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Afghanistan
{{Infobox country
http://wn.com/Afghanistan -
Albania
Albania ( , , Gheg Albanian: Shqipnia/Shqypnia), officially known as the Republic of Albania (, pronounced ), is a country in South Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Montenegro to the northwest, Kosovo to the northeast, the Republic of Macedonia to the east and Greece to the south and southeast. It has a coast on the Adriatic Sea to the west, and on the Ionian Sea to the southwest. It is less than from Italy, across the Strait of Otranto which links the Adriatic Sea to the Ionian Sea.
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Arctic Ocean
The Arctic Ocean, located in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Arctic north polar region, is the smallest, and shallowest of the world's five major oceanic divisions. The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) recognizes it as an ocean, although some oceanographers call it the Arctic Mediterranean Sea or simply the Arctic Sea, classifying it as one of the mediterranean seas of the Atlantic Ocean. Alternatively, the Arctic Ocean can be seen as the northernmost lobe of the all-encompassing World Ocean.
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Armenia
http://wn.com/Armenia -
Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan ( ; ), officially the Republic of Azerbaijan (), is one of the six independent Turkic states in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Eastern Europe and Western Asia, it is bounded by the Caspian Sea to the east, Russia to the north, Georgia to the northwest, Armenia to the west, and Iran to the south.
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Azerbaijan SSR
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Battle of Stalingrad
The Battle of Stalingrad was a major battle of World War II in which Germany and its allies fought the Soviet Union for control of the city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) in southwestern Russia. It took place between 17 July 1942 and 2 February 1943. The battle's outcome was disastrous for Germany, making its victory in the East impossible. The battle marked the turning of the tide of war in favour of the Allies. Contemporaries described the Soviet victory at Stalingrad as salvation of European civilization.
http://wn.com/Battle_of_Stalingrad -
Belarus
Belarus, ( ; , ), officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered clockwise by Russia to the northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno (Hrodna), Gomel (Homiel), Mogilev (Mahilyow) and Vitebsk (Viciebsk). Forty percent of its is forested, and its strongest economic sectors are agriculture and manufacturing.
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Belavezha Accords
The Belavezha Accords (, ,) is the agreement which declared the Soviet Union effectively dissolved and established the Commonwealth of Independent States in its place. It was signed at the state dacha near Viskuli in Belovezhskaya Pushcha on December 8, 1991, by the leaders of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine.
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Bering Strait
[[Image:dateliner cam.jpg|thumb|200px|right|[http://209.165.175.132/sample/LvAppl/lvappl.htm A US-based webcam] providing a view across the Bering Strait]]
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Berlin Wall
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British Empire
The British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom. It originated with the overseas colonies and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. At its height it was the largest empire in history and, for over a century, was the foremost global power. By 1922 the British Empire held sway over about 458 million people, one-quarter of the world's population at the time, and covered more than 13 million square miles (34 million km2), almost a quarter of the Earth's total land area. As a result, its political, linguistic and cultural legacy is widespread. At the peak of its power, it was often said that "the sun never sets on the British Empire" because its span across the globe ensured that the sun was always shining on at least one of its numerous territories.
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Caucasus Mountains
The Caucasus Mountains are a mountain system in Eurasia between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea in the Caucasus region ( ).
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China
China is seen variously as an ancient civilization extending over a large area in East Asia, a nation and/or a multinational entity.
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Cuba
The Republic of Cuba (; , ) is an island country in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos.
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Czechoslovakia
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Demography of Russia
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East Germany
The German Democratic Republic (GDR; German: Deutsche Demokratische Republik or DDR), informally called East Germany by the West, was the socialist state established in 1949 in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany and in the East Berlin portion of the Allied-occupied capital city. The German Democratic Republic, which consisted geographically of northeast Germany rather than all of eastern Germany, had an area of 107,771 km2. (41,610 mi.2), bordering Czechoslovakia in the south, West Germany (officially: Federal Republic of Germany) in the south and west, the Baltic Sea to the north, and Poland in the east.
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East Prussia
http://wn.com/East_Prussia -
Estonian SSR
http://wn.com/Estonian_SSR -
Eurasian Union
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Finland
Finland (pronounced ), officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden on the west, Norway on the north and Russia on the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.
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Geography of Russia
The geography of Russia entails the physical and human geography of Russia, a country extending over much of northern Eurasia. Comprising much of eastern Europe and northern Asia, it is the world's largest country in total area. Due to its size, Russia displays both monotony and diversity. As with its topography, its climates, vegetation, and soils span vast distances. From north to south the East European Plain is clad sequentially in tundra, coniferous forest (taiga), mixed and broad-leaf forests, grassland (steppe), and semi-desert (fringing the Caspian Sea) as the changes in vegetation reflect the changes in climate. Siberia supports a similar sequence but is taiga. The country contains 40 UNESCO Biosphere reserves.
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Georgia (country)
http://wn.com/Georgia_(country) -
Hungary
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Iran
Iran ( ), officially the Islamic Republic of Iran is a country in Central Eurasia and Western Asia. The name Iran has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was also known to the western world as Persia. Both Persia and Iran are used interchangeably in cultural contexts; however, Iran is the name used officially in political contexts.
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Irtysh
http://wn.com/Irtysh -
Kazakhstan
http://wn.com/Kazakhstan -
Kirghiz SSR
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Kulak
http://wn.com/Kulak -
Laos
Laos (, , or ), officially the '''Lao People's Democratic Republic''', is a landlocked country in Southeast Asia, bordered by Burma and People's Republic of China to the northwest, Vietnam to the east, Cambodia to the south and Thailand to the west.
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Latvia
Latvia (; ), officially the Republic of Latvia () is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by Estonia (343 km), to the south by Lithuania (588 km), to the east by the Russian Federation (276 km), and to the southeast by Belarus (141 km). Across the Baltic Sea to the west lies Sweden. The territory of Latvia covers and it has a temperate seasonal climate.
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Leningrad
http://wn.com/Leningrad -
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and number of books. The head of the Library is the Librarian of Congress, currently James H. Billington.
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Lithuania
Lithuania (, U.S. usually ; ), officially the Republic of Lithuania () is a country in Northern Europe, the southernmost of the three Baltic states. Situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, it shares borders with Latvia to the north, Belarus to the southeast, Poland, and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad to the southwest.
http://wn.com/Lithuania -
Moldova
Moldova , officially the Republic of Moldova (Moldovan/) is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, located between Romania to the west and Ukraine to the north, east and south. It declared itself an independent state with the same boundaries as the preceding Moldovan SSR in 1991, as part of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. A strip of Moldova's internationally recognized territory on the east bank of the river Dniester has been under the de facto control of the breakaway government of Transnistria since 1990.
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Mongolia
Mongolia (; ) is a landlocked country in East and Central Asia. It is bordered by Russia to the north and the People's Republic of China to the south, east and west. Although Mongolia does not share a border with Kazakhstan, its western-most point is only from Kazakhstan's eastern tip. Ulaanbaatar, the capital and largest city, is home to about 38% of the population. Mongolia's political system is a parliamentary republic.
http://wn.com/Mongolia -
Moscow
Moscow ( or ; ; see also ) is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the world, a global city. Moscow is the most populous city on the continent of Europe and the seventh largest city proper in the world, a megacity. The population of Moscow (as of 1 January 2010) is 10,563,038.
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Nazi Germany
http://wn.com/Nazi_Germany -
NKVD
The '''People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs' ( Narodnyy komissariat vnutrennikh del''), abbreviated NKVD ( ) was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Stalin.
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North Korea
http://wn.com/North_Korea -
North Vietnam
North Vietnam, also called the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) (), was a communist state that ruled the northern half of Vietnam from 1954 until 1976 following the Geneva Conference and laid claim to all of Vietnam from 1945 to 1954 during the First Indochina War, during which they controlled pockets of territory throughout the country.
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Norway
http://wn.com/Norway -
Poland
Poland (), officially the Republic of Poland (Rzeczpospolita Polska), is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north. The total area of Poland is , making it the 69th largest country in the world and the 9th largest in Europe. Poland has a population of over 38 million people, which makes it the 34th most populous country in the world and the sixth most populous member of the European Union, being its most populous Slavic member.
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Poznań 1956 protests
http://wn.com/Poznań_1956_protests -
Romania
Romania ( ; dated: Rumania; ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, north of the Balkan Peninsula, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea. Romania shares a border with Hungary and Serbia to the west, Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova to the northeast, and Bulgaria to the south.
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Russia
Russia (; ), also officially known as the Russian Federation (), is a state in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects. From northwest to southeast, Russia shares borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland (both via Kaliningrad Oblast), Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, the People's Republic of China, Mongolia, and North Korea. It also has maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk and the United States by the Bering Strait. At , Russia is the largest country in the world, covering more than a ninth of the Earth's land area. Russia is also the ninth most populous nation with 142 million people. It extends across the whole of northern Asia and 40% of Europe, spanning 9 time zones and incorporating a wide range of environments and landforms. Russia has the world's largest reserves of mineral and energy resources. It has the world's largest forest reserves and its lakes contain approximately one-quarter of the world's fresh water.
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Saint Petersburg
http://wn.com/Saint_Petersburg -
Saudi Arabia
http://wn.com/Saudi_Arabia -
Siberia
Siberia ( ), is a vast region, constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union (USSR) from its beginning, as the preceding Russian Empire conquered it in the 16th century.
http://wn.com/Siberia -
Somalia
Somalia ( ; ; ), officially the Republic of Somalia (, ) and formerly known as the Somali Democratic Republic under communist rule, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is bordered by Djibouti to the northwest, Kenya to the southwest, the Gulf of Aden with Yemen to the north, the Indian Ocean to the east, and Ethiopia to the west. With the longest coastline on the continent, its terrain consists mainly of plateaus, plains and highlands.
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South Yemen
http://wn.com/South_Yemen -
Soviet Union
http://wn.com/Soviet_Union -
Spain under Franco
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Tajik SSR
http://wn.com/Tajik_SSR -
Tajikistan
Tajikistan ( or ; ), officially the Republic of Tajikistan (, Jumhurii Tojikiston; , Respublika Tadzhikistan; Jomhuri-ye Tajikestan), is a mountainous landlocked country in Central Asia. Afghanistan borders it to the south, Uzbekistan to the west, Kyrgyzstan to the north, and People's Republic of China to the east. Tajikistan also lies adjacent to Pakistan and the Gilgit-Baltistan region, separated by the narrow Wakhan Corridor.
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Tsardom of Russia
http://wn.com/Tsardom_of_Russia -
Turkey
Turkey (), known officially as the Republic of Turkey (), is a Eurasian country that stretches across the Anatolian peninsula in western Asia and Thrace in the Balkan region of southeastern Europe. Turkey is one of the six independent Turkic states. Turkey is bordered by eight countries: Bulgaria to the northwest; Greece to the west; Georgia to the northeast; Armenia, Azerbaijan (the exclave of Nakhchivan) and Iran to the east; and Iraq and Syria to the southeast. The Mediterranean Sea and Cyprus are to the south; the Aegean Sea to the west; and the Black Sea is to the north. The Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles (which together form the Turkish Straits) demarcate the boundary between Eastern Thrace and Anatolia; they also separate Europe and Asia.
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Turkmen SSR
http://wn.com/Turkmen_SSR -
Turkmenistan
The Turkmenistan (), also known as Turkmenia () is one of the Turkic states in Central Asia. Until 1991, it was a constituent republic of the Soviet Union, the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic (Turkmen SSR). Turkmenistan is one of the six independent Turkic states. It is bordered by Afghanistan to the southeast, Iran to the south and southwest, Uzbekistan to the east and northeast, Kazakhstan to the north and northwest and the Caspian Sea to the west.
http://wn.com/Turkmenistan -
Ukraine
Ukraine ( ; , transliterated: , ), with its area of 603,628 km2, is the second largest country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by the Russian Federation to the east and northeast, Belarus to the northwest, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary to the west, Romania and Moldova to the southwest, and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south and southeast respectively.
http://wn.com/Ukraine -
Ukrainian SSR
http://wn.com/Ukrainian_SSR -
United States
The United States of America (also referred to as the United States, the U.S., the USA, or America) is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to the east and Russia to the west across the Bering Strait. The state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The country also possesses several territories in the Caribbean and Pacific.
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Ural Mountains
The Ural Mountains (, Uralskiye gory) are a mountain range that runs approximately from north to south through western Russia, from the coast of the Arctic Ocean to the Ural River and northwestern Kazakhstan. Their eastern side is usually considered the natural boundary between Europe and Asia. The mountains lie within the Ural geographical region and significantly overlap with the Ural Federal District and Ural economic region. They are rich in various deposits, including metal ores, coal, precious and semi-precious stones, and since the 18th century have been the major mineral base of Russia.
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Uzbekistan
http://wn.com/Uzbekistan -
Vienna
Vienna (; ; ) is the capital of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.7 million (2.3 million within the metropolitan area, more than 25% of Austria's population), and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre. It is the 10th largest city by population in the European Union. Vienna is host to many major international organizations such as the United Nations and OPEC.
http://wn.com/Vienna -
Vietnam
Vietnam ( ; , ), officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (, ), is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by People's Republic of China (PRC) to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea, referred to as East Sea (), to the east. With a population of over 86 million, Vietnam is the 13th most populous country in the world.
http://wn.com/Vietnam -
West Germany
West Germany () is the common English name for the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG () in the period between its creation in May 1949 to German reunification on 3 October 1990. This period, during which Germany and Berlin were divided, ended when communist East Germany was dissolved and its five states joined the eleven states of the Federal Republic of Germany. The enlarged Federal Republic of Germany with sixteen states (known simply as "Germany") is thus the continuation of the pre-1990 Federal Republic of Germany, and not its successor.
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Winter Palace
The Winter Palace () in Saint Petersburg, Russia, was, from 1732 to 1917, the official residence of the Russian Tsars. Situated between the Palace Embankment and the Palace Square, adjacent to the site of Peter the Great's original Winter Palace, the present and fourth Winter Palace was built and altered almost continuously between the late 1730s and 1837, when it was severely damaged by fire and immediately rebuilt. The storming of the palace in 1917 became an iconic symbol of the Russian Revolution.
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Yale University
Yale University is a private Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States.
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Yalta Conference
http://wn.com/Yalta_Conference
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Aleksandr Chervyakov
http://wn.com/Aleksandr_Chervyakov -
Alexey Leonov
Alexey Arkhipovich Leonov () (born 30 May 1934 in Listvyanka, Kemerovo Oblast, Soviet Union) is a retired Soviet/Russian cosmonaut and Air Force General who, on 18 March 1965, became the first human to conduct a space walk.
http://wn.com/Alexey_Leonov -
Anatoly Lunacharsky
Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky (, born in Poltava, Ukraine – December 26, 1933, Menton, France) was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and the first Soviet People's Commissar of Enlightenment responsible for culture and education. He was active as an art critic and journalist throughout his career.
http://wn.com/Anatoly_Lunacharsky -
Belarusians
Belarusians (, ) Bielarusy; also Belarussians, Belorussians, or Byelorussians) are an East Slavic ethnic group (or nationality) who populate the majority of the Republic of Belarus. Introduced to the world as a new state in the early 1990s, the Republic of Belarus brought with it the notion of a re-emerging Belarusian ethnicity, drawn upon the lines of the Old Belarusian language spoken by the Ruthenian ethnic group that ruled (together with ancestors of today's Lithuanians) the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. However, after the creation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, many of the Old Belarusian-speaking Ruthenian nobles would be absorbed by the Polish szlachta in the West and, later, the Russian nobility in the East, leaving only a small rural-dwelling population to be the propagators of a distinct non-literary Belarusian language up until its revival.
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Bernard Comrie
Bernard Comrie (; born May 23, 1947 in Sunderland, England) is a British-born linguist. Comrie is a specialist in linguistic typology and linguistic universals, and on Caucasian languages.
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Boris Yeltsin
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Buddhism
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China
China is seen variously as an ancient civilization extending over a large area in East Asia, a nation and/or a multinational entity.
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Dmitry Orlov
http://wn.com/Dmitry_Orlov -
Donald Rayfield
Donald Rayfield (born 1942) is professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary College, University of London. He is an author of books about Russian and Georgian literature, and about Joseph Stalin and his secret police. He is also a series editor for books about Russian writers and intelligentsia.
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Georgian people
http://wn.com/Georgian_people -
Georgians
The Georgians (, kartvelebi) are a South Caucasian people and nation mainly centered in Georgia. They also live in Turkey, Russia, the United States, Iran, and other countries.
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Georgy Malenkov
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Goryani
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Grigory Petrovsky
Grigory Ivanovich Petrovsky (, Hryhoriy Ivanovych Petrovsky) (January 23, 1878 - January 9, 1958) was a revolutionary of Ukrainian origin, who was the Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR from December 30, 1922, to January 12, 1938.
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Grigory Zinoviev
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Ivan Silayev
Ivan Stepanovich Silayev (; born on 21 October 1930 in Baktyzino, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, Russia, USSR) is a Russian political figure. He served as the Prime Minister of Russia from 15 June 1990 to 26 September 1991 and was also the last Prime Minister of the Soviet Union from September 6, 1991 to December 25, 1991, and was effectively one of two Prime Ministers to control the Cabinet of Ministers of the USSR.
http://wn.com/Ivan_Silayev -
Jimmy Carter
James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. (born October 1, 1924) served as the 39th President of the United States from 1977 to 1981 and was the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the only U.S. President to have received the Prize after leaving office. Before he became President, Carter served two terms as a Georgia State Senator and one as Governor of Georgia, from 1971 to 1975, and was a peanut farmer and naval officer.
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John Dewey
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Joseph Stalin
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Konstantin Chernenko
Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko (; 24 September 1911 – 10 March 1985) was a Soviet politician and the fifth General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He led the Soviet Union from 13 February 1984 until his death thirteen months later, on 10 March 1985. Chernenko was also Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet from 11 April 1984 until his death.
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Kulak
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Laika
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Leon Trotsky
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Leonid Brezhnev
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Lev Kamenev
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List of Russians
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Madhavan K. Palat
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Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong (; December 26, 1893 September 9, 1976) was a Han Chinese revolutionary, political theorist and communist leader. He led the People's Republic of China (PRC) from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976. His theoretical contribution to Marxism-Leninism, military strategies, and his brand of Communist policies are now collectively known as Maoism.
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Mikhail Bulgakov
Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov (, , Kiev – March 10, 1940, Moscow) was a Soviet Russian writer and playwright active in the first half of the 20th century. He is best known for his novel The Master and Margarita, which The Times of London has called one of the masterpieces of the 20th century.
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Mikhail Frunze
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Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev ( Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachyov ; born 2 March 1931) was the sixth General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, serving from 1985 until 1991, and the last head of state of the USSR, serving from 1988 until its collapse in 1991.
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Mikhail Kalinin
Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin (; 18751946), known familiarly by Soviet citizens as "Kalinych," was a Bolshevik revolutionary and the nominal head of state of the Soviet Union from 1919 to 1946. From 1926 he was a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, where he was one of the inner circle of party leaders around Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
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Mingrelians
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Murray Feshbach
Murray Feshbach (born August 8, 1929) is a scholar focusing on the demographics of the Soviet Union and demographics of Russia (population, health, and environment}. Currently, he is a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center where he conducts research on the policy implications of the demographic, health and environmental crises in Russia.
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Nikita Khrushchev
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Nikolai Yezhov
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov (sometimes known as Ezhov; ; May 1, 1895 – February 4, 1940) was a senior figure in the NKVD (the Soviet secret police) under Joseph Stalin during the period of the Great Purge. His reign is sometimes known as "Yezhovshchina" (), "The Yezhov era"; also "The Hedgehog Era," since the word Yezh () means hedgehog.
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Nikolas Gvosdev
Nikolas N. Gvosdev is the former Editor of the bi-monthly foreign policy journal, The National Interest. He was appointed to the post in 2005, after having been the journal's Executive Editor and the founding Editor of the journal's now-defunct separate web edition, In The National Interest[http://www.inthenationalinterest.com]. Upon leaving the editorship in 2008, he was succeeded by Justine Rosenthal; he remains associated with the journal as a contributing editor.
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Nikolay Gumilev
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Proto-Indo-Europeans
The Proto-Indo-Europeans were the speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE), a reconstructed prehistoric language.
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Richard Sakwa
Richard Sakwa (born 1953) is an expert in the field of Russian and Eastern European communist and post-communist politics.
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Ronald Reagan
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Russian Civil War
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Scythians
The Scythians or Scyths (, ) were an ancient Iranian people of horse-riding nomadic pastoralists who throughout Classical Antiquity dominated the Pontic-Caspian steppe, known at the time as Scythia. They were believed to have ranged west of the Altai Mountains until 2006, when a royal burial was found to the east in Mongolia. By Late Antiquity the closely-related Sarmatians came to dominate the Scythians in the west. Much of the surviving information about the Scythians comes from the Greek historian Herodotus (c. 440 BC) in his Histories and Ovid in his poem of exile Epistulae ex Ponto, and archaeologically from the depictions of Scythian life shown in relief on exquisite goldwork found in Scythian burial mounds in Ukraine and Southern Russia.
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Sergei Eisenstein
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Spanish Civil War
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Stanley Fischer
Stanley "Stan" Fischer () is an economist and the current Governor of the Bank of Israel.
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Ukrainians
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Uzbeks
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Valentina Tereshkova
Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova () (born 6 March 1937) is the first woman in space, now a retired Soviet cosmonaut. Out of more than four hundred applicants and then out of five finalists, she was selected to pilot Vostok 6 on 16 June 1963 and become the first woman to fly in space. This also made her the first civilian in space (she was only honorarily inducted into the USSR's Air Force as a condition on joining the Cosmonaut Corps). On this mission, lasting almost three days in space, she performed various tests on herself to collect data on the female body's reaction to spaceflight.
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Vladimir Ivashko
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Vladimir Lenin
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Warsaw Pact
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William Easterly
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Winston Churchill
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World War I
World War I was a military conflict centered on Europe that began in the summer of 1914. The fighting ended in late 1918. This conflict involved all of the world's great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances: the Allies (centred around the Triple Entente) and the Central Powers. More than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, were mobilized in one of the largest wars in history. More than 9 million combatants were killed, due largely to great technological advances in firepower without corresponding ones in mobility. It was the second deadliest conflict in history.
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Yevgeniy Chazov
Yevgeniy Ivanovich Chazov (born June 10, 1929) () is a prominent physician of the Soviet Union and Russia, specializing in cardiology, Chief of the Fourth Directorate of the Soviet Ministry of Health, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, a recipient of numerous awards and decorations, Soviet, Russian, and foreign.
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Yevgeny Zamyatin
http://wn.com/Yevgeny_Zamyatin -
Yuri Andropov
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Yuri Gagarin
http://wn.com/Yuri_Gagarin -
Yury Trifonov
Yury Valentinovich Trifonov (; 28 August 1925 - 28 March 1981) was a leading representative of the so-called Soviet "urban prose", a 1970s movement inspired by the psychologically complicated works of Anton Chekhov and his 20th-century American followers. He was considered a close contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981.
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Stabbing the Empire: Last Day of Soviet Union
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 25:54
- Published: 11 Dec 2011
- Updated: 16 Oct 2012
On December 8th, 1991, the three leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the document which marked the end of the Soviet empire. The fate of the great conglomerate country was decided in less than 24 hours. It happened in secret in a remote residence in the Belavezha forest. Soon the agreement entered the history as the Belavezha Accords. Visit the place where it happened and reveal the mysterious details of the document with the eyewitnesses to the historic event only on RT. RT on Twitter twitter.com RT on Facebook www.facebook.com
http://wn.com/Stabbing_the_Empire_Last_Day_of_Soviet_Union
Complete History Of The Soviet Union, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:48
- Published: 12 Jul 2010
- Updated: 16 Oct 2012
September 2012 - our new album at itunes.apple.com Click to tweet this video: clicktotweet.com Buy our first album at pigfaceboy.co.uk iTunes at http Amazon at www.amazon.co.uk Facebook at www.facebook.com Follow Dan on twitter: twitter.com A Complete History Of The Soviet Union Through The Eyes Of A Humble Worker, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris. Music by "Pig With The Face Of A Boy" Written and performed by DONALD NEWHOLM and DAN WOODS, with MALCOLM GAYNER & ROBIN HARRIS Photographed by TIM JORDAN Costumes by LUCY NEWHOLM Production assistant NICOLA LINCÉ Special thanks to JAMES LAMONT and REMY LAMONT Additional sound effects: www.freesound.org/people/nemoDaedalus/ www.freesound.org/people/themfish Produced by CHRIS LINCÉ and DAN WOODS for Xylophone Productions Directed, animated, and edited by CHRIS LINCÉ WINNER - BEST ANIMATION - Super Shorts International Film Festival 2010 WINNER - LOW BUDGET AWARD - Super Shorts International Film Festival 2010 GET THE T-SHIRT! I Am The Man Who Arranges The Blocks T-shirts pigfaceboy.co.uk
http://wn.com/Complete_History_Of_The_Soviet_Union,_Arranged_To_The_Melody_Of_Tetris
The Last Soviet In Afghanistan (RT Documentary)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 25:09
- Published: 05 Aug 2012
- Updated: 15 Oct 2012
An ex-Soviet soldier in Afghanistan hasn't returned to the motherland in more than 25 years. He remembers 1983 like it was yesterday: It was the height of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and the USSR had brought a communist regime to power in the country and provided it with economic and military supported. He fought on the Soviet side of the conflict, but was captured by the Mujahideen. The ex-soldier now lives in Afghanistan, and has a wife and four children. Is this man a traitor to his country, or simply a victim of circumstance? Watch more on RT's documentary channel rtd.rt.com RT LIVE http Subscribe to RT! www.youtube.com Like us on Facebook www.facebook.com Follow us on Twitter twitter.com Follow us on Google+ plus.google.com RT (Russia Today) is a global news network broadcasting from Moscow and Washington studios. RT is the first news channel to break the 500 million YouTube views benchmark.
http://wn.com/The_Last_Soviet_In_Afghanistan_RT_Documentary
Soviet Top Secret Weapons
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 42:49
- Published: 08 Feb 2012
- Updated: 17 Oct 2012
For the entire period of the Cold War, a large proportion of the Soviet Union's economy and massive scientific establishment was dedicated to the development and refinement of new and better weapons. During the 50s and 60s, the Soviet government's paranoia about Western technical superiority was at its height.
http://wn.com/Soviet_Top_Secret_Weapons
Soviet National Anthem(With Lyrics)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:43
- Published: 13 Apr 2008
- Updated: 17 Oct 2012
National anthem of the Soviet Union/CCCP...Nation of the working class, and my beautiful motherland.
http://wn.com/Soviet_National_AnthemWith_Lyrics
Kremlin Secret Files: Magic pills for Soviet leaders
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 26:18
- Published: 31 Mar 2012
- Updated: 16 Oct 2012
Watch more on RT's documentary channel rtd.rt.com They say that there was a magic pill that could cure any illness and prolong life. But only the Soviet leaders had an access to it. Get inside the Kremlin walls and learn what the heads of USSR used to eat and drink, how they protected themselves from illnesses and what their main phobias were. Meet the doctors, chefs and close relatives of people who ruled the state and find out all the Kremlin secrets. RT on Twitter http RT on Facebook www.facebook.com
http://wn.com/Kremlin_Secret_Files_Magic_pills_for_Soviet_leaders
What Hitler Wants - Soviet Propaganda
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:14
- Published: 16 Oct 2007
- Updated: 11 Oct 2012
This World War II-era Soviet propaganda pieces shows the comrades what the fuhrer really wants to do to the Motherland. Pretty interesting stuff
http://wn.com/What_Hitler_Wants_Soviet_Propaganda
How to Fight the Soviet T-64 and T-72 Tanks
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 37:58
- Published: 11 Mar 2012
- Updated: 16 Oct 2012
This is an educational video documenting the characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses of two famous Soviet tanks of the Cold War era, the T-64 and T-72. This information is valuable to all Cold War historians. Portions of this video may contain background music or other elements which are used legally and legitimately in this educational video, under the "fair use" doctrine, as detailed here:. Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976: Allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use."
