The Decay of the Soviet Union

Abstract

The Soviet Union was a country of astonishing variety and contrasts. Generations of Communist Party bureaucrats, planners, educators, propagandists and secret policemen had tried to turn it into an ordered, standardized, logical, controlled human machine. But despite this — or perhaps because of this — beneath its drab and standardized exterior bubbled a way of life rich in its passions, options and energy. The Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania had been relatively recently incorporated into the USSR, by conquest after the Second World War. Their culture was thoroughly European, looking north and west along the Baltic and to Scandinavia. To the south, the Transcaucasians of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan kept alive traditions of clan loyalty and blood vengeance which predated the Imperial Russian conquerors of the nineteenth century and still survive to this day. To the far south-east were the Central Asian Soviet Socialist Republics of Kirghizia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.