The soviet union dealt well with threats to communist control of eastern europe in the period 1956 to 1968.' How far do you agree with this Statement? Explain your answer?
Answers
Answer:
By the late 1950s, the Stalinist economic system began to show signs of stagnation in both the USSR and Eastern Europe, though the process was more critical in the latter. This meant that the communist governments imposed by the Soviet Union could not deliver on their promise of a better life, which was their only claim to legitimacy.
Polish economists were probably the first to state the need for economic reform and work out a reform model, but the party leader, Gomulka, refused to consider it. There were some limited Soviet experiments in economic reform in the mid-1960s, but reform implementation went much further in Hungary than anywhere else in the bloc, beginning in 1968.
Althugh developments in the Soviet Union always affected its satellites in Eastern Europe, some of the latter were ahead of Moscow. This is particularly true of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland in 1980-81 and then 1989, when Hungary was a close second. In particular, the Prague Spring of 1968, which the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact armies crushed in late August that year, had a significant impact on Soviet dissent of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It pointed the way for Mikhail S. Gorbachev's reform program twenty years later.
We will look first at key developments in Eastern European states, then Khrushchev's USSR and the early years of Brezhnev, followed by the Prague Spring of 1968 in Czechoslovakia and dissent in the Soviet Union