The USSR and post-Soviet Russia (1945–2020)

1945 — the USSR emerged victorious but devastated; Stalin ruled until his death in March 1953.

Stalin's post-war reconstruction plan; prioritised heavy industry over consumer goods, rebuilt factories fast but kept living standards low.

Many were treated as traitors under Stalin's order that surrender was betrayal; sent to filtration camps, and thousands ended up in the Gulag.

A purge of Leningrad Communist Party leaders, several executed; showed Stalin's paranoia and terror continued after the war.

Stalin's accusation that Jewish doctors were plotting to kill Soviet leaders; part of rising antisemitism and paranoia just before his death.

Khrushchev's speech to the 20th Party Congress denouncing Stalin's cult of personality and crimes, kept from the public but leaked internationally.

Khrushchev's process of reducing Stalin's image and legacy: renaming cities, releasing Gulag prisoners, reforming the party after 1956.

Khrushchev's scheme to plough huge new areas of Kazakhstan/Siberia for grain; strong early yields, but soil erosion caused later failures.

Sputnik 1 (1957), first satellite; Yuri Gagarin (1961), first human in orbit — both under Khrushchev, boosting Soviet prestige.

October 1964 — ousted in a bloodless Politburo coup, replaced by Leonid Brezhnev; officially retired for 'health reasons'.

Erratic policymaking (failed Virgin Lands harvests, farm reorganisations) plus humiliation abroad (Cuban Missile Crisis climbdown, 1962) and colleagues resenting his unpredictable style.

Stalin used mass terror/Gulag to control the party (Leningrad Affair, Doctors' Plot); Khrushchev denounced this terror and released many prisoners, though he still purged rivals politically, not violently.

October 1964 — replaced by Alexei Kosygin (Premier) and Leonid Brezhnev (General Secretary).

Give factory managers more autonomy and judge them on profit/sales rather than just output quotas, to make the economy more efficient.

Central planners kept overruling local decisions, prices stayed fixed by the state, and post-1968 Prague Spring fears made the leadership nervous about any loosening of control.

The privileged class of senior Communist Party officials who filled key approved posts across the USSR and enjoyed special access to goods, housing and healthcare.

The term historians use for the Brezhnev era (1964–1982) — slow economic and political decline hidden beneath a surface of outward stability.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn — exiled abroad in 1974. Andrei Sakharov — sent into internal exile in Gorky in 1980.

Declaring dissidents mentally ill and committing them to psychiatric hospitals to silence them without a public political trial.

March 1985, aged 54 — the youngest Soviet leader in decades.

Perestroika = economic restructuring (enterprise autonomy, limited private cooperatives). Glasnost = political openness (relaxed censorship, freer public debate). Both were meant to renew the system but instead exposed its weaknesses.

The first genuinely competitive Soviet elections since 1917; multiple candidates could stand, and reformers/critics won seats in nationally televised proceedings.

Hardliners placed Gorbachev under house arrest (19 Aug 1991) fearing his new Union Treaty; Yeltsin rallied resistance from atop a tank in Moscow; the coup collapsed within three days, fatally weakening Gorbachev's authority.

8 December 1991 — Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Belavezha Accords; Gorbachev resigned 25 December 1991 as the Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin.

Yeltsin's rapid 1992 removal of Soviet price controls and subsidies to force an immediate transition to a market economy, causing severe inflation and hardship.

Parliament tried to impeach Yeltsin; he ordered tanks to shell the parliament building (White House), killing over 100 — resolved with a new constitution giving the president sweeping powers.

A 1995–96 scheme where bankers lent the cash-strapped government money in exchange for shares in valuable state companies; when the state defaulted, bankers kept the firms cheaply — this created the oligarchs.

Oligarch-owned media ran relentless pro-Yeltsin coverage and oligarchs personally funded his campaign in exchange for future favours.

Russia invaded to crush Chechen independence but was fought to a standstill; the 1996 Khasavyurt Accord saw Russia withdraw, a major humiliation for Yeltsin.

Launched in 1999 after apartment bombings blamed on Chechen militants, it was led by Putin as prime minister and let him present himself as the strong leader Yeltsin never was — his launchpad to power.

Putin, barred from a third consecutive presidential term, became prime minister while ally Dmitry Medvedev served as president — widely seen as Putin retaining real power before returning as president in 2012.

Journalist Anna Politkovskaya (murdered 2006), opposition leader Boris Nemtsov (assassinated 2015), and Alexei Navalny (poisoned 2020, later imprisoned) — all critics of Putin's government.

He let them keep their wealth if they stayed out of politics; those who defied him, like Khodorkovsky (arrested 2003), lost their companies and freedom.

Yeltsin allowed regions significant autonomy amid state weakness; Putin reversed this, creating federal districts with his own appointees and stripping governors of national political power.

Both show Putin using force against former Soviet states drifting toward the West: war with Georgia over separatist regions (2008), and annexation of Crimea plus backing Donbas separatists in Ukraine (2014).

Rising global oil and gas prices funded rising wages, debt repayment and a growing middle class, contrasting sharply with the economic collapse of the Yeltsin years.