A brilliantly sharp and entertaining short history of the Soviet Union. The past is prologue, wrote Shakespeare. With Russia's invasion of Ukraine, anxious observers look towards history to try and explain, if not the future, at least what may have led to current events. Australian historian and Russia expert Sheila Fitzpatrick's The Shortest History of the Soviet Union seems to have come at the perfect moment. The story begins with the 1917 Russian Revolution, which saw the overthrow of the monarchy and installation of a socialist government, based on Marxist principles. Vladimir Lenin's far-left group, the Bolsheviks, more or less muddled through into power. Under enormous pressure, Lenin succumbed to poor health and died relatively young, in his mid-fifties. He was immediately deified, his body embalmed and placed in Red Square mausoleum. His wife and friends were horrified. The public clamoured for it. Joseph Stalin was an unlikely successor. He was largely seen as a mediocre bureaucrat. Vastly underestimated, he turned out to be a consummate politician. His political skills involved the use of terror on his own population. The so-called Great Purge saw the execution of 700,000 people between 1934 – 1939. Over a million were also imprisoned. The strange and self-defeating thing about the Great Purge was that Stalin executed, for no seemingly logical reason, his military and industrial leadership, all in the lead up to a war that he knew was coming with Germany. A conflict that he greatly feared, no less. Two leaders followed Stalin's death in short succession (Georgy Malenkov and Nikolai Bulganin) until Nikita Khrushchev's reign from 1953 – 1961. Khrushchev could be a hothead and he seriously miscalculated when he stationed nuclear missiles in Cuba, unwittingly launching the Cuban Missile Crisis. Russia had to backtrack and remove the warheads. The Kremlin stripped him of power in 1964 and installed Leonid Brezhnev. The final leader of the Soviet Union was Mikhail Gorbachev. His main policy of glasnost (“openneness”) would see the Soviet state suddenly crumble. This wasn't Gorbachev's intention. He simply wanted reasonable reform. Bizarrely, it seemed seventy years of Soviet government had been built on nothing more than sand. It only took someone to sneeze and the whole edifice came down. The unstable Boris Yeltsin succeeded, but as poor health plagued him he installed Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent raised to take pride in notions of Russian empire. The crumbling of Soviet satellite states, moving culturally and politically to a Western European model, only caused anxiety. Sheila Fitzpatrick has written a pithy and witty short history of the Soviet union. She employs a dry humour when explaining the political and ideological contortions of Soviet philosophy. This was a topsy-turvy world where black was white and yes meant no; a nightmare Alice in Wonderland like environment where the leader would irrationally demand “off with your head”; a strange place built on ideology with little basis in reality. The history of the Soviet Union reads like politics for politics sake. The Shortest History of the Soviet Union, by Sheila Fitzpatrick. Published by Black Inc. $24.99 Review by Chris Saliba Comments are closed.
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