Before the Age of the Donald by Dave Jaffe - Part Eight

    Before The Age of the Donald by Dave Jaffe continued


           World War Two devastated the U.S.S.R. . In 1941 Nazi Germany invaded the U.S.S.R. killing over 20 million Soviet people. The U.S.S.R. survived and played an enormous part in defeating Germany. For a time in World War Two the U.S.S.R. was allied with the United States, Great Britain, China and Canada. In 1944 it pushed the Germans back and its troops entered Eastern Europe.
     There's no doubt that the U.S.S.R. and China took the most casualties in the second world war. "You gave us time," Stalin told Britain's wartime leader Winston Churchill at the Yalta Conference in 1944. "You gave us money," Stalin said pointing to the U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. "And," he said pointing to himself and his advisors, "we gave blood."
      Stalin kept power in the U.S.S.R. until his death in 1953. The U.S.S.R. at the time of his death was a ruthless top down communist dictatorship that had killed millions of its own people. Yet at the same time it was now also a world power second only to the United States. The two countries were locked in a world wide struggle for power. This was the Cold War. Never before and never since was the Soviet Union so powerful and so feared.
      The downside of being one of Stalin's assistants was well explained by his successor Nikita Khruschev. "You never knew when you went to see Stalin," Khruschev said in effect," whether you'd emerge alive." When Khruschev took power as one of Stalin's successors, he and his associates killed Lavrenti Beria, who had been one of Stalin's most murderous henchmen.
      Later Khruschev ousted all of his rivals to emerge as the Soviet union's top leader. Yet Khruschev didn't kill his defeated rivals. In 1956 he addressed a secret communist meeting and denounced Stalin for his crimes. He closed down the terrible gulag prison camps and freed their 3 million prisoners.
   Yet there were limits to change in the Soviet Union. The Hungarian Revolution in 1956 was drowned in blood as Soviet troops and their Warsaw Pact allies rolled into Budapest and other Hungarian cities, and crushed the uprising. The U.S. tagged Khruschev with the title, "The Butcher of Budapest."
    In 1964 Khruschev himself was removed from power but he wasn't killed. Leonid Brezhnev emerged as the U.S.S.R."s new leader of the Soviet Union. He tightened things up but there was no repeat of Stalin's terror.
   Brezhnev cracked down on the 1968 revolt in Czechoslavakia and the emerging dissident movement in the Soviet Union. Yet life in the Soviet Union improved for most people as it did in most of the Soviet-dominated countries in Eastern Europe. Then there was the United States that was the U.S.S.R.'s formidable rival. Despite its war in Vietnam its economy boomed. Thanks to U.S. aid the countries of western Europe and Japan had become prosperous lands.
     By this time in the late 1960's the U.S.S.R. faced another formidable foe namely the Mao-ruled Communist country of China. In the late 1960's China and the U.S.S.R. were mortal enemies and nearly went into a full scale war with each other. In Yugoslavia to the U.S.S.R's west , Josip Broz or "Tito" as he was called remained in power. He was a communist who had stood up to Hitler, Stalin and Khruschev. Yet he remained in power. So life in the world of the richer countries kept improving.
       But then came Afghanistan.