Monday, February 11, 2008

Project Theme #1 Rough Draft #4

Body Paragraph #2
Another Axis power form World War Two that disregarded the concepts of personal freedoms and human dignity was Josef Stalin's Communist Soviet Union, before known as Russia. The inhumane ways of the Soviet Union continued throughout the post WWII era until the Cold War was ended in 1992. When Josef Stalin came into power in Soviet Russia, his policies obliterated whatever little successes the New Economic Policy had made, along with the nations agricultural sector, and took complete control of the peoples viewpoint of economic life. The ideas of Communism completely throw away the idea of all three concepts of personal freedoms,in which case, no one could talk negatively about the government, individual responsibility, which, in the Soviet Union, the government provided everything, and human dignity, in which people could get shot just for attempting to leave the country. During Stalin's rule over the Soviet Union, there was no capitalist free market, but "central planning," which was a market controlled by the government. Oleg Gordievsky, a British spy passing off as a KGB agent, told the British intelligence service, "the Soviet Union had been spending at least 50 percent [of the economy] on the military." When this information reached U.S. President Ronald Reagan, he know that America could resist against the Soviet Union by creating an arms race, with project such as an eight-hundred ship navy and the Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as the "Star Wars." His strategy was to out spend the Soviet Union until their economy went bankrupt, which it did. Another contribution to the Soviet Unions collapse was the last communist ruler of the nation Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev's policies began to bring a sense of democracy into the Soviet Union. His most important policies were Glasnost, which allowed freedom of the press and open criticism of the Soviet Government, and Perestroika, a plan for the reconstruction of the Soviet Union. And to help recover the collapsed economy, he called for less government control. The Cold War had finally ended when President George Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin declared the end of the Cold War, and the Soviet Union became the Commonwealth of Independent States In February of 1992.

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