http://wn.com/How_to_Fight_the_Soviet_T-64_and_T-72_Tanks
Russia: No confirmation Soviet cluster bombs used in Syria
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:16
- Published: 15 Oct 2012
- Updated: 17 Oct 2012
Russia maintains it's not supplying cluster bombs to Syria - which are allegedly being used by the government in its fight against the rebels there. Human Rights Watch earlier claimed that Soviet-era munitions are being dropped on residential areas. RT LIVE rt.com Subscribe to RT! www.youtube.com Like us on Facebook www.facebook.com Follow us on Twitter twitter.com Follow us on Google+ plus.google.com RT (Russia Today) is a global news network broadcasting from Moscow and Washington studios. RT is the first news channel to break the 500 million YouTube views benchmark.
http://wn.com/Russia_No_confirmation_Soviet_cluster_bombs_used_in_Syria
Experiments in the Revival of Dead Organisms
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 19:32
- Published: 23 Aug 2012
- Updated: 14 Oct 2012
A film showing Soviet scientists killing and reviving various dogs. Yes. Part of the Prelinger Archives. Original video can be downloaded at: www.archive.org
http://wn.com/Experiments_in_the_Revival_of_Dead_Organisms
The Soviet Media's Portrait of America
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:34
- Published: 26 Oct 2011
- Updated: 21 Aug 2012
Overview of Soviet perceptions of the United States, created by CIA's Global Video Program. Reagan was interested in the subject and wrote how important it is to see "how others see us." To learn more, read Ronald Reagan: Intelligence and the Cold War on CIA.gov's Historical Collections Division page at go.usa.gov
http://wn.com/The_Soviet_Media's_Portrait_of_America
Soviet Pony March
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:31
- Published: 30 May 2012
- Updated: 17 Oct 2012
Important disclaimer: this video isn't meant to promote communism or something. It's made only for entertainment. So please don't write essays about it in the comments. MP4: www.mediafire.com Wallpapers! dabupl.deviantart.com dabupl.deviantart.com dabupl.deviantart.com dabupl.deviantart.com dabupl.deviantart.com --- Credits: Main song - "Hell March 2 - From First to Last Remix" from Red Alert 3 soundtrack Credits song - "Demolition Victory" from Call of Duty 2 soundtrack Based on "USSRD" wallpaper by Delta105 - goo.gl Please, show him some love, as this PMV exists only because of his art. He was even so kind to share a psd file with me. :D Credits art by DaVca - goo.gl Map of the Equestria by hlissner - goo.gl Some of the animations are from Green Screen Ponies - goo.gl --- Link spam: Portfolio - hl2.com.pl Second channel - http Facebook - facebook.com Tumblr - dabudash.tumblr.com DeviantArt - http Donation - www.paypal.com --- My Little Pony (c) Hasbro
http://wn.com/Soviet_Pony_March
Reagan tells Soviet jokes
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:31
- Published: 18 Mar 2008
- Updated: 17 Oct 2012
Reagan tells Soviet jokes
http://wn.com/Reagan_tells_Soviet_jokes
Philby the Masterspy: Soviet triple agent's top secret story
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 26:29
- Published: 18 Mar 2012
- Updated: 11 Oct 2012
Kim Philby, a former British Secret Intelligence Service officer and an agent for the Soviet Union at the same time, was perhaps the most famous of a group of British government officials who served as Russian spies from the 1930s to 1950s. Philby came from a very respected background in British society and attended Trinity College at Cambridge University. His life seemed to be quite predictable and clear. What made him turn to spying for the USSR? Get an access to a top secret information only on RT! RT on Twitter twitter.com RT on Facebook www.facebook.com
http://wn.com/Philby_the_Masterspy_Soviet_triple_agent's_top_secret_story
The Soviet Space Program
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:20
- Published: 26 Oct 2011
- Updated: 27 Jul 2012
Overview of the Soviet Space Program, created by CIA's Global Video Program. Reagan watched this film on 10/14/82, according to his diary entry of that date. To learn more, read Ronald Reagan: Intelligence and the Cold War on CIA.gov's Historical Collections Division page at go.usa.gov
http://wn.com/The_Soviet_Space_Program
Soviet RPK
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:08
- Published: 09 Aug 2010
- Updated: 16 Oct 2012
Soviet RPK Marstar Canada www.marstar.ca
http://wn.com/Soviet_RPK
C&C; Red Alert 3 Theme - Soviet March
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:40
- Published: 30 Oct 2008
- Updated: 16 Oct 2012
The theme song for Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3, from the Red Alert 3: Official Soundtrack. Track composed by James Hannigan, Album by Frank Klepacki, James Hannigan & Timothy Michael Wyn - published by EA. -------------------- Don't forget to visit our forum where you can discuss Red Alert 3! www.omgclan.com -------------------- Soviet March and all associated copyright is owned by Electronic Arts.
http://wn.com/C&C;_Red_Alert_3_Theme_Soviet_March
◀ArmA 2: DayZ - In Soviet Russia Cold Catches You, Ep 7
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 25:09
- Published: 22 May 2012
- Updated: 15 Oct 2012
Back in the land of the living, but for how long? SideStrafe brings you more DayZ! SideStrafe on facebook - www.facebook.com
http://wn.com/◀ArmA_2_DayZ_In_Soviet_Russia_Cold_Catches_You,_Ep_7
Soviet Subversion of the Free World Press, 1984 - Complete
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 81:29
- Published: 25 Apr 2011
- Updated: 14 Oct 2012
Yuri Bezmenov, a Russian born, KGB trained subverter tells about the influence of the Soviet Union on Western media and describes the stages of communist takeovers. This interview was conducted by G. Edward Griffin in 1984. This video has been remastered and is now available on DVD. See realityzone.com The Reality Zone Producer: G. Edward Griffin
http://wn.com/Soviet_Subversion_of_the_Free_World_Press,_1984_Complete
Socialist "Occupier" Clams Up As Former Soviet Citizen Reminds Che Guevara Was Homophobe and Racist
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:27
- Published: 05 May 2012
- Updated: 15 Oct 2012
May Day Demonstration on Union Square in New York City (3rd battery died...)
http://wn.com/Socialist_Occupier_Clams_Up_As_Former_Soviet_Citizen_Reminds_Che_Guevara_Was_Homophobe_and_Racist
TOP SECRET SOVIET BOMBER PROJECT
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:41
- Published: 04 Dec 2011
- Updated: 17 Oct 2012
Excerpt from the series "Planes That Never Flew". Property of: DD Video Southern Star Alba Used under fair use for research and comment purposes.
http://wn.com/TOP_SECRET_SOVIET_BOMBER_PROJECT
Soviet Files: Best men for Star Squad
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 25:08
- Published: 15 Apr 2012
- Updated: 16 Oct 2012
The documentary marks the Cosmonautics day when on April 12, 1961 the first manned space flight took place! Everyone knows his name. Yury Gagarin, the first man in space. But there were 19 people more -- the members of the first cosmonauts squad. What did they have to endure before the first human being flew into space? What happened to them afterwards? Find out the secrets of the Soviet space programme and personal dramas of the star squad members. Only on RT. RT on Twitter: twitter.com RT on Facebook: www.facebook.com
http://wn.com/Soviet_Files_Best_men_for_Star_Squad
Soviet Power of USSR
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:28
- Published: 13 Nov 2006
- Updated: 16 Oct 2012
The Great Soviet man Stalin, the Great Soviet Empire, the Great Soviet people, the Great RKKA.
http://wn.com/Soviet_Power_of_USSR
Creative Commons / Jbarta
Creative Commons / Dmitry G
Creative Commons
Creative Commons / Shikhlinski
Public Domain / Shikhlinski
Creative Commons / Craigboy
Creative Commons / Twdragon
Creative Commons / George Chernilevsky
Creative Commons / Vmenkov
Creative Commons
Creative Commons / Brattarb
Public Domain / Richardfabi
Creative Commons / Ranbar
Public Domain / Ondřej Žváček
Public Domain / Fisherga
Creative Commons / Bartek Wawraszko
Creative Commons / Kolanin
PIB of India
Creative Commons / Scapler
Creative Commons / Clemensfranz
AP / Burhan Ozbilici
NASA / Soerfm
Creative Commons / myself
Creative Commons / Przemyslaw "Blueshade" Idzkiewicz
Creative Commons / Alvesgaspar
Creative Commons / High Contrast
Creative Commons / Jose Lopez
Creative Commons / Alexander Mishin
Creative Commons / Stahlkocher
Creative Commons / Patrick Mutzenberg
Photo: WN / Aruna Mirasdar
15 Oct 2012
PUNE: Profiles of all secondary schools in the state will now be available at the click of a mouse. A project to this effect has been undertaken by the state Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan, a...
Photo: AP / Richard Drew
16 Oct 2012
NEW YORK - US stocks climbed on Tuesday as stronger-than-expected quarterly earnings from such bellwethers as Goldman Sachs and Johnson & Johnson tempered recent concerns that the sluggish global...
Photo: AP / Shakil Adil
15 Oct 2012
ISLAMABAD — Pakistan airlifted a 14-year-old activist who was shot and seriously wounded by the Taliban to the United Kingdom for treatment today, a move that will give her access to the...
Photo: AP / Predrag Vuckovic
14 Oct 2012
Update: Extreme athlete Felix Baumgartner has landed on Earth after a jump from the stratosphere in what could be the world's first supersonic skydive. Baumgartner landed in eastern New Mexico desert...
Photo: AP / Clemens Bilan
15 Oct 2012
Des dizaines de millions de personnes ont regardé dimanche avec fascination et angoisse le saut spectaculaire du parachutiste autrichien Felix Baumgartner, qui a franchi pour la...
Photo: AP / Jon Super
17 Oct 2012
Moscow - Roman Shirokov struck a late penalty as Russia laboured to a 1-0 win over Group F outsiders Azerbaijan on Tuesday to maintain their 100 percent World Cup qualifying record under coach Fabio...
Photo: White House / Pete Souza
17 Oct 2012
Let us stop this interference in the internal affairs of other countries. Let us stop overthrowing the heads of other governments and attempting to dictate who their leaders should be: or what form of...
Photo: Creative Commons / Keith Allison
16 Oct 2012
MOSCOW, October 16 (RIA Novosti) - As an American stranger in Moscow, Varvara Lepchenko is relieved her return to the former Soviet Union wasn't the lion's-den experience she feared it might be. The...
Helsingin Sanomat
Jarmo Huhtanen A significantly larger number of the spies that Finland sent to Soviet Union during the so-called Continuation War (1941-44) made it back alive than has been previously thought. This is the...(size: 4.9Kb)
Russia asks Afghans for help with Soviet MIAs
16 Oct 2012
Tulsa World
Russia appealed Monday to the Afghan authorities and public to provide information on more than 200 Soviet troops listed as missing since Soviet forces ended their occupation of Afghanistan in 1989 - including 30 to 40 who may still be alive. Russian Ambassador Andrey Avetisyan said the two...(size: 2.9Kb)
The Washington Post
KABUL, Afghanistan — Russia appealed Monday to the Afghan authorities and public to provide information on over 200 Soviet troops listed as missing since Soviet forces ended their occupation of Afghanistan in 1989 — including 30 to 40 who may still be alive. Russian ambassador Andrey...(size: 4.8Kb)
Russia asks Afghanistan for help with Soviet MIAs - Wire World News - The Sacramento ...
15 Oct 2012
Sacramento Bee
KABUL -- Russia is appealing to the Afghan authorities and the public to provide information on over 200 Soviet troops - including...(size: 0.9Kb)
Seattle Post
KABUL (AP) — Russia is appealing to the Afghan authorities and the public to provide information on over 200 Soviet troops —...(size: 0.8Kb)
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
MOSCOW -- Eduard Y. Volodarsky, a Russian screenwriter whose films are recognized classics today in Russia but whose efforts to present a picture of war on his own terms led the Soviet authorities to shelve many of his works for years, died here on Tuesday. He was 71. His death was confirmed by...(size: 2.8Kb)
Business Insider
Far from being just a political storm in the Caribbean, the Cuban missile crisis came dangerously close to triggering a nuclear war between two superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union – both nations having stockpiled enough missiles that a conflict between them would have destroyed much of...(size: 3.6Kb)
The U.S. today, the Soviet Union in the 1980s
13 Oct 2012
The Los Angeles Times
Responding to the Op-Ed article Tuesday, "" which noted a series of post-Cold War military failures and standoffs by the United States despite the country's profligate spending on defense and its relative lack of major enemies, reader John Arndt of Torrance wrote: "Tom Engelhardt contradicts his...(size: 16.7Kb)
Erratic Castro upset Soviet missile plan
12 Oct 2012
The Australian
FIFTY years after the Cuban missile crisis, a new book says the Soviets had secretly planned to leave 100 nuclear missiles in Cuba but changed their mind because of Fidel Castro's erratic behaviour. CIA documents also being released half a century after the Cold War drama shine a light on the...(size: 4.1Kb)
Newstrack India
Tweet London, Oct. 12 (ANI): The Soviet Union had secretly planned to leave over 100 nuclear weapons in Cuba after the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis but were so scared by Fidel Castro's instability that they made up a law to retrieve them, according to a report....(size: 2.2Kb)
"USSR" and "CCCP" redirect here. For other uses, see USSR (disambiguation) and CCCP (disambiguation).
"Soviet" redirects here. For other uses, see Soviet (disambiguation).
| Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Other names Союз Советских Социалистических Республик Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik |
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| Motto Пролетарии всех стран, соединяйтесь! (Translit.: Proletarii vsekh stran, soyedinyaytes'!) English: Workers of the world, unite! |
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| Anthem "The Internationale" (1922–1944)  "National Anthem of the Soviet Union" (1944–1991) |
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| Capital | Moscow | ||||
| Language(s) | Russian, many others | ||||
| Religion | Atheism | ||||
| Government | Union, Marxist–Leninist single-party socialist state |
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| General Secretary | |||||
| - 1922–1952 | Joseph Stalin (first) | ||||
| - 1991 | Vladimir Ivashko (last) | ||||
| Head of State | |||||
| - 1922–1938 | Mikhail Kalinin (first) | ||||
| - 1988–1991 | Mikhail Gorbachev (last) | ||||
| Head of Government | |||||
| - 1922–1924 | Vladimir Lenin (first) | ||||
| - 1991 | Ivan Silayev (last) | ||||
| Legislature | Supreme Soviet | ||||
| - Upper house | Soviet of the Union | ||||
| - Lower house | Soviet of Nationalities | ||||
| Historical era | Interwar period / Cold War | ||||
| - Treaty of Creation | 30 December 1922 | ||||
| - Union dissolved | 26 December 1991 | ||||
| Area | |||||
| - 1991 | 22,402,200 km2 (8,649,538 sq mi) | ||||
| Population | |||||
| - 1991 est. | 293,047,571 | ||||
| Density | 13.1 /km2 (33.9 /sq mi) | ||||
| Currency | Soviet ruble (руб) (SUR) | ||||
| Internet TLD | .su2 | ||||
| Calling code | +7 | ||||
| 1On 21 December 1991, eleven of the former socialist republics declared in Alma-Ata (with the 12th republic – Georgia – attending as an observer) that with the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ceases to exist. 2Assigned on 19 September 1990, existing onwards. |
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| Soviet Union |
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Atlas USSR Portal |
The Soviet Union (Russian: Советский Союз, tr. Sovetsky Soyuz), officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR; Russian: Сою́з Сове́тских Социалисти́ческих Респу́блик, tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik; IPA: [sɐˈjus sɐˈvʲetskʲɪx sətsɨəlʲɪˈstʲitɕɪskʲɪx rʲɪsˈpublʲɪk] (
listen); abbreviated СССР, SSSR), was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991.
The Soviet Union was a single-party state ruled by the Communist Party from its foundation until 1990.[1] A union of 15 subnational Soviet republics, the Soviet state was structured under a highly centralized government and economy.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 caused the downfall of the Russian Empire. Following the Russian Revolution, there was a struggle for power between the Bolshevik party, led by Vladimir Lenin, and the anti-communist White movement. In December 1922, the Bolsheviks won the civil war, and the Soviet Union was formed with the merger of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Following the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, Joseph Stalin came to power,[2] leading the USSR through a large-scale industrialization program. Stalin established a planned economy.[2]
In June 1941, Nazi Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union, breaking the non-aggression pact, which the latter had signed in 1939. After four years of fighting, the Soviet Union emerged victorious as one of the world's two superpowers, the other being the United States.
The Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite states, known as the Eastern Bloc, engaged in the Cold War, a prolonged global ideological and political struggle against the United States and its Western allies, which it ultimately abandoned in the face of economic troubles and both domestic and foreign political unrest.[3][4] In the late 1980s, the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform the state with his policies of perestroika and glasnost, but the Soviet Union collapsed and was formally dissolved in December 1991 after the abortive August coup attempt.[5] The Russian Federation assumed its rights and obligations.[6]
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Geography, climate and environment[link]
Main article: Geography of the Soviet Union
With an area of 22,402,200 square kilometres (8,649,500 sq mi), the Soviet Union was the world's largest state. The world's largest state, incidentally, today is Russia, which emerged from the USSR after it ended. Covering a sixth of the Earth's land surface, its size was comparable to that of North America. The European portion accounted for a quarter of the country's area, and was the cultural and economic center. The eastern part in Asia extended to the Pacific Ocean to the east and Afghanistan to the south, and was much less populous. It spanned over 10,000 kilometres (6,200 mi) east to west across 11 time zones, and almost 7,200 kilometres (4,500 mi) north to south. It had five climate zones: tundra, taiga, steppes, desert, and mountains.
The Soviet Union had the world's longest border, measuring over 60,000 kilometres (37,000 mi), two-thirds of it a coastline of the Arctic Ocean. Across the Bering Strait was the United States. The Soviet Union bordered Afghanistan, China, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Hungary, Iran, Mongolia, North Korea, Norway, Poland, Romania, and Turkey from 1945 to 1991.
The Soviet Union's longest river was the Irtysh. Its highest mountain was Communism Peak (now Ismail Samani Peak) in Tajikistan, at 7,495 metres (24,590 ft). The world's largest lake, the Caspian Sea, lay mainly within the Soviet Union. The world's largest freshwater and deepest lake, Lake Baikal, was in the Soviet Union.
History[link]
Main article: History of the Soviet Union
The last Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, ruled the Russian Empire until his abdication in March 1917, due in part to the strain of fighting in World War I. A short-lived Russian provisional government took power, to be overthrown in the 1917 October Revolution (N.S. November 1917) by revolutionaries led by the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin.
The Soviet Union was officially established in December 1922 with the union of the Russian, Ukrainian, Byelorussian, and Transcaucasian Soviet republics- each ruled by local Bolshevik parties. Despite the foundation of the Soviet state as a federative entity of many constituent republics, each with its own political and administrative entities, the term "Soviet Russia" – strictly applicable only to the Russian Federative Socialist Republic – was often incorrectly applied to the entire country by non-Soviet writers and politicians.
Revolution and foundation[link]
Main articles: History of Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union (1917–1927), Russian Revolution (1917), February Revolution, Russian Provisional Government, October Revolution, and Russian Civil War
Modern revolutionary activity in the Russian Empire began with the Decembrist Revolt of 1825. Although serfdom was abolished in 1861, it was done on terms unfavorable to the peasants and served to encourage revolutionaries. A parliament—the State Duma—was established in 1906 after the Russian Revolution of 1905, but the Tsar resisted attempts to move from absolute to constitutional monarchy. Social unrest continued and was aggravated during World War I by military defeat and food shortages in major cities.
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A spontaneous popular uprising in Petrograd, in response to the wartime decay of Russia's economy and morale, culminated in the February Revolution and the toppling of the imperial government in March 1917. The tsarist autocracy was replaced by the Russian Provisional Government, which intended to conduct elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly and to continue fighting on the side of the Entente in World War I.
At the same time, workers' councils, known as Soviets, sprang up across the country. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, pushed for socialist revolution in the Soviets and on the streets. In November 1917, during the October Revolution, the Red Guards stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd, ending the rule of the Provisional Government and leaving all political power to the Soviets. In December, the Bolsheviks signed an armistice with the Central Powers, though by February 1918, fighting had resumed. In March, the Soviets quit the war for good and signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
A long and bloody Russian Civil War ensued between the Reds and the Whites, starting in 1917 and ending in 1923 with the Reds victorious. It included foreign intervention, the execution of Nicholas II and his family, and the famine of 1921, which killed about five million.[7] In March 1921, during a related conflict with Poland, the Peace of Riga was signed, splitting disputed territories in Belarus and Ukraine between the Republic of Poland and Soviet Russia. The Soviet Union had to resolve similar conflicts with the newly established Republic of Finland, the Republic of Estonia, the Republic of Latvia, and the Republic of Lithuania.
Unification of republics[link]
On 28 December 1922, a conference of plenipotentiary delegations from the Russian SFSR, the Transcaucasian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR approved the Treaty of Creation of the USSR[8] and the Declaration of the Creation of the USSR, forming the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.[9] These two documents were confirmed by the 1st Congress of Soviets of the USSR and signed by the heads of the delegations,[10] Mikhail Kalinin, Mikha Tskhakaya, Mikhail Frunze, Grigory Petrovsky, and Aleksandr Chervyakov,[11] on 30 December 1922.
On 1 February 1924, the USSR was recognized by the British Empire. The same year, a Soviet Constitution was approved, legitimizing the December 1922 union.
An intensive restructuring of the economy, industry and politics of the country began in the early days of Soviet power in 1917. A large part of this was done according to the Bolshevik Initial Decrees, government documents signed by Vladimir Lenin. One of the most prominent breakthroughs was the GOELRO plan, which envisioned a major restructuring of the Soviet economy based on total electrification of the country. The plan was developed in 1920 and covered a 10-to 15-year period. It included construction of a network of 30 regional power plants, including ten large hydroelectric power plants, and numerous electric-powered large industrial enterprises.[12] The plan became the prototype for subsequent Five-Year Plans and was fulfilled by 1931.[13]
Stalin era[link]
Main article: History of the Soviet Union (1927–1953)
From its creation, the government in the Soviet Union was based on the one-party rule of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks).[14] After the economic policy of "War Communism" during the Russian Civil War, as a prelude to fully developing socialism in the backward country, the Soviet government permitted some private enterprise to coexist alongside nationalized industry in the 1920s and total food requisition in the countryside was replaced by a food tax (see New Economic Policy).
The stated purpose of the one-party state was to ensure that capitalist exploitation would not return to the Soviet Union and that the principles of Democratic Centralism would be most effective in representing the people's will in a practical manner. Debate over the future of the economy provided the background for a power struggle in the years after Lenin's death in 1924. Initially, Lenin was to be replaced by a "troika" consisting of Grigory Zinoviev of Ukraine, Lev Kamenev of Moscow, and Joseph Stalin of Georgia.
On 3 April 1922, Stalin was named the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Lenin had appointed Stalin the head of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, which gave Stalin considerable power. By gradually consolidating his influence and isolating and out-maneuvering his rivals within the party, Stalin became the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union and, by the end of the 1920s, established totalitarian rule. In October 1927, Grigory Zinoviev and Leon Trotsky were expelled from the Central Committee and forced into exile.
In 1928, Stalin introduced the First Five-Year Plan for building a socialist economy. While encompassing the internationalism expressed by Lenin throughout the Revolution, it also aimed to build socialism in one country. In industry, the state assumed control over all existing enterprises and undertook an intensive program of industrialization. In agriculture, rather than adhering to the "lead by example" policy advocated by Lenin,[15] forced collectivisation of farms was implemented all over the country.
Famines ensued, causing millions of deaths; surviving kulaks were persecuted and many sent to Gulags to do forced labour.[16] Social upheaval continued in the mid-1930s. Stalin's Great Purge resulted in the execution or detainment of many "Old Bolsheviks" who had participated in the October Revolution with Lenin. According to declassified Soviet archives, in 1937 and 1938, the NKVD arrested more than one and a half million people, of whom 681,692 were shot – an average of 1,000 executions a day.[17] The excess deaths during the 1930s as a whole were in the range of 10–11 million.[18] Yet despite the turmoil of the mid-to-late 1930s, the Soviet Union developed a powerful industrial economy in the years before World War II.
The 1930s[link]
The early 1930s saw closer cooperation between the West and the USSR. From 1932 to 1934, the Soviet Union participated in the World Disarmament Conference. In 1933, diplomatic relations between the United States and the USSR were established. In September 1934, the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations. After the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the USSR actively supported the Republican forces against the Nationalists, who were supported by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
In December 1936, Stalin unveiled a new Soviet Constitution. The constitution was seen as a personal triumph for Stalin, who on this occasion was described by Pravda as a "genius of the new world, the wisest man of the epoch, the great leader of communism." By contrast, western historians and historians from former Soviet occupied countries have viewed the constitution as a meaningless propaganda document.
The late 1930s saw a shift towards the Axis powers. In 1938, after the United Kingdom and France had concluded the Munich Agreement with Germany, the USSR dealt with the Nazis as well, both militarily and economically during extensive talks. The two countries concluded the German–Soviet Nonaggression Pact and the German–Soviet Commercial Agreement. The nonaggression pact made possible Soviet occupation of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and eastern Poland. In late November of the same year, unable to coerce the Republic of Finland by diplomatic means into moving its border 25 kilometres (16 mi) back from Leningrad, Joseph Stalin ordered the invasion of Finland.
In the east, the Soviet military won several decisive victories during border clashes with the Japanese Empire in 1938 and 1939. However, in April 1941, USSR signed the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact with the Empire of Japan, recognizing the territorial integrity of Manchukuo, a Japanese puppet state.
World War II[link]
Main article: Eastern Front (World War II)
Although it has been debated whether the Soviet Union intended to invade Germany once it was strong enough,[19] Germany itself broke the treaty and invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, starting what was known in the USSR as the "Great Patriotic War". The Red Army stopped the seemingly invincible German Army at the Battle of Moscow, aided by an unusually harsh winter. The Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted from late 1942 to early 1943, dealt a severe blow to the Germans from which they never fully recovered and became a turning point of the war. After Stalingrad, Soviet forces drove through Eastern Europe to Berlin before Germany surrendered in 1945. The German Army suffered 80% of its military deaths in the Eastern Front.[20]
The same year, the USSR, in fulfillment of its agreement with the Allies at the Yalta Conference, denounced the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact in April 1945[21] and invaded Manchukuo and other Japan-controlled territories on 9 August 1945.[22] This conflict ended with a decisive Soviet victory, contributing to the unconditional surrender of Japan and the end of World War II.
The Soviet Union suffered greatly in the war, losing around 27 million people.[23] Despite this, it emerged as a superpower in the post-war period. Once denied diplomatic recognition by the Western world, the Soviet Union had official relations with practically every nation by the late 1940s. A member of the United Nations at its foundation in 1945, the Soviet Union became one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, which gave it the right to veto any of its resolutions (see Soviet Union and the United Nations).
The Soviet Union maintained its status as one of the world's two superpowers for four decades through its hegemony in Eastern Europe, military strength, economic strength, aid to developing countries, and scientific research, especially in space technology and weaponry.
Cold War[link]
Main article: Cold War
During the immediate postwar period, the Soviet Union rebuilt and expanded its economy, while maintaining its strictly centralized control. It aided post-war reconstruction in the countries of Eastern Europe, while turning them into satellite states, binding them in a military alliance (the Warsaw Pact) in 1955, and an economic organization (The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance or Comecon) from 1949 to 1991, the latter a counterpart to the European Economic Community.[24] Later, the Comecon supplied aid to the eventually victorious Chinese Communist Party, and saw its influence grow elsewhere in the world. Fearing its ambitions, the Soviet Union's wartime allies, the United Kingdom and the United States, became its enemies. In the ensuing Cold War, the two sides clashed indirectly using mostly proxies.
Khrushchev era[link]
Main article: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)
Stalin died on 5 March 1953. Without a mutually agreeable successor, the highest Communist Party officials opted to rule the Soviet Union jointly. Nikita Khrushchev, who had won the power struggle by the mid-1950s, denounced Stalin's use of repression in 1956 and eased repressive controls over party and society. This was known as de-Stalinization.
Moscow considered Eastern Europe to be a buffer zone for the forward defense of its western borders, and ensured its control of the region by transforming the East European countries into satellite states. Soviet military force was used to suppress anti-communist uprisings in Hungary and Poland in 1956.
In the late 1950s, a confrontation with China regarding the USSR's rapprochement with the West and what Mao Zedong perceived as Khrushchev's revisionism led to the Sino–Soviet split. This resulted in a break throughout the global Communist movement, with Communist regimes in Albania, Cambodia and Somalia choosing to ally with China in place of the USSR.
