Historical Events
The Prague Spring
The Prague Spring was a reform movement in Czechoslovakia in 1968 led by Alexander Dubček. Its “socialism with a human face” — easing censorship, widening freedom of expression and movement, and economic reform — won broad popular support. But the Soviet Union defined it as a break from the bloc and, in August 1968, occupied Czechoslovakia with the armies of five Warsaw Pact states.
Somali military rule and the socialist declaration
Siad Barre’s Supreme Revolutionary Council took power in the 1969 coup and proclaimed scientific socialism in 1970. Military rulers concentrated legislative and executive authority and promoted state-led social transformation.
Détente and the SALT Negotiations
Détente and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) were a decade-long effort, from 1969 to 1979, by the United States and the Soviet Union to reduce Cold War tensions and bring the nuclear arms buildup under control. When the Soviet Union achieved strategic parity in intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with the United States in the late 1960s, both sides concluded that limits were safer than an unbounded arms race. SALT I, signed by Nixon and Brezhnev in Moscow in 1972, produced the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty restricting missile defences and an Interim Agreement freezing the number of offensive missile launchers. The SALT II negotiations that followed reached their own peak with the Vladivostok agreement of 1974 and the signing by Carter and Brezhnev in Vienna in 1979, but the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan prevented ratification by the U.S. Senate and brought détente to an end.
Madagascar’s military transition and socialist Second Republic
After 1972, Madagascar’s military governments reconsidered ties with France and inherited economic structures. Leadership changes reflected competing directions.
Establishment of the Lao PDR
In December 1975 Laos abolished the monarchy and established the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. Pathet Lao predominance displaced coalition government with a one-party state.
People’s Republic of Benin and the National Conference
Mathieu Kérékou, in power after the 1972 coup, declared Marxism-Leninism in 1974 and renamed the country the People’s Republic of Benin in 1975. One-party institutions and an expanded state sector followed.
Ethiopian revolution and the Derg power struggle
In 1974 the military Derg deposed Emperor Haile Selassie and took power. Social protest and military unrest developed into military rule and radical social reform.
The Helsinki Accords
The Helsinki Accords (August 1, 1975) were the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), signed by 35 states: 33 European nations plus the United States and Canada, in Helsinki, Finland. The Soviet Union had pursued a European security conference since 1954, seeking formal recognition of postwar borders, and the détente of the early 1970s finally brought the West to the table. After preliminary consultations in 1972 and two years of substantive negotiations in Geneva (1973 to 1975), heads of state gathered in Helsinki. The Final Act was organized into three 'baskets': political-military security (Basket I), economic and scientific cooperation (Basket II), and human rights and humanitarian cooperation (Basket III). Brezhnev believed he had secured the inviolability of frontiers, but the human rights provisions of Basket III gave dissidents across the Soviet bloc a platform grounded in commitments their own governments had signed.
Angolan independence and formation of MPLA rule
Independence from Portugal in 1975 occurred amid civil war between liberation movements and foreign military intervention. The MPLA proclaimed a people’s republic in Luanda with Agostinho Neto as president.
Democratic Kampuchea and the 1979 regime change
After taking Phnom Penh in 1975, the Khmer Rouge imposed forced urban evacuation, labor and food controls. Executions, persecution, hunger and disease caused massive loss of life.
Mozambican independence and socialist orientation
Mozambique became independent from Portugal in 1975 under FRELIMO leader Samora Machel. The government pursued changes in education, health and economic organization.
End of the Vietnam War and state reunification
The fall of Saigon ended the South Vietnamese government in 1975; the Socialist Republic of Vietnam institutionalized state reunification in 1976. Military victory and legal unification were different stages.
The Sino-Vietnamese War
After reunification in 1975 Vietnam allied with the Soviet Union, drove out ethnic Chinese and at the end of 1978 invaded Cambodia, ruled by China’s Khmer Rouge allies. Just after visiting the United States, Deng Xiaoping vowed to “teach a lesson” and on 17 February 1979 sent some 200,000 troops into northern Vietnam. The PLA took Lạng Sơn on 6 March, declared its punishment complete and withdrew by the 16th, while border clashes went on through the 1980s.
The Soviet-Afghan War
In December 1979 the Soviet Union decided on military intervention to prop up a faltering communist government in Afghanistan. Driven by Brezhnev, Andropov, Ustinov and Gromyko, the decision was conceived as a brief stabilization operation, but amid mujahideen resistance and U.S. and Pakistani support it became a decade-long war of attrition.
Reform and opening: the Deng Xiaoping era
After the arrest of the Gang of Four, Hua Guofeng’s “two whatevers” confronted Deng Xiaoping’s “seek truth from facts”, and in December 1978 the Third Plenum moved the party’s focus to economic construction. Household contracting in Anhui, the special economic zones in Guangdong, state-enterprise reform and the dual-track price system followed, while Democracy Wall and the campaigns against “bourgeois liberalisation” drew the political limits. After the retreat of 1989, Deng’s southern tour of 1992 settled the “socialist market economy”.
