Centenary of the USSR: experts explain the rise and fall of one of the powers of the bipolar world.
In an interview with Sputnik Brazil, experts explain what the Soviet Union was and what it represented for history throughout the 20th century.
Sputnik - The Soviet Union would have turned 100 this Friday (30), if it still existed. On that date, in 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was officially founded, encompassing 15 countries: Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.
To understand what the Soviet Union was and what it represented for history throughout the 20th century, Sputnik Brazil spoke with Cesar Albuquerque, a researcher of contemporary history at the University of São Paulo (USP), with an emphasis on the processes and transformations of the Soviet Union; and Rodrigo Ianhez, a historian trained at Moscow State University and a specialist in the history of the Soviet Union.
Ianhez points out that the USSR was founded at the very end of 1922, that is, "right at the end of the Russian Civil War".
"A civil war that involved all the countries of the former Russian Empire and interventions from various international powers. And in the wake of the First World War and this civil war, we find a country in a state that can be classified as calamitous."
He adds that it was quite impressive the leap the USSR managed to make in less than two decades, going from a calamitous situation to becoming one of the main players on the global stage.
"About two decades after the creation of the Soviet state, we see a country rising as a global power, and after the Second World War, undoubtedly, it establishes itself as one of the powers that creates a new bipolar world order."
Cesar Albuquerque, in turn, points out that the USSR was founded in 1922, but its roots lie in the Russian Revolution of 1917.
"Until the end of 1921, there was the so-called Civil War, an internal conflict in the defunct Russian Empire. And with the Bolsheviks coming to power, there was a reaction from reactionary forces linked to the Tsarist regime and supported by landowners, sectors of the economic elite, and foreign forces. When the revolution broke out, the Russian troops decided to leave the First World War. With the end of the Civil War and the consolidation of the Bolsheviks in power, from 1921 onwards, the USSR was created, which changed the official configuration of the former Russian Empire, which was a unitary state, and created a structure closer to a federation. The arrival of the USSR created a global geopolitical configuration."
When asked about which period could be considered the peak of the USSR, Ianhez points to "the mid-1970s".
"If we're going to talk about economic growth rates, the USSR had a record of very high growth. From 1930 until the 1970s, with rates of 10%. Today, what we see in Chinese growth is what the USSR had regularly for 40 years," says the expert.
Both experts point out that participation in World War II, which was not initially part of the Soviet plans, was one of the greatest battles won by the USSR.
"The USSR adopted a position of distancing itself from the conflict. It did not enter in 1938 and 1939 initially because it understood that this conflict was part of the capitalist world. That was the official Soviet discourse. The USSR was in a process of development, focusing its resources on industrialization, and did not want to divert its resources to focus on a conflict," says Albuquerque.
He adds that the situation changes when "German troops invade Soviet territory, initiating the campaign to reach Moscow." "The USSR's entry is a result of German aggression, and the USSR becomes an ally of the USA, England, and France, joining the alliance against the Axis."
Ianhez emphasizes that, "if we consider the major global actors in the fight against Nazism, the greatest of them was, without a doubt, the USSR."
"In the USSR, the Great Patriotic War has a very emotional element for all Soviet republics, because we are talking about families who had their great-grandparents and grandparents involved in this conflict."
He adds that, in the USSR, "this period, from June 1941, when the Germans invaded the USSR, until the day of victory in May 1945, was treated as the Great Patriotic War."
Finally, the experts analyze what led a power of such importance on the international stage to collapse.
According to Albuquerque, the decisive moment for the fall was the year 1980, "the moment when reform entered the agenda of Soviet leadership."
"There were more intense experiments in the early years, especially after the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982, and already in 1984 with Yuri Andropov. And they gained centrality from the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. The reforms known as Perestroika initially focused not on the deconstruction of the economic model itself, but on a reform, as the word itself means, in the sense of giving it greater flexibility, adopting measures linked to what is often called the market mechanism. Common structures in the market economy."
Ianhez, in turn, concludes by saying he believes the collapse could have been avoided. "An American diplomat or general says that if Yuri Andropov had been 15 years younger, perhaps we would still have the USSR today. What does he mean? He means that the end wasn't inevitable. There was a possibility of carrying out reforms that would have actually allowed the survival of this Soviet socialist system," the expert concludes.
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