Beissinger, Mark R. (2002). Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hahn, Gordon M. (2002). Russia’s Revolution from Above, 1985-2000: Reform, Transition, and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime. New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction Publishers. Solchanyk, Roman. (2001). Ukraine and Russia: The Post Soviet Transition. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Little-field.
The United Nations, successor to the League of Nations, was conceived and created by the allies during World War II. In 1944 the USSR and the United States, with other major nations, met at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., to plan a postwar organization that would provide a forum for the settlement of disputes. Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill solidified plans for the United Nations at Yalta (1945), compromising on substantive issues regarding voting procedures, territorial trusteeships, and the admission of various countries. In April 1945 the allies met in San Francisco and wrote the charter of the new organization, and the United Nations officially came into existence on October 24, 1945, following the charter’s ratification by the major powers. All member nations received one vote in the General Assembly, but the five major powers enjoyed the right of veto in the Security Council.
Disputes in the United Nations between the Soviet Union and the United States paralleled the growing bitterness of the Cold War. In 1946 the Soviet Union and the United States clashed over the issues of Soviet troops in Iran and the control of atomic weapons. In both cases American victories led to increasing Soviet disaffection from the international body. The United States scored another success in 1950, when a boycott of the Security Council by Soviet ambassador Yakov Malik over the seating of China allowed the United States to win United Nations support for military assistance for South Korea.
The United Nations remained largely impotent in the face of a determined superpower. When Soviet troops moved to crush the Hungarian uprising in 1956, appeals for assistance from the
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freedom fighters to the United Nations were ignored. Nevertheless the USSR and the United States agreed that same year to allow United Nations monitors into the Middle East to help end the Suez Crisis. In the fall of 1960 Khrushchev attended the opening session of the General Assembly and delivered a speech attacking the Western powers. During a reply to the Soviet leader, members of his delegation hit their fists on the desk in protest; Khrushchev proceeded to bang the table with his shoe, creating one of the more memorable images of the Cold War. In October 1962, when the USSR denied that it had placed offensive missiles in Cuba, the United States presented photographic evidence of the missile sites at the United Nations and convinced world opinion of its position.
The Soviet view of the United Nations slowly changed over the next two decades, as the emergence of new nations in Africa and Asia shifted the balance of power in the General Assembly away from the United States. After seeing the United Nations as an unfriendly body for its first twenty years of existence, and thereby exercising its right to veto many United Nations resolutions, the Soviet Union began to perceive the General Assembly as a more sympathetic body. Both the USSR and the United States continued to use the United Nations as a forum for influencing other nations. Fierce arguments continued over the Middle East, surrogate wars in Africa, Korean Airline 007, and other issues.
During the Gorbachev era the USSR sought better relations with the West and became more cooperative at the United Nations. The first major test of this new policy occurred when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, and Gorbachev brought Soviet policy into line with that of the Western powers. Since that time, Russia has attempted to maintain cordial relations with the United Nations. See also: COLD WAR; LEAGUE OF NATIONS; UNITED STATES, RELATIONS WITH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
United States. (1945). United States Statutes at Large (79th Congress, 1st Session, 1945), 59(2):1033-1064, 1125-1156. United States. Department of State. (1944). Department of State Bulletin, vol. 11. Washington, DC: Office of Public Communication, Bureau of Public Affairs. United States. Department of State. (1945). Conferences at Malta and Yalta, 1945 (Foreign Relations of the
United States diplomatic papers 6), 969-984. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. United States. Department of State. (1945). Department of State Bulletin, vol. 13. Washington, DC: Office of Public Communication, Bureau of Public Affairs.
Carr, E. H., and Davies, R. W. (1971). Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926-1929. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan. Deutscher, Isaac. (1963). The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921-1929. London: Oxford University Press.
Formed in April 1926, the United Opposition was an alliance between Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev. These former foes headed a loose association of several thousand anti-Stalinists, including remnants of other opposition groups, as well as Vladimir Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krup-skaya. The United Opposition’s main goal was to offset support for Josef Stalin among rank-and-file party members.
In July 1926, United Oppositionists openly clashed with Stalin at a Central Committee plenum. Chief among their many complaints was the failure of state industry to keep pace with economic development, thus perpetuating a shortage of goods. They advocated a program of intensified industrial production and the collectivization of agriculture, the same program that Stalin would adopt two years later. The Central Committee responded by charging Zinoviev with violating the Party’s ban on factions and removed him from the Politburo.
Thus blocked in the Central Committee, the United Opposition took its case directly to the factories by staging public demonstrations in late September. Within a month, under fire from Stalin’s supporters, Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev capitulated and publicly recanted. Trotsky was removed from the Politburo, and Kamenev lost his standing as a candidate member. Further machinations and conflicts resulted in the expulsion of the trio from the Central Committee in October 1927. The following month Trotsky and Zinoviev were purged from the party altogether, followed by Kamenev’s removal from the party in December 1927. The defeat of the United Opposition set the stage for Stalin to move against what he labeled the Right Opposition, thereby consolidating his power. See also: KAMENEV, LEV BORISOVICH; LEFT OPPOSITION; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH; TROTSKY, LEON DAVIDOVICH; ZINOVIEV, GRIGORY YERSEYEVICH
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
The history of the interactions between the two great powers of the last half of the twentieth century ranged from a close and mutually beneficial understanding to intense hostility, yet they never fought directly against each other. For long periods, in fact, their experience was one of similar goals, of respect, and even of adulation, tempered by periods of fear-the American fear of a threat to its free and democratic way of life from an “evil empire,” whether Russian or Communist, and the Russian fear of encirclement by a superior power taking advantage of its transitional weaknesses and vulnerability. The relations of Russia-as an empire, a Soviet socialist state, or as a fledgling democracy- with the United States have had a profound impact upon the history of both countries and on the whole world. Already in the seventeenth century, Russian expansion overland through Siberia had reached the Pacific coast and contact with Asian powers such as China. Peter the Great, endowed with great energy and curiosity, commissioned Vitus Bering to explore the waters and determine whether Asia (Russia’s Siberia) was connected by land to North America. This drew political and economic attention to the region,
