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 RussiaThe Berlin Blockade and the Cold WarAfter the war, the Soviet Union, United States, Great Britain, and
France divided Berlin and Germany into four zones of occupation, which led
to immediate antagonism between the Soviet and Western powers, culminating
in the Berlin blockade in 1948. The USSR's tightening control over a
cordon of Communist states, running from Poland in the north to Albania in
the south, was dubbed the “iron curtain” by Churchill and
would later lead to the Warsaw Pact. It marked the beginning of the cold
war, the simmering hostility that pitted the world's two superpowers, the
U.S. and the USSR—and their competing political
ideologies—against each other for the next 45 years. Stalin died on
March 6, 1953.
The new power emerging in the Kremlin was Nikita S. Khrushchev
(1958–1964), first secretary of the party. Khrushchev formalized the
eastern European system into a Council for Mutual Economic Assistance
(Comecon) and a Warsaw Pact Treaty Organization as a counterweight to
NATO. The Soviet Union exploded a hydrogen bomb in 1953, developed an
intercontinental ballistic missile by 1957, sent the first satellite into
space (Sputnik I) in 1957, and put Yuri Gagarin in the first orbital
flight around Earth in 1961. Khrushchev's downfall stemmed from his
decision to place Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba and then, when
challenged by the U.S., backing down and removing the weapons. He was also
blamed for the ideological break with China after 1963. Khrushchev was
forced into retirement on Oct. 15, 1964, and was replaced by Leonid I.
Brezhnev as first secretary of the party and Aleksei N. Kosygin as
premier.
U.S. president Jimmy Carter and Brezhnev signed the SALT II treaty in
Vienna on June 18, 1979, setting ceilings on each nation's arsenal of
intercontinental ballistic missiles. The U.S. Senate refused to ratify the
treaty because of the invasion of Afghanistan by Soviet troops on Dec. 27,
1979. On Nov. 10, 1982, Leonid Brezhnev died. Yuri V. Andropov, who had
formerly headed the KGB, became his successor but died less than two years
later, in Feb. 1984. Konstantin U. Chernenko, a 72-year-old party stalwart
who had been close to Brezhnev, succeeded him. After 13 months in office,
Chernenko died on March 10, 1985. Chosen to succeed him as Soviet leader
was Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who led the Soviet Union in its long-awaited
shift to a new generation of leadership. Unlike his immediate
predecessors, Gorbachev did not also assume the title of president but
wielded power from the post of party general secretary.
Gorbachev introduced sweeping political and economic reforms, bringing
glasnost
and
perestroika,
“openness” and
“restructuring,” to the Soviet system. He established much
warmer relations with the West, ended the Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan, and announced that the Warsaw Pact countries were free to
pursue their own political agendas. Gorbachev's revolutionary steps
ushered in the end of the cold war, and in 1990 he was awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize for his contributions to ending the 45-year conflict between
East and West.
The Soviet Union took much criticism in early 1986 over the April 24
meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear plant and its reluctance to give out any
information on the accident.
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