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Essay on The Fall of Communism

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The era that preceded the formation of the Soviet Union was earmarked with social unrest, famine, and failed governments. After many struggles, many smaller soviet republics joined to form a large conglomerate nation, known as the Soviet Union in 1922. Vladimir Lenin, leader at the time, replaced the failing capitalist government with a communist government. . At the end of WWII, most of Eastern and Central Europe’s countries were being occupied by the soviet army. They came to be controlled by the Soviet government and pulled back behind an “iron Curtain”. Winston Churchill’s famed Iron curtain remark refers to the countries that fell under the spell of the Soviet Union and shut out the western world ways of capitalism. The countries of …show more content…

On June 12, 1987, United States President Ronald Regan issued a speech while at the Berlin Wall to Mikhail Gorbachev, then the general Secretary of the Soviet Union- “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” (Wikipedia, 2011) Later, in the fall of 1989, civilians started chipping away at the wall. The growing desire for personal rights, democratic government, and a better way of life lead to the break up of the Eastern bloc. Citizens were tired of oppression, hunger, censorship, and in essence, life itself being a hardship. Protestors gathered and a peaceful revolution had started to tear down the wall. By the beginning of 1990, the wall was decimated with a few watch towers standing as memorials to the fallen that tried to escape to freedom in the West. In December of 1991, the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc officially broke apart, breaking up into fifteen sovereign countries. This was the end of the biggest communist country in the world, end to the Cold War, and containment policies. The former Soviet Union is now known as Russia. When governments are overthrown and dismantled, some of the effects are obviously immediate while others last for centuries. The same rule applied to the collapse of the soviet bloc in Eastern

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