File:Lunokhod hires.jpg
Lunokhod 1 rover landed on the moon on 17 November 1970
During this period, the Soviet Union continued to realize scientific and technological exploits: Launching the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1 in 1957; a living dog, Laika in 1957; the first human being, Yuri Gagarin in 1961; the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963; Alexey Leonov, the first person to walk in space in 1965; and the first moon rovers, Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2.[25]
Khrushchev initiated "The Thaw" better known as Khrushchev's Thaw, a complex shift in political, cultural and economic life in the Soviet Union. That included some openness and contact with other nations and new social and economic policies with more emphasis on commodity goods, allowing living standards to rise dramatically while maintaining high levels of economic growth. Censorship was relaxed as well.
Khrushchev's reforms in agriculture and administration, however, were generally unproductive. In 1962, he precipitated a crisis with the United States over the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. The Soviet Union backed down after the United States initiated a naval blockade, causing Khrushchev much embarrassment and loss of prestige. He was removed from power in 1964.
Brezhnev era[link]
Main articles: History of the Soviet Union (1964–1982) and Era of Stagnation
Following the ousting of Khrushchev, another period of collective leadership ensued, consisting of Leonid Brezhnev as General Secretary, Alexei Kosygin as Premier and Nikolai Podgorny as Chairman of the Presidium, lasting until Brezhnev established himself in the early 1970s as the preeminent Soviet leader. In 1968 the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia to halt the Prague Spring reforms.
Brezhnev presided over a period of détente with the West (see SALT I, SALT II, Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty) while at the same time building up Soviet military might.
In October 1977, the third Soviet Constitution was unanimously adopted. The prevailing mood of the Soviet leadership at the time of Brezhnev's death in 1982 was one of aversion to change. The long period of Brezhnev's rule had come to be dubbed one of "standstill", with an aging and ossified top political leadership.
Reforms and dissolution[link]
Main articles: Cold War (1985–1991), History of the Soviet Union (1982–1991), Dissolution of the Soviet Union, 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt, and Commonwealth of Independent States
Two developments dominated the decade that followed: the increasingly apparent crumbling of the Soviet Union's economic and political structures, and the patchwork attempts at reforms to reverse that process. Kenneth S. Deffeyes argued in Beyond Oil that the Reagan administration encouraged Saudi Arabia to lower the price of oil to the point where the Soviets could not make a profit selling their oil, so that the USSR's hard currency reserves became depleted.[26]
Brezhnev's next two successors, transitional figures with deep roots in his tradition, did not last long. Yuri Andropov was 68 years old and Konstantin Chernenko 72 when they assumed power; both died in less than two years. In an attempt to avoid a third short-lived leader, in 1985, the Soviets turned to the next generation and selected Mikhail Gorbachev.
Gorbachev made significant changes in the economy and party leadership, called perestroika. His policy of glasnost freed public access to information after decades of heavy government censorship.
Gorbachev also moved to end the Cold War. In 1988, the Soviet Union abandoned its nine-year war in Afghanistan and began to withdraw its forces. In the late 1980s, he refused military support to the Soviet Union's former satellite states, resulting in the toppling of multiple communist regimes. With the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and with East Germany and West Germany pursuing unification, the Iron Curtain came down.
In the late 1980s, the constituent republics of the Soviet Union started legal moves towards potentially declaring sovereignty over their territories, citing Article 72 of the USSR constitution, which stated that any constituent republic was free to secede.[27] On 7 April 1990, a law was passed allowing a republic to secede if more than two-thirds of its residents voted for it in a referendum.[28] Many held their first free elections in the Soviet era for their own national legislatures in 1990. Many of these legislatures proceeded to produce legislation contradicting the Union laws in what was known as the "War of Laws".
In 1989, the Russian SFSR, which was then the largest constituent republic (with about half of the population) convened a newly elected Congress of People's Deputies. Boris Yeltsin was elected its chairman. On 12 June 1990, the Congress declared Russia's sovereignty over its territory and proceeded to pass laws that attempted to supersede some of the USSR's laws. The period of legal uncertainty continued throughout 1991 as constituent republics slowly became de facto independent.
A referendum for the preservation of the USSR was held on 17 March 1991, with the majority of the population voting for preservation of the Union in nine out of the 15 republics. The referendum gave Gorbachev a minor boost. In the summer of 1991, the New Union Treaty, which would have turned the Soviet Union into a much looser Union, was agreed upon by eight republics.
The signing of the treaty, however, was interrupted by the August Coup—an attempted coup d'état by hardline members of the government and the KGB who sought to reverse Gorbachev's reforms and reassert the central government's control over the republics. After the coup collapsed, Yeltsin was seen as a hero for his decisive actions, while Gorbachev's power was effectively ended. The balance of power tipped significantly towards the republics. In August 1991, Latvia and Estonia immediately declared the restoration of their full independence (following Lithuania's 1990 example), while the other twelve republics continued discussing new, increasingly looser, models of the Union.
On 8 December 1991, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Belavezha Accords, which declared the Soviet Union dissolved and established the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place. While doubts remained over the authority of the accords to do this, on 21 December 1991, the representatives of all Soviet republics except Georgia signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, which confirmed the accords. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev yielded to the inevitable and resigned as the President of the USSR, declaring the office extinct. He turned the powers that had been vested in the presidency over to Yeltsin, the President of Russia.
The following day, the Supreme Soviet, the highest governmental body of the Soviet Union, dissolved itself. This is generally recognized as marking the official, final dissolution of the Soviet Union as a functioning state. The Soviet Army remained in place in the early months of 1992, but was thereafter absorbed into the different military forces of the newly independent states.
Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union on 26 December 1991, Russia was internationally recognized[29] as its legal successor on the international stage. To that end, Russia voluntarily accepted all Soviet foreign debt and claimed overseas Soviet properties as its own. Since then, the Russian Federation has assumed the Soviet Union's rights and obligations.
Politics[link]
Main articles: Politics of the Soviet Union and State ideology of the Soviet Union
There were three power hierarchies in the Soviet Union: the legislative branch represented by the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, the government represented by the Council of Ministers, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the only legal party and the ultimate policymaker in the country.[30]
Communist Party[link]
Main article: Communist Party of the Soviet Union
At the top of the Communist Party was the Central Committee, elected at Party Congresses and Conferences. The Central Committee in turn voted for a Politburo (called the Presidium between 1952–1966), Secretariat and the General Secretary (First Secretary from 1953 to 1966), the highest office in the USSR.[31] Depending on the degree of power consolidation, it was either the Politburo as a collective body or the General Secretary, who always was one of the Politburo members, that effectively led the party and the country[32] (except for the period of the highly personalized authority of Stalin, exercised directly through his position in the Council of Ministers rather than the Politburo after 1941).[33] They were not controlled by the general party membership, as the key principle of the party organization was democratic centralism, demanding strict subordination to higher bodies, and elections went uncontested, endorsing the candidates proposed from above.[34]
The Communist Party maintained its dominance over the state largely through its control over the system of appointments. All senior government officials and most deputies of the Supreme Soviet were members of the CPSU. Of the party heads themselves, Stalin in 1941–1953 and Khrushchev in 1958–1964 were Premiers. Upon the forced retirement of Khrushchev, the party leader was prohibited from this kind of double membership,[35] but the later General Secretaries for at least some part of their tenure occupied the largely ceremonial position of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the nominal head of state. The institutions at lower levels were overseen and at times supplanted by primary party organizations.[36]
In practice, however, the degree of control the party was able to exercise over the state bureaucracy, particularly after the death of Stalin, was far from total, with the bureaucracy pursuing different interests that were at times in conflict with the party.[37] Nor was the party itself monolithic from top to bottom, although factions were officially banned.[38]
Government[link]
Main article: Government of the Soviet Union
The Supreme Soviet (successor of the Congress of Soviets and Central Executive Committee) was nominally the highest state body for most of the Soviet history,[39] at first acting as a rubber stamp institution, approving and implementing all decisions made by the party. However, the powers and functions of the Supreme Soviet were extended in the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, including the creation of new state commissions and committees. It gained additional powers when it came to the approval of the Five-Year Plans and the Soviet state budget.[40] The Supreme Soviet elected a Presidium to wield its power between plenary sessions,[41] ordinarily held twice a year, and appointed the Supreme Court,[42] the Procurator General[43] and the Council of Ministers (known before 1946 as the Council of People's Commissars), headed by the Chairman (Premier) and managing an enormous bureaucracy responsible for the administration of the economy and society.[41] State and party structures of the constituent republics largely emulated the structure of the central institutions, although the Russian SFSR, unlike the other constituent republics, for most of its history had no republican branch of the CPSU, being ruled directly by the union-wide party until 1990. Local authorities were organized likewise into party committees, local Soviets and executive committees. While the state system was nominally federal, the party was unitary.[44]
The state security police (the KGB and its predecessor agencies) played an important role in Soviet politics. It was instrumental in the Stalinist terror,[45] but after the death of Stalin, the state security police was brought under strict party control. Under Yuri Andropov, KGB chairman in 1967–1982 and General Secretary from 1982 to 1983, the KGB engaged in the suppression of political dissent and maintained an extensive network of informers, reasserting itself as a political actor to some extent independent of the party-state structure,[46] culminating in the anti-corruption campaign targeting high party officials in the late 1970s and early 1980s.[47]
Separation of power and reform[link]
Main article: Perestroika
The Soviet constitutions, which were promulgated in 1918, 1924, 1936 and 1977,[48] did not limit state power. No formal separation of powers existed between the Party, Supreme Soviet and Council of Ministers[49] that represented executive and legislative branches of the government. The system was governed less by statute than by informal conventions, and no settled mechanism of leadership succession existed. Bitter and at times deadly power struggles took place in the Politburo after the deaths of Lenin[50] and Joseph Stalin,[51] as well as after Khrushchev's dismissal,[52] itself due to a coup in both the Politburo and the Central Committee.[53] All Soviet party leaders before Gorbachev died in office, except Georgy Malenkov[54] and Khrushchev, both dismissed from the party leadership amid internal struggle within the party.[53]
In 1988–1990, facing considerable opposition, Mikhail Gorbachev enacted reforms shifting power away from the highest bodies of the party and making the Supreme Soviet less dependent on them. The Congress of People's Deputies was established, the majority of whose members were directly elected in competitive elections held in March 1989. The Congress now elected the Supreme Soviet, which became a full-time parliament, much stronger than before. For the first time since the 1920s, it refused to rubber stamp proposals from the party and Council of Ministers.[55] In 1990, Gorbachev introduced and assumed the position of the President of the Soviet Union, concentrated power in his executive office, independent of the party, and subordinated the government,[56] now renamed the Cabinet of Ministers of the USSR, to himself.[57]
Tensions grew between the union-wide authorities under Gorbachev, reformists led in Russia by Boris Yeltsin and controlling the newly elected Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR, and Communist Party hardliners. On 19–21 August 1991, a group of hardliners staged an abortive coup attempt. Following the failed coup, the State Council of the Soviet Union became the highest organ of state power "in the period of transition".[58] Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary, only remaining President for the final months of the existence of the USSR.[59]
Judicial system[link]
Main articles: Law of the Soviet Union and Socialist law
The judiciary was not independent of the other branches of government. The Supreme Court supervised the lower courts (People's Court) and applied the law as established by the Constitution or as interpreted by the Supreme Soviet. The Constitutional Oversight Committee reviewed the constitutionality of laws and acts. The Soviet Union used the inquisitorial system of Roman law, where the judge, procurator, and defense attorney collaborate to establish the truth.[60]
Political divisions[link]
Main articles: Soviet Republic (system of government) and Republics of the Soviet Union
Constitutionally, the Soviet Union was a union of Soviet Socialist Republics (SSRs) and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), although the rule of the highly centralized Communist Party made the union merely nominal.[30] The Treaty on the Creation of the USSR was signed in December 1922 by four founding republics, the RSFSR, Transcaucasian SFSR, Ukrainian SSR and Belorussian SSR. In 1924, during the national delimitation in Central Asia, the Uzbek and Turkmen SSRs were formed from parts of the RSFSR's Turkestan ASSR and two Soviet dependencies, the Khorezm and Bukharan SSR. In 1929, the Tajik SSR was split off from the Uzbek SSR. With the constitution of 1936, the constituents of the Transcaucasian SFSR, namely the Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijan SSRs, were elevated to union republics, while the Kazakh and Kirghiz SSRs were split off from the RSFSR.[61] In August 1940, the Soviet Union formed the Moldavian SSR from parts of the Ukrainian SSR and parts of Bessarabia annexed from Romania. It also annexed the Baltic states as the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian SSRs. The Karelo-Finnish SSR was split off from the RSFSR in March 1940 and merged back in 1956. Between July 1956 and September 1991, there were 15 union republics (see map below).[62]
On 16 November 1988, the Supreme Soviet of the Estonian SSR passed the Estonian Sovereignty Declaration that asserted Estonia's sovereignty and declared the supremacy of Estonian laws over those of the Soviet Union.[63] In March 1990, the newly elected Supreme Soviet of the Lithuanian SSR declared independence, followed by the Georgian Supreme Soviet in April 1991. Although the symbolic right of the republics to secede was nominally guaranteed by the constitution and the union treaty,[30] Soviet authorities at first refused to recognize it. After the August coup attempt, most of the other republics followed suit. The Soviet Union ultimately recognized the secession of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania on 6 September 1991. The remaining republics were recognized as independent with the Soviet Union's final dissolution in December 1991.[64]
| # | Republic | Map of the Union Republics between 1956–1991 |
|---|---|---|
| 1 |  Russian SFSR |
 |
| 2 |  Ukrainian SSR |
|
| 3 |  Belorussian SSR |
|
| 4 |  Uzbek SSR |
|
| 5 |  Kazakh SSR |
|
| 6 |  Georgian SSR |
|
| 7 |  Azerbaijan SSR |
|
| 8 |  Lithuanian SSR |
|
| 9 |  Moldavian SSR |
|
| 10 |  Latvian SSR |
|
| 11 |  Kirghiz SSR |
|
| 12 |  Tajik SSR |
|
| 13 |  Armenian SSR |
|
| 14 |  Turkmen SSR |
|
| 15 |  Estonian SSR |
Economy[link]
Main article: Economy of the Soviet Union
The Soviet Union became the first country to adopt a planned economy, whereby production and distribution of goods were centralized and directed by the government. The first Bolshevik experience with a command economy was the policy of War Communism, which involved nationalization of industry, centralized distribution of output, coercive requisition of agricultural production, and attempts to eliminate the circulation of money, as well as private enterprises and free trade. As it had aggravated a severe economic collapse caused by the war, in 1921, Lenin replaced War Communism with the New Economic Policy (NEP), legalizing free trade and private ownership of smaller businesses. The economy quickly recovered.[65]
Following a lengthy debate among the members of Politburo over the course of economic development, by 1928–1929, upon gaining control of the country, Joseph Stalin abandoned the NEP and pushed for full central planning, starting forced collectivization of agriculture and enacting draconian labor legislation. Resources were mobilized for rapid industrialization, which greatly expanded Soviet capacity in heavy industry and capital goods during the 1930s.[65] Preparation for war was one of the main driving forces behind industrialization, mostly due to distrust of the outside capitalistic world.[66] As a result, the USSR was transformed from a largely agrarian economy into a great industrial power, leading the way for its emergence as a superpower after World War II.[67] During the war, the Soviet economy and infrastructure suffered massive devastation and required extensive reconstruction.[68]
By the early 1940s, the Soviet economy had become relatively self-sufficient; for most of the period until the creation of Comecon, only a very small share of domestic products was traded internationally.[69] After the creation of the Eastern Bloc, external trade rose rapidly. Still the influence of the world economy on the USSR was limited by fixed domestic prices and a state monopoly on foreign trade.[70] Grain and sophisticated consumer manufactures became major import articles from around the 1960s.[69] During the arms race of the Cold War, the Soviet economy was burdened by military expenditures, heavily lobbied for by a powerful bureaucracy dependent on the arms industry. At the same time, the Soviet Union became the largest arms exporter to the Third World. Significant amounts of Soviet resources during the Cold War were allocated in aid to the other socialist states.[69]
From the 1930s until its collapse in the late 1980s, the way the Soviet economy operated remained essentially unchanged. The economy was formally directed by central planning, carried out by Gosplan and organized in five-year plans. In practice, however, the plans were highly aggregated and provisional, subject to ad hoc intervention by superiors. All key economic decisions were taken by the political leadership. Allocated resources and plan targets were normally denominated in rubles rather than in physical goods. Credit was discouraged, but widespread. Final allocation of output was achieved through relatively decentralized, unplanned contracting. Although in theory prices were legally set from above, in practice the actual prices were often negotiated, and informal horizontal links (between producer factories etc.) were widespread.[65]
A number of basic services were state-funded, such as education and healthcare. In the manufacturing sector, heavy industry and defense were assigned higher priority than the production of consumer goods.[71] Consumer goods, particularly outside large cities, were often scarce, of poor quality and limited choice. Under command economy, consumers had almost no influence over production, so the changing demands of a population with growing incomes could not be satisfied by supplies at rigidly fixed prices.[72] A massive unplanned second economy grew up alongside the planned one at low levels, providing some of the goods and services that the planners could not. Legalization of some elements of the decentralized economy was attempted with the reform of 1965.[65]
At the same time the party elite, aka "nomenclature", enjoyed separate system of supply of goods which provided them with ample supply of high quality goods under lowest prices, the very existence of which was kept secret from the general public.
Although statistics of the Soviet economy are notoriously unreliable and its economic growth difficult to estimate precisely,[73][74] by most accounts, the economy continued to expand until the mid 1980s. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet economy experienced comparatively high growth and was catching up to the West.[75] However, after 1970, the growth, while still positive, steadily declined, much more quickly and consistently than in other countries, despite a rapid increase in the capital stock (the rate of increase in capital was only surpassed by Japan).[65]
Overall, between 1960 and 1989, the growth rate of per capita income in the Soviet Union was slightly above the world average (based on 102 countries).[citation needed] However, given the very high level of investment in physical capital, high percentage of people with a secondary education, and low population increase, the economy should have grown much faster.[dubious – discuss] According to Stanley Fischer and William Easterly, the Soviet growth record was among "the worst in the world". By their calculation, per capita income of Soviet Union in 1989 should have been twice as high as it was, if investment, education and population had their typical effect on growth. The authors attribute this poor performance to low productivity of capital in the Soviet Union.[76] Steven Rosenfielde states that the standard of living actually declined as a result of Stalin's despotism, and while there was a brief improvement following his death, lapsed into stagnation.[77]
In 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform and revitalize the economy with his program of perestroika. His policies relaxed state control over enterprises, but did not yet allow it to be replaced by market incentives, ultimately resulting in a sharp decline in production output. The economy, already suffering from reduced petroleum export revenues, started to collapse. Prices were still fixed, and property was still largely state-owned until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.[65][72] For most of the period after World War II up to its collapse, the Soviet economy was the second largest in the world by GDP (PPP),[78] though in per capita terms the Soviet GDP was behind that of the First World countries.[79]
Energy[link]
Main article: Energy policy of the Soviet Union
The need for fuel declined in the Soviet Union from the 1970s to the 1980s,[80] both per ruble of gross social product and per ruble of industrial product. At the start, this decline grew very rapidly, but gradually slowed down between 1970 and 1975. From 1975 and 1980, it grew even slower,[clarification needed] only 2.6 percent.[81] David Wilson, a historian, believed that the gas industry would account for 40 percent of Soviet fuel production by the end of the century. His theory did not come to fruition because of the USSR's collapse.[82] The USSR, in theory, would have continued to have an economic growth rate of 2–2.5 percent during the 1990s because of Soviet energy fields[clarification needed].[83] However, the energy sector faced many difficulties, among them the country's high military expenditure and hostile relations with the First World (pre-Gorbachev era).[84]
In 1991, the Soviet Union had a pipeline network of 82,000 kilometres (51,000 mi) for crude oil and another 206,500 kilometres (128,300 mi) for natural gas.[85] Petroleum and petroleum-based products, natural gas, metals, wood, agricultural products, and a variety of manufactured goods, primarily machinery, arms and military equipment, were exported.[86] In the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet Union heavily relied on fossil fuel exports to earn hard currency.[69] At its peak in 1988, it was the largest producer and second largest exporter of crude oil, surpassed only by Saudi Arabia.[87]
Science and technology[link]
Main article: Science and technology in the Soviet Union
The Soviet Union placed great emphasis on science and technology within its economy,[88] however, the most remarkable Soviet successes in technology, such as producing the world's first space satellite, typically were the responsibility of the military.[71] Lenin believed that the USSR would never overtake the developed world if it remained as technologically backward as it was. Soviet authorities proved their commitment to Lenin's belief by developing massive networks, research and development organizations. By 1989, Soviet scientists were among the world's best-trained specialists in several areas, such as energy physics, selected areas of medicine, mathematics, welding and military technologies. Due to rigid state planning and bureaucracy, the Soviets remained far behind technologically in chemistry, biology, and computers when compared to the First World.
Project Socrates, under the Reagan administration, determined that the Soviet Union addressed the acquisition of science and technology in a manner that was radically different from what the US was using. In the case of the US, economic prioritization was being used for indigenous research and development as the means to acquire science and technology in both the private and public sectors. In contrast, the Soviet Union was offensively and defensively maneuvering in the acquisition and utilization of the worldwide technology, to increase the competitive advantage that they acquired from the technology, while preventing the US from acquiring a competitive advantage. However, in addition, the Soviet Union's technology-based planning was executed in a centralized, government-centric manner that greatly hindered its flexibility. It was this significant lack of flexibility that was exploited by the US to undermine the strength of the Soviet Union and thus foster its reform.[89][90][91]
Transport[link]
Main article: Transport in the Soviet Union
Transport was a key component of the nation's economy. The economic centralisation of the late 1920s and 1930s led to the development of infrastructure on a massive scale, most notably the establishment of Aeroflot, an aviation enterprise.[92] The country had a wide variety of modes of transport by land, water and air.[85] However, due to bad maintenance, much of the road, water and Soviet civil aviation transport were outdated and technologically backward compared to the First World.[93]
Soviet rail transport was the largest and most intensively used in the world;[93] it was also better developed than most of its Western counterparts.[94] By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Soviet economists were calling for the construction of more roads to alleviate some of the burden from the railways and to improve the Soviet state budget.[95] The road network and automobile industry[96] remained underdeveloped,[97] and dirt roads were common outside major cities.[98] Soviet maintenance projects proved unable to take care of even the few roads the country had. By the early-to-mid-1980s, the Soviet authorities tried to solve the road problem by ordering the construction of new ones.[98] Meanwhile, the automobile industry was growing at a faster rate than road construction.[99] The underdeveloped road network led to a growing demand for public transport.[100]
Despite improvements, several aspects of the transport sector were still riddled with problems due to outdated infrastructure, lack of investment, corruption and bad decision-making. Soviet authorities were unable to meet the growing demand for transport infrastructure and services.
The Soviet merchant fleet was one of the largest in the world.[85]
Demographics[link]
Main article: Demographics of the Soviet Union
The first fifty years of the 20th century in tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union were marked by a succession of disasters, each accompanied by large–scale population losses. Excess deaths over the course of World War I and the Russian Civil War (including the postwar famine) amounted to a combined total of 18 million,[101] some 10 million in the 1930s,[18] and more than 26 million in 1941–5. The postwar Soviet population was 45 to 50 million smaller than it would have been if pre-war demographic growth had continued.[23]
The crude birth rate of the USSR decreased from 44.0 per thousand in 1926 to 18.0 in 1974, largely due to increasing urbanization and the rising average age of marriages. The crude death rate demonstrated a gradual decrease as well – from 23.7 per thousand in 1926 to 8.7 in 1974. In general, the birth rates of the southern republics in Transcaucasia and Central Asia were considerably higher than those in the northern parts of the Soviet Union, and in some cases even increased in the post–World War II period, a phenomenon partly attributed to slower rates of urbanization and traditionally earlier marriages in the southern republics.[102] Soviet Europe moved towards sub-replacement fertility, while Soviet Central Asia continued to exhibit population growth well above replacement-level fertility.[103]
The late 1960s and the 1970s witnessed a reversal of the declining trajectory of the rate of mortality in the USSR, and was especially notable among men of working age, but was also prevalent in Russia and other predominantly Slavic areas of the country.[104] An analysis of the official data from the late 1980s showed that after worsening in the late-1970s and the early 1980s, adult mortality began to improve again.[105] The infant mortality rate increased from 24.7 in 1970 to 27.9 in 1974. Some researchers regarded the rise as largely real, a consequence of worsening health conditions and services.[106] The rises in both adult and infant mortality were not explained or defended by Soviet officials, and the Soviet government simply stopped publishing all mortality statistics for ten years. Soviet demographers and health specialists remained silent about the mortality increases until the late-1980s, when the publication of mortality data resumed and researchers could delve into the real causes.[107]
Education[link]
Main article: Education in the Soviet Union
Before 1917, education was not free in the Russian Empire and was therefore either inaccessible or barely accessible for many children from lower-class working and peasant families. Estimates from 1917 recorded that 75–85 percent of the Russian population was illiterate.
Anatoly Lunacharsky became the first People's Commissariat for Education of Soviet Russia. At the beginning, the Soviet authorities placed great emphasis on the elimination of illiteracy. People who were literate were automatically hired as teachers. For a short period, quality was sacrificed for quantity. By 1940, Joseph Stalin could announce that illiteracy had been eliminated. In the aftermath of the Great Patriotic War, the country's educational system expanded dramatically. This expansion had a tremendous effect. In the 1960s, nearly all Soviet children had access to education, the only exception being those living in remote areas. Nikita Khrushchev tried to make education more accessible, making it clear to children that education was closely linked to the needs of society. Education also became important in creating the New Soviet Man.[108]
Only 20 percent of all applicants were accepted. The rest entered the labor market or learned a skill at a vocational technical school or technicum[dubious – discuss]. Students from families of dubious political reliability were barred from higher education.[109] The Brezhnev administration introduced a rule that required all university applicants to present a reference from the local Komsomol party secretary.[110] According to statistics from 1986, the number of students per 10,000 population was 181 for the USSR, compared to 517 for the US.[111]
Ethnic groups[link]
The Soviet Union was a very ethnically diverse country, with more than 100 distinct ethnic groups. The total population was estimated at 293 million in 1991. According to a 1990 estimate, the majority were Russians (50.78%), followed by Ukrainians (15.45%) and Uzbeks (5.84%).[112]
All citizens of the USSR had their own ethnic affiliation. The ethnicity of a person was chosen at the age of sixteen[113] by the child's parents. If the parents did not agree, the child was automatically assigned the ethnicity of the mother. Partly due to Soviet policies, some of the smaller minority ethnic groups were considered part of larger ones, such as the Mingrelians of the Georgian SSR, who were classified with the linguistically related Georgians.[114] Some ethnic groups voluntarily assimilated, while others were brought in by force. Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians shared close cultural ties, while other groups did not. With multiple nationalities living in the same territory, ethnic antagonisms developed over the years.[115]
Health[link]
Main article: Health care in the Soviet Union
In 1917, before the Bolshevik uprising, health conditions were significantly behind the developed countries. As Lenin later noted, "Either the lice will defeat socialism, or socialism will defeat the lice".[116] The Soviet principle of health care was conceived by the People's Commissariat for Health in 1918. Health care was to be controlled by the state and would be provided to its citizens free of charge. Article 42 of the 1977 Soviet Constitution gave all citizens the right to health protection and free access to any health institutions in the USSR. However, the Soviet Union's health care system was not able to fulfill all the needs of its people.[117] Before Leonid Brezhnev rose to power, Soviet socialised medicine was held in high esteem by many foreign specialists. This changed however, from Brezhnev's accession and Mikhail Gorbachev's tenure as leader, the Soviet health care system was heavily criticised for many basic faults, such as the quality of service and the unevenness in its provision.[118] Minister of Health Yevgeniy Chazov, during the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, while highlighting such Soviet success as having the most doctors and hospitals in the world, recognised the system's deficiencies and felt that billions of Soviet rubles were squandered.[119]
After the communist takeover, the life expectancy for all age groups went up. This statistic was used by authorities to prove that the socialist system was superior to the capitalist system. These improvements continued into the 1960s, when the life expectancy in the Soviet Union surpassed that of the United States. It remained stable during most years, although in the 1970s, it went down slightly, probably because of alcohol abuse. Most western sources put the blame on growing alcohol abuse and poor health care; this theory was also implicitly accepted by the Soviet authorities. At the same time, infant mortality began to rise. After 1974, the government stopped publishing statistics on this. This trend can be partly explained by the number of pregnancies rising drastically in the Asian part of the country where infant mortality was highest, while declining markedly in the more developed European part of the Soviet Union.[120]
Language[link]
Main article: Languages of the Soviet Union
The Soviet government headed by Vladimir Lenin gave small language groups their own writing systems.[121] The development of these writing systems was very successful, even though some flaws were detected. During the later days of the USSR, countries with the same multilingual situation implemented similar policies. A serious problem when creating these writing systems was that the languages differed dialectally greatly from each other.[122] When a language had been given a writing system and appeared in a notable publication, that language would attain "official language" status. There were many minority languages which never received their own writing system; therefore their speakers were forced to have a second language.[123] There are examples where the Soviet government retreated from this policy, most notable under Stalin's regime, where education was discontinued in languages which were not widespread enough. These languages were then assimilated into another language, mostly Russian.[124] During the Great Patriotic War (World War II), some minority languages were banned, and their speakers accused of collaborating with the enemy.[125]
As the most widely spoken of the Soviet Union's many languages, Russian de facto functioned as an official language as the "language of interethnic communication" (Russian: язык межнационального общения), but only assumed the de jure status as the official national language in 1990.[126]
Religion[link]
File:Brezhnev with priests and rabbi 1977.jpg
General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev makes a toast with Russian Orthodox clergymen and a rabbi at a celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1977.
