Gorbachev To Communism

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Russia was a communist country since roughly 1912, which was created due to harsh inequalities of the 19th century life by the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Democratic Labour Party. Communism developed from the ideas of Karl Marx, whose ideas and ideology became popular amongst the workers of Russia. The reason for this was that during this time many difficulties were experienced through the tsarist regime. As a result Vladimir llych Lenin became the first leader of the Soviet Union, who led the November 1917 revolution that replaced the Provisional Government with the communist Bolshevik Party. The Soviet Union, as Russia became to be known, was developed into one of the strongest nations in the world and entered into a protracted power …show more content…
His arrival meant the beginning of a new and final stage of the Soviet Union (Kort, 2006). When Gorbachev took power he did not wait long to initiate changes. He undertook the unlikely cause of reforming the USSR with a passion of new thinking in foreign policy, which was designed to end the Cold War with America and to release the resources Russia had left for an economic modernisation. First signs of Russia in transition from communism to capitalism were when Gorbachev wanted to make some serious changes within the socialist system. One of them was when a new term, “socialist entrepreneurship”, appeared and for the Kremlin it meant an ideologically correct blend of socialism with elements of the free market. Other signs were the attempts to revive the old system by introducing two massive reforms which were called perestroika (reconstruction) and glasnost (openness), in order to reconstruct political and economical …show more content…
The disagreement between Yeltsin and the parliament ended with violent conflict known as the black October of 1993. The leaders of the parliament, who had been elected in the Soviet times, wanted to have a constitution that would guarantee a strong parliamentary republic (Khasbulatov, 2008). Yeltsin on the other hand expected to built a strong presidential republic with weak legislature and he wanted to develop a new economy based on the major principles of economic liberalism and private property. In other words Boris Yeltsin, who was a liberal president, wanted to get rid of communism and bring capitalism into Russia. But the leaders of the Russian parliament did not support his rapid plunge into capitalism. This resulted in a deadly violence in Moscow but at the end in December 1993 Yeltsin and his supporters won, which allowed him to create a strong presidency. On the same day after the victory people voted for the delegates to a new Russian parliament, a two-chamber institution including the Duma and the Federation Council, which will be discussed in the next paragraph in greater detail since it is now a very similar political system as from the capitalism in the West. There was also a struggle of power between Yeltsin and the Russian Communist Party, which was formed to oppose Gorbachev in