The Fall of the Soviet Union and the Rise of Terrorism
The victory of communism in 1945 assured the Soviet Union's domination of Eastern Europe during the Cold War and for more than 40 years, but the international Communist movement was anything but united. Tito's Yugoslavia refused to be part of the Communist bloc in 1948. Instead, it embarked on a more flexible Communist experiment, with firmer links with the West and less rigid economic controls.In 1958 Soviet Union relations with Communist China deteriorated sharply at the moment when Mao launched the Great Leap Forward to modernize the Chinese economy. By 1960 there was an open rupture between the two powers. Albania and a number of Communist movements in the developing world followed Mao's lead, and the Communist world divided between allegiance to either Moscow or Beijing.
In Western Europe, Communist parties became increasingly critical of the crude authoritarianism of the Soviet Union model. By the 1980s, Communist nations were forced to adapt to the realities of the more prosperous West. In 1985 a new Soviet Union leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, embarked on a new policy of openness and restructuring (glasnost and perestroika) to try to introduce a reformed communism with greater economic freedoms. Reform in the Soviet Union encouraged other Soviet bloc populations to question the Communist system.
When in 1989 Gorbachev prompted the other Communist regimes to accept change, there was widespread upheaval. A non-Communist regime emerged in Poland in August 1989, and over the following four months every Soviet bloc regime collapsed. That fall the Berlin Wall was breached, and in 1990 the divided halves of Germany were united again in a single state. In 1990 the Soviet Union itself began to crumble as the separate republics demanded independence, and in 1991 the Union was scrapped. The Communist parties were at least nominally dissolved and parliamentary systems were adopted throughout the former Soviet bloc, bringing to an end a long era of European dictatorships. In Russia, Boris Yeltsin was elected president on June 12, 1991.
The problems faced by the world in the 1990s and the early 21st century were problems not inherited directly from World War II. Global warming and environmental crises, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the turmoil in the Middle East, and the emergence of China as an economic superpower were the products of the postwar transformation of the industrial and political landscape. The "war on terror," provoked by the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001, is a war quite different from World War II.
This new war is set in an unfamiliar international setting in which, after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, there is only one major power, the United States. American defense spending is currently equal to the spending of the rest of the world combined, but the targets of American intervention have been failing states (Afghanistan and Iraq). The contest takes place on a global scale, and it combines the very latest electronic technology against primitive bomb attacks and ambushes. Yet this enormous technological and military gap has not produced the assurance of victory as it did in 1945.
In the next section, read about the ongoing impact of World War II, which can be felt even today in countries around the world.
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