Main article: Religion in the Soviet Union
A.L. Eliseev writes that a meeting of the antireligious commission of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) took place on 23 May 1929 under the Chairmanship of E. laroslavskii. There, believers in the country were estimated at 80 percent. It cannot be ruled out that this percentage was somewhat understated, to prove the successfulness of the struggle with religion.[127]
Christianity and Islam had the greatest number of adherents among the Soviet state's religious citizens.[128] Eastern Christianity predominated among Christians, with Russia's traditional Russian Orthodox Church being the Soviet Union's largest Christian denomination. About 90 percent of the Soviet Union's Muslims were Sunnis, with Shiites concentrated in the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic.[128] Smaller groups included Roman Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, and a variety of Protestant sects.[128]
Religious influence had been strong in the Russian Empire. The Russian Orthodox Church enjoyed a privileged status as the church of the monarchy and took part in carrying out official state functions.[129] The immediate period following the establishment of the Soviet state included a struggle against the Orthodox Church, which the revolutionaries considered an ally of the former ruling classes.[130]
In Soviet law, the "freedom to hold religious services" was constitutionally guaranteed, although the ruling Communist Party regarded religion as incompatible with the Marxist spirit of scientific materialism.[130] In practice, the Soviet system subscribed to a narrow interpretation of this right, and in fact utilized a range of official measures to discourage religion and curb the activities of religious groups.[130]
The 1918 Council of People's Commissars decree establishing the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) as a secular state also decreed that "the teaching of religion in all [places] where subjects of general instruction are taught, is forbidden. Citizens may teach and may be taught religion privately."[131] Among further restrictions, those adopted in 1929, a half-decade into Stalin's rule, included express prohibitions on a range of church activities, including meetings for organized Bible study.[130] Both Christian and non-Christian establishments were shut down by the thousands in the 1920s and 1930s. By 1940, as many as 90 percent of the churches, synagogues, and mosques that had been operating in 1917 were closed.[132]
Convinced that religious anti-Sovietism had become a thing of the past, the Stalin regime began shifting to a more moderate religion policy in the late 1930s.[133] Soviet religious establishments overwhelmingly rallied to support the war effort during the Soviet war with Nazi Germany. Amid other accommodations to religious faith, churches were reopened, Radio Moscow began broadcasting a religious hour, and a historic meeting between Stalin and Orthodox Church leader Patriarch Sergius I of Moscow was held in 1943.[133] The general tendency of this period was an increase in religious activity among believers of all faiths.[134]
The Soviet establishment again clashed with the churches under General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev's leadership in 1958–1964, a period when atheism was emphasized in the educational curriculum, and numerous state publications promoted atheistic views.[133] During this period, the number of churches fell from 20,000 to 10,000 from 1959 to 1965, and the number of synagogues dropped from 500 to 97.[135] The number of working mosques also declined, falling from 1,500 to 500 within a decade.[135]
Religious institutions remained monitored by the Soviet government, but churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques were all given more leeway in the Brezhnev era.[136] Official relations between the Orthodox Church and the Soviet government again warmed to the point that the Brezhnev government twice honored Orthodox Patriarch Alexy I with the Order of the Red Banner of Labor.[137] A poll conducted by Soviet authorities in 1982 recorded 20 percent of the Soviet population as "active religious believers."[138]
Culture[link]
Main article: Culture of the Soviet Union
See also: Soviet cuisine
The culture of the Soviet Union passed through several stages during the USSR's 70-year existence. During the first eleven years following the Revolution (1918–1929), there was relative freedom and artists experimented with several different styles to find a distinctive Soviet style of art. Lenin wanted art to be accessible to the Russian people. On the other hand, hundreds of intellectuals, writers, and artists were exiled or executed, and their work banned, for example Nikolay Gumilev (shot for conspiring against the Bolshevik regime) and Yevgeny Zamyatin (banned).[139]
The government encouraged a variety of trends. In art and literature, numerous schools, some traditional and others radically experimental, proliferated. Communist writers Maksim Gorky and Vladimir Mayakovsky were active during this time. Film, as a means of influencing a largely illiterate society, received encouragement from the state; much of director Sergei Eisenstein's best work dates from this period.
Later, during Stalin's rule, Soviet culture was characterised by the rise and domination of the government-imposed style of socialist realism, with all other trends being severely repressed, with rare exceptions, for example Mikhail Bulgakov's works. Many writers were imprisoned and killed.[140]
Following the Khrushchev Thaw of the late 1950s and early 1960s, censorship was diminished. Greater experimentation in art forms were again permissible, with the result that more sophisticated and subtly critical work began to be produced. The regime loosened its emphasis on socialist realism; thus, for instance, many protagonists of the novels of author Yury Trifonov concerned themselves with problems of daily life rather than with building socialism. An underground dissident literature, known as samizdat, developed during this late period. In architecture the Khrushchev era mostly focused on functional design as opposed to the highly decorated style of Stalin's epoch.
In the second half of the 1980s, Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and glasnost significantly expanded freedom of expression in the media and press.[141]
See also[link]
References[link]
- ^ Bridget O'Laughlin (1975) Marxist Approaches in Anthropology Annual Review of Anthropology Vol. 4: pp. 341–70 (October 1975) (doi:10.1146/annurev.an.04.100175.002013).
William Roseberry (1997) Marx and Anthropology Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 26: pp. 25–46 (October 1997) (doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.26.1.25) - ^ a b Robert Service (9 September 2005). Stalin: a biography. Picador. ISBN 978-0-330-41913-0. http://books.google.com/?id=ITKUPwAACAAJ.
- ^ Mr. David Holloway (27 March 1996). Stalin and the Bomb. Yale University Press. p. 18. ISBN 978-0-300-06664-7. http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300066647.
- ^ Turner 1987, p. 23
- ^ Iain McLean (1996). The concise Oxford dictionary of politics. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-285288-5. http://books.google.com/?id=UMuBAAAAMAAJ.
- ^ "Russia is now a party to any Treaties to which the former Soviet Union was a party, and enjoys the same rights and obligations as the former Soviet Union, except insofar as adjustments are necessarily required, e.g. to take account of the change in territorial extent. [...] The Russian federation continues the legal personality of the former Soviet Union and is thus not a successor State in the sense just mentioned. The other former Soviet Republics are successor States.", United Kingdom Materials on International Law 1993, BYIL 1993, pp. 579 (636).
- ^ Evan Mawdsley (1 March 2007). The Russian Civil War. Pegasus Books. p. 287. ISBN 978-1-933648-15-6. http://books.google.com/?id=LUhXZD2BPeQC&pg=PA287.
- ^ Richard Sakwa The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union, 1917–1991: 1917–1991. Routledge, 1999. ISBN 978-0-415-12290-2, ISBN 978-0-415-12290-0. pp. 140–143.
- ^ Julian Towster. Political Power in the U.S.S.R., 1917–1947: The Theory and Structure of Government in the Soviet State Oxford Univ. Press, 1948. p. 106.
- ^ (Russian) Voted Unanimously for the Union. Archived 22 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ (Russian) Creation of the USSR at Khronos.ru.[dead link]
- ^ "70 Years of Gidroproekt and Hydroelectric Power in Russia". http://www.springerlink.com/content/h3677572g016338u/. [dead link]
- ^ (Russian) On GOELRO Plan — at Kuzbassenergo. Archived 23 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ The consolidation into a single-party regime took place during the first three and a half years after the revolution, which included the period of War Communism and an election in which multiple parties competed. See Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet State, First Phase 1917–1922. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955, 1966.
- ^ Lenin, V.I.. Collected Works. pp. pp. 152-164, Vol. 31.
- ^ Stéphane Courtois; Mark Kramer (15 October 1999). Livre noir du Communisme: crimes, terreur, répression. Harvard University Press. p. 206. ISBN 978-0-674-07608-2. http://books.google.com/?id=H1jsgYCoRioC&pg=PA206.
- ^ Abbott Gleason (2009). A companion to Russian history. Wiley-Blackwell. p. 373. ISBN 978-1-4051-3560-3. http://books.google.com/?id=JyN0hlKcfTcC&pg=PA373.
- ^ a b Geoffrey A. Hosking (2001). Russia and the Russians: a history. Harvard University Press. p. 469. ISBN 978-0-674-00473-3. http://books.google.com/?id=oh-5AAmboMUC&pg=PA469.
- ^ (Russian) Mel'tiukhov, Mikhail. Upushchennyi shans Stalina: Sovietskii Soiuz i bor'ba za Evropu 1939–1941. Moscow: Veche, 2000. ISBN 978-5-7838-1196-3.
- ^ William J. Duiker (31 August 2009). Contemporary World History. Wadsworth Pub Co. p. 128. ISBN 978-0-495-57271-8. http://books.google.com/?id=uqvgYtJHGSMC.
- ^ Denunciation of the neutrality pact 5 April 1945. (Avalon Project at Yale University)
- ^ Soviet Declaration of War on Japan, 8 August 1945. (Avalon Project at Yale University)
- ^ a b Geoffrey A. Hosking (2006). Rulers and victims: the Russians in the Soviet Union. Harvard University Press. p. 242. ISBN 978-0-674-02178-5. http://books.google.com/?id=CDMVMqDvp4QC&pg=PA242.
- ^ "Main Intelligence Administration (GRU) Glavnoye Razvedovatel'noye Upravlenie – Russia / Soviet Intelligence Agencies". Fas.org. http://www.fas.org/irp/world/russia/gru/. Retrieved 24 November 2008.
- ^ "Tank on the Moon". The Nature of Things with David Suzuki. 6 December 2007. CBC-TV. http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/magazine2.html.
- ^ Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak.
- ^ The red blues — Soviet politics by Brian Crozier, National Review, 25 June 1990. Archived 28 June 2011 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Origins of Moral-Ethical Crisis and Ways to Overcome it by V.A.Drozhin Honoured Lawyer of Russia.
- ^ Country Profile: Russia Foreign & Commonwealth Office of the United Kingdom.
- ^ a b c Sakwa, Richard. Soviet Politics in Perspective. 2nd ed. London – N.Y.: Routledge, 1998.
- ^ Law, David A. (1975). Russian Civilization. Ardent Media. pp. 193–94. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-8422-0529-2|978-0-8422-0529-2]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=f3ky9qBavl4C&dq.
- ^ Zemtsov, Ilya (1989). Chernenko: The Last Bolshevik: The Soviet Union on the Eve of Perestroika. Transaction Publishers. p. 325. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-88738-260-6|978-0-88738-260-6]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=hgscfLr5dCsC&dq.
- ^ Knight, Amy (1995). Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant. Princeton University Press. p. 5. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-691-01093-5|978-0-691-01093-5]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=PxiuUGRQhUIC&dq.
- ^ Hough, Jerry F.; Fainsod, Merle (1979). How the Soviet Union is Governed. Harvard University Press. p. 486. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-674-41030-0|978-0-674-41030-0]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=38gMzMRXCpQC&dq.
- ^ Service, Robert (2009). History of Modern Russia: From Tsarism to the Twenty-first Century. Penguin Books Ltd. p. 378. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-14-103797-0|978-0-14-103797-0]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=o8Z1QAAACAAJ&dq.
- ^ Конститутион оф тхе Руссиян Федератион: витх комментариес анд интерпретатион. Brunswick Publishing Corp. 1994. p. 82. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-1-55618-142-6|978-1-55618-142-6]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=3mQjvzP8VSYC&dq.
- ^ Ōgushi, Atsushi (2008). The Demise of the Soviet Communist Party. Routledge. pp. 31–32. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-415-43439-4|978-0-415-43439-4]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=N7mDUC1nOZsC&dq.
- ^ Taras, Ray (1989). Leadership change in Communist states. Routledge. p. 132. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-04-445277-2|978-0-04-445277-2]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=AlcVAAAAIAAJ&dq.
- ^ F. Triska, Jan; Slusser, Robert M. (1962). The Theory, Law, and Policy of Soviet Treaties. Stanford University Press. pp. 63–64. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-8047-0122-9|978-0-8047-0122-9]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=QmWmAAAAIAAJ&dq.
- ^ Deb, Kalipada (1996). Soviet Union to Commonwealth: Transformation and Challenges. M.D. Publications Pvt. Ltd. p. 81. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-81-85880-95-6|978-81-85880-95-6]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=IvK6r-8Ogg0C&dq.
- ^ a b Benson, Shirley (2001). Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower. Penn State University Press. pp. XIV. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-271-02170-5|978-0-271-02170-5]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=dQeahlZdM7sC&dq.
- ^ The Communist World. Ardent Media. 2001. p. 441. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-271-02170-5|978-0-271-02170-5]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=h9FFVgu-Ff0C&dq.
- ^ Joseph Marie Feldbrugge, Ferdinand (1993). Russian Law: The End of the Soviet System and the Role of Law. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. p. 205. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-7923-2358-0|978-0-7923-2358-0]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=JWt7MN3Dch8C&dq.
- ^ White, Stephen; J. Gill, Graeme; Slider, Darrell (1993). The Politics of Transition: Shaping a post-Soviet Future. Cambridge University Press. p. 108. ISBN 978-0-521-44634-1. http://books.google.com/books?id=O9IGbITqT_EC&dq.
- ^ P. Hoffmann, Erik; Laird, Robin Frederick (1984). The Soviet Polity in the Modern Era. Transaction Publishers. pp. 313–315. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-202-24165-3|978-0-202-24165-3]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=63_obglArrMC&dq.
- ^ P. Hoffmann, Erik; Laird, Robin Frederick (1984). The Soviet Polity in the Modern Era. Transaction Publishers. pp. 315–319. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-202-24165-3|978-0-202-24165-3]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=63_obglArrMC&dq.
- ^ "The Soviet Polity in the Modern Era". Great Russian Encyclopedia. Bol'shaya Rossiyskaya Enciklopediya Publisher. 2005. p. 742.
- ^ Sakwa, Richard (1998). Soviet Politics in Perspective. Routledge. p. 106. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-415-07153-4|978-0-415-07153-4]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=vX1U5G_xnqcC&dq.
- ^ Kucherov, Samuel (1970). The Organs of Soviet Administration of Justice: Their History and Operation. Brill Archive Publishers. p. 31. http://books.google.com/books?id=ssMUAAAAIAAJ&dq.
- ^ Phillips, Steve (2000). Lenin and the Russian Revolution. Heinemann. p. 71. ISBN 978-0-435-32719-4. http://books.google.com/books?id=_na0zfdhKQMC&dq.
- ^ Encyclopædia Britannica (2005). Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.. p. 1014.
- ^ Service, Robert (2009). History of Modern Russia: From Tsarism to the Twenty-first Century. Penguin Books Ltd. p. 379. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-14-103797-0|978-0-14-103797-0]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=o8Z1QAAACAAJ&dq.
- ^ a b Khrushchev, Nikita (2007). Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, Volume 3: Statesman. Pennsylvania State University Press. p. 674. ISBN 978-0-271-02935-1.
- ^ Polley, Martin (2000). A–Z of modern Europe since 1789. Routledge. p. 88. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-415-18597-1|978-0-415-18597-1]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=_f8Avd5N5Y4C&dq.
- ^ "Gorbachev's Reform Dilemma". Library of Congress Country Studies. http://countrystudies.us/russia/18.htm. Retrieved 16 October 2010.
- ^ Polmar, Norman (1991). The Naval Institute Guide to the Soviet. United States Naval Institute. p. 1. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-87021-241-9|978-0-87021-241-9]]. http://books.google.ca/books?id=tkGDkpkQh-sC&dq.
- ^ McCauley, Martin (2007). The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union. Pearson Education. p. 490. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-582-78465-4|978-0-582-78465-4]]. http://books.google.ca/books?id=ycCZqmhhceMC&dq.
- ^ Government of the USSR: Gorbachev, Mikhail (21 March 1972). "УКАЗ: ПОЛОЖЕНИЕ О МИНИСТЕРСТВЕ ЮСТИЦИИ СССР [Law: About state governing bodies of USSR in a transition period On the bodies of state authority and administration of the USSR in Transition]" (in Russian). sssr.su. http://www.sssr.su/zopp.html. Retrieved 15 October 1991.
- ^ Vincent Daniels, Robert (1993). A Documentary History of Communism in Russia: From Lenin to Gorbachev. University Press of New England (UPNE). p. 388. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-87451-616-1|978-0-87451-616-1]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=gTIZ2dvDKF0C&dq.
- ^ Encyclopædia Britannica. "Inquisitorial procedure (law) – Britannica Online Encyclopedia". Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/288956/inquisitorial-procedure. Retrieved 30 October 2010.
- ^ Adams, Simon (2005). Russian Republics. Black Rabbit Books. p. 21. ISBN 978-1-58340-606-9. http://books.google.com/books?id=LyqIDCc-cSsC&dq.
- ^ Feldbrugge, Ferdinand Joseph Maria (1993). Russian Law: The Rnd of the Soviet system and the Role of Law. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. p. 94. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-7923-2358-0|978-0-7923-2358-0]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=JWt7MN3Dch8C&dq.
- ^ Walker, Edward (2003-06). Dissolution. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 63. ISBN 978-0-7425-2453-8. http://books.google.com/?id=Y06eqVKtfQgC.
- ^ Hughes, James; Sasse, Gwendolyn (2002). Ethnicity and Territory in the former Soviet Union: Regions in Conflict. Routledge. pp. 63 and 146. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-7146-5226-1|978-0-7146-5226-1]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=7vjb-0eZ-wcC&dq.
- ^ a b c d e f Gregory, Paul R. (2004). The Political Economy of Stalinism: Evidence from the Soviet Secret Archives. Cambridge University Press. pp. 218–20. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-521-53367-8|978-0-521-53367-8]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=hFHU5kaXhu8C&dq.
- ^ Mawdsley, Evan (1998). The Stalin Years: The Soviet Union, 1929–1953. Manchester University Press. p. 30. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-7190-4600-9|978-0-7190-4600-9]]. http://books.google.com/?id=m-voAAAAIAAJ&dq.
- ^ Wheatcroft, S. G.; Davies, R. W.; Cooper, J. M. (1986). Soviet Industrialization Reconsidered: Some Preliminary Conclusions about Economic Development between 1926 and 1941. 39. Economic History Review. p. 264. ISBN 978-0-7190-4600-1. http://books.google.com/?id=m-voAAAAIAAJ&dq.
- ^ "Reconstruction and Cold War". Library of Congress. http://countrystudies.us/russia/12.htm. Retrieved 23 October 2010.
- ^ a b c d "Reconstruction and Cold War". Library of Congress Country Studies. http://rs6.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?frd/cstdy:@field%28DOCID+su0391%29. Retrieved 23 October 2010.
- ^ IMF and OECD (1991). A Study of the Soviet Economy. 1. International Monetary Fund. p. 9. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-14-103797-0|978-0-14-103797-0]]. http://books.google.com/?id=o8Z1QAAACAAJ&dq.
- ^ a b "Economy". Library of Congress Country Studies. http://rs6.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?frd/cstdy:@field%28DOCID+su0009%29. Retrieved 23 October 2010.
- ^ a b Hanson, Philip. The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy: An Economic History of the USSR from 1945. London: Longman, 2003.
- ^ Bergson, Abram (1997). "How Big was the Soviet GDP?". Comparative Economic Studies 39 (1): 1–14. DOI:10.1057/ces.1997.1.
- ^ Harrison, Mark (1993). "Soviet Economic Growth Since 1928: The Alternative Statistics of G. I. Khanin". Europe–Asia Studies 45 (1): 141–167. DOI:10.1080/09668139308412080.
- ^ Gvosdev, Nikolas (2008). The Strange Death of Soviet communism: A Postscript. Transaction Publishers. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-1-4128-0698-4|978-1-4128-0698-4]]. http://books.google.com/?id=Q_xTyZUEqkYC&dq.
- ^ Fischer, Stanley; Easterly, Willian (1994). "The Soviet Economic Decline, Historical and Republican Data". World Bank. http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/IW3P/IB/1994/04/01/000009265_3961006063138/Rendered/PDF/multi0page.pdf. Retrieved 23 October 2010.
- ^ Steven Rosefielde (1996). "Stalinism in Post-Communist Perspective: New Evidence on Killings, Forced Labour and Economic Growth in the 1930s". Europe-Asia Studies (Taylor & Francis, Ltd.) 48 (6): 956–987. http://www.jstor.org/stable/152635. "The new evidence shows that administrative command planning and Stalin's forced industrialisation strategies failed in the 1930s and beyond. The economic miracle chronicled in official hagiographies and until recently faithfully recounted in Western textbooks has no basis in fact. It is the statistical artefact not of index number relativity (the Gerschenkron effect) but of misapplying to the calculation of growth cost prices that do not accurately measure competitive value. The standard of living declined during the 1930s in response to Stalin's despotism, and after a brief improvement following his death, lapsed into stagnation. Glasnost and post-communist revelations interpreted as a whole thus provide no basis for Getty, Rittersporn & Zemskov's relatively favourable characterisation of the methods, economic achievements and human costs of Stalinism. The evidence demonstrates that the suppression of markets and the oppression of vast segments of the population were economically counterproductive and humanly calamitous, just as anyone conversant with classical economic theory should have expected."
- ^ Central Intelligence Agency (1991). "GDP – Million 1990". The World Factbook. http://www.theodora.com/wfb/1990/rankings/gdp_million_1.html. Retrieved 12 June 2010.
- ^ Central Intelligence Agency (1992). "GDP Per Capita – 1991". The World Factbook. http://www.theodora.com/wfb/1991/rankings/gdp_per_capita_0.html. Retrieved 12 June 2010.
- ^ Wilson, David (1983). The Demand for Energy in the Soviet Union. Rowman and Littfield. pp. 105 to 108. ISBN 0-7099-2704-5, 9780709927044.
- ^ Wilson 1983, p. 295.
- ^ Wilson 1983, p. 297.
- ^ Wilson 1983, p. 297–99.
- ^ Wilson 1983, p. 299.
- ^ a b c Central Intelligence Agency (1991). "Soviet Union – Communications". The World Factbook. http://www.theodora.com/wfb1991/soviet_union/soviet_union_communications.html. Retrieved 20 October 2010.
- ^ Central Intelligence Agency (1992). "Soviet Union – Economy". The World Factbook. http://www.theodora.com/wfb1991/soviet_union/soviet_union_economy.html. Retrieved 23 October 2010.
- ^ Hardt, John Pearce; Hardt, John P. (2003). Russia's Uncertain Economic Future: With a Comprehensive Subject Index. M.E. Sharpe. p. 233. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-7656-1208-9|978-0-7656-1208-9]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=IvKF3PKGYAcC&dq.
- ^ "Science and Technology". Library of Congress Country Studies. http://rs6.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?frd/cstdy:@field%28DOCID+su0413%29. Retrieved 23 October 2010.
- ^ MacFarland, Margo (3 May 1990). "Global Tech Strategies Brought to U.S.". Washington Technology.
- ^ Deckert, R.A. (10 October 1990). "The science of uncovering industrial information". Business Journal of the Treasure Coast.
- ^ "U.S. Firms Must Trade Short-Term Gains for Long-Term Technology Planning". Inside the Pentagon. 7 March 1991.
- ^ Highman, Robert D.S.; Greenwood, John T.; Hardesty, Von (1998). Russian Aviation and Air Power in the Twentieth Century. Routledge. p. 134. ISBN 978-0-7146-4784-5. http://books.google.no/books?id=cpynoFM-Jf4C&dq.
- ^ a b Wilson 1983, p. 205.
- ^ Wilson 1983, p. 201.
- ^ Ambler, Shaw and Symons 1985, p. 166–67.
- ^ Ambler, Shaw and Symons 1985, p. 168.
- ^ Ambler, Shaw and Symons 1985, p. 165.
- ^ a b Ambler, Shaw and Symons 1985, p. 167.
- ^ Ambler, Shaw and Symons 1985, p. 169.
- ^ International Monetary Fund and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 1991, p. 56.
- ^ Mark Harrison (18 July 2002). Accounting for War: Soviet Production, Employment, and the Defence Burden, 1940–1945. Cambridge University Press. p. 167. ISBN 978-0-521-89424-1. http://books.google.com/?id=yJcD7_Q_rQ8C&pg=PA167.
- ^ Government of the USSR (1977) (in Russian). Большая советская энциклопедия [Great Soviet Encyclopaedia]. 24. Moscow: State Committee for Publishing. p. 15.
- ^ Anderson, Barbara A. (1990). Growth and Diversity of the Population of the Soviet Union. 510. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. pp. 155–77.
- ^ Vallin, J.; Chesnais, J.C. (1970). Recent Developments of Mortality in Europe, English-Speaking Countries and the Soviet Union, 1960–1970. 29. Population Studies. pp. 861–898.
- ^ Ryan, Michael (28 May 1988). Life expectancy and mortality data from the Soviet Union. 296. p. 1,513–1515.
- ^ Davis, Christopher; Feshbach, Murray. Rising Infant Mortality in the USSR in the 1970s. Washington, D.C.: United States Census Bureau. p. 95.
- ^ Krimins, Juris (3–7 December 1990). The Changing Mortality Patterns in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia: Experience of the Past Three Decades. Paper presented at the International Conference on Health, Morbidity and Mortality by Cause of Death in Europe.
- ^ Law, David A. (1975). Russian Civilization. Ardent Media. pp. 300–1. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-8422-0529-2|978-0-8422-0529-2]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=f3ky9qBavl4C&dq.
- ^ Shelley, Louise (1996). Policing Soviet Society: The Evolution of State Control. Routledge. p. 208. ISBN 978-0-415-10470-8. http://books.google.com/books?id=jla71nIxeBUC&dq.
- ^ Shlapentokh, Vladimir (1990). Soviet Intellectuals and Political Power: The post-Stalin Era. I.B. Tauris. p. 26. ISBN 978-1-85043-284-5. http://books.google.com/books?id=7VFqqE5995UC&dq.
- ^ Pejovich, Svetozar (1990). The Economics of Property Rights: Towards a Theory of Comparative Systems. Springer Science+Business Media. p. 130. ISBN 978-0-7923-0878-2. http://books.google.com/?id=ocQKHRReKdcC.
- ^ Central Intelligence Agency (1991). "Soviet Union – People". The World Factbook. http://www.theodora.com/wfb1991/soviet_union/soviet_union_people.html. Retrieved 25 October 2010.
- ^ Comrie 1981, p. 2.
- ^ Comrie 1981, p. 3.
- ^ Hosking, Geoffrey (13 March 2006). "Rulers and Victims: The Russians in the Soviet Union". History Today. http://www.historytoday.com/geoffrey-hosking/rulers-and-victims-russians-soviet-union. Retrieved 25 October 2010. (pay-fee)
- ^ Lane 1992, p. 353.
- ^ Lane 1992, p. 360.
- ^ Lane 1992, p. 352.
- ^ Lane 1992, p. 352–53.
- ^ Dinkel, R.H. (1990). The Seeming Paradox of Increasing Mortality in a Highly Industrialized Nation: the Example of the Soviet Union. pp. 155–77.
- ^ Comrie 1981, p. 3–4.
- ^ Comrie 1981, p. 4.
- ^ Comrie 1981, p. 25.
- ^ Comrie 1981, p. 26.
- ^ Comrie 1981, p. 27.
