Victim and executioner are equally ignoble; the lesson of the camps is brotherhood in abjection.
—DAVID ROUSSET, THE DAYS OF OUR DEATH
In any event, we must remember that it’s not the blinded wrongdoers who are primarily responsible for the triumph of evil in the world, but the spiritually sighted servants of the good.
—FYODOR STEPUN, FOREGONE AND GONE FOREVER
1953: Josef Stalin dies on March 5. On September 14, Nikita Khrushchev becomes First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).
FEBRUARY 1956: Khrushchev delivers a speech to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality and the excesses of his policies. Over the next decades, this speech circulates covertly through samizdat and is discussed at closed Party meetings, shocking many. The speech marks the beginning of de-Stalinization and the Khrushchev Thaw, a time of relative liberalization.
NOVEMBER 1956: The Soviet army violently puts down an uprising in Hungary.
NOVEMBER 1957: The Italian publisher Feltrinelli publishes Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. Under pressure from the Soviet authorities, Pasternak is forced to turn down the Nobel Prize in Literature the following year.
NOVEMBER 1962: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is published in Novy Mir, an influential Russian literary magazine. It is the first time that the Soviet labor camps had been written about openly. Nevertheless, a crackdown on dissident groups marks the end of the Thaw.
1964: Khrushchev is removed from power and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev.
1968: The Soviet military invades Czechoslovakia in an attempt to counteract the series of liberalizing reforms known as the Prague Spring reforms, sparking off waves of protests and nonviolent resistance.
1973–1974: Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago is published in the West in Russian and other languages. In February 1974 Solzhenitsyn is expelled from the Soviet Union.
1975: Thirty-five states, including the USSR and the United States, sign the Helsinki Accords, an attempt to improve relations between the Communist Bloc and the West. The document cites respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms such as freedom of speech.
1979: Soviet troops invade Afghanistan.
NOVEMBER 1982: Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1964 to 1982, dies of a heart attack. Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB, succeeds him.
FEBRUARY 1984: Andropov dies of renal failure. Konstantin Chernenko replaces him.
MARCH 1985: Chernenko dies of emphysema. Mikhail Gorbachev becomes General Secretary of the Communist Party and takes steps toward reform, marking the beginning of perestroika. Novy Mir commences serialization of Doctor
Zhivago three years later.Important reforms undertaken by Gorbachev between 1985 and 1991 under the umbrella of perestroika and glasnost: restitution of land to peasants after sixty years of collectivized agriculture; progressive restoration of political pluralism and freedom of speech, liberation of political prisoners, publication of banned literature; withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan;
creation of a new legislative assembly, the Congress of People’s Deputies. The Congress elects Gorbachev to the presidency of the Soviet Union for five years and institutes constitutional reforms in March 1990. Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) agreements are signed with the United States in 1991.
FEBRUARY 1986: Boris Yeltsin becomes a member of the Politburo a few months after being named First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee (effectively making him the mayor of Moscow). He is removed from the Politburo in 1988.
APRIL 26, 1986: Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explodes, leading to serious contamination of Soviet territory.
MARCH 1989: Yeltsin is elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies.
NOVEMBER 1989: East Berlin permits passage to West Berlin, marking the effective end of the Cold War and the beginning of the reunification of Germany.
DECEMBER 1989: Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush announce the end of the Cold War in Malta.
JUNE 1990: The Congress of People’s Deputies of the Republic adopts the Declaration of State Sovereignty of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), pitting the Soviet Union against the Russian Federation and other constituent republics and signaling the beginning of constitutional reform in Russia.
MAY 1991: Boris Yeltsin is elected president of the RSFSR.
AUGUST 1991: A group of eight high-ranking officials led by Gorbachev’s vice president, Gennady Yanayev, form the General Committee on the State Emergency, the GKChP, and stage an attempted coup of the government. It becomes known as “the putsch.” The GKChP issues an emergency decree suspending all political activity, banning most newspapers, and putting Gorbachev, who is on holiday in Foros, Crimea, under house arrest.Thousands of protesters come out to stand against the putsch in front of the White House, the Russian Federation’s parliament building and office of Boris Yeltsin, building barricades to protect their positions. Yeltsin famously addresses the crowd from atop a tank. The Army forces dispatched by the GKChP ultimately refuse to storm the barricades and side with the protesters. After three days, the putsch collapses. Gorbachev returns from Foros, and members of the GKChP are arrested. On August 24, Gorbachev dissolves the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and resigns as its general secretary.
NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 1991: In the Ukrainian popular referendum on December 1, 1991, 90 percent of voters opt for independence from the Soviet Union.On December 8, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus secretly meet in western Belarus and sign the Belavezha Accords, declaring the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place. On the night of December 25, 1991, the Soviet flag is lowered for the last time and the Russian tricolor is raised in its place, symbolically marking the end of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev resigns. In a period of great tumult, Yeltsin takes on both the prime ministerial and presidential roles.
The newly independent states of Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan are created and immediately succumb to violent ethnic conflicts. Armenia and Azerbaijan fight over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave; Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Adjara fight to secede from Georgia. Dzhokhar Dudayev takes power in Chechnya and proclaims independence.
JANUARY 1992: The liberalization of prices leads to massive, destabilizing inflation, from 200 percent initially to a high of 2600 percent.
AUTUMN 1993: In response to President Yeltsin’s attempt to dissolve the parliament, the parliament impeaches Yeltsin and proclaims vice president Alexander Rustkoy president. In events reminiscent of the 1991 putsch, demonstrators congregate at the White House and attempt to storm the Ostankino television tower. On Yeltsin’s orders, the army storms the White House and arrests members of the parliament who oppose Yeltsin.The ten-day standoff between protesters supporting the parliament and army-backed Yeltsin supporters leads to the deadliest street fighting in Moscow since 1917. Estimates place the death toll as high as two thousand casualties.
1994–1995: First Chechen War.
1998: Economic difficulties, which dramatically lowered the quality of life of the population throughout the 1990s, lead to a financial crisis and a brutal devaluation of the ruble.
1999–2000: Second Chechen War. On December 31, 1999, Yeltsin resigns and Vladimir Putin becomes president of the Russian Federation. In 2000, Putin wins his first presidential election against Communist opponent Gennady Zyuganov, firmly establishing his power.
OCTOBER 2003: Oil magnate and prominent liberal Mikhail Khodorkovsky is arrested on charges of tax evasion and fraud, an early casualty of Putin’s campaign to drive Yeltsin-era oligarchs out of politics. The imprisonment of Khodorovsky and seizure of his assets marks the beginning of Vladimir Putin’s efforts to transfer control of all major Russian industries to his political party, United Russia. This economic takeover, necessitating a great deal of corrupt maneuvering, also leads to the necessity of silencing criticism and dissent in the press. By 2010, most formerly privately owned media enterprises are under government control, including nearly all major television networks. Independent media outlets are almost exclusively relegated to the Internet.
2008: War breaks out between Georgia and South Ossetia. Dmitri Medvedev of United Russia is elected president of the Russian Federation and names Putin prime minister.
DECEMBER 2010: Alexander Lukashenko is reelected for a fourth term as president of Belarus. This leads to protests, which are brutally repressed.
DECEMBER 2011: Prime Minister Putin declares that he will once again run for president in 2012, with Dmitri Medvedev as prime minister; effectively Putin and Medvedev will switch places. This sparks the first major antigovernment protests since the early 1990s. While these are tacitly tolerated, individual activists begin to be arrested and penalized in larger numbers than previously, and the parliament begins to seriously curtail the rights of activist groups and nongovernmental organizations that work in opposition to government policies.
FEBRUARY 2012: Putin is reelected president of Russia with 63 percent of the vote and names Medvedev prime minister. Oppositionists again take to the streets of several major cities to protest; the police arrest hundreds. Putin’s government harshly punishes a handful of protesters, intensifying its efforts to repress political dissent in the Russian Federation.
FEBRUARY–MAY 2014: The Maidan protests in Kiev, Ukraine, lead to armed conflict between Ukrainians supporting a pro–European Union political orientation and those who wish to remain under the Russian sphere of influence. After the flight from Ukraine of pro-Moscow president Viktor Yanukovych, Russian forces take over Crimea, which then votes to join Russia in a referendum. At the same time, Russia denies that its forces have entered Ukraine and are providing financial and military support to pro-Russian groups, effectively fueling a civil war in Ukraine. These events spark the biggest East-West showdown since the Cold War, with the United States and its European allies imposing harsh sanctions on Russia.
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