RUS Lecture 7With Europe more or less pacified, the Far East once more (as in the first decade of the century) became the major theater of action. On 25 June 1950 the Communist North Korean regime unleashed a [Blitzkrieg] on South Korea. Sensitive to criticism that his administration had somehow "lost China," President Truman took strong action to back up his Truman Doctrine that Communism's spread had to be checked wherever and whenever. Various United Nations members entered the Korean War on behalf of South Korea and its American supporters. The Communist Chinese entered on the side of North Korea, and the Soviet Union sent considerable military aid. It raged bloodily until 1953, resulting in a stalemate which continues to this day.
The Korean War also introduced the Proxy Wars, which took place in peripheral regions (the future "[Third World]") between movements and/or governments sympathetic to either the United States or the Soviet Union. Although each superpowers wanted to check or at least harass its opposite number, each also (thank God) recognized the dangers of direct confrontation. Although the North Korean Army was trained and equipped by the Soviets, direct Soviet participation was limited to a handful of advisers and a small number of highly skilled fighter pilot aces.
Further discussion of Soviet-American relations during the Cold War will be taken up later in the semester. The Soviet union had plenty on its plate just keeping its network of satellite states functioning. The death of Stalin in 1953 and ultimate ascent of Nikita Khrushchev led to a much-welcomed slackening of tensions throughout the "Soviet bloc." However, revolutions of various severity took place in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Poland (1980). Each of these revolts was suppressed, although the amount of bloodshed required seemed to decline with time. Also, two major states stood boldly outside of the Soviet bloc: [Yugoslavia] and the People's Republic of China. In 1955, Khruschev went to Belgrade and admitted there were "many paths to socialism," thereby trying to bring Tito back somewhat into the fold. On the other hand, the Soviets came to look at the Chinese path to socialism as downright wrong. Part of the problem had to do with doctrinal matters. [Leninism] had fudged the role of the small Russian urban proletariat, creating a top-down revolution on the backs of the Russian peasants. [Mao Zedong]'s approach placed explicit emphasis on the peasantry as vanguard of the revolution. An even bigger part was due to the long and adversarial relationship between Russia and China dating back before the 1689 Treaty Of Nerchinsk. Each side had nearly endless grounds for mistrusting the other, and not even Marx could bring them together. The cost of a military establishment capable of maintaining these commitments was enormous. Stalin had pulled it off - not always successfully even in his case - through strength of will and the widespread employment of terror. The somewhat kinder, gentler Soviet Union of Khrushchev and his successors made concessions to the people which, while necessary, ultimately detracted from the research and development, industrial capacity, and manpower needed to maintain the Soviet Union's imperial aims. The United States did not help matters much with initiatives such as the Marshall Plan and their enthusiastic participation in the arms race. Soviet resources were further tested by the proxy war in Vietnam, which lasted basically from the end of the Second World War until 1975, by lavish support of third-world countries such as Cuba, and by the USSR's disastrous Christmas Eve 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. Here is the Iron Curtain falling down. Even though the Soviet Union withdrew its troops from Afghanistan in 1989, and the comparatively youthful and energetic Mikhail Gorbachev was now at the helm, it had been borrowing Peter to pay Paul for too long. Its costly military adventures had yielded nothing, or in cases like Afghanistan, worse than nothing. The system of haves and have-nots which marked the Russian Empire now marked the Soviet Union, with only the names of the respective classes changed. As the standard of living declined all around the Soviet bloc, it became harder and harder for Bubbakov and Jetherina to reconcile the Communist party's pie-in-the-sky promises of a worker's paradise with the sad reality of their everyday lives. On the periphery of the Soviet world, matters got worse. It was all well and good for Russians to live with the decline of the Soviet Union - they were still the top dogs in their own empire, after all. But the subject peoples both within (Ukrainians, Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians) and without (Poles, Germans, Czechs) had no emotional investment in a transmogrified Russian Empire, and were just waiting for an opportunity to throw off the yoke. 
Here is the Soviet Union crumbling into gavno - exercising their Lenin-granted rights to secede. It is undeniably tempting to look at this map and infer a massive triumph of freedom, democracy, and prosperity was in progress, but such was not necessarily the case. The Soviet government had very carefully created a political, military, and even social infrastructure designed to bind the republics tightly to Russia proper. Huge communities of Russians who had been settled in the republics to "Russify" them now found themselves bereft of a homeland. Industrial concerns which had once dealt with suppliers and/or markets in other republics were now dealing with other countries. Russian forces, many of which contained soldiers, sailors, and airmen from many different republics, now found themselves stationed on sometimes hostile territory. Worst, there was no settled pattern or set of guidelines for building democracy upon the corpse of Communism. When the Italians seceded from Rome in 91 BC, they created a parallel Rome differing only in its requirements for full citizenship. When the Southern states seceded from the Union in 1861, they created a Confederacy based upon the government they had just left. The disintegration of the Soviet Union and its system of satellites had nothing to offer but confusion. In depressingly many instances, the old Communist overlords reinvented themselves as apparently devoted democrats, as other members of the Communist upper class looted the state's holdings in the name of free enterprise. 
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