- ^ "ЗАКОН СССР ОТ 24.04.1990 О ЯЗЫКАХ НАРОДОВ СССР [Law of the USSR from 24.04.1990 On languages of the USSR]" (in Russian). Government of the Soviet Union. 24 April 1990. http://legal-ussr.narod.ru/data01/tex10935.htm. Retrieved 24 October 2010.
- ^ Religion and Politics in Russia: A Reader By Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer page 6-7
- ^ a b c Eaton, Katherine Bliss (2004). Daily life in the Soviet Union. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 285 and 286. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-313-31628-7|978-0-313-31628-7]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=VVFuYN8TS5AC&dq.
- ^ Silvio Ferrari; W. Cole Durham, Elizabeth A. Sewell (2003). Law and religion in post-communist Europe. Peeters Pub & Booksellers. p. 261. ISBN 978-90-429-1262-5. http://books.google.com/?id=QEucgny-0k4C.
- ^ a b c d Simon 1974, pp. 64–65.
- ^ Simon 1974, p. 209.
- ^ Atwood, Craig D. (2001). Always Reforming: A History of Christianity Since 1300. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press. p. 311. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-86554-679-7|978-0-86554-679-7]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=72Ulz0fpr4cC.
- ^ a b c Janz 1998, pp. 38–39.
- ^ Ro'i, Yaacov (1995). Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union. London: Frank Cass. p. 263. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-7146-4619-9|978-0-7146-4619-9]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=bJBH5pxzSyMC.
- ^ a b Nahaylo, Bohdan & Victor Swoboda (1990). Soviet Disunion: A History of the Nationalities Problem in the USSR. London: Hamish Hamilton. p. 144. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-0-02-922401-2|978-0-02-922401-2]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=ZrG7vrPue4wC.
- ^ Mark D. Steinberg; Catherine Wanner (2008-10). Religion, morality, and community in post-Soviet societies. Indiana University Press. p. 6. ISBN 978-0-253-22038-7. http://books.google.com/?id=LR6X3EY8oPIC.
- ^ Janz 1998, p. 42.
- ^ McKay, George; Williams, Christopher (2009). Subcultures and New Religious Movements in Russia and East-Central Europe. Peter Lang. pp. 231–32. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-3-03911-921-4|978-3-03911-921-4]]. http://books.google.com/books?id=xpNBm-z7aOYC&dq.
- ^ 'On the other hand...' See the index of Stalin and His Hangmen by Donald Rayfield, 2004, Random House
- ^ Rayfield 2004, pp. 317–320.
- ^ "Gorbachev, Mikhail." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 2 October 2007 <http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9037405>. "Under his new policy of glasnost ("openness"), a major cultural thaw took place: freedoms of expression and of information were significantly expanded; the press and broadcasting were allowed unprecedented candour in their reportage and criticism; and the country's legacy of Stalinist totalitarian rule was eventually completely repudiated by the government."
Bibliography[link]
- Ambler, John; Shaw, Denis J.B.; Symons, Leslie (1985). Soviet and East European Transport Problems. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-0-7099-0557-8. http://books.google.no/books?id=Rpg9AAAAIAAJ&dq.
- Comrie, Bernard (1981). The Languages of the Soviet Union. Cambridge University Press (CUP) Archive. ISBN 978-0-521-29877-3. http://books.google.com/books?id=QTU7AAAAIAAJ&dq.
- Janz, Denis (1998). World Christianity and Marxism. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-511944-2. http://books.google.com/books?id=EUVwrcnXwBsC.
- Lane, David Stuart (1992). Soviet Society under Perestroika. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-07600-5. http://books.google.com/books?id=rcXafOqyxgQC&dq.
- Rayfield, Donald (2004). Stalin and His Hangmen: An Authoritative Portrait of a Tyrant and Those Who Served Him. Viking Press. ISBN 978-0-375-75771-6.
- Simon, Gerard (1974). Church, State, and Opposition in the U.S.S.R.. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-02612-4. http://books.google.com/books?id=sTLc8H3b4vUC.
- Wilson, David (1983). The Demand for Energy in the Soviet Union. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-0-7099-2704-4. http://books.google.no/books?id=1qgOAAAAQAAJ&dq.
- World Bank and OECD (1991). A Study of the Soviet economy. 3. International Monetary Fund. ISBN 9789264134683. http://books.google.com/books?id=fiDpE5M9jRAC&dq.
- Palat, Madhavan K. (2001). Social Identities in Revolutionary Russia. UK: Palgrave. ISBN 978-0-333-92947-6. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=T-d_QgAACAAJ. Retrieved 26 May 2012.
Further reading[link]
- Surveys
- A Country Study: Soviet Union (Former). Library of Congress Country Studies, 1991.
- Brown, Archie, et al., eds.: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia and the Soviet Union (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
- Gilbert, Martin: The Routledge Atlas of Russian History (London: Routledge, 2002).
- Goldman, Minton: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (Connecticut: Global Studies, Dushkin Publishing Group, Inc., 1986).
- Grant, Ted: Russia, from Revolution to Counter-Revolution, London, Well Red Publications,1997
- Howe, G. Melvyn: The Soviet Union: A Geographical Survey 2nd. edn. (Estover, UK: MacDonald and Evans, 1983).
- Pipes, Richard. Communism: A History (2003), by a leading conservative scholar
- Lenin and Leninism
- Clark, Ronald W. Lenin (1988). 570 pp.
- Debo, Richard K. Survival and Consolidation: The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1918–1921 (1992).
- Marples, David R. Lenin's Revolution: Russia, 1917–1921 (2000) 156pp. short survey
- Pipes, Richard. A Concise History of the Russian Revolution (1996) excerpt and text search, by a leading conservative
- Pipes, Richard. Russia under the Bolshevik Regime. (1994). 608 pp.
- Service, Robert. Lenin: A Biography (2002), 561pp; standard scholarly biography; a short version of his 3 vol detailed biography
- Volkogonov, Dmitri. Lenin: Life and Legacy (1994). 600 pp.
- Stalin and Stalinism
- Daniels, R. V., ed. The Stalin Revolution (1965)
- Davies, Sarah, and James Harris, eds. Stalin: A New History, (2006), 310pp, 14 specialized essays by scholars excerpt and text search
- De Jonge, Alex. Stalin and the Shaping of the Soviet Union (1986)
- Fitzpatrick, Sheila, ed. Stalinism: New Directions, (1999), 396pp excerpts from many scholars on the impact of Stalinism on the people (little on Stalin himself) online edition
- Hoffmann, David L. ed. Stalinism: The Essential Readings, (2002) essays by 12 scholars
- Laqueur, Walter. Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations (1990)
- Kershaw, Ian, and Moshe Lewin. Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (2004) excerpt and text search
- Lee, Stephen J. Stalin and the Soviet Union (1999) online edition
- Lewis, Jonathan. Stalin: A Time for Judgement (1990)
- McNeal, Robert H. Stalin: Man and Ruler (1988)
- Martens, Ludo. Another view of Stalin (1994), a highly favorable view from a Maoist historian
- Service, Robert. Stalin: A Biography (2004), along with Tucker the standard biography
- Trotsky, Leon. Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, (1967), an interpretation by Stalin's worst enemy
- Tucker, Robert C. Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879–1929 (1973); Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1929–1941. (1990) online edition with Service, a standard biography; online at ACLS e-books
- World War II
- Bellamy, Chris. Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War (2008), 880pp excerpt and text search
- Broekmeyer, Marius. Stalin, the Russians, and Their War, 1941–1945. 2004. 315 pp.
- Overy, Richard. Russia's War: A History of the Soviet Effort: 1941–1945 (1998) excerpt and text search
- Roberts, Geoffrey. Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953 (2006).
- Seaton, Albert. Stalin as Military Commander, (1998) online edition
- Cold war
- Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1989)
- Edmonds, Robin. Soviet Foreign Policy: The Brezhnev Years (1983)
- Goncharov, Sergei, John Lewis and Litai Xue, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao and the Korean War (1993) excerpt and text search
- Gorlizki, Yoram, and Oleg Khlevniuk. Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953 (2004) online edition
- Holloway, David. Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (1996) excerpt and text search
- Mastny, Vojtech. Russia's Road to the Cold War: Diplomacy, Warfare, and the Politics of Communism, 1941–1945 (1979)
- Mastny, Vojtech. The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (1998) excerpt and text search; online complete edition
- Nation, R. Craig. Black Earth, Red Star: A History of Soviet Security Policy, 1917–1991 (1992)
- Sivachev, Nikolai and Nikolai Yakolev, Russia and the United States (1979), by Soviet historians
- Taubman, William. Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (2004), Pulitzer Prize; excerpt and text search
- Ulam, Adam B. Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–1973, 2nd ed. (1974)
- Zubok, Vladislav M. Inside the Kremlin's Cold War (1996) 20% excerpt and online search
- Zubok, Vladislav M. A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (2007)
- Collapse
- Beschloss, Michael, and Strobe Talbott. At the Highest Levels:The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (1993)
- Bialer, Seweryn and Michael Mandelbaum, eds. Gorbachev's Russia and American Foreign Policy (1988).
- Garthoff, Raymond. The Great Transition: American–Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (1994), detailed narrative
- Grachev, A.S. Gorbachev's Gamble: Soviet Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (2008) excerpt and text search
- Hogan, Michael ed. The End of the Cold War. Its Meaning and Implications (1992) articles from Diplomatic History
- Kotkin, Stephen. Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (2008) excerpt and text search
- Matlock, Jack. Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador's Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union (1995)
- Pons, S., Romero, F., Reinterpreting the End of the Cold War: Issues, Interpretations, Periodizations, (2005) ISBN 978-0-7146-5695-X
- Remnick, David. Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, (1994), ISBN 978-0-679-75125-4
- Specialty studies
- Armstrong, John A. The Politics of Totalitarianism: The Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1934 to the Present. New York: Random House, 1961.
- Katz, Zev, ed.: Handbook of Major Soviet Nationalities (New York: Free Press, 1975).
- Moore, Jr., Barrington. Soviet politics: the dilemma of power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950.
- Dmitry Orlov, Reinventing Collapse, New Society Books, 2008, ISBN 978-0-86571-606-3
- Rizzi, Bruno: "The Bureaucratization of the World : The First English edition of the Underground Marxist Classic That Analyzed Class Exploitation in the USSR", New York, NY : Free Press, 1985.
- Schapiro, Leonard B. The Origin of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet State, First Phase 1917–1922. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955, 1966.
This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the Library of Congress Country Studies.
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- Che redirects here. For other uses, see Che (disambiguation)
| Che Guevara | |
|---|---|
| 250px "Guerrillero Heroico" Che Guevara at the La Coubre memorial service. Taken by Alberto Korda on March 5, 1960. |
|
| Born | Ernesto Guevara (1928-06-14)June 14, 1928 [1] Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina |
| Died | October 9, 1967(1967-10-09) (aged 39) (execution) La Higuera, Vallegrande, Bolivia |
| Resting place | Che Guevara Mausoleum Santa Clara, Cuba |
| Organization | 26th of July Movement, United Party of the Cuban Socialist Revolution,[2] National Liberation Army (Bolivia) |
| Religion | None (Marxist humanist)[3][4][5] |
| Spouse | Hilda Gadea (1955–1959) Aleida March (1959-1967, his death) |
| Children | Hilda (1956–1995), Aleida (b. 1960), Camilo (b. 1962), Celia (b. 1963), Ernesto (b. 1965) |
| Parents | Ernesto Guevara Lynch[6] Celia de la Serna[6] |
| Signature |  |
Ernesto "Che" Guevara (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈtʃe ɣeˈβaɾa];[7] June 14,[1] 1928 – October 9, 1967), commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist. A major figure of the Cuban Revolution, his stylized visage has become a ubiquitous countercultural symbol of rebellion and global insignia within popular culture.[8]
As a young medical student, Guevara traveled throughout Latin America and was radically transformed by the endemic poverty and alienation he witnessed.[9] His experiences and observations during these trips led him to conclude that the region's ingrained economic inequalities were an intrinsic result of capitalism, monopolism, neocolonialism, and imperialism, with the only remedy being world revolution.[10] This belief prompted his involvement in Guatemala's social reforms under President Jacobo Arbenz, whose eventual CIA-assisted overthrow solidified Guevara's political ideology. Later, while living in Mexico City, he met Raúl and Fidel Castro, joined their 26th of July Movement, and sailed to Cuba aboard the yacht, Granma, with the intention of overthrowing U.S.-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.[11] Guevara soon rose to prominence among the insurgents, was promoted to second-in-command, and played a pivotal role in the victorious two-year guerrilla campaign that deposed the Batista regime.[12]
Following the Cuban Revolution, Guevara performed a number of key roles in the new government. These included reviewing the appeals and firing squads for those convicted as war criminals during the revolutionary tribunals,[13] instituting agrarian land reform as minister of industries, helping spearhead a successful nationwide literacy campaign, serving as both national bank president and instructional director for Cuba’s armed forces, and traversing the globe as a diplomat on behalf of Cuban socialism. Such positions also allowed him to play a central role in training the militia forces who repelled the Bay of Pigs Invasion[14] and bringing the Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles to Cuba which precipitated the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.[15] Additionally, he was a prolific writer and diarist, composing a seminal manual on guerrilla warfare, along with a best-selling memoir about his youthful motorcycle journey across South America. Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to foment revolution abroad, first unsuccessfully in Congo-Kinshasa and later in Bolivia, where he was captured by CIA-assisted Bolivian forces and executed.[16]
Guevara remains both a revered and reviled historical figure, polarized in the collective imagination in a multitude of biographies, memoirs, essays, documentaries, songs, and films. As a result of his perceived martyrdom, poetic invocations for class struggle, and desire to create the consciousness of a "new man" driven by moral rather than material incentives; he has evolved into a quintessential icon of various leftist-inspired movements. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century,[17] while an Alberto Korda photograph of him entitled Guerrillero Heroico (shown), was cited by the Maryland Institute College of Art as "the most famous photograph in the world".[18]
Contents |
Early life[link]
Ernesto Guevara was born to Celia de la Serna y Llosa and Ernesto Guevara Lynch on June 14, 1928[1] in Rosario, Argentina, the eldest of five children in an Argentine family of Spanish, Basque and Irish descent.[19] In lieu of his parents' surnames, his legal name (Ernesto Guevara) will sometimes appear with de la Serna, or Lynch accompanying it. In reference to Che's "restless" nature, his father declared "the first thing to note is that in my son's veins flowed the blood of the Irish rebels."[20] Very early on in life Ernestito (as he was then called) developed an "affinity for the poor".[21] Growing up in a family with leftist leanings, Guevara was introduced to a wide spectrum of political perspectives even as a boy.[22] His father, a staunch supporter of Republicans from the Spanish Civil War, often hosted many veterans from the conflict in the Guevara home.[23]
Though suffering crippling bouts of acute asthma that were to afflict him throughout his life, he excelled as an athlete, enjoying swimming, football, golf, and shooting; while also becoming an "untiring" cyclist.[24][25] He was an avid rugby union player,[26] and played at fly-half for Club Universitario de Buenos Aires.[27] His rugby playing earned him the nickname "Fuser"—a contraction of El Furibundo (raging) and his mother's surname, de la Serna—for his aggressive style of play.[28]
Intellectual and literary interests[link]
Guevara learned chess from his father and began participating in local tournaments by age 12. During adolescence and throughout his life he was passionate about poetry, especially that of Pablo Neruda, John Keats, Antonio Machado, Federico García Lorca, Gabriela Mistral, César Vallejo, and Walt Whitman.[29] He could also recite Rudyard Kipling's "If—" and José Hernández's "Martín Fierro" from memory.[29] The Guevara home contained more than 3,000 books, which allowed Guevara to be an enthusiastic and eclectic reader, with interests including Karl Marx, William Faulkner, André Gide, Emilio Salgari and Jules Verne.[30] Additionally, he enjoyed the works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Vladimir Lenin, and Jean-Paul Sartre; as well as Anatole France, Friedrich Engels, H. G. Wells, and Robert Frost.[31]
As he grew older, he developed an interest in the Latin American writers Horacio Quiroga, Ciro Alegría, Jorge Icaza, Rubén Darío, and Miguel Asturias.[31] Many of these authors' ideas he cataloged in his own handwritten notebooks of concepts, definitions, and philosophies of influential intellectuals. These included composing analytical sketches of Buddha and Aristotle, along with examining Bertrand Russell on love and patriotism, Jack London on society, and Nietzsche on the idea of death. Sigmund Freud's ideas fascinated him as he quoted him on a variety of topics from dreams and libido to narcissism and the oedipus complex.[31] His favorite subjects in school included philosophy, mathematics, engineering, political science, sociology, history and archaeology.[32][33]
Years later, a February 13, 1958, declassified CIA 'biographical and personality report' would make note of Guevara’s wide range of academic interests and intellect, describing him as "quite well read" while adding that "Che is fairly intellectual for a Latino."[34]
Motorcycle journey[link]
Main articles: The Motorcycle Diaries (book) and The Motorcycle Diaries (film)
In 1948, Guevara entered the University of Buenos Aires to study medicine. His "hunger to explore the world"[35] led him to intersperse his collegiate pursuits with two long introspective journeys that would fundamentally change the way he viewed himself and the contemporary economic conditions in Latin America. The first expedition in 1950 was a 4,500 kilometer (2,800 mi) solo trip through the rural provinces of northern Argentina on a bicycle on which he installed a small motor.[36] This was followed in 1951 by a nine month 8,000 kilometer (5,000 mi) continental motorcycle trek through most of South America. For the latter, he took a year off from studies to embark with his friend Alberto Granado, with the final goal of spending a few weeks volunteering at the San Pablo Leper colony in Peru, on the banks of the Amazon River.
In Chile, Guevara found himself enraged by the working conditions of the miners in Anaconda's Chuquicamata copper mine; and moved by his overnight encounter in the Atacama Desert with a persecuted communist couple who did not even own a blanket, describing them as "the shivering flesh-and-blood victims of capitalist exploitation".[38] Additionally, on the way to Machu Picchu high in the Andes, he was struck by the crushing poverty of the remote rural areas, where peasant farmers worked small plots of land owned by wealthy landlords.[39] Later on his journey, Guevara was especially impressed by the camaraderie among those living in a Leper Colony, stating "The highest forms of human solidarity and loyalty arise among such lonely and desperate people."[39] Guevara used notes taken during this trip to write an account entitled The Motorcycle Diaries, which later became a New York Times best-seller,[40] and was adapted into a 2004 award-winning film of the same name.
In total, the journey took Guevara through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and to Miami, before returning home to Buenos Aires. By trip's end, he came to view Latin America not as collection of separate nations, but as a single entity requiring a continent-wide liberation strategy. His conception of a borderless, united Hispanic America sharing a common 'Latino' heritage was a theme that prominently recurred during his later revolutionary activities. Upon returning to Argentina, he completed his studies and received his medical degree in June 1953, making him officially "Dr. Ernesto Guevara".[41][42]
"A motorcycle journey the length of South America awakened him to the injustice of U.S. domination in the hemisphere, and to the suffering colonialism brought to its original inhabitants."
— George Galloway, British politician [43]
Guevara later remarked that through his travels of Latin America, he came in "close contact with poverty, hunger and disease" along with the "inability to treat a child because of lack of money" and "stupefaction provoked by the continual hunger and punishment" that leads a father to "accept the loss of a son as an unimportant accident". It was these experiences which Guevara cites as convincing him that in order to "help these people", he needed to leave the realm of medicine, and consider the political arena of armed struggle.[9]
Guatemala, Árbenz and United Fruit[link]
Main article: 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état
On July 7, 1953, Guevara set out again, this time to Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador. On December 10, 1953, before leaving for Guatemala, Guevara sent an update to his Aunt Beatriz from San José, Costa Rica. In the letter Guevara speaks of traversing through the "dominions" of the United Fruit Company, which convinced him "how terrible" the "Capitalist octopuses" were.[44] This affirmed indignation carried the "head hunting tone" that he adopted in order to frighten his more Conservative relatives, and ends with Guevara swearing on an image of the then recently deceased Joseph Stalin, not to rest until these "octopuses have been vanquished".[45] Later that month, Guevara arrived in Guatemala where President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán headed a democratically elected government that, through land reform and other initiatives, was attempting to end the latifundia system. To accomplish this, President Árbenz had enacted a major land reform program, where all uncultivated portions of large land holdings were to be expropriated and redistributed to landless peasants. The biggest land owner, and one most affected by the reforms, was the United Fruit Company, from which the Árbenz government had already taken more than 225,000 acres (910 km2) of uncultivated land.[46] Pleased with the road the nation was heading down, Guevara decided to settle down in Guatemala so as to "perfect himself and accomplish whatever may be necessary in order to become a true revolutionary."[47]
In Guatemala City, Guevara sought out Hilda Gadea Acosta, a Peruvian economist who was well-connected politically as a member of the left-leaning Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA, American Popular Revolutionary Alliance). She introduced Guevara to a number of high-level officials in the Arbenz government. Guevara then established contact with a group of Cuban exiles linked to Fidel Castro through the July 26, 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. During this period he acquired his famous nickname, due to his frequent use of the Argentine diminutive interjection che, a vocative casual speech filler used to call attention or ascertain comprehension, similarly to both "bro" or the Canadian phrase "eh".[48]
Guevara's attempts to obtain a medical internship were unsuccessful and his economic situation was often precarious. On May 15, 1954, a shipment of Škoda infantry and light artillery weapons was sent from Communist Czechoslovakia for the Arbenz Government and arrived in Puerto Barrios.[49] As a result, the U.S. CIA sponsored an army which invaded the country and installed the right-wing dictatorship of Carlos Castillo Armas.[47] Guevara was eager to fight on behalf of Arbenz and joined an armed militia organized by the Communist Youth for that purpose, but frustrated with the group's inaction, he soon returned to medical duties. Following the coup, he again volunteered to fight, but soon after, Arbenz took refuge in the Mexican Embassy and told his foreign supporters to leave the country. Guevara’s repeated calls to resist were noted by supporters of the coup, and he was marked for murder.[50] After Hilda Gadea was arrested, Guevara sought protection inside the Argentine consulate, where he remained until he received a safe-conduct pass some weeks later and made his way to Mexico.[51] He married Gadea in Mexico in September 1955.[52]
The overthrow of the Arbenz regime cemented Guevara's view of the United States as an imperialist power that would oppose and attempt to destroy any government that sought to redress the socioeconomic inequality endemic to Latin America and other developing countries. In speaking about the coup Guevara stated:
"The last Latin American revolutionary democracy – that of Jacobo Arbenz – failed as a result of the cold premeditated aggression carried out by the U.S.A. Its visible head was the Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a man who, through a rare coincidence, was also a stockholder and attorney for the United Fruit Company."[50]
Guevara's conviction that Marxism achieved through armed struggle and defended by an armed populace was the only way to rectify such conditions was thus strengthened.[53] Gadea wrote later, "It was Guatemala which finally convinced him of the necessity for armed struggle and for taking the initiative against imperialism. By the time he left, he was sure of this."[54]
Mexico City and preparation[link]
Guevara arrived in Mexico City in early September 1954, and worked in the allergy section of the General Hospital. In addition he gave lectures on medicine at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and worked as a news photographer for Latina News Agency.[55] His first wife Hilda notes in her memoir My Life with Che, that for a while, Guevara considered going to work as a doctor in Africa and that he continued to be deeply troubled by the poverty around him.[56] In one instance, Hilda describes Guevara's obsession with an elderly washerwoman whom he was treating, remarking that he saw her as "representative of the most forgotten and exploited class". Hilda later found a poem that Che had dedicated to the old woman, containing "a promise to fight for a better world, for a better life for all the poor and exploited."[56]
During this time he renewed his friendship with Ñico López and the other Cuban exiles whom he had met in Guatemala. In June 1955, López introduced him to Raúl Castro who subsequently introduced him to his older brother, Fidel Castro, the revolutionary leader who had formed the 26th of July Movement and was now plotting to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. During a long conversation with Fidel on the night of their first meeting, Guevara concluded that the Cuban's cause was the one for which he had been searching and before daybreak he had signed up as a member of the July 26 Movement.[57] Despite their "contrasting personalities", from this point on Che and Fidel began to foster what dual biographer Simon Reid-Henry deems a "revolutionary friendship that would change the world", as a result of their coinciding commitment to anti-imperialism.[58]
By this point in Guevara’s life, he deemed that U.S.-controlled conglomerates installed and supported repressive regimes around the world. In this vein, he considered Batista a "U.S. puppet whose strings needed cutting".[59] Although he planned to be the group's combat medic, Guevara participated in the military training with the members of the Movement. The key portion of training involved learning hit and run tactics of guerrilla warfare. Guevara and the others underwent arduous 15-hour marches over mountains, across rivers, and through the dense undergrowth, learning and perfecting the procedures of ambush and quick retreat. From the start Guevara was Alberto Bayo's "prize student" among those in training, scoring the highest on all of the tests given.[60] At the end of the course, he was called "the best guerrilla of them all" by their instructor, General Bayo.[61]
Cuban Revolution[link]
Invasion, warfare and Santa Clara[link]
The first step in Castro's revolutionary plan was an assault on Cuba from Mexico via the Granma, an old, leaky cabin cruiser. They set out for Cuba on November 25, 1956. Attacked by Batista's military soon after landing, many of the 82 men were either killed in the attack or executed upon capture; only 22 found each other afterwards.[62] Guevara wrote that it was during this bloody confrontation that he laid down his medical supplies and picked up a box of ammunition dropped by a fleeing comrade, finalizing his symbolic transition from physician to combatant.
