Research Report,what was going on in the world at the time of my birth Essay

Research Report,what was going on in the world at the time of my birth - Essay Example However this did not pen out as hoped and eventually the leadership took complete control of the country and transformed it into a totalitarian state (Kenez 67). There were several issues that had not been foreseen during the creation of the unified state. Part of the group, that was not Russian, resisted assimilation into what would make them a Russian state, and these non-Russian groups made up over fifty percent of the population. The Soviet Union was also in an arms race against the United States of America which saw the economic plan that was drafted to drive the state forward fail. The ideology that this state was built on, that is communism, which was also a big failure as totalitarian rule dominated. Mikhail Gorbachev came into power with the aim of transforming the state, as political and economic issues plagued the soviet union and put it in stagnation mode (Daily Mail Reporter). Gorbachev drafted a reform policy that allowed freedom of speech and he also started to rebuild the economy of the country; sadly, the goals that he had set for the economy did not come to fruition as expected. Giving the people a voice worked against him, they used their new found freedom to criticize Gorbachev’s failure to improve their economy. Their anger was fueled even more by the bottled up emotions of their political past (Gottfried 14). The fall The crumble of the Soviet Union started slowly, first in the areas that were occupied by non-Russians. In 1987, there was a demand for autonomy from Estonia, which was later joined by Lithuania and Latvia. Gorbachev decided not to take any harsh steps against the people who had participated in the protest. The fact that allowing the masses their freedom to do as they will would mean that the Soviet Union had less chances of survival was not lost to him (Sommers 2013). In a short span of time, protests gathered momentum in the Soviet Union. In the southern part of the Soviet Union, the Armenians demanded that they be al lowed to leave the union and join their country, the republic of Armenia. Gorbachev’s government though, refused to give the Armenians the permission to leave. The situation turned into a dispute which became volatile and eventually into a fully fledged war. The result of the protests and wars was a weak soviet union but a group of communists decided to fight and save the Soviet Union from disintegrating. They organized a coup d’etat, this they did by kidnapping their ruler, Gorbachev, and then later announced that he was very ill and could not govern the country anymore (Darraj 85). This statement caused uproar in most of the cities of the Soviet Union and in a bid to restore some peace; the military was called to calm the people. The military also decided to go against the orders and rebelled, they said that they could not fire at their people. After a gruesome three days, the organizers of the coup decided to surrender after coming to conclusion that they could not win the battle without the help of the military. They did not have enough power against the masses in the absence of the military and therefore decided to surrender, and my grandfather, whom I interviewed, informed me of the uncertainty that was felt during this time. He also stated that people all over the world