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The Bolsheviks, Soviet Union & its End

In 1990, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics officially disbanded. Since 1990, the Soviet Union has passed into a short-lived commonwealth and finally into a region of independent states still in large part influenced by Russian hegemony in economic development, size, and communications. The Soviet Army is disbanded, and occupation troops no longer keep order in Eurasia, but ever-weakening Belarus applied for reunion, and Chechnia found that bombs are still the classic Russian answer to dissidence.

The Soviet Union may have passed, but the Soviet system remains. It is not a political system; rather, it is and was an intrinsically Russian system of autocratic rule (Lowenhardt 52-53). Styled Soviet by the Bolsheviks in 1917, it was the natural 20th century evolution of Czarist Russia. Its current incarnation as a democratic political system is still safely within the autocratic mold of Russian tradition. What changed with the October Revolution on through the perestroika era of last-stand Sovietism continuing still today was only the succession of subsystems, each bearing the stamp of a different autocratic leader: Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Boris Yeltsin (Brzezinski 69). The Czarist system was hereditary; these latter-day autocrats each had a specific reason behind their ascent to power. When that reason ceased to matter as the dominant issue, that autocrat's subsystem deteriorated or was pushed aside, victim of its own success in achieving its goal.

As Russia entered World War I, the Czar's empire stretched to great, insupportable lengths from the Baltic to the Black Sea, from mid-Poland to an island only 50 miles distant from Alaska. It was a centralized hegemony and largely feudal: outside of a few cities, the Industrial Revolution that had embraced Western Europe for two centuries was only just penetrating Russia (Thompson 168-181). Roads, commu...

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The Bolsheviks, Soviet Union & its End. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 20:08, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1691996.html