Only a small band of revolutionaries survived to re-group as a bedraggled fighting force deep in the Sierra Maestra mountains, where they received support from the urban guerrilla network of Frank País, the 26th of July Movement, and local campesinos. With the group withdrawn to the Sierra, the world wondered whether Castro was alive or dead until early 1957 when the interview by Herbert Matthews appeared in The New York Times. The article presented a lasting, almost mythical image for Castro and the guerrillas. Guevara was not present for the interview, but in the coming months he began to realize the importance of the media in their struggle. Meanwhile, as supplies and morale diminished, and with an allergy to mosquito bites which resulted in agonizing walnut-sized cysts on his body,[63] Guevara considered these "the most painful days of the war".[64]
During Guevara’s time living hidden among the poor subsistence farmers of the Sierra Maestra mountains, he discovered that there were no schools, no electricity, minimal access to healthcare, and more than 40 percent of the adults were illiterate.[65] As the war continued, Guevara became an integral part of the rebel army and "convinced Castro with competence, diplomacy and patience".[12] Guevara set up factories to make grenades, built ovens to bake bread, taught new recruits about tactics, and organized schools to teach illiterate campesinos to read and write.[12] Moreover, Guevara established health clinics, workshops to teach military tactics, and a newspaper to disseminate information.[66] The man who three years later would be dubbed by Time Magazine: "Castro's brain", at this point was promoted by Fidel Castro to Comandante (commander) of a second army column.[12]
As second in command, Guevara was a harsh disciplinarian who sometimes shot defectors. Deserters were punished as traitors, and Guevara was known to send squads to track those seeking to go AWOL.[67] As a result, Guevara became feared for his brutality and ruthlessness.[68] During the guerrilla campaign, Guevara was also responsible for the sometimes summary execution of a number of men accused of being informers, deserters or spies.[69] In his diaries, Guevara described the first such execution of Eutimio Guerra, a peasant army guide who admitted treason when it was discovered he accepted the promise of ten thousand pesos for repeatedly giving away the rebel's position for attack by the Cuban air force.[70] Such information also allowed Batista's army to burn the homes of rebel-friendly peasants.[70] Upon Guerra's request that they "end his life quickly",[70] Che stepped forward and shot him in the head, writing "The situation was uncomfortable for the people and for Eutimio so I ended the problem giving him a shot with a .32 pistol in the right side of the brain, with exit orifice in the right temporal [lobe]."[71] His scientific notations and matter-of-fact description, suggested to one biographer a "remarkable detachment to violence" by that point in the war.[71] Later, Guevara published a literary account of the incident entitled "Death of a Traitor", where he transfigured Eutimio's betrayal and pre-execution request that the revolution "take care of his children", into a "revolutionary parable about redemption through sacrifice".[71]
Although he maintained a demanding and harsh disposition, Guevara also viewed his role of commander as one of a teacher, entertaining his men during breaks between engagements with readings from the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson, Cervantes, and Spanish lyric poets.[72] Together with this role, and inspired by José Martí's principle of "literacy without borders", Guevara further ensured that his rebel fighters made daily time to teach the uneducated campesinos with whom they lived and fought to read and write, in what Guevara termed the "battle against ignorance".[65]
His commanding officer Fidel Castro has described Guevara as intelligent, daring, and an exemplary leader who "had great moral authority over his troops".[73] Castro further remarked that Guevara took too many risks, even having a "tendency toward foolhardiness".[74] Guevara's teenage lieutenant, Joel Iglesias, recounts such actions in his diary, noting that Guevara's behavior in combat even brought admiration from the enemy. On one occasion Iglesias recounts the time he had been wounded in battle, stating "Che ran out to me, defying the bullets, threw me over his shoulder, and got me out of there. The guards didn't dare fire at him ... later they told me he made a great impression on them when they saw him run out with his pistol stuck in his belt, ignoring the danger, they didn't dare shoot."[75]
Guevara was instrumental in creating the clandestine radio station Radio Rebelde (Rebel Radio) in February 1958, which broadcast news to the Cuban people with statements by the 26th of July movement, and provided radiotelephone communication between the growing number of rebel columns across the island. Guevara had apparently been inspired to create the station by observing the effectiveness of CIA supplied radio in Guatemala in ousting the government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán.[76]
In late July 1958, Guevara played a critical role in the Battle of Las Mercedes by using his column to halt a force of 1,500 men called up by Batista's General Cantillo in a plan to encircle and destroy Castro's forces. Years later, Major Larry Bockman of the United States Marine Corps would analyze and describe Che's tactical appreciation of this battle as "brilliant".[77] During this time Guevara also became an "expert" at leading hit-and-run tactics against Batista’s army, and then fading back into the countryside before the army could counterattack.[78]
As the war extended, Guevara led a new column of fighters dispatched westward for the final push towards Havana. Travelling by foot, Guevara embarked on a difficult 7 week march only travelling at night to avoid ambush, and often not eating for several days.[79] In the closing days of December 1958, Guevara’s task was to cut the island in half by taking Las Villas province. In a matter of days he executed a series of "brilliant tactical victories" that gave him control of all but the province’s capital city of Santa Clara.[79] Guevara then directed his "suicide squad" in the attack on Santa Clara, that became the final decisive military victory of the revolution.[80][81] In the six weeks leading up to the Battle of Santa Clara there were times when his men were completely surrounded, outgunned, and overrun. Che's eventual victory despite being outnumbered 10:1, remains in the view of some observers a "remarkable tour de force in modern warfare".[82]
Radio Rebelde broadcast the first reports that Guevara's column had taken Santa Clara on New Year's Eve 1958. This contradicted reports by the heavily controlled national news media, which had at one stage reported Guevara's death during the fighting. At 3 am on January 1, 1959, upon learning that his generals were negotiating a separate peace with Guevara, Fulgencio Batista boarded a plane in Havana and fled for the Dominican Republic, along with an amassed "fortune of more than $300,000,000 through graft and payoffs".[83] The following day on January 2, Guevara entered Havana to take final control of the capital.[84] Fidel Castro took 6 more days to arrive, as he stopped to rally support in several large cities on his way to rolling victoriously into Havana on January 8, 1959. In mid-January 1959, Guevara went to live at a summer villa in Tarara to recover from a violent asthma attack.[85] While there he started the Tarara Group, a group that debated and formed the new plans for Cuba's social, political, and economic development.[86] In addition, Che began to write his book Guerrilla Warfare while resting at Tarara.[86]
In February, the revolutionary government proclaimed Guevara "a Cuban citizen by birth" in recognition of his role in the triumph.[87] When Hilda Gadea arrived in Cuba in late January, Guevara told her that he was involved with another woman, and the two agreed on a divorce,[88] which was finalized on May 22.[89] On June 2, 1959, he married Aleida March, a Cuban-born member of the 26th of July movement with whom he had been living since late 1958. Guevara returned to the seaside village of Tarara in June for his honeymoon with Aleida.[90] Guevara had children from both his marriages, and one illegitimate child, as follows: With Hilda Gadea (married August 18, 1955; divorced May 22, 1959), Hilda Beatriz Guevara Gadea, born February 15, 1956 in Mexico City; died August 21, 1995 in Havana, Cuba; with Aleida March (married June 2, 1959), Aleida Guevara March, born November 24, 1960 in Havana, Cuba, Camilo Guevara March, born May 20, 1962 in Havana, Cuba, Celia Guevara March, born June 14, 1963 in Havana, Cuba, and Ernesto Guevara March, born February 24, 1965 in Havana, Cuba; and with Lilia Rosa López (extramarital), Omar Pérez, born March 19, 1964 in Havana, Cuba.[91]
La Cabaña, land reform, and literacy[link]
The first major political crisis arose over what to do with the captured Batista officials who had been responsible for the worst of the repression.[92] During the rebellion against Batista's dictatorship, the general command of the rebel army, led by Fidel Castro, introduced into the liberated territories the 19th century penal law commonly known as the Ley de la Sierra (Law of the Sierra).[93] This law included the death penalty for extremely serious crimes, whether perpetrated by the Batista regime or by supporters of the revolution. In 1959, the revolutionary government extended its application to the whole of the republic and to those it considered war criminals, captured and tried after the revolution. According to the Cuban Ministry of Justice, this latter extension was supported by the majority of the population, and followed the same procedure as those in the Nuremberg Trials held by the Allies after World War II.[94]
To implement a portion of this plan, Castro named Guevara commander of the La Cabaña Fortress prison, for a five-month tenure (January 2 through June 12, 1959).[95] Guevara was charged with purging the Batista army and consolidating victory by exacting "revolutionary justice" against those considered to be traitors, chivatos (informants) or war criminals.[96] Serving in the post as commander of La Cabaña, Guevara reviewed the appeals of those convicted during the revolutionary tribunal process.[13] On some occasions the penalty delivered by the tribunal was death by firing squad.[97] Raúl Gómez Treto, senior legal advisor to the Cuban Ministry of Justice, has argued that the death penalty was justified in order to prevent citizens themselves from taking justice into their own hands, as happened twenty years earlier in the anti-Machado rebellion.[98] Biographers note that in January 1959, the Cuban public was in a "lynching mood",[99] and point to a survey at the time showing 93% public approval for the tribunal process.[13] Moreover, a January 22, 1959, Universal Newsreel broadcast in the U.S. and narrated by Ed Herlihy, featured Fidel Castro asking an estimated one million Cubans whether they approved of the executions, and was met with a roaring "¡Si!" (yes).[100] With 20,000 Cubans estimated to have been killed at the hands of Batista's collaborators,[101] and many of the war criminals sentenced to death accused of torture and physical atrocities,[13] the newly empowered government carried out executions, punctuated by cries from the crowds of "¡paredón!" (to the wall),[92] which biographer Jorge Castañeda describes as "without respect for due process".[102]
"I have yet to find a single credible source pointing to a case where Che executed 'an innocent'. Those persons executed by Guevara or on his orders were condemned for the usual crimes punishable by death at times of war or in its aftermath: desertion, treason or crimes such as rape, torture or murder. I should add that my research spanned five years, and included anti-Castro Cubans among the Cuban-American exile community in Miami and elsewhere."
Although there are varying accounts, it is estimated that several hundred people were executed nationwide during this time, with Guevara's jurisdictional death total at La Cabaña ranging from 55 to 105 (see reference).[104] Conflicting views exist of Guevara's attitude towards the executions at La Cabaña. Some exiled opposition biographers report that he relished the rituals of the firing squad, and organized them with gusto, while others relate that Guevara pardoned as many prisoners as he could.[102] What is acknowledged by all sides is that Guevara had become a "hardened" man, who had no qualms about the death penalty or summary and collective trials. If the only way to "defend the revolution was to execute its enemies, he would not be swayed by humanitarian or political arguments."[102] This is further confirmed by a February 5, 1959, letter to Luis Paredes López in Buenos Aires where Guevara states unequivocally "The executions by firing squads are not only a necessity for the people of Cuba, but also an imposition of the people."[105]
Along with ensuring "revolutionary justice", the other key early platform of Guevara's was establishing agrarian land reform. Almost immediately after the success of the revolution on January 27, 1959, Guevara made one of his most significant speeches where he talked about "the social ideas of the rebel army". During this speech, he declared that the main concern of the new Cuban government was "the social justice that land redistribution brings about".[106] A few months later on May 17, 1959, the Agrarian Reform Law crafted by Guevara went into effect, limiting the size of all farms to 1,000 acres (4.0 km2). Any holdings over these limits were expropriated by the government and either redistributed to peasants in 67-acre (270,000 m2) parcels or held as state run communes.[107] The law also stipulated that sugar plantations could not be owned by foreigners.[108]
On June 12, 1959, Castro sent Guevara out on a three-month tour of 14 mostly Bandung Pact countries (Morocco, Sudan, Egypt, Syria, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, Yugoslavia, Greece) and the cities of Singapore and Hong Kong.[109] Sending Guevara away from Havana allowed Castro to appear to be distancing himself from Guevara and his Marxist sympathies, which troubled both the United States and some of Castro's July 26 Movement members.[110] Guevara spent 12 days in Japan (July 15–27), participating in negotiations aimed at expanding Cuba's trade relations with that nation. During the visit, he refused to visit and lay a wreath at Japan's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier commemorating soldiers lost during World War II, remarking that the Japanese "imperialists" had "killed millions of Asians".[111] In its place, Guevara stated that he would instead visit Hiroshima, where the American military had detonated an atom-bomb 14 years earlier.[111] Despite his denunciation of Imperial Japan, Guevara also considered President Truman a "macabre clown" for the bombings,[112] and after visiting Hiroshima and its Peace Memorial Museum, he sent back a postcard to Cuba stating "In order to fight better for peace, one must look at Hiroshima."[113]
Upon Guevara's return to Cuba in September 1959, it was evident that Castro now had more political power. The government had begun land seizures included in the agrarian reform law, but was hedging on compensation offers to landowners, instead offering low interest "bonds", a step which put the U.S. on alert. At this point the affected wealthy cattlemen of Camagüey mounted a campaign against the land redistributions, and enlisted the newly disaffected rebel leader Huber Matos, who along with the anti-Communist wing of the 26th of July Movement, joined them in denouncing the "Communist encroachment".[114] During this time Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo was offering assistance to the "Anti-Communist Legion of the Caribbean" which was training in the Dominican Republic. This multi-national force, composed mostly of Spaniards and Cubans, but also of Croatians, Germans, Greeks, and right-wing mercenaries, was plotting to topple Castro's new regime.[114]
Such threats were heightened when, on March 4, 1960, two massive explosions ripped through the French freighter La Coubre, which was carrying Belgian munitions from the port of Antwerp, and was docked in Havana Harbor. The blasts killed at least 76 people and injured several hundred, with Guevara personally providing first aid to some of the victims. Cuban leader Fidel Castro immediately accused the CIA of "an act of terrorism" and held a state funeral the following day for the victims of the blast.[115] It was at the memorial service that Alberto Korda took the famous photograph of Guevara, now known as Guerrillero Heroico.[116]
These perceived threats prompted Castro to further eliminate "counter-revolutionaries", and to utilize Guevara to drastically increase the speed of land reform. To implement this plan, a new government agency, the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA), was established to administer the new Agrarian Reform law. INRA quickly became the most important governing body in the nation, with Guevara serving as its head in his capacity as minister of industries.[108] Under Guevara's command, INRA established its own 100,000 person militia, used first to help the government seize control of the expropriated land and supervise its distribution, and later to set up cooperative farms. The land confiscated included 480,000 acres (1,900 km2) owned by U.S. corporations.[108] Months later, as retaliation, U.S President Dwight D. Eisenhower sharply reduced U.S. imports of Cuban sugar (Cuba’s main cash crop), thus leading Guevara on July 10, 1960, to address over 100,000 workers in front of the Presidential Palace at a rally called to denounce U.S. "economic aggression".[117]
Along with land reform, one of the primary areas that Guevara stressed needed national improvement was in the area of literacy. Before 1959 the official literacy rate for Cuba was between 60–76%, with educational access in rural areas and a lack of instructors the main determining factors.[118] As a result, the Cuban government at Guevara's behest dubbed 1961 the "year of education", and mobilized over 100,000 volunteers into "literacy brigades", who were then sent out into the countryside to construct schools, train new educators, and teach the predominately illiterate guajiros (peasants) to read and write.[65][118] Unlike many of Guevara's later economic initiatives, this campaign was "a remarkable success".[118] By the completion of the Cuban Literacy Campaign, 707,212 adults had been taught to read and write, raising the national literacy rate to 96%.[118]
"Guevara was like a father to me ... he educated me. He taught me to think. He taught me the most beautiful thing which is to be human."
— Urbano (aka Leonardo Tamayo),
fought with Guevara in Cuba and Bolivia [119]
fought with Guevara in Cuba and Bolivia [119]
Accompanying literacy, Guevara was also concerned with establishing universal access to higher education. To accomplish this, the new regime introduced affirmative action to the universities.[120] While announcing this new commitment, Guevara told the gathered faculty and students at the University of Las Villas that the days when education was "a privilege of the white middle class" had ended. "The University" he said, "must paint itself black, mulatto, worker, and peasant." If it did not, he warned, the people would break down its doors "and paint the University the colors they like."[120]
The "New Man", Bay of Pigs and missile crisis[link]
Main articles: Bay of Pigs Invasion and Cuban Missile Crisis
"Man truly achieves his full human condition when he produces without being compelled by the physical necessity of selling himself as a commodity."— Che Guevara, Man and Socialism in Cuba [121]
At this stage, Guevara acquired the additional position of Finance Minister, as well as President of the National Bank. These appointments, combined with his existing position as Minister of Industries, placed Guevara at the zenith of his power, as the "virtual czar" of the Cuban economy.[117] As a consequence of his position at the head of the central bank, it was now Guevara's duty to sign the Cuban currency, which per custom would bear his signature. Instead of using his full name, he signed the bills solely "Che".[122] It was through this symbolic act, which horrified many in the Cuban financial sector, that Guevara signaled his distaste for money and the class distinctions it brought about.[122] Guevara's long time friend Ricardo Rojo later remarked that "the day he signed Che on the bills, (he) literally knocked the props from under the widespread belief that money was sacred."[123]
Guevara's first desired economic goal, which coincided with his aversion for wealth condensation and economic inequality, was to see a nation-wide elimination of material incentives in favor of moral ones. He viewed capitalism as a "contest among wolves" where "one can only win at the cost of others" and thus desired to see the creation of a "new man and woman".[125] Guevara continually stressed that a socialist economy in itself is not "worth the effort, sacrifice, and risks of war and destruction" if it ends up encouraging "greed and individual ambition at the expense of collective spirit".[126] A primary goal of Guevara's thus became to reform "individual consciousness" and values to produce better workers and citizens.[126] In his view, Cuba's "new man" would be able to overcome the "egotism" and "selfishness" that he loathed and discerned was uniquely characteristic of individuals in capitalist societies.[126] In describing this new method of "development", Guevara stated:
"There is a great difference between free-enterprise development and revolutionary development. In one of them, wealth is concentrated in the hands of a fortunate few, the friends of the government, the best wheeler-dealers. In the other, wealth is the people’s patrimony."[127]
A further integral part of fostering a sense of "unity between the individual and the mass", Guevara believed, was volunteer work and will. To display this, Guevara "led by example", working "endlessly at his ministry job, in construction, and even cutting sugar cane" on his day off.[128] He was known for working 36 hours at a stretch, calling meetings after midnight, and eating on the run.[126] Such behavior was emblematic of Guevara's new program of moral incentives, where each worker was now required to meet a quota and produce a certain quantity of goods. As a replacement for the pay increases abolished by Guevara, workers who exceeded their quota now only received a certificate of commendation, while workers who failed to meet their quotas were given a pay cut.[126] Guevara unapologetically defended his personal philosophy towards motivation and work, stating:
"This is not a matter of how many pounds of meat one might be able to eat, or how many times a year someone can go to the beach, or how many ornaments from abroad one might be able to buy with his current salary. What really matters is that the individual feels more complete, with much more internal richness and much more responsibility."[129]
In the face of a loss of commercial connections with Western states, Guevara tried to replace them with closer commercial relationships with Eastern Bloc states, visiting a number of Marxist states and signing trade agreements with them. At the end of 1960 he visited Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Hungary and East Germany and signed, for instance, a trade agreement in East Berlin on December 17, 1960.[130] Such agreements helped Cuba's economy to a certain degree but also had the disadvantage of a growing economic dependency on the Eastern Bloc. It was also in East Germany where Guevara met Tamara Bunke (later known as "Tania"), who was assigned as his interpreter, and who would years later join him and be killed with him in Bolivia.
Whatever the merits or demerits of Guevara’s economic principles, his programs were unsuccessful.[131] Guevara's program of "moral incentives" for workers caused a rapid drop in productivity and a rapid rise in absenteeism.[132] In reference to the collective failings of Guevara's vision, reporter I.F. Stone who interviewed Guevara twice during this time, remarked that he was "Galahad not Robespierre", while opining that "in a sense he was, like some early saint, taking refuge in the desert. Only there could the purity of the faith be safeguarded from the unregenerate revisionism of human nature."[133]
On April 17, 1961, 1,400 U.S.-trained Cuban exiles invaded Cuba during the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Guevara did not play a key role in the fighting, as one day before the invasion a warship carrying Marines faked an invasion off the West Coast of Pinar del Río and drew forces commanded by Guevara to that region. However, historians give him a share of credit for the victory as he was director of instruction for Cuba’s armed forces at the time.[14] Author Tad Szulc in his explanation of the Cuban victory, assigns Guevara partial credit, stating: "The revolutionaries won because Che Guevara, as the head of the Instruction Department of the Revolutionary Armed Forces in charge of the militia training program, had done so well in preparing 200,000 men and women for war."[14] It was also during this deployment that he suffered a bullet grazing to the cheek when his pistol fell out of its holster and accidentally discharged.[134]
According to Dick goodwin "[Che] went on to say that he wanted to thank us [the United States] very much for the invasion –that it had been a great political victory for them– enabled them to consolidate — and transformed them from an aggrieved little country to an equal."[135]
In August 1961, during an economic conference of the Organization of American States in Punta del Este, Uruguay, Che Guevara sent a note of "gratitude" to U.S. President John F. Kennedy through Richard N. Goodwin, a young secretary of the White House. It read "Thanks for Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs). Before the invasion, the revolution was shaky. Now it's stronger than ever."[136] In response to U.S. Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon presenting the Alliance for Progress for ratification by the meeting, Guevara antagonistically attacked the United States claim of being a "democracy", stating that such a system was not compatible with "financial oligarchy, discrimination against blacks, and outrages by the Ku Klux Klan".[137] Guevara continued, speaking out against the "persecution" that in his view "drove scientists like Oppenheimer from their posts, deprived the world for years of the marvelous voice of Paul Robeson, and sent the Rosenbergs to their deaths against the protests of a shocked world."[137] Guevara ended his remarks by insinuating that the United States was not interested in real reforms, sardonically quipping that "U.S. experts never talk about agrarian reform; they prefer a safe subject, like a better water supply. In short they seem to prepare the revolution of the toilets."[31]
Guevara, who was practically the architect of the Soviet-Cuban relationship,[138] then played a key role in bringing to Cuba the Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles that precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 and brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.[139] A few weeks after the crisis, during an interview with the British communist newspaper the Daily Worker, Guevara was still fuming over the perceived Soviet betrayal and told correspondent Sam Russell that, if the missiles had been under Cuban control, they would have fired them off.[140] While expounding on the incident later, Guevara reiterated that the cause of socialist liberation against global "imperialist aggression" would ultimately have been worth the possibility of "millions of atomic war victims".[141] The missile crisis further convinced Guevara that the world's two superpowers (the United States and the Soviet Union) used Cuba as a pawn in their own global strategies. Afterward he denounced the Soviets almost as frequently as he denounced the Americans.[142]
International diplomacy[link]
By December 1964, Che Guevara had emerged as a "revolutionary statesman of world stature" and thus traveled to New York City as head of the Cuban delegation to speak at the United Nations.[123] During his impassioned address, he criticized the United Nations' inability to confront the "brutal policy of apartheid" in South Africa, asking "Can the United Nations do nothing to stop this?"[143] Guevara then denounced the United States policy towards their black population, stating:
"Those who kill their own children and discriminate daily against them because of the color of their skin; those who let the murderers of blacks remain free, protecting them, and furthermore punishing the black population because they demand their legitimate rights as free men—how can those who do this consider themselves guardians of freedom?"[143]
An indignant Guevara ended his speech by reciting the Second Declaration of Havana, decreeing Latin America a "family of 200 million brothers who suffer the same miseries".[143] This "epic", Guevara declared, would be written by the "hungry Indian masses, peasants without land, exploited workers, and progressive masses". To Guevara the conflict was a struggle of masses and ideas, which would be carried forth by those "mistreated and scorned by imperialism" who were previously considered "a weak and submissive flock". With this "flock", Guevara now asserted, "Yankee monopoly capitalism" now terrifyingly saw their "gravediggers".[143] It would be during this "hour of vindication", Guevara pronounced, that the "anonymous mass" would begin to write its own history "with its own blood" and reclaim those "rights that were laughed at by one and all for 500 years". Guevara ended his remarks to the General Assembly by hypothesizing that this "wave of anger” would "sweep the lands of Latin America" and that the labor masses who "turn the wheel of history" were now, for the first time, "awakening from the long, brutalizing sleep to which they had been subjected".[143]
Guevara later learned that there were two failed attempts on his life by Cuban exiles during his stop at the U.N. complex.[144] The first from Molly Gonzales who tried to break through barricades upon his arrival with a seven-inch hunting knife, and later during his address by Guillermo Novo with a timer-initiated bazooka that was fired off target from a boat in the East River at the United Nations Headquarters.[144] Afterwards Guevara commented on both incidents, stating that "it is better to be killed by a woman with a knife than by a man with a gun", while adding with a languid wave of his cigar that the explosion had "given the whole thing more flavor".[144]
While in New York Guevara also appeared on the CBS Sunday news program Face the Nation and met with a range of people, from U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy[145] to associates of Malcolm X. The latter expressed his admiration, declaring Guevara "one of the most revolutionary men in this country right now" while reading a statement from him to a crowd at the Audubon Ballroom.[146]
On December 17 Guevara left for Paris, France, and from there embarked on a three-month world tour that included vists to the People's Republic of China, North Korea, the United Arab Republic, Egypt, Algeria, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Dahomey, Congo-Brazzaville and Tanzania, with stops in Ireland and Prague. While in Ireland Guevara embraced his own Irish heritage, celebrating Saint Patrick's Day in Limerick City.[147] He wrote to his father on this visit, humorously stating "I am in this green Ireland of your ancestors. When they found out, the television [station] came to ask me about the Lynch genealogy, but in case they were horse thieves or something like that, I didn't say much."[148]
During this voyage he wrote a letter to Carlos Quijano, editor of a Uruguayan weekly, which was later retitled Socialism and Man in Cuba.[125] Outlined in the treatise was Guevara's summons for the creation of a new consciousness, a new status of work, and a new role of the individual. He also laid out the reasoning behind his anti-capitalist sentiments, stating:
"The laws of capitalism, blind and invisible to the majority, act upon the individual without his thinking about it. He sees only the vastness of a seemingly infinite horizon before him. That is how it is painted by capitalist propagandists, who purport to draw a lesson from the example of Rockefeller—whether or not it is true—about the possibilities of success. The amount of poverty and suffering required for the emergence of a Rockefeller, and the amount of depravity that the accumulation of a fortune of such magnitude entails, are left out of the picture, and it is not always possible to make the people in general see this."[125]
Guevara ended the essay by declaring that "the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love" and beckoning on all revolutionaries to "strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into acts that serve as examples", thus becoming "a moving force".[125] The genesis for Guevara's assertions relied on the fact that he believed the example of the Cuban Revolution was "something spiritual that would transcend all borders".[31]
Algiers, the Soviets and China[link]
In Algiers, Algeria on February 24, 1965, Guevara made what turned out to be his last public appearance on the international stage when he delivered a speech at an economic seminar on Afro-Asian solidarity.[149] He specified the moral duty of the socialist countries, accusing them of tacit complicity with the exploiting Western countries. He proceeded to outline a number of measures which he said the communist-bloc countries must implement in order to accomplish the defeat of imperialism.[150] Having criticized the Soviet Union (the primary financial backer of Cuba) in such a public manner, he returned to Cuba on March 14 to a solemn reception by Fidel and Raúl Castro, Osvaldo Dorticós and Carlos Rafael Rodríguez at the Havana airport.
As revealed in his last public speech in Algiers, Guevara had come to view the Northern Hemisphere, led by the U.S. in the West and the Soviet Union in the East, as the exploiter of the Southern Hemisphere. He strongly supported Communist North Vietnam in the Vietnam War, and urged the peoples of other developing countries to take up arms and create "many Vietnams".[151]
Moreover, the coincidence of Guevara's views with those expounded by the Chinese Communist leadership under Mao Zedong was increasingly problematic for Cuba as the nation's economy became more and more dependent on the Soviet Union. Since the early days of the Cuban revolution, Guevara had been considered by many an advocate of Maoist strategy in Latin America and the originator of a plan for the rapid industrialization of Cuba that was frequently compared to China's "Great Leap Forward". Castro became weary of Guevara's opposition to Soviet conditions and recommendations: measures that Castro saw as necessary, but which Guevara described as corrupt and "pre-monopolist".[152]
"Marx characterized the psychological or philosophical manifestation of capitalist social relations as alienation and antagonism; the result of the commodification of labor and the operation of the law of value. For Guevara, the challenge was to replace the individuals' alienation from the productive process, and the antagonism generated by class relations, with integration and solidarity, developing a collective attitude to production and the concept of work as a social duty."
