History Of The Soviet Union (1953-1982)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. The period after Joseph Stalin and the death and funeral of Leonid Brezhnev was dominated by Cold War politics, as the Soviet Union and the United States struggled both directly and indirectly for the planetary domination of their respective systems and the defense of their established spheres of influence. Although by the late fifties the party disowned the legacy of Stalin, the political culture Stalin established (concentration of power in the hands of the General Secretary, anti-Trotskyism, post-New Economic Policy (NEP) planned economy under Five-Year Plans and the denial of the secret protocols of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) essentially remained in place unchanged until Mikhail Gorbachev.