For thirty years, Georgy Malenkov led the Soviet Union. No other Soviet leader would reign as long as he had, though Stalin came very close. He was succeeded by Alexander Shelepin, a hardliner who came closer than anyone else to starting World War III. He led the Soviet Union for just over a year. His successor, Yegor Ligachev, stood in stark contrast with Shelepin. He was a reformist who opposed Shelepin’s brinkmanship. Leaders from Washington to Nanking breathed a sigh of relief. Ligachev was eager to have at least a working relationship with Chiang Ching-kuo and Robert F. Kennedy (and later Paul Laxalt). The Soviet Union, and the entire Eastern Bloc, would go through many changes during his time as leader.
Ligachev enacted some political reforms. He admitted that his predecessors had made mistakes. This was not only true of Alexander Shelepin, but also Georgy Malenkov and Josef Stalin. Under Ligachev, there would be more freedom to criticize Soviet policy (though this new freedom was limited). After Shelepin’s administration, it was generally agreed that there should be more checks and balances to make sure that power wasn’t so heavily concentrated in one man. There would also be market reforms to help revitalize the economy. By the mid 1980s, the majority of those at the higher levels of the Soviet government agreed that some sorts of reforms were necessary. The Soviet economy was in a terrible condition. Economic growth had nearly ground to a halt by 1984 and the wars in Iran and Afghanistan were a drain on the treasury.
Ligachev was eager to avoid any sort of confrontation with either the West or China. He hoped to renormalize relations with China, and he would get along well with Chiang Ching-kuo on a personal level. He even tried to renormalize relations with Israel, backtracking on the USSR’s decades long anti-Israel stance. He continued Soviet involvement in the Iranian Civil War, however. Abandoning the Communist regime in Tehran was a non-starter and would lead to Ligachev’s removal from office if tried. Afghanistan was a different story. The Communist leadership there did not have good relations with Moscow and the country was seen as much less important than Iran. In 1986, the US, Saudi Arabia, China, and Pakistan all agreed to end their support of Afghan rebels in exchange for a withdrawal of Soviet military forces from the country.
The increased openness in Moscow trickled down to its satellite states, at least for some of them. East Germany and Albania would continue to be run by hardline Stalinists. The citizens of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, on the other hand, would find themselves having more political and economic freedoms. The governments of both countries would pursue closer relations with the west. Thousands in other Eastern Bloc countries would go on vacation to Hungary and Czechoslovakia for the purpose of crossing the border into Austria or West Germany. In Romania, people protested the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu in 1986, and were subsequently gunned down by the army. Protests erupted and were put down in Poland as well. Seeing the situation in Eastern Europe, by 1987 Yegor Ligachev decided that the reforms had gone too far, and did not pursue reform any further. He was still hated by hardliners within his own government.