— Helen Yaffe, author of Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution [153]
In Guevara's private writings from this time (since released), he displays his growing criticism of the Soviet political economy, believing that the Soviets had "forgotten Marx".[153] This led Guevara to denounce a range of Soviet practices including what he saw as their attempt to "air-brush the inherent violence of class struggle integral to the transition from capitalism to socialism", their "dangerous" policy of peaceful co-existence with the United States, their failure to push for a "change in consciousness" towards the idea of work, and their attempt to "liberalize" the socialist economy.[153] It was Guevara's desire to see the complete elimination of money, interest, commodity production, the market economy, and "mercantile relationships": all conditions that the Soviets argued would only disappear when world communism was achieved.[153] Disagreeing with this incrementalist approach, Guevara criticized the Soviet Manual of Political Economy, correctly predicting that since the Soviets were not willing to abolish the law of value (as Guevara desired), they would eventually return to capitalism.[153]
Two weeks after his Algiers speech, Guevara dropped out of public life and then vanished altogether. His whereabouts were a great mystery in Cuba, as he was generally regarded as second in power to Castro himself. His disappearance was variously attributed to the failure of the industrialization scheme he had advocated while minister of industry, to pressure exerted on Castro by Soviet officials disapproving of Guevara's pro-Chinese Communist stance on the Sino-Soviet split, and to serious differences between Guevara and the pragmatic Castro regarding Cuba's economic development and ideological line. Pressed by international speculation regarding Guevara's fate, Castro stated on June 16, 1965 that the people would be informed when Guevara himself wished to let them know. Still, rumors spread both inside and outside Cuba. On October 3, 1965, Castro publicly revealed an undated letter purportedly written to him by Guevara some months earlier; in it, Guevara reaffirmed his enduring solidarity with the Cuban Revolution but declared his intention to leave Cuba to fight for the revolutionary cause abroad. Additionally, he resigned from all his positions in the government and party, and renounced his honorary Cuban citizenship.[154]
Congo[link]
In early 1965 Guevara went to Africa to offer his knowledge and experience as a guerrilla to the ongoing conflict in the Congo. According to Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella, Guevara thought that Africa was imperialism's weak link and therefore had enormous revolutionary potential.[155] Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had fraternal relations with Che dating back to his 1959 visit, saw Guevara's plans to fight in the Congo as "unwise" and warned that he would become a "Tarzan" figure, doomed to failure.[156] Despite the warning, Guevara traveled to the Congo using the alias Ramón Benítez.[157] Guevara led the Cuban operation in support of the Marxist Simba movement, which had emerged from the ongoing Congo crisis. Guevara, his second-in-command Victor Dreke, and 12 other Cuban expeditionaries arrived in the Congo on April 24, 1965 and a contingent of approximately 100 Afro-Cubans joined them soon afterward.[158][159] They collaborated for a time with guerrilla leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who had previously helped supporters of the overthrown Patrice Lumumba lead an unsuccessful revolt months earlier. As an admirer of the late Lumumba, Guevara declared that his "murder should be a lesson for all of us".[160] Guevara, with limited knowledge of Swahili and the local languages, was assigned a teenage interpreter, Freddy Ilanga. Over the course of seven months Ilanga grew to "admire the hard-working Guevara", who "showed the same respect to black people as he did to whites".[161] However, Guevara soon became disillusioned with the discipline of Kabila's troops and later dismissed him, stating "nothing leads me to believe he is the man of the hour".[162]
As an additional obstacle, white South African mercenaries, led by Mike Hoare in concert with Cuban exiles and the CIA, worked with the Congo National Army to thwart Guevara in the mountains near the village of Fizi on Lake Tanganyika. They were able to monitor his communications and so pre-empted his attacks and interdicted his supply lines. Despite the fact that Guevara sought to conceal his presence in the Congo, the U.S. government was aware of his location and activities. The National Security Agency was intercepting all of his incoming and outgoing transmissions via equipment aboard the USNS Private Jose F. Valdez (T-AG-169), a floating listening post that continuously cruised the Indian Ocean off Dar es Salaam for that purpose.[163]
Guevara's aim was to export the revolution by instructing local anti-Mobutu Simba fighters in Marxist ideology and foco theory strategies of guerrilla warfare. In his Congo Diary, he cites the incompetence, intransigence and infighting of the local Congolese forces as key reasons for the revolt's failure.[164] Later that year on November 20, 1965, in ill health with dysentery, suffering from acute asthma and disheartened after seven months of frustration and inactivity, Guevara left the Congo with the Cuban survivors, six members of his 12-man column having died. At one point Guevara considered sending the wounded back to Cuba and fighting in Congo alone until his death, as a revolutionary example. After being urged by his comrades and pressed by two emissaries sent by Castro, at the last moment he reluctantly agreed to leave Africa. In speaking about his experience in the Congo months later, Guevara concluded that he left rather than fight to the death because: "The human element failed. There is no will to fight. The leaders are corrupt. In a word... there was nothing to do."[165] Guevara also declared that "we can't liberate by ourselves a country that does not want to fight."[166] A few weeks later, when writing the preface to the diary he kept during the Congo venture, he began: "This is the history of a failure."[167]
Guevara was reluctant to return to Cuba, because Castro had made public Guevara's "farewell letter"—a letter intended to only be revealed in the case of his death—wherein he severed all ties in order to devote himself to revolution throughout the world.[168] As a result, Guevara spent the next six months living clandestinely in Dar es Salaam and Prague.[169] During this time he compiled his memoirs of the Congo experience and wrote drafts of two more books, one on philosophy and the other on economics. He then visited several Western European countries to test his new false identity papers, created by Cuban Intelligence for his later travels to South America. As Guevara prepared for Bolivia, he secretly traveled back to Cuba to visit Castro, as well as to see his wife and to write a last letter to his five children to be read upon his death, which ended with him instructing them:
"Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary."[170]
Bolivia[link]
Main article: Ñancahuazú Guerrilla
In late 1966, Guevara's location was still not public knowledge, although representatives of Mozambique's independence movement, the FRELIMO, reported that they met with Guevara in late 1966 in Dar es Salaam regarding his offer to aid in their revolutionary project, an offer which they ultimately rejected.[171] In a speech at the 1967 International Workers' Day rally in Havana, the acting minister of the armed forces, Major Juan Almeida, announced that Guevara was "serving the revolution somewhere in Latin America".
Before he departed for Bolivia, Guevara altered his appearance by shaving off his beard and part of the top of his head as well as dyeing the rest of his hair grey so he would be unrecognizable as Che Guevara.[172] On November 3, 1966, Guevara secretly arrived in La Paz on a flight from Montevideo under the false name Adolfo Mena González, posing as a middle-aged Uruguayan businessman working for the Organization of American States.[173]
Guevara's first base camp was located in the montane dry forest in the remote Ñancahuazú region. Training at the camp in the Ñancahuazú valley proved to be hazardous, and little was accomplished in way of building a guerrilla army. The Argentine-born East German operative Haydée Tamara Bunke Bider, better known by her nom de guerre "Tania", had been installed as Che's primary agent in La Paz.[174][175]
Guevara's guerrilla force, numbering about 50[176] and operating as the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional de Bolivia; "National Liberation Army of Bolivia"), was well equipped and scored a number of early successes against Bolivian army regulars in the difficult terrain of the mountainous Camiri region. As a result of Guevara’s units' winning several skirmishes against Bolivian troops in the spring and summer of 1967, the Bolivian government began to overestimate the true size of the guerrilla force.[177] But in September the Army managed to eliminate two guerrilla groups in a violent battle, reportedly killing one of the leaders.
Researchers hypothesize that Guevara's plan for fomenting revolution in Bolivia failed for an array of reasons:
- He had expected to deal only with the Bolivian military, who were poorly trained and equipped, and was unaware that the U.S. government had sent a team of the CIA's Special Activities Division commandos and other operatives into Bolivia to aid the anti-insurrection effort. The Bolivian Army would also be trained, advised, and supplied by U.S. Army Special Forces including a recently organized elite battalion of Rangers trained in jungle warfare that set up camp in La Esperanza, a small settlement close to the location of Guevara's guerrillas.[178]
- Guevara had expected assistance and cooperation from the local dissidents that he did not receive, nor did he receive support from Bolivia's Communist Party under the leadership of Mario Monje, which was oriented toward Moscow rather than Havana. In Guevara's own diary captured after his death, he wrote about the Communist Party of Bolivia, which he characterized as "distrustful, disloyal and stupid".[179]
- He had expected to remain in radio contact with Havana. The two shortwave transmitters provided to him by Cuba were faulty; thus the guerrillas were unable to communicate and be resupplied, leaving them isolated and stranded.
In addition, Guevara's known preference for confrontation rather than compromise, which had previously surfaced during his guerrilla warfare campaign in Cuba, contributed to his inability to develop successful working relationships with local leaders in Bolivia, just as it had in the Congo.[180] This tendency had existed in Cuba, but had been kept in check by the timely interventions and guidance of Fidel Castro.[181]
The end result was that Guevara was unable to attract inhabitants of the local area to join his militia during the eleven months he attempted recruitment. Near the end of the venture Guevara wrote in his diary that "the peasants do not give us any help, and they are turning into informers."[182]
Capture and execution[link]
"There was no person more feared by the company (CIA) than Che Guevara because he had the capacity and charisma necessary to direct the struggle against the political repression of the traditional hierarchies in power in the countries of Latin America."
— Philip Agee, CIA agent, later defected to Cuba [183]
Félix Rodríguez, a Cuban exile turned CIA Special Activities Division operative, advised Bolivian troops during the hunt for Guevara in Bolivia.[184] In addition the 2007 documentary My Enemy's Enemy, directed by Kevin Macdonald, alleges that Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, aka "The Butcher of Lyon", advised and possibly helped the CIA orchestrate Guevara's eventual capture.[185]
On October 7, 1967, an informant apprised the Bolivian Special Forces of the location of Guevara's guerrilla encampment in the Yuro ravine.[186] On October 8, they encircled the area with 1,800 soldiers, and Guevara was wounded and taken prisoner while leading a detachment with Simeón Cuba Sarabia. Che biographer Jon Lee Anderson reports Bolivian Sergeant Bernardino Huanca's account: that a twice-wounded Guevara, his gun rendered useless, shouted, "Do not shoot! I am Che Guevara and worth more to you alive than dead."[187]
Guevara was tied up and taken to a dilapidated mud schoolhouse in the nearby village of La Higuera on the night of October 8. For the next half day, Guevara refused to be interrogated by Bolivian officers and would only speak quietly to Bolivian soldiers. One of those Bolivian soldiers, helicopter pilot Jaime Nino de Guzman, describes Che as looking "dreadful". According to Guzman, Guevara was shot through the right calf, his hair was matted with dirt, his clothes were shredded, and his feet were covered in rough leather sheaths. Despite his haggard appearance, he recounts that "Che held his head high, looked everyone straight in the eyes and asked only for something to smoke." De Guzman states that he "took pity" and gave him a small bag of tobacco for his pipe, and that Guevara then smiled and thanked him.[188] Later on the night of October 8, Guevara, despite having his hands tied, kicked Bolivian Officer Espinosa into the wall after the officer entered the schoolhouse and tried to snatch Guevara's pipe from his mouth as a souvenir while he was still smoking it.[189] In another instance of defiance, Guevara spat in the face of Bolivian Rear Admiral Ugarteche shortly before his execution.[189]
The following morning on October 9, Guevara asked to see the maestra (school teacher) of the village, 22-year-old Julia Cortez. Cortez would later state that she found Guevara to be an "agreeable looking man with a soft and ironic glance" and that during their conversation she found herself "unable to look him in the eye" because his "gaze was unbearable, piercing, and so tranquil".[189] During their short conversation, Guevara pointed out to Cortez the poor condition of the schoolhouse, stating that it was "anti-pedagogical" to expect campesino students to be educated there, while "government officials drive Mercedes cars", and declaring "that's what we are fighting against."[189]
Later that morning on October 9, Bolivian President René Barrientos ordered that Guevara be killed. The order was relayed by Félix Rodríguez despite the U.S. government’s desire that Guevara be taken to Panama for further interrogation.[190] The executioner was Mario Terán, a half-drunken sergeant in the Bolivian army who had requested to shoot Che on the basis of the fact that three of his friends from B Company, all named "Mario", had been killed in an earlier firefight with Guevara's band of guerrillas.[13] To make the bullet wounds appear consistent with the story the government planned to release to the public, Félix Rodríguez ordered Terán to aim carefully to make it appear that Guevara had been killed in action during a clash with the Bolivian army.[191] Gary Prado, the Bolivian captain in command of the army company that captured Guevara, said that the reasons Barrientos ordered the immediate execution of Guevara is so there would be no possibility that Guevara would escape from prison, and also so there would be no drama in regard to a trial.[192]
A few minutes before Guevara was executed, he was asked by a Bolivian soldier if he was thinking about his own immortality. "No," he replied, "I'm thinking about the immortality of the revolution."[193] When Sergeant Terán entered the hut, Che Guevara then told his executioner, "I know you've come to kill me. Shoot, coward! You are only going to kill a man!"[194] Terán hesitated, then opened fire with his semiautomatic rifle, hitting Guevara in the arms and legs. Guevara writhed on the ground, apparently biting one of his wrists to avoid crying out. Terán then fired several times again, wounding him fatally in the chest at 1:10 pm according to Rodríguez.[194] In all, Guevara was shot nine times. This included five times in the legs, once in the right shoulder and arm, once in the chest, and finally in the throat.[189]
Months earlier, during his last public declaration to the Tricontinental Conference,[151] Guevara wrote his own epitaph, stating "Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this our battle cry may have reached some receptive ear and another hand may be extended to wield our weapons."[195]
Post-execution, remains and memorial[link]
File:FreddyAlbertoChe.jpg
The day after his execution on October 10, 1967, Guevara's corpse was displayed to the world press in the laundry house of the Vallegrande hospital. (photo by Freddy Alborta)
Face Side angle Shoes
Face Side angle ShoesMain article: Che Guevara Mausoleum
After his execution, Guevara's body was lashed to the landing skids of a helicopter and flown to nearby Vallegrande, where photographs were taken of him lying on a concrete slab in the laundry room of the Nuestra Señora de Malta.[196] Several witnesses were called to confirm that it was Guevara, key amongst them British journalist Richard Gott, the only witness to have met Guevara when he was alive.
Put on public show as hundreds of local residents filed past the body, Guevara's corpse was considered by many to represent a "Christ-like" visage, with some even surreptitiously clipping locks of his hair as divine relics.[197] Such comparisons were further extended when English art critic John Berger, two weeks later upon seeing the post-mortem photographs, observed that they resembled two famous paintings: Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp and Andrea Mantegna's Lamentation over the Dead Christ.[198] There were also four correspondents present when Guevara's body arrived in Vallegrande, including Bjorn Kumm of the Swedish Aftonbladet, who described the scene in an November 11, 1967 exclusive for The New Republic.[199]
A declassified memorandum dated October 11, 1967 to United States President Lyndon B. Johnson from his National Security Advisor Walt Whitman Rostow, called the decision to kill Guevara "stupid" but "understandable from a Bolivian standpoint".[200] After the execution Rodríguez took several of Guevara's personal items—including a Rolex GMT Master wristwatch[201] that he continued to wear many years later—often showing them to reporters during the ensuing years.Today some of these belongings, including his flashlight, are on display at the CIA.[202] After a military doctor amputated his hands, Bolivian army officers transferred Guevara's body to an undisclosed location and refused to reveal whether his remains had been buried or cremated. The hands were preserved in formaldehyde to be sent to Buenos Aires for fingerprint identification. (His fingerprints were on file with the Argentine police.) They were later sent to Cuba.
On October 15 Fidel Castro publicly acknowledged that Guevara was dead and proclaimed three days of public mourning throughout Cuba.[203] On October 18 Castro addressed a crowd of one million mourners in Havana's Plaza de la Revolución and spoke about Guevara's character as a revolutionary.[204] Fidel Castro closed his impassioned eulogy thusly:
"If we wish to express what we want the men of future generations to be, we must say: Let them be like Che! If we wish to say how we want our children to be educated, we must say without hesitation: We want them to be educated in Che’s spirit! If we want the model of a man, who does not belong to our times but to the future, I say from the depths of my heart that such a model, without a single stain on his conduct, without a single stain on his action, is Che!"[205]
French intellectual Régis Debray, who was captured in April 1967 while with Guevara in Bolivia, gave an interview from prison in August 1968, in which he enlarged on the circumstances of Guevara's capture. Debray, who had lived with Guevara's band of guerrillas for a short time, said that in his view they were "victims of the forest" and thus "eaten by the jungle".[206] Debray described a destitute situation where Guevara's men suffered malnutrition, lack of water, absence of shoes, and only possessed six blankets for 22 men. Debray recounts that Guevara and the others had been suffering an "illness" which caused their hands and feet to swell into "mounds of flesh" to the point where you could not discern the fingers on their hands.[206] Debray described Guevara as "optimistic about the future of Latin America" despite the futile situation, and remarked that Guevara was "resigned to die in the knowledge that his death would be a sort of renaissance", noting that Guevara perceived death "as a promise of rebirth" and "ritual of renewal".[206]
In late 1995 retired Bolivian General Mario Vargas revealed to Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, that Guevara's body was located near a Vallegrande airstrip. The result was a multi-national search for the remains, which would last more than a year. In July 1997 a team of Cuban geologists and Argentine forensic anthropologists discovered the remnants of seven bodies in two mass graves, including one man with amputated hands (like Guevara). Bolivian government officials with the Ministry of Interior later identified the body as Guevara when the excavated teeth "perfectly matched" a plaster mold of Che's teeth made in Cuba prior to his Congolese expedition. The "clincher" then arrived when Argentine forensic anthropologist Alejandro Inchaurregui inspected the inside hidden pocket of a blue jacket dug up next to the handless cadaver and found a small bag of pipe tobacco. Nino de Guzman, the Bolivian helicopter pilot who had given Che a small bag of tobacco, later remarked that he "had serious doubts" at first and "thought the Cubans would just find any old bones and call it Che"; but "after hearing about the tobacco pouch, I have no doubts."[188] On October 17, 1997, Guevara's remains, with those of six of his fellow combatants, were laid to rest with military honors in a specially built mausoleum in the Cuban city of Santa Clara, where he had commanded over the decisive military victory of the Cuban Revolution.[207]
Removed when Guevara was captured were his 30,000-word, hand-written diary, a collection of his personal poetry, and a short story he had authored about a young Communist guerrilla who learns to overcome his fears.[208] His diary documented events of the guerrilla campaign in Bolivia[209], with the first entry on November 7, 1966, shortly after his arrival at the farm in Ñancahuazú, and the last dated October 7, 1967, the day before his capture. The diary tells how the guerrillas were forced to begin operations prematurely because of discovery by the Bolivian Army, explains Guevara's decision to divide the column into two units that were subsequently unable to re-establish contact, and describes their overall unsuccessful venture. It also records the rift between Guevara and the Communist Party of Bolivia that resulted in Guevara having significantly fewer soldiers than originally expected, and shows that Guevara had a great deal of difficulty recruiting from the local populace, partly because of the fact that the guerrilla group had learned Quechua, unaware that the local language was actually a Tupí–Guaraní language.[210] As the campaign drew to an unexpected close, Guevara became increasingly ill. He suffered from ever-worsening bouts of asthma, and most of his last offensives were carried out in an attempt to obtain medicine.[211]
The Bolivian Diary was quickly and crudely translated by Ramparts magazine and circulated around the world.[212] There are at least four additional diaries in existence—those of Israel Reyes Zayas (Alias "Braulio"), Harry Villegas Tamayo ("Pombo"), Eliseo Reyes Rodriguez ("Rolando")[174] and Dariel Alarcón Ramírez ("Benigno")[213]—each of which reveals additional aspects of the events. In July 2008 the Bolivian government of Evo Morales unveiled Guevara's formerly sealed diaries composed in two frayed notebooks, along with a logbook and several black-and-white photographs. At this event Bolivia's vice-minister of culture, Pablo Groux, expressed that there were plans to publish photographs of every handwritten page later in the year.[214] Meanwhile, in August 2009 anthropologists working for Bolivia's Justice Ministry discovered and unearthed five of Guevara's fellow guerrillas near the Bolivian town of Teoponte.[215]
Legacy[link]
Main articles: Legacy of Che Guevara and Che Guevara in popular culture
"The discovery of Che’s remains metonymically activated a series of interlinked associations – rebel, martyr, rogue figure from a picaresque adventure, savior, renegade, extremist – in which there was no fixed divide among them. The current court of opinion places Che on a continuum that teeters between viewing him as a misguided rebel, a coruscatingly brilliant guerrilla philosopher, a poet-warrior jousting at windmills, a brazen warrior who threw down the gauntlet to the bourgeoisie, the object of fervent paeans to his sainthood, or a mass murderer clothed in the guise of an avenging angel whose every action is imbricated in violence – the archetypal Fanatical Terrorist."
— Dr. Peter McLaren, author of Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution [216]
Over forty years after his execution, Che's life and legacy still remain a contentious issue. The contradictions of his ethos at various points in his life have created a complex character of unending duality.
An array of notable individuals have lauded Guevara as a hero;[217] for example, Nelson Mandela referred to him as "an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom"[183], while Jean-Paul Sartre described him as "not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age".[218] Others who have expressed their admiration include authors Graham Greene, who remarked that Che "represented the idea of gallantry, chivalry, and adventure",[219] and Susan Sontag, who expounded that "[Che's] goal was nothing less than the cause of humanity itself."[220] In the black community, philosopher Frantz Fanon professed Guevara to be "the world symbol of the possibilities of one man",[221] while Black Panther Party head Stokely Carmichael eulogized that "Che Guevara is not dead, his ideas are with us."[222] Praise has been reflected throughout the political spectrum, with the libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard extolling Guevara as a "heroic figure", lamenting after his death that "more than any man of our epoch or even of our century, [Che] was the living embodiment of the principle of revolution",[223] while journalist Christopher Hitchens commented that "[Che's] death meant a lot to me and countless like me at the time, he was a role model, albeit an impossible one for us bourgeois romantics insofar as he went and did what revolutionaries were meant to do—fought and died for his beliefs."[224] Guevara remains a beloved national hero to many in Cuba, where his image adorns the $3 Cuban peso and school children begin each morning by pledging "We will be like Che."[225] In his homeland of Argentina, where high schools bear his name,[226] numerous Che museums dot the country, which in 2008 unveiled a 12-foot (3.7 m) bronze statue of him in the city of his birth, Rosario.[227] Additionally, Guevara has been sanctified by some Bolivian campesinos[228] as "Saint Ernesto", to whom they pray for assistance.[229]
Conversely, Jacobo Machover, an exiled opposition author, dismisses the hero-worshipping and portrays him as a ruthless executioner.[230] Detractors have theorized that Che-inspired revolutions in much of Latin America had the practical result of reinforcing brutal militarism and internecine conflict for many years.[231] In an assessment of Guevara, British historian Hugh Thomas opines that Che was a "brave, sincere and determined man who was also obstinate, narrow, and dogmatic."[232] At the end of his life, according to Thomas, "he seems to have become convinced of the virtues of violence for its own sake", while "his influence over Castro for good or evil" grew after his death, as Fidel took up many of his views. In Thomas' assessment, "As in the case of Martí, or Lawrence of Arabia, failure has brightened, not dimmed the legend."[232] Alvaro Vargas Llosa of The Independent Institute has hypothesized that Guevara’s contemporary followers "delude themselves by clinging to a myth", while describing Guevara as "Marxist Puritan" who employed his rigid power to suppress dissent, while also operating as a "cold-blooded killing machine".[231] Llosa has also accused Guevara's "fanatical disposition" as being the linchpin of the "Sovietization" of the Cuban revolution, speculating that he possessed a "total subordination of reality to blind ideological orthodoxy".[231] Guevara remains a hated figure amongst many in the Cuban exile and Cuban-American community of the United States, who view him with animosity as "the butcher of La Cabaña".[233]
Despite his polarized status, a high-contrast monochrome graphic of his face, created in 1968 by Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick, has become one of the world's most universally merchandized and objectified images,[234][235] found on an endless array of items, including T-shirts, hats, posters, tattoos, and bikinis,[236] ironically contributing to the consumer culture Guevara despised. Yet, he still remains a transcendent figure both in specifically political contexts[237] and as a wide-ranging popular icon of youthful rebellion.[238]
Timeline[link]
<timeline> ImageSize = width:600 height:700 PlotArea = left:40 right:10 top:10 bottom:10 DateFormat = yyyy TimeAxis = orientation:vertical order:reverse format:yyyy Period = from:1925 till:1970 AlignBars = early ScaleMajor = unit:year increment:10 start:1930 ScaleMinor = unit:year increment:5 start:1925
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- there is no automatic collision detection,
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Define $dx = 20 # shift text to right side of bar
PlotData =
bar:event width:20 color:blue shift:($dx,-4) from:start till:end color:blue mark:(line,white) at:1928 text:"1928 Ernesto Guevara de la Serna born in Rosario, Argentina" at:1930 text:"1930 Suffers first asthma attack" at:1933 text:"1933 Guevara family moves to Alta Gracia" at:1934 text:"1934 Home schooling begins" at:1937 text:"1937 Enrolls in primary school" at:1942 text:"1942 Begins high school at Colegio Nacional Dean Funes" at:1943 text:"1943 Guevara family moves to Córdoba" at:1946 text:"1946 Graduates from Colegio Nacional Dean Funes" at:1947 text:"1947 Guevara family moves to Buenos Aires; Ernesto begins medical school" at:1950 text:"1950 Travels on motorbike through northern Argentina" at:1951 text:"1951 Works for six months as male nurse aboard petrol tankers" at:1952 text:"1952 Travels through Latin America with Alberto Granado; volunteers at leprosarium in Peru"
at:1953 text:"1953 Graduates from medical school; visits Bolivia and other countries; arrives in Guatemala" at:1954 text:"1954 Árbenz government overthrown; Ernesto arrives in Mexico"
at:1955 text:"1955 Meets Fidel Castro, joins 26th of July Revolutionary Movement"
at:1956 text:"1956 Arrives in Cuba aboard the Granma" at:1957 text:"1957 Guerrilla fighter in the Sierra Maestra; promoted to Comandante" at:1958 text:"1958 Captures City of Santa Clara; Batista flees Cuba" at:1959 text:"1959 Appointed commander of La Cabaña fortress; named President of the National Bank of Cuba" at:1961 text:"1961 Appointed Minister of Industries" at:1964 text:"1964 Decides to leave Cuba; speaks at the UN; travels in Africa" at:1965 text:"1965 Gives his Farewell Letter to Fidel Castro; travels to the Congo to begin guerrilla operations" at:1966 text:"1966 Lives clandestinely in Dar Es Salaam, then Prague; returns briefly to Cuba; arrives in Bolivia" at:1967 text:"1967 Leads guerrilla operations; captured at Quebrada del Yuro and summarily executed in La Higuera"
TextData =
tabs:(25-left) pos:(100,710) fontsize:12 text:"Timeline"
</timeline>
Archival media[link]
Video footage[link]
- Guevara addressing the United Nations General Assembly on December 11, 1964, (6:21), public domain footage uploaded by the U.N., Video Clip
- Guevara interviewed in 1964 on a visit to Dublin, Ireland, (2:53), English translation, from RTÉ Libraries and Archives, Video Clip
- Guevara reciting a poem, (0:58), English subtitles, from El Che: Investigating a Legend – Kultur Video 2001, Video Clip
- Guevara showing support for Fidel Castro, (0:22), English subtitles, from El Che: Investigating a Legend – Kultur Video 2001, Video Clip
- Guevara speaking about labor, (0:28), English subtitles, from El Che: Investigating a Legend – Kultur Video 2001, Video Clip
- Guevara speaking about the Bay of Pigs, (0:17), English subtitles, from El Che: Investigating a Legend – Kultur Video 2001, Video Clip
- Guevara speaking against imperialism, (1:20), English subtitles, from El Che: Investigating a Legend – Kultur Video 2001, Video Clip
Audio recording[link]
- Guevara interviewed on ABC's Issues and Answers, (23:53), English translation, narrated by Lisa Howard, March 24, 1964, Audio clip
List of works[link]
Main article: Bibliography of Che Guevara
Originally written in Spanish by Ernesto "Che" Guevara, later translated into English
- A New Society: Reflections for Today's World, Ocean Press, 1996, ISBN 1-875284-06-0
- Back on the Road: A Journey Through Latin America, Grove Press, 2002, ISBN 0-8021-3942-6
- Che Guevara, Cuba, and the Road to Socialism, Pathfinder Press, 1991, ISBN 0-87348-643-9
- Che Guevara on Global Justice, Ocean Press (AU), 2002, ISBN 1-876175-45-1
- Che Guevara: Radical Writings on Guerrilla Warfare, Politics and Revolution, Filiquarian Publishing, 2006, ISBN 1-59986-999-3
- Che Guevara Reader: Writings on Politics & Revolution, Ocean Press, 2003, ISBN 1-876175-69-9
- Che Guevara Speaks: Selected Speeches and Writings, Pathfinder Press (NY), 1980, ISBN 0-87348-602-1
- Che Guevara Talks to Young People, Pathfinder, 2000, ISBN 0-87348-911-X
- Che: The Diaries of Ernesto Che Guevara, Ocean Press (AU), 2008, ISBN 1-920888-93-4
- Colonialism is Doomed, Ministry of External Relations: Republic of Cuba, 1964, ASIN B0010AAN1K
- Critical Notes on Political Economy: A Revolutionary Humanist Approach to Marxist Economics, Ocean Press, 2008, ISBN 1-876175-55-9
- Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 1956–58, Pathfinder Press (NY), 1996, ISBN 0-87348-824-5
- Guerrilla Warfare: Authorized Edition, Ocean Press, 2006, ISBN 1-920888-28-4
- Latin America: Awakening of a Continent, Ocean Press, 2005, ISBN 1-876175-73-7
- Marx & Engels: An Introduction, Ocean Press, 2007, ISBN 1-920888-92-6
- Our America And Theirs: Kennedy And The Alliance For Progress, Ocean Press, 2006, ISBN 1-876175-81-8
- Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War: Authorized Edition, Ocean Press, 2005, ISBN 1-920888-33-0
- Self Portrait Che Guevara, Ocean Press (AU), 2004, ISBN 1-876175-82-6
- Socialism and Man in Cuba, Pathfinder Press (NY), 1989, ISBN 0-87348-577-7
- The African Dream: The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo, Grove Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8021-3834-9
- The Argentine, Ocean Press (AU), 2008, ISBN 1-920888-93-4
- The Bolivian Diary of Ernesto Che Guevara, Pathfinder Press, 1994, ISBN 0-87348-766-4
- The Great Debate on Political Economy, Ocean Press, 2006, ISBN 1-876175-54-0
- The Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey Around South America, London: Verso, 1996, ISBN 1-85702-399-4
- The Secret Papers of a Revolutionary: The Diary of Che Guevara, American Reprint Co, 1975, ASIN B0007GW08W
- To Speak the Truth: Why Washington's "Cold War" Against Cuba Doesn't End, Pathfinder, 1993, ISBN 0-87348-633-1
See also[link]
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References[link]
- ^ a b c The date of birth recorded on his birth certificate was June 14, 1928, although one tertiary source, (Julia Constenla, quoted by Jon Lee Anderson), asserts that he was actually born on May 14 of that year. Constenla alleges that she was told by an unidentified astrologer that his mother, Celia de la Serna, was already pregnant when she and Ernesto Guevara Lynch were married and that the date on the birth certificate of their son was forged to make it appear that he was born a month later than the actual date to avoid scandal. (Anderson 1997, pp. 3, 769.)
