Yuri Andropov and the Rise of Mikhail Gorbachev

Abstract

By 1979, even the most complacent members of the Soviet leadership had begun to awaken to the problems facing their regime. To a large extent this was an internal problem, yet it took events outside the USSR’s borders to bring home the scale of the danger facing them; specifically, events in Afghanistan and Poland. Afghanistan alerted the Kremlin to the threat posed by nationalism, in the non-Russian regions of the USSR in particular, while Poland raised the spectre of mass, working-class protest against hardships and mismanagement.