Page 132 - Olympism in Socialism

casualties accounted for the highest proportion
of the conflict in the cost of acquiring the upper
hand over Axis forces at intense battles such
as Stalingrad. Soviet forces eventually captured
Berlin and won World War II in Europe on 9 May
1945. The territory overtaken by the Red Army
became satellite states of the Eastern Bloc.
The Cold War emerged in 1947 as a result of a
post-war Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe,
where the Eastern Bloc confronted the Western
Bloc that united in the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization in 1949.
Following Stalin's death in 1953, a period
known as de-Stalinization and the Khrushchev
Thaw occurred under the leadership of Nikita
Khrushchev. The country developed rapidly, as
millions of peasants were moved into
industrialized cities. The USSR took an early lead
in the Space Race with the first ever satellite and
the first human spaceflight. In the 1970s, there
was a brief détente of relations with the United
States, but tensions resumed when the Soviet
Union deployed troops in Afghanistan in 1979.
The war drained economic resources and was
matched by an escalation of American military
aid to Mujahideen fighters.
In the mid-1980s, the last Soviet
leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to further
reform and liberalize the economy through his
policies of glasnost and perestroika. The goal was
to preserve the Communist Party while
reversing economic stagnation. The Cold War
ended during his tenure and in 1989, Warsaw
Pact countries in Eastern Europe overthrew their
respective Marxist-Leninist regimes.
In particular, the indecisive action of the
Eastern European rulers after the Pan-European
Picnic caused the fall of the Iron Curtain, which

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