- ^ Partido Unido de la Revolución Socialista de Cuba, aka PURSC.
- ^ The Spark That Does Not Die by Michael Löwy, International Viewpoint, July 1997
- ^ McLaren 2000, p. 78.
- ^ Embodiment and Agency, by Sue Campbell & Letitia Meynell, Penn State Press, 2009, ISBN 0-271-03522-6, p. 243
- ^ a b Unknown, Autor. "Guevara, Che". Encyclopædia Britannica Online. http://members.eb.com/bol/topic?eu=39170&sctn=1. Retrieved 30 September 2001.
- ^ The various sound clips on this site of international Spanish speakers: Forvo.com pronounce the G in the name "Guevara" as [ɡ] or [ɣ] depending on how carefully they enunciate. When the names are spoken together, it is [ɣ]; when enunciated separately, [ɡ].
- ^ Casey 2009, p. 128.
- ^ a b On Revolutionary Medicine Speech by Che Guevara to the Cuban Militia on August 19, 1960.
- ^ At the Afro-Asian Conference in Algeria A speech by Che Guevara to the Second Economic Seminar of Afro-Asian Solidarity in Algiers, Algeria on February 24, 1965.
- ^ Beaubien, NPR Audio Report, 2009, 00:09–00:13.
- ^ a b c d "Castro's Brain" 1960.
- ^ a b c d e Taibo 1999, p. 267.
- ^ a b c Kellner 1989, pp. 69–70.
- ^ Anderson 1997, pp. 526–530.
- ^ Ryan 1998, p. 4.
- ^ Dorfman 1999.
- ^ Maryland Institute of Art, referenced at BBC News May 26, 2001.
- ^ Che's last name "Guevara" derives from the Castilianized form of the Basque "Gebara", a habitational name from the province of Álava. Through his grandmother, Ana Lynch, he was a descendant of Patrick Lynch, an emigrant from Galway, Ireland in the 1740s.
- ^ Lavretsky 1976.
- ^ Kellner 1989, p. 23.
- ^ Argentina: Che's Red Mother Time Magazine, July 14, 1961.
- ^ Anderson 1997, pp. 22–23.
- ^ Sandison 1996, p. 8.
- ^ Kellner 1989, p. 24.
- ^ Argentine Rugby Inspired by Che Guevara by Brendan Gallagher, The Daily Telegraph, October 5, 2007
- ^ Cain, Nick & Growden, Greg "Chapter 21: Ten Peculiar Facts about Rugby" in Rugby Union for Dummies (2nd Edition), John Wiley and Sons, ISBN 978-0-470-03537-5, p. 293.
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 28.
- ^ a b Hart 2004, p. 98.
- ^ Haney 2005, p. 164.
- ^ a b c d e (Anderson 1997, pp. 37–38).
- ^ Sandison 1996, p. 10.
- ^ Kellner 1989, p. 26.
- ^ Ratner 1997, p. 25.
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 64.
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 59-64.
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 89.
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 75-76.
- ^ a b Kellner 1989, p. 27.
- ^ NYT bestseller list: #38 Paperback Nonfiction on 2005-02-20, #9 Nonfiction on 2004-10-07 and on more occasions.
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 98.
- ^ A copy of Guevara's University transcripts showing conferral of his medical diploma can be found on p. 75 of Becoming Che: Guevara's Second and Final Trip through Latin America, by Carlos 'Calica' Ferrer (Translated from the Spanish by Sarah L. Smith), Marea Editorial, 2006, ISBN 987-1307-07-1. Ferrer was a longtime childhood friend of Che, and when Guevara passed the last of his 12 exams in 1953, he gave him a copy to prove to Ferrer, who had been telling Guevara that he would never finish, that he had finally completed his studies.
- ^ A Very Modern Icon by George Galloway, New Statesman, June 12, 2006
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 126.
- ^ Taibo 1999, p. 31.
- ^ Kellner 1989, p. 31.
- ^ a b Guevara Lynch 2000, p. 26.
- ^ Ignacio 2007, p. 172.
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 144.
- ^ a b Kellner 1989, p. 32.
- ^ Taibo 1999, p. 39.
- ^ Snow, Anita. "'My Life With Che' by Hilda Gadea". Associated Press at WJXX-TV. August 16, 2008. Retrieved on February 23, 2009.
- ^ Che Guevara 1960–67 by Frank E. Smitha.
- ^ Sinclair, Andrew (1970). Che Guevara. The Viking Press. p. 12.
- ^ Kellner 1989, p. 33.
- ^ a b Rebel Wife, A Review of My Life With Che: The Making of a Revolutionary by Hilda Gadea by Tom Gjelten, The Washington Post, October 12, 2008.
- ^ Taibo 1999, p. 55.
- ^ Fidel and Che: A Revolutionary Friendship by Simon Reid-Henry audio slideshow by The Guardian, January 9, 2009
- ^ Sandison 1996, p. 28.
- ^ Kellner 1989, p. 37.
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 194.
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 213.
- ^ Sandison 1996, p. 32.
- ^ DePalma 2006, pp. 110–111.
- ^ a b c Latin lessons: What can we Learn from the World’s most Ambitious Literacy Campaign? by The Independent, November 7, 2010
- ^ Kellner 1989, p. 45.
- ^ Anderson 1997, pp. 269–270.
- ^ Castañeda 1998, pp. 105, 119.
- ^ Anderson 1997, pp. 237–238, 269–270, 277–278.
- ^ a b c Luther 2001, pp. 97–99.
- ^ a b c Anderson 1997, 237.
- ^ Sandison 1996, p. 35.
- ^ Ignacio 2007, p. 177.
- ^ Ignacio 2007, p. 193.
- ^ Poster Boy of The Revolution by Saul Landau, The Washington Post, October 19, 1997, p. X01.
- ^ Moore, Don. "Revolution! Clandestine Radio and the Rise of Fidel Castro". Patepluma Radio. http://www.pateplumaradio.com/central/cuba/rebel1.html.
- ^ Bockman 1984.
- ^ Kellner 1989, p. 40.
- ^ a b Kellner 1989, p. 47.
- ^ Castro 1972, pp. 439–442.
- ^ Dorschner 1980, pp. 41–47, 81–87.
- ^ Sandison 1996, p. 39.
- ^ Kellner 1989, p. 48.
- ^ Kellner 1989, p. 13.
- ^ Castañeda, pp. 145–146.
- ^ a b Castañeda, p. 146.
- ^ Anderson 1997, 397.
- ^ Anderson 1997, pp. 400–401.
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 424.
- ^ Castañeda, p. 159.
- ^ (Castañeda 1998, pp. 264–265).
- ^ a b Skidmore 2008, pp. 273.
- ^ Gómez Treto 1991, p. 115. "The Penal Law of the War of Independence (July 28, 1896) was reinforced by Rule 1 of the Penal Regulations of the Rebel Army, approved in the Sierra Maestra February 21, 1958, and published in the army's official bulletin (Ley penal de Cuba en armas, 1959)" (Gómez Treto 1991, p. 123).
- ^ Gómez Treto 1991, pp. 115–116.
- ^ Anderson 1997, pp. 372, 425.
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 376.
- ^ Niess 2007, p. 60.
- ^ Gómez Treto 1991, p. 116.
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 388.
- ^ Rally For Castro: One Million Roar "Si" To Cuba Executions – Video Clip by Universal-International News, narrated by Ed Herlihy, from January 22, 1959
- ^ Niess 2007, p. 61.
- ^ a b c Castañeda 1998, pp. 143–144.
- ^ The Legacy of Che Guevara – a PBS online forum with author Jon Lee Anderson, November 20, 1997
- ^ Different sources cite differing numbers of executions attributable to Guevara, with some of the discrepancy resulting from the question of which deaths to attribute directly to Guevara and which to the regime as a whole. Anderson (1997) gives the number specifically at La Cabaña prison as 55 (p. 387.), while also stating that "several hundred people were officially tried and executed across Cuba" as a whole (p. 387). (Castañeda 1998) notes that historians differ on the total number killed, with different studies placing it as anywhere from 200 to 700 nationwide (p. 143), although he notes that "after a certain date most of the executions occurred outside of Che's jurisdiction" (p. 143). These numbers are supported by the opposition-based Free Society Project / Cuba Archive, which gives the figure as 144 executions ordered by Guevara across Cuba in three years (1957–1959) and 105 "victims" specifically at La Cabaña, which according to them were all "carried out without due process of law". Of further note, much of the discrepancy in the estimates between 55 versus 105 executed at La Cabaña revolves around whether to include instances where Guevara had denied an appeal and signed off on a death warrant, but where the sentence was carried out while he traveled overseas from June 4 to September 8, or after he relinquished his command of the fortress on June 12, 1959.
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 375.
- ^ Kellner 1989, p. 54.
- ^ Kellner 1989, p. 57.
- ^ a b c Kellner 1989, p. 58.
- ^ Taibo 1999, p. 282-285.
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 423.
- ^ a b Anderson 1997, p. 431.
- ^ Taibo 1999, p. 300.
- ^ Che Guevara's Daughter Visits Bomb Memorial in Hiroshima by The Japan Times, May 16, 2008
- ^ a b Anderson 1997, p. 435.
- ^ Casey 2009, p. 25.
- ^ Casey 2009, pp. 25–50.
- ^ a b Kellner 1989, p. 55.
- ^ a b c d Kellner 1989, p. 61.
- ^ Latin America's New Look at Che by Daniel Schweimler, BBC News, October 9, 2007.
- ^ a b Anderson 1997, pp. 449
- ^ Man and Socialism in Cuba by Che Guevara
- ^ a b Crompton 2009, p. 71.
- ^ a b Kellner 1989, p. 60.
- ^ Dumur 1964 a 1964 video interview of Che Guevara speaking French (with English subtitles).
- ^ a b c d "Socialism and Man in Cuba" A letter to Carlos Quijano, editor of Marcha, a weekly published in Montevideo, Uruguay; published as "From Algiers, for Marcha: The Cuban Revolution Today" by Che Guevara on March 12, 1965.
- ^ a b c d e Kellner 1989, p. 62.
- ^ Kellner 1989, p. 59.
- ^ PBS: Che Guevara, Popular but Ineffective.
- ^ Kellner 1989, p. 75.
- ^ Latin America Report. Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS). 1984–03–23. p. 24. http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA351284. Retrieved 2010-10-30.
- ^ Kellner 1989, p. 63.
- ^ Kellner 1989, p. 74.
- ^ The Spirit of Che Guevara by I.F. Stone, New Statesman, October 20, 1967.
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 507.
- ^ Jones, Nate. "Document Friday: Che Guevara Thanks the United States for the Bay of Pigs Invasion". NSA Archive. http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2012/02/03/document-friday-che-guevara-thanks-the-united-states-for-the-bay-of-pigs-invasion/. Retrieved May 4, 2012.
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 509.
- ^ a b "Economics Cannot be Separated from Politics" speech by Che Guevara to the ministerial meeting of the Inter-American Economic and Social Council (CIES), in Punta del Este, Uruguay on August 8, 1961.
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 492.
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 530.
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 545.
- ^ Guevara 1997, pp 304
- ^ Kellner 1989, p. 73.
- ^ a b c d e "Colonialism is Doomed" speech to the 19th General Assembly of the United Nations in New York City by Cuban representative Che Guevara on December 11, 1964.
- ^ a b c Bazooka Fired at U.N. as Cuban Speaks by Homer Bigart, The New York Times, December 12, 1964 – p. 1.
- ^ Hart 2004, p. 271.
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 618.
- ^ "Che Guevara: Father Of Revolution, Son Of Galway". Fantompowa.net. http://www.fantompowa.net/Flame/che_guevara_irish_roots.htm. Retrieved 2010-10-31.
- ^ Gerry Adams Featured in New Che Guevara Documentary by Kenneth Haynes, Irish Central, September 8, 2009
- ^ Guevara 1969, p. 350.
- ^ Guevara 1969, pp. 352–59.
- ^ a b Message to the Tricontinental A letter sent by Che Guevara from his jungle camp in Bolivia, to the Tricontinental Solidarity Organisation in Havana, Cuba, in the Spring of 1967.
- ^ Che Guevara's Final Verdict on the Soviet Economy by John Riddell, Centre for Research on Globalization, June 13, 2008.
- ^ a b c d e Ernesto 'Che' Guevara: A Rebel Against Soviet Political Economy by Helen Yaffe (author of Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution), 2006
- ^ Guevara 1965.
- ^ Ben Bella 1997.
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 624.
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 629.
- ^ Gálvez 1999, p. 62.
- ^ Gott 2004 p. 219.
- ^ Kellner 1989, p. 86.
- ^ DR Congo's Rebel-Turned-Brain Surgeon by Mark Doyle, BBC World Affairs', December 13, 2005.
- ^ BBC News January 17, 2001.
- ^ "The intercept operators knew that Dar-es-Salaam was serving as a communications center for the fighters, receiving messages from Castro in Cuba and relaying them on to the guerrillas deep in the bush (Bamford 2002, p. 181).
- ^ Ireland's Own 2000.
- ^ Kellner 1989, p. 87.
- ^ From Cuba to Congo, Dream to Disaster for Che Guevara by The Guardian, August 12, 2000
- ^ Guevara 2000, p. 1.
- ^ Castañeda 1998, p. 316.
- ^ Che Guevara’s Central Bohemian Hideaway article and audio by Ian Willoughby, Český rozhlas, June 27, 2010
- ^ Guevara 2009, p. 167.
- ^ Mittleman 1981, p. 38.
- ^ Jacobson, Sid and Ernie Colón. Che: A Graphic Biography. Hill and Wang, 2009. 96–97.
- ^ Jacobson, Sid and Ernie Colón. Che: A Graphic Biography. Hill and Wang, 2009. 98.
- ^ a b Selvage 1985.
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 693.
- ^ Members of Che Guevara's Guerrilla Movement in Bolivia by the Latin American Studies Organization
- ^ Kellner 1989, p. 97.
- ^ U.S. Army 1967 and Ryan 1998, pp. 82–102, inter alia. "U.S. military personnel in Bolivia never exceeded 53 advisers, including a sixteen-man Mobile Training Team (MTT) from the 8th Special Forces Group based at Fort Gulick, Panama Canal Zone" (Selvage 1985).
- ^ "Bidding for Che", Time Magazine, Dec. 15, 1967.
- ^ Guevara 1972.
- ^ Castañeda 1998, pp. 107–112; 131–132.
- ^ Wright 2000, p. 86.
- ^ a b Guevara 2009, p. II.
- ^ Shadow Warrior: The CIA Hero of 100 Unknown Battles, Felix Rodriguez and John Weisman, Simon & Schuster, October 1989.
- ^ Barbie "Boasted of Hunting Down Che" by David Smith, The Observer, December 23, 2007.
- ^ Green Beret Behind the Capture of Che Guevara by Richard Gott, The Age, September 8, 2010
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 733.
- ^ a b "The Man Who Buried Che" by Juan O. Tamayo, Miami Herald, September 19, 1997.
- ^ a b c d e Ray, Michèle (March 1968). "In Cold Blood: The Execution of Che by the CIA". Ramparts Magazine: 33.
- ^ Grant 2007
- ^ Grant 2007. René Barrientos has never revealed his motives for ordering the summary execution of Guevara rather than putting him on trial or expelling him from the country or turning him over to the U.S. authorities.
- ^ Almudevar, Lola. "Bolivia marks capture, execution of 'Che' Guevara 40 years ago." San Francisco Chronicle. Tuesday October 9, 2007. Retrieved on November 7, 2009.
- ^ Time magazine 1970.
- ^ a b Anderson 1997, p. 739.
- ^ Obituary: Che Guevara, Marxist Architect of Revolution by Richard Bourne, The Guardian, October 11, 1967
- ^ Almudevar 2007 and Gott 2005.
- ^ Casey 2009, p. 179.
- ^ Casey 2009, p. 183.
- ^ The Death of Che Guevara by Bjorn Kumm, The New Republic, Originally published on November 11, 1967.
- ^ Lacey 2007a.
- ^ Watch blog image of Guevara's GMT Master.
- ^ Kornbluh 1997.
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 740.
- ^ Anderson 1997, p. 741.
- ^ Kellner 1989, p. 101.
- ^ a b c Nadle, Marlene (August 24, 1968). "Régis Debray Speaks from Prison". Ramparts Magazine: 42.
- ^ Cuba salutes 'Che' Guevara: Revolutionary Icon Finally Laid to Rest CNN, October 17, 1997
- ^ "Bidding for Che", Time Magazine, Dec. 15, 1967.
- ^ Guevara 1967b.
- ^ Ryan 1998, p. 45.
- ^ Ryan 1998, p. 104.
- ^ Ryan 1998, p. 148.
- ^ Ramírez 1997.
- ^ Bolivia unveils original Che Guevara diary by Eduardo Garcia, Reuters, July 7, 2008.
- ^ Slain Che Guevara Soldiers Found? video report by National Geographic, August 21, 2009.
- ^ McLaren 2000, p. 7.
- ^ Che's Second Coming? by David Rieff, November 20, 2005, New York Times.
- ^ Moynihan 2006.
- ^ Sinclair 1968 / 2006, p. 80.
- ^ Sinclair 1968 / 2006, p. 127.
- ^ McLaren 2000, p. 3.
- ^ Sinclair 1968 / 2006, p. 67.
- ^ Ernesto Che Guevara R.I.P. by Murray Rothbard, Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought, Volume 3, Number 3 (Spring-Autumn 1967).
- ^ Just a Pretty Face? by Sean O'Hagan, The Observer, July 11, 2004.
- ^ People's Weekly 2004.
- ^ Argentina pays belated homage to "Che" Guevara by Helen Popper, Reuters, June 14, 2008.
- ^ Statue for Che's '80th birthday' by Daniel Schweimler, BBC News, June 15, 2008.
- ^ On a tourist trail in Bolivia's hills, Che's fame lives on By Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times, October 17, 2004.
- ^ Schipani 2007.
- ^ Behind Che Guevara’s mask, the cold executioner Times Online, September 16, 2007.
- ^ a b c Vargas Llosa 2005.
- ^ a b Kellner 1989, p. 106.
- ^ Casey 2009, pp. 325 & 235.
- ^ BBC News May 26, 2001.
- ^ see also Che Guevara (photo).
- ^ Lacey 2007b.
- ^ BBC News 2007.
- ^ O'Hagan 2004.
Notes and Further Reading[link]
- Almudevar, Lola (October 9, 2007). "Bolivia marks capture, execution of 'Che' Guevara 40 years ago". San Francisco Chronicle.
- Anderson, Jon Lee (1997). Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Grove Press. ISBN 0-8021-1600-0.
- Bamford, James (2002). Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (Reprint edition). New York: Anchor Books. ISBN 0-385-49908-6.
- BBC News (January 17, 2001). "Profile: Laurent Kabila". Accessed April 10, 2008.
- BBC News (May 26, 2001). Che Guevara photographer dies. Accessed January 4, 2006.
- BBC News (October 9, 2007). "Cuba pays tribute to Che Guevara". BBC News, International version.
- Beaubien, Jason (2009). Cuba Marks 50 Years Since 'Triumphant Revolution'. NPR: All Things Considered, Audio Report. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98937598.
- Ben Bella, Ahmed (October 1997). "Che as I knew him". Le Monde diplomatique. mondediplo.com. Accessed February 28, 2008.
- Bockman, USMC Major Larry James (April 1, 1984). The Spirit of Moncada: Fidel Castro's Rise to Power 1953–1959. United States: Marine Corps Command and Staff College.
- Casey, Michael (2009). Che's Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image. Vintage. ISBN 0-307-27930-8.
- Castañeda, Jorge G (1998). Che Guevara: Compañero. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-679-75940-9.
- Castro, Fidel (editors Bonachea, Rolando E. and Nelson P. Valdés; 1972). Revolutionary Struggle 1947–1958. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-02065-3.
- Crompton, Samuel (2009). Che Guevara: The Making of a Revolutionary. Gareth Stevens. ISBN 1-4339-0053-X.
- DePalma, Anthony (2006). The Man Who Invented Fidel: Castro, Cuba, and Herbert L. Matthews of the New York Times. New York: Public Affairs. ISBN 1-58648-332-3.
- Dorfman, Ariel (June 14, 1999). Time 100: Che Guevara. Time magazine.
- Dorschner, John and Roberto Fabricio (1980). The Winds of December: The Cuban Revolution of 1958. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegen. ISBN 0-698-10993-7.
- Dumur, Jean (interviewer) (1964). L'interview de Che Guevara (Video clip; 9:43; with English subtitles).
- Free Society Project Inc. / Cuba Archive (September 30, 2009). "Documented Victims of Che Guevara in Cuba: 1957 to 1959PDF (244 KB)". Summit, New Jersey: Free Society Project.
- Gálvez, William (1999). Che in Africa: Che Guevara's Congo Diary. Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1999. ISBN 1-876175-08-7.
- Gómez Treto, Raúl (Spring 1991). "Thirty Years of Cuban Revolutionary Penal Law". Latin American Perspectives 18(2), Cuban Views on the Revolution. 114–125.
- Gott, Richard (2004). Cuba: A New History. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-10411-1.
- Gott, Richard (August 11, 2005). "Bolivia on the Day of the Death of Che Guevara". Le Monde diplomatique. Accessed February 26, 2006.
- Grant, Will (October 8, 2007). "CIA man recounts Che Guevara's death". BBC News. Accessed February 29, 2008.
- Guevara, Ernesto "Che" (1995). Motorcycle Diaries. London: Verso Books.
- Guevara, Ernesto "Che" (editor Waters, Mary Alice) (1996). Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War 1956–1958. New York: Pathfinder. ISBN 0-87348-824-5.
- Guevara, Ernesto "Che" (1965). "Che Guevara's Farewell Letter".
- Guevara, Ernesto "Che" (1967a). "English Translation of Complete Text of his Message to the Tricontinental"
- Guevara, Ernesto "Che" (1967b). "Diario (Bolivia)". Written 1966–1967.
- Guevara, Ernesto "Che" (editors Bonachea, Rolando E. and Nelson P. Valdés; 1969). Che: Selected Works of Ernesto Guevara, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-52016-8
- Guevara, Ernesto (2009). Che: The Diaries of Ernesto Che Guevara. Ocean Press. ISBN 1-920888-93-4.
- Guevara, Ernesto "Che" (1972). Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria.
- Guevara, Ernesto "Che" (translated from the Spanish by Patrick Camiller; 2000). The African Dream. New York: Grove Publishers. ISBN 0-8021-3834-9.
- Guevara, Ernesto "Che" (2005). "Socialism and man in Cuba" (First published March 12, 1965 as "From Algiers, for Marcha. The Cuban Revolution Today"). Che Guevara Reader. (1997). Ocean Press. ISBN 1-875284-93-1
- Guevara, Ernesto; Deutschmann, David (1997). Che Guevara Reader: Writings by Ernesto Che Guevara on Guerrilla Strategy, Politics & Revolution. Ocean Press. ISBN 1-875284-93-1.
- Guevara Lynch, Ernesto (2000). Aquí va un soldado de América. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés Editores, S.A. ISBN 84-01-01327-5.
- Hall, Kevin (2004). "In Bolivia, Push for Che Tourism Follows Locals' Reverence". Common Dreams. commondreams.org. Accessed November 15, 2008.
- Haney, Rich (2005). Celia Sánchez: The Legend of Cuba's Revolutionary Heart. New York: Algora Pub. ISBN 0-87586-395-7.
- Hari, Johann (October 6, 2007). "Johann Hari: Should Che be an icon? No". The Independent.
- Hart, Joseph (2004). Che: The Life, Death, and Afterlife of a Revolutionary. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press. ISBN 1-56025-519-6.
- Ireland's Own (August 12, 2000). From Cuba to Congo, Dream to Disaster for Che Guevara. Accessed January 11, 2006.
- Kellner, Douglas (1989). Ernesto "Che" Guevara (World Leaders Past & Present). Chelsea House Publishers (Library Binding edition). p. 112. ISBN 1-55546-835-7.
- Kornbluh, Peter (1997). Electronic Briefing Book No. 5. National Security Archive. Accessed March 25, 2007.
- Lacey, Mark (October 26, 2007). "Lone Bidder Buys Strands of Che's Hair at U.S. Auction". New York Times.
- Lacey, Mark (October 9, 2007). "A Revolutionary Icon, and Now, a Bikini". The New York Times.
- Lavretsky, Iosif (1976). Ernesto Che Guevara. translated by A. B. Eklof. Moscow: Progress. p. 5. ASIN B000B9V7AW. OCLC 22746662.
- Luther, Eric (2001). Che Guevara (Critical Lives). Penguin Group (USA). p. 276. ISBN 0-02-864199-X.
- McLaren, Peter (2000). Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 0-8476-9533-6.
- Mittleman, James H (1981). Underdevelopment and the Transition to Socialism – Mozambique and Tanzania. New York: Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-500660-8
- Moynihan, Michael. "Neutering Sartre at Dagens Nyheter". Stockholm Spectator. Accessed February 26, 2006.
- Murray, Edmundo (November–December 2005). "Guevara, Ernesto [Che] (1928–1967)". Irish Migration Studies in Latin America (www.irlandeses.org).
- Che Guevara, by Frank Niess, Haus Publishers Ltd, 2007, ISBN 1-904341-99-3.
- O'Hagan, Sean (July 11, 2004). "Just a pretty face?". The Guardian. Accessed October 25, 2006.
- Ramírez, Dariel Alarcón (1997). Le Che en Bolivie. Paris: Éditions du Rocher. ISBN 2-268-02437-7.
- Ramonez, Ignacio (2007). Translated by Andrew Hurley. Fidel Castro: My Life London: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-102626-8
- Ratner, Michael (1997). Che Guevara and the FBI: The U.S. Political Police Dossier on the Latin American Revolutionary. Ocean Press. ISBN 1-875284-76-1.
- Rodriguez, Félix I. and John Weisman (1989). Shadow Warrior/the CIA Hero of a Hundred Unknown Battles. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-66721-1.
- Ryan, Henry Butterfield (1998). The Fall of Che Guevara: A Story of Soldiers, Spies, and Diplomats. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-511879-0.
- Sanati, Kimia (October 3, 2007). "Islamist, Socialist Revolutions Don't Mix". IPS News. (Reporting from Tehran, Iran). Accessed October 13, 2010.
- Sandison, David (1996). The Life & Times of Che Guevara. Paragon. ISBN 0-7525-1776-7.
- Schipani, Andres (September 23, 2007). "The Final Triumph of Saint Che". The Observer. (Reporting from La Higuera.)
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- Sinclair, Andrew (1968 / re-released in 2006). Viva Che!: The Strange Death and Life of Che Guevara. Sutton publishing. ISBN 0-7509-4310-6.
- Skidmore, Thomas E.; Peter H. Smith (2008). Modern Latin America. Oxford University Press. p. 436. ISBN 0-19-505533-0.
- Taibo II, Paco Ignacio (1999). Guevara, Also Known as Che. St Martin's Griffin. 2nd edition. p. 691. ISBN 0-312-20652-6.
- Time Magazine (October 12, 1970). "Che: A Myth Embalmed in a Matrix of Ignorance".
- Time Magazine cover story (August 8, 1960). "Castro's Brain".
- U.S. Army (April 28, 1967). Memorandum of Understanding Concerning the Activation, Organization and Training of the 2d Ranger Battalion – Bolivian Army. Accessed June 19, 2006.
- Vargas Llosa, Alvaro (July 11, 2005). "The Killing Machine: Che Guevara, from Communist Firebrand to Capitalist Brand". The Independent Institute. Accessed November 10, 2006.
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- Wright, Thomas C. (2000 Revised edition). Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution. Praeger. ISBN 0-275-96706-9.
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| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Guevara, Che |
| Alternative names | Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, el Che |
| Short description | Argentine-born Marxist, politician, and leader of Cuban and internationalist guerrillas |
| Date of birth | May 14, 1928 |
| Place of birth | Rosario, Argentina |
| Date of death | October 9, 1967 |
| Place of death | La Higuera, Bolivia |
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