Introduction

The USSR emerged from World War II as a superpower. Its victory over Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front gave it control over the whole of Eastern Europe and East-Central Europe. During the postwar period, the USSR steadily increased its political influence throughout the world and, by the mid-1950s, was beginning to develop relations with friendly regimes in the newly emerged countries in Africa and Asia and with Cuba, as well as many political parties and movements in the West. The technological lag behind the West, exacerbated by the rigid and obsolete system of ordaining plans and targets from the top and by the democratic centralism of the Soviet political regime, grew to awesome proportions during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev. Mikhail Gorbachev initiated economic reforms aimed at revitalizing industrial production by granting the enterprises economic and financial accountability.