soviet Union, You're going to start
World War three? What's going on next? And I say,
chuck that we end this episode here.
Speaker 3 (40:16):
Yeah, it's the end of part one, everybody, And as
per tradition, we don't do listener mails at the end
of a part one. I think we just say, you know,
tune in on Thursday.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
Right, Yeah, we go out and stunned silence.
Speaker 3 (40:32):
I feel like, don't do we usually say anything? It's
been so long. Aren't you the one that handles this?
Speaker 2 (40:36):
Yeah? Yeah, I know. But it's fun watching.
Speaker 3 (40:39):
So thank you everybody, and we'll be back with part
two of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
That was great, But don't forget to tell them what
our email addresses.
Speaker 3 (40:48):
Oh do we have to do that?
Speaker 2 (40:50):
We usually do?
Speaker 3 (40:51):
All right?
Speaker 2 (40:52):
What is it?
Speaker 3 (40:52):
I Heart Stuff podcast at iHeartMedia dot com, iHeartRadio, iHeartRadio.
I see I never say it. This is your job.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
You did great?
Speaker 3 (41:01):
All right, we'll see everyone Thursday.
Speaker 1 (41:06):
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