I. Scan the text and explain the words in bold.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 375.

Introduction

Part I

SOVIET RUSSIA: REFORM, DECLINE, AND COLLAPSE (1953–1991)

Unit 14 (Part I)

The basic institutions of the Soviet system were conceived and built between the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 and Stalin's death in March 1953, a period of slightly more than 35 years. The country's Communist Party leadership then spent another 38 years struggling to reform those institutions to enable the Soviet system to compete with the world's modern capitalist societies. To that end the leaders had to make the economy more efficient and productive, stabilize the Communist political system, and deal with a growing number of serious social problems.

Three leadership teams with three very different approaches tried, and ultimately failed, to cope with these tasks. Between 1953 and 1964, Nikita Khrushchev directed an energetic, albeit often spasmodic and poorly conceived reform effort. With Khrushchev at the helm the Communist Party leadership ended Stalin's terror while preserving and trying to improve the basic institutions of Soviet life inherited from the Stalin era. From 1964 until 1982, the Communist Party leadership headed by Leonid Brezhnev rejected many of Khrushchev's reforms as potentially destabilizing and relied instead on the status quo, tinkering here and there in the hope that stability was the best solution to the country's problems.

Meanwhile, under both sets of leaders the Soviet Union competed for world influence with the United States and its allies in the Cold War. It was an extremely expensive and burdensome struggle whose inherent dangers were exponentially compounded by the Soviet-American nuclear arms race it produced.

After a short transition period, beginning in 1985 the dynamic new leader Mikhail Gorbachev, having concluded that the Soviet Union's problems were turning into a systemic crisis, returned the party to the path of reform. Gorbachev went far beyond anything Khrushchev had contemplated as he tried to overhaul the Soviet system while preserving its fundamental socialist framework. That radical effort proved to be more than the system could stand, and, rather than fixing what was broken, it unleashed forces that caused the Soviet Union to collapse.

II. Read the text again and discuss the following questions:

1. Why did the country's Communist Party leadership struggle to reform the institutions built between the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 and Stalin's death in March 1953? What had to be done to that end?

2. What was the essence of Nikita Khrushchev's policy? What kind of reform effort was directed by him?

3. What country did the Soviet Union compete with? How can that struggle be characterized?

4. What type of leadership was chosen by Mikhail Gorbachev? What did his policy lead to?