After Andropov’s death fifteen months after his appointment, an even older leader, Konstantin Chernenko, 72, was elected to the General Secretariat. His government lasted just over a year until his death thirteen months later, on March 10, 1985. Karl Marx A German-born revolutionary scientist, philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and socialist. Through his theories of alienation, value, commercial fetishism and surplus value, he argued that capitalism facilitated social relations and ideology through commodification, inequality and labor exploitation.
The Cultural Revolution caused a complete collapse of the Sino-Soviet relations, as Moscow considered that event a simple madness. The Red Guard denounced the Soviet Union and the entire Eastern Bloc as revisionists who pursued false socialism and conspired with the forces of imperialism. Brezhnev was called “the new Hitler” and the Soviets as war-fighters who ignored the standard of living of their people in favor of military spending. In 1968, Lin Biao, the Chinese defense minister, claimed that the Soviet Union was preparing for a war against China.
The war exhausted economic resources and accompanied an escalation in US military aid to Mujahideen fighters. At the age of 54, Mikhail Gorbachev was elected a member of the General Secretariat by the Politburo on March 11, 1985. In May 1985, Gorbachev publicly admitted that economic development has slowed down and that the standard of living is insufficient because he was the first Soviet leader to do so while embarking on a series of fundamental reforms. From 1986 to about 1988, it dismantled central planning, allowed state-owned Soviet collectibles companies to establish their own products, allowed private investment in companies that previously did not have a private property license, and allowed foreign investment, among other things. It also opened up management and decision-making within the Soviet Union and allowed for further discussion and public criticism, along with a warming up of relations with the West. This dual policy was known as perestroika (which literally means “reconstruction”, although it varies) and glasnost (“openness” and “transparency”).
The Russian Federation has taken over the rights and obligations of the Soviet Union and is recognized as its continuing legal personality in world affairs. The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was a socialist state that spread all over Europe and Asia during its existence from 1922 to 1991. It was nominally a federal union of several national republics; In practice, the government and the economy were highly centralized until later years.
Brezhnev was not fueled by the desire to leave a mark on history, but rather weakened Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin’s prestige. The constitution was maintained in Brezhnev’s political style and was not anti-Stalinist or neo-Stalinist, but remained on the aisle, according to most of the same principles and ideas as the previous constitutions. The most striking difference was that it codified the development changes that the Soviet Union had undergone since the 1936 Constitution was drafted. In this sense, the resulting document can be seen as evidence of the performance and limits of de-stalinization. It improved the state of the individual in all matters of life, while strengthening the party’s power control.
Soviet policy on the Eastern Bloc did not change much with the replacement of Khrushchev, as the states of Eastern Europe were seen as an essential buffer zone to distance NATO from the borders of the Soviet Union. The Brezhnev regime inherited a skeptical attitude towards the reform policy that became more radical after the Prague Spring in 1968. János Kádár, the leader of Hungary, has implemented a number of reforms similar to Alexei Kosygin’s economic reform in 1965. Reform measures, called the new economic mechanism, were introduced during the Khrushchev government in Hungary and were protected by Kosygin in the post-Khrushchev era.
Environmental damage and pollution became a growing problem at all costs due to the development policy of the Soviet government, and some parts of the country, such as the Kazakhstan SSR, suffered mainly from use as a nuclear weapons testing ground. While Soviet citizens had a higher average life expectancy in 1962 than the United States, it had fallen by nearly five years in 1982. Podgorny’s fall was not seen as the end of collective leadership, and Suslov continued to write several ideological documents about it. In 1978, a year after Podgorny’s retirement, Suslov referred to collective leadership in his ideological works. Around this time, Kirilenko’s power and prestige within the Soviet leadership began to decline. By the end of the period, Brezhnev was even considered too old to simultaneously perform all functions of head of state by his colleagues.
The regime loosened the emphasis on socialist realism; For example, many protagonists of the novels by author Yury Trifonov were concerned about the problems of everyday life rather than building socialism. The underground dissident literature, known as samizdat, developed during this late period. In architecture, the Khrushchev era focused primarily on functional design rather than the highly decorated style of Stalin’s time.
] in large higher education institutions that subject Jewish applicants to stricter entrance exams. The Brezhnev era also introduced a rule requiring all university applicants to submit a reference from the local secretary of the Komsomol party. According to 1986 statistics, the number of higher education students per population was 10,000 to 181 for the USSR, compared to 517 for the United States