Rationale: For thousands of years, man had looked to the heavens and dreamed of going into space and walking on the distant moon. In 1969, the Saturn V rocket was part of the Apollo 11 mission carrying Neil Armstrong to became the very first to accomplish that dream. The famous quote by Neil Armstrong the moment he step foot on the surface of the moon was, “That’s one small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind”. Those words simply sparked my interest for outer space explorations and looking into
Konstantin Chernenko ruled over the Soviet Union from February 13th 1984, to March 10th 1985. Chernenko was considered to be the last Russian communist “hardliner” prior to the ascension to power of the reform minded Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931 in Russia. His parents were peasants. As a child, Gorbachev had a passion for learning. He graduated high school with a silver medal and went to Moscow University. He steadily rose in the ranks in the communist league
The overall collapse of the Communist regime came rather quickly, but there were underlying causes of the collapse that were apparent during the preceding decades. On the surface, the 1970s looked good for the Soviet Union. A lot of certain aspects were still going the Soviet Unions way. However, in 1975, the Soviet Union’s power peaked. In 1975, the Soviet Union’s power began to dwindle and there were six underlying causes of the collapse that can be dated back to that year. In this essay I will
Between 1985 and 1991, the youngest individual in decades to become head of the Soviet Communist Party dominated the history of the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev launched a program of political and economic reform that dramatically affected domestic life and the place of his country in world affairs. The Soviet dictatorship was transformed into a multiparty state in which the Communist Party had to struggle to maintain a role. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union moved toward a free-market economy. With
contrasted the policies of his predecessor Leonid Brezhnev. Although Brezhnev was not the immediate predecessor of Gorbachev, the Brezhnev Era was considered the Era preceding the Gorbachev Era because Brezhnev’s successors, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko only served from 1982, which was Brezhnev’s death to 1985 when Gorbachev assumed power. The three years between both Eras, Brezhnev’s policies were still being implemented and no significant reforms or changes
When Mikhail Gorbachev assumed control of the Soviet Union upon the death of Konstantin Chernenko in 1985, the nation was in a deep hole dug by Stalin’s past regime. Though Stalin had been dead for decades, his successors had done little to reverse the results of his tyrannical rule. The Soviet Union was left in a state which barely resembled communism at all, and could best be described as repressive totalitarian control. The whole of the Union was under a thick fog of censorship, oppression, and
Mikhail Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931, in Privolnoye, Russia. In 1961, he became a delegate to the Communist Party Congress. He was elected general secretary in 1985. He became the first president of the Soviet Union in 1990, and won the Nobel Prize for Peace that same year. He resigned in 1991, and has since founded the Gorbachev Foundation and remains active in social and political causes. EARLY LIFE Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931, to a Russian-Ukrainian family in
Soviet Union The Soviet Union was a global superpower, possessing the largest armed forces on the planet with military bases from Angola in Africa, to Vietnam in South-East Asia, to Cuba in the Americas. When Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded Konstantin Chernenko as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1985, nobody expected than in less than seven years the USSR would disintergrate into fifteen separate states. Gorbachev's attempt at democratising
Communism in the Soviet Union and Why it Failed Communism is defined as "a system of political and economic organization in which property is owned by the community and all citizens share in the enjoyment of the common wealth, more or less according to their need." In 1917 the rise of power in the Marxist-inspired Bolsheviks in Russia along with the consolidation of power by Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, the word communism came to mean a totalitarian system controlled by a single political party