Solidarity and Martial Law in Poland
In the summer of 1980, a strike at the Gdańsk Lenin Shipyard against food price rises grew into a self-organised workers' movement issuing 21 demands, and the agreement signed on 31 August with the government created the Eastern Bloc's first recognised independent trade union: Solidarity (Solidarność). Within months the union enrolled 10 million members, and over sixteen months it grew from a trade union into a social movement demanding a self-governing republic. Under Soviet pressure and facing economic collapse, First Secretary Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law on 13 December 1981, installing a Military Council of National Salvation and outlawing Solidarity. Tens of thousands of troops cut communications and interned the leadership; at the Wujek coal mine, special riot police shot dead nine striking miners.
The War Scare of 1983
The War Scare of 1983 was the most dangerous US-Soviet confrontation since the Cuban Missile Crisis. It began with the Soviet Union launching Operation RYAN in 1981, the largest peacetime intelligence operation in its history to detect a Western nuclear first strike, and culminated in November 1983 when NATO's Able Archer 83 nuclear command exercise was mistaken by Soviet leaders for the real thing. Pershing II deployments, the KAL 007 shootdown, a false alarm in the Oko early-warning system that Stanislav Petrov correctly dismissed, and the Reagan administration's psychological operations and fleet exercises combined to convince Moscow that NATO was using an exercise to mask an actual attack. The Soviet 4th Air Army loaded nuclear warheads onto combat aircraft in East Germany and Poland; the 1990 PFIAB report confirmed that 'some Soviet forces were preparing to pre-empt or counterattack a NATO strike launched under cover of Able Archer.'
Perestroika and Glasnost
Becoming General Secretary in 1985, Gorbachev launched perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) to revive a stagnant economy and a rigid politics. The glasnost designed by Yakovlev lifted censorship and exposed past crimes, and Shevardnadze’s diplomacy steered the Cold War toward its end. But the reforms slipped out of control between conservatives and radicals.
The Anti-Alcohol Campaign
It was the Gorbachev leadership's first large-scale social reform, launched barely two months into his tenure. With the May 1985 measures against drunkenness and alcoholism, vodka production was cut, sale hours were restricted, and alcohol prices rose sharply. In the Politburo, Ligachev and Solomentsev pushed the campaign hardest, and amid competition to over-fulfil it, vineyards in Moldova, Crimea and Georgia were ploughed under.
The Chernobyl Disaster
On 26 April 1986, reactor no. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine exploded, spreading large amounts of radioactive material across Europe. The reflex to minimize and conceal the accident became a test for a new leadership that professed glasnost. A government commission under Ryzhkov led the response, and hundreds of thousands of liquidators were mobilized at the risk of radiation.
The New Thinking and the End of the Cold War
Gorbachev recast Soviet diplomacy under the New Thinking: nuclear war could have no winner, and security was to be gained with one's adversary, not against them. Gromyko, foreign minister for twenty-eight years, stepped aside for Shevardnadze. Through the Geneva (1985) and Reykjavik (1986) summits came the 1987 INF Treaty, the first abolition of an entire class of nuclear weapons, and in his December 1988 UN address Gorbachev announced a unilateral cut of half a million troops and freedom of choice for all nations. By February 1989 the withdrawal from Afghanistan was complete.
The Nineteenth Party Conference and the First Contested Elections
At the Nineteenth All-Union Party Conference in June 1988, Gorbachev pushed through a political reform shifting power from the party apparatus to elected soviets. For the first time in decades the conference became a stage for open debate, and Ligachev's rebuke to Yeltsin, Boris, you are wrong, became a national catchphrase. The March 1989 elections of people's deputies were the first contested elections in Soviet history. Dozens of regional party bosses lost to unknown challengers, and Yeltsin, disgraced two years earlier, returned with 89 percent of the vote in the Moscow at-large district.
The Nationalities Crisis and the Collapse of Central Authority
The sequence running from the Sumgait pogrom of 1988 to the killings in Vilnius in 1991 is the process by which the Soviet national order and Soviet central authority came apart together under perestroika. The four episodes were not of one kind. Sumgait was an anti-Armenian pogrom touched off by the Nagorno-Karabakh question and a failure of policing; Tbilisi in 1989 was the military dispersal of an unarmed national and independence movement; Baku in 1990 was a large military intervention where ethnic violence and the collapse of central power overlapped; Vilnius in 1991 was force used against the sovereign institutions of a republic that had declared independence. Yet they show one crisis. The centre could not protect people from ethnic violence, and still reached for the army whenever a republic moved politically away from it.
The Baltic Independence Movement and the Baltic Way
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania remembered their 1940 annexation under the secret protocols of the Nazi-Soviet pact, and once glasnost opened, that memory became politics. The Hirvepark rally in Tallinn in August 1987 was the first public denunciation of the protocols; in 1988 popular fronts formed in all three republics: the Rahvarinne in Estonia, the Latvian Popular Front, Sajudis in Lithuania. Grown on the tradition of song festivals, the movement was called the Singing Revolution. In November 1988 Estonia issued the first declaration of sovereignty, and on 23 August 1989, the pact's fiftieth anniversary, two million people joined hands in the Baltic Way, a human chain of six hundred kilometres linking the three capitals. That December the Congress of People's Deputies acknowledged the secret protocols existed and declared them void: the legal basis of the annexation was repudiated by Soviet hands.