Welcome to Russian history retold, episode 255, the transition from the Soviet Union to Russia.

Last time we concluded our series on the transition from the nation of Russia to the Soviet

Union. Today we reverse the order and talk about the transition from the USSR back to Russia

at the end of the 20th century. My primary sources of information for this episode are the

coming Soviet crash by Judy Shelton, a failed empire by Vladislav Zubok, memoirs by Mikhail Gorbachev,

and the history of modern Russia from Tsarism to the 21st century by Robert Service.

Then of course I will back it all up with my extensive library.

The communist ruled Russia and the rest of the countries under Soviet control from its formation

in 1922 until its collapse in 1991. The USSR had eight leaders. Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin,

Georgy Malenkov, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenkov,

and Mikhail Gorbachev. When the Soviet Union closed its doors on December 26, 1991, it was flat

broke. The promise of a communist socialist utopia failed and failed big time. Gorbachev and the USSR

had been begging for capital infusions from the West with mixed results. But as Judy Shelton puts

in her book The Coming Soviet Crash, published in 1889, quote, the Soviets are now working very hard

to obtain financial credits from the West. Why have they stepped up their borrowing from commercial

banks? What are they going after investment capital through joint ventures with private

Western companies? What prompted their decision to issue sovereign bonds to Western investors?

For the first time, since Zara's times, and why are Kremlin officials suggesting

that they would like to join the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank?

The short answer is the correct one. They need the money.

It must have been tough for the Kremlin leadership to admit that the Marxist Londonist system

was a failure. The thing is, they might have believed it in their heart and soul.

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