Page 71 - The Baltic Capitals & St. Petersburg

seize dictatorial control. General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and other leading politicians
organized an anti-Beria alliance and staged a coup d’état. Beria was arrested in June of 1953
and executed later that year; Khrushchev became the undisputed leader of the USSR.

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reforms in agriculture and administration, however, were generally unproductive, and foreign
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when he began installing nuclear missiles in Cuba (after the United States installed Jupiter
missiles in Turkey which nearly provoked a war with the Soviet Union).

Following the ousting of Khrushchev, another period of rule by collective leadership ensued,
lasting until Leonid Brezhnev established himself in the early 1970s as the pre-eminent
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development of the Soviet Union. In contrast to the revolutionary spirit that accompanied
the birth of the Soviet Union, the prevailing mood of the Soviet leadership at the time of
Brezhnev’s death in 1982 was one of aversion to change.

In the mid 1980s, the reform-minded Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. He introduced the
landmark policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), in an attempt to
modernize Soviet communism. Glasnost meant that the harsh restrictions on free speech
that had characterized most of the Soviet Union’s existence were removed, and open political
discourse and criticism of the government became possible again. Perestroika meant sweeping
economic reforms designed to decentralize the planning of the Soviet economy. However, his
initiatives provoked strong resentment amongst conservative elements of the government, and
an unsuccessful military coup that attempted to remove Gorbachev from power instead led to
the collapse of the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin came to power and declared the end of exclusive
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dissolved in December of 1991.

Post-Soviet Russia

Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin had been elected President of Russia
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of the USSR, the Russian economy went through a crisis. Russia took up the responsibility
for settling the USSR’s external debts, even though its population made up just half of the
population of the USSR at the time of its dissolution. The largest state enterprises (petroleum,
metallurgy, and the like) were controversially privatized for the small sum of $US 600 million,
far less than they were worth, while the majority of population plunged into poverty.
Yeltsin disbanded the Supreme Soviet and the Congress of People’s Deputies by decree, which
was illegal under the constitution. On the same day there was a military showdown, the
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