History Sphere Podcast

Boris Yeltsin, though he was once overwhelmingly popular, is today remembered by most Russians as the corrupt leader responsible for Russia's degradation in the 1990's. His real legacy is actually significantly more complicated. Without Yeltsin, the Soviet Union would not have collapsed the way it did, and modern Russia would look very different.

Throughout the late 1980's and early 1990's, Glasnost awakened an irrepressible movement for independence in the Baltic States. In March 1990, Lithuania became the first Soviet Republic to formally declare independence from the USSR, precipitating a crisis.

The Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were the smallest republics of the USSR, yet the international politics concerning them are among the most far-reaching consequences of the USSR's disintegration. An understanding of their history is therefore crucial understanding the decline and fall of the Soviet Union.

The Romanian Revolution of 1989 capped of a year of tumultuous change across Eastern Europe. Its brutal conclusion marked the end of the Communist Era in Eastern Europe.

Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution is often overshadowed by the dramatic fall of the Berlin Wall, which took place only a few days earlier. However, it was a deeply fascinating chapter, and an important domino in the fall of Eastern Bloc Communism.

On November 9, 1989, a series of blunders by the East German Communist regime set in motion a chain reaction of events that led to the fall of the most infamous symbol of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall.

In the late summer and fall of 1989, upon receiving news of the reforms there, huge numbers of East Germans made their way to Hungary hoping to escape across the border to Austria and on to West Germany. The ensuing refugee crisis initiated a series of events that forced the Communist regime in East Germany into a struggle for its very survival.

The partition of Germany was never meant to be permanent, but materialized by accident as a practical solution to the unbridgeable divide between the Soviets and their erstwhile Western allies on what to do with their defeated German enemies in the wake of the Second World War. This divide placed Germany on the front line of the Cold War for more than four decades.

After 1956, the Communist leaders of Hungary elected to rule with a softer touch than was employed elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Hungary became just the second domino to fall in the series of revolutions that spread across Eastern and Central Europe in 1989.

In the summer of 1980, the workers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Poland went on strike to demand the reinstatement of a fired coworker and the recognition of their independent trade union. They were soon joined by workers around the country. What began as a relatively moderate labor movement soon transformed into a social and political revolution that would unravel Communism in Poland.

In addition to the widespread loss of faith in the Soviet system by ordinary citizens as a result of the Chernobyl disaster, by 1987, the Soviet Union also faced a deepening economic crisis. The reforms of Perestroika were an attempt to remake this failing system and save the USSR.

The initial response of the Soviet government to the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl was the perfect storm of incompetence, callousness, and shameless lies. This bungled exposed the flaws in the Soviet system its own people and to the wider world.

In the early morning hours of April 26, 1986, reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station suffered a catastrophic failure when the poor decisions of the plant's electrical engineers combined with a critical design flaw in the reactor. The result was the worst nuclear accident in history.

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev did not yet have the political capital or the right people in place to enact his bold domestic reforms. However, in the realm of foreign policy, he was able to make a splash more quickly.

Mikhail Gorbachev was a natural leader and a skilled administrator, but little about his early life led people to believe that he would usher in an era of revolutionary change when he became General Secretary in March 1985.

The period between the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982 and the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 is often glossed over in histories of the Soviet Union. Yet, much of what happened in this time period provides vital context for the turmoil that would rock the USSR in the coming decade.

The Guerilla forces who faced the Red Army in Afghanistan have been defined in various lights. To some, they were the heroic defenders of Afghanistan's freedom. To others, they were bloodthirsty terrorists. In truth, they were mostly ordinary people forced to live in extraordinary and difficult times.

The war in Afghanistan was a bridge between the old Soviet Union and the new Russia. The soldiers of the Red Army who fought in it came from every republic and region of the USSR, and the war left an indelible mark on those who survived.

Between 1973 and 1979, there were three violent coups in Afghanistan, generating a crisis that culminated in the full-scale Soviet invasion of the country. It would be a war with few, if any, redeeming qualities. There were no good guys and everybody lost.