Page 343 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

1644 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

The Novgorod 1000th
anniversary monument
photographed between
1860 and 1880.

establish its links with earlier
autocracy. Moreover, under
conditions of monolithic rule,
the heightened international
insecurity of the 1930s, and
especially the Great Patriotic
War (the Russian struggle
against the World War II Nazi
offensive of 1941–1945),
non-Russian elites and, in the
case of the Crimean Tartars
and Kalmucks, whole peoples
were regarded as unreliable,
and viciously persecuted, while Great Russian culture by the United States. Because it had now emerged as a
and Russification were promoted as important mobi- predominately urban country, its development model
lizing forces. likewise proved attractive to many emerging states of the
Third World, especially those ruled by native revolution-
Postwar Superpower ary movements (Yugoslavia, China, North Korea, Cuba,
and Beyond Vietnam). The Soviet Union also supported non-
The emergence of the USSR as a superpower in the sec- Communist clients in Africa, the Middle East, and South
ond half of the twentieth century has led some scholars Asia. Soviet leaders attempted to develop a socialist divi-
to regard the Soviet empire as the culmination of a sin- sion of labor within its sphere of influence, although in
gularly successful and uniquely Russian alternative practice, exchanges often amounted to colonialist under-
modernity. In the 1930s, Stalin oversaw the mobilization development (as in cotton-growing Uzbekistan) and
of the USSR’s vast resources in the construction of a transfers of military technology.
modern industrial base, and in achieving spectacular Nevertheless, the realities of being an empire in the
rates of economic growth. These factors enabled the twentieth century weighed upon the Soviet Union to a
Soviet Union to defeat Nazi Germany in World War II much greater degree than its leaders or totalitarian theo-
and subsequently to become a nuclear power and the rists realized. Its success during the Cold War was largely
main strategic competitor of the United States (though a conjunctural—a product of the temporary vacuum cre-
de facto junior partner in the American-led world order). ated by the wartime destruction in Europe and Japan.The
In the wake of the war, the USSR reincorporated the Soviet “command-administrative” system proved inca-
Baltics, the western parts of Ukraine and Belorussia, and pable of long-term competition with Western and Asian
Bessarabia, and conquered East Prussia. Its newly economies under the conditions of “peaceful coexistence”
acquired string of satellite states in Eastern and Central promoted by Stalin’s successors. The stagnation of
Europe, organized on the Soviet model, paralleled the “socialist development,” partial cultural liberalization,
more successful East Asian single-party regimes—Japan, the exposing of Stalinist crimes, and increased contacts
Taiwan, and South Korea— constructed at the same time with the outside world had the effect of demoralizing