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A New Union "Пролетарии всех стран, соединяйтесь!"
The Cold War, despite the ebb and flow of international influence and pride, had raged on without stop for over thirty years. Though the Soviet Union enjoyed a period of international strength through the ascension of power of Soviet-backed Communist governments, as the 1970s were brought to a close, the Soviet Union seemed to be slowly crumbling. A declining planned economy combined with an increasingly belligerent United States were shaking the foundation of the Soviet state to its core.
With the situation in Afghanistan deteriorating rapidly, and the Soviet economy increasingly weakened by economic stagnation and a strained foreign aid budget, it was certainly an inauspicious time for the effective ruler of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev to finally succumb to his numerous health problems. Overweight, old, addicted to sleeping pills, and suffering from Arteriosclerosis and leukemia, if anything it was a miracle that he had lasted so long. The most influential men in the Soviet leadership knew that the death of any Soviet leader inevitably resulted in power struggles between those in high leadership positions. So Brezhnev, despite presiding over a declining economy and nation in general, was kept in position by influential Soviet powerbrokers to avoid a bout of political instability at a time of national duress.
On the 13th of November 1979, Leonid Brezhnev's heart gave out after fourteen hours of intensive surgery in an attempt to keep him alive. All of those in high Soviet leadership knew Brezhnev's death was approaching, but the speed at which he succumbed to his illnesses caught most in the Soviet hierarchy by surprise. Subsequently, the aging second-in-command to Brezhnev, Mikhail Suslov, ascended with the approval of the nomenklatura, fearful of another political crisis, from his previous post as Second Secretary of the CPSU to the General Secretary of the Party itself. Subsequently, he took it upon himself to reveal the rest of the world that Leonid Brezhnev had died. Suslov's ascension to Party leadership marked a decisive move to cement himself as the new leader of the Soviet Union. Following this rapid power grab, he was formally elected to Brezhnev's post as the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, placing himself at the head of both the Party and Parliament, effective master of the Soviet State.
In a single day, the political makeup of the Soviet Union was irrevocably disrupted, a dying bureaucrat replaced by a man known as a hardliner even in Stalin's time. As the Cold War was reaching a peak with a growing arms race, and the unsolved Iran hostage crisis, the rapid ascension to power by a hardliner worried many Western heads of state. Ronald Reagan would make the ascension of Suslov a central issue in his campaign pledge to confront the U.S.S.R.
Following Suslov's ascension, he immediately put to work reshuffling the political makeup of the USSR's high leadership. Suslov's young protégé, Mikhail Gorbachev, was appointed a member of the Politburo, while several members deemed "revisionist" by Suslov's inner circle, such as Alexei Kosygin were quietly dismissed or demoted to mostly ceremonial positions. However, the majority of previous members of the Brezhnev Government remained in power, many of whom had been in government for decades. Despite the relative lack of unrest in the Soviet Union and the Soviet Government, reports of political purges were widely exaggerated in the West. Rumors even circulated that the Stalin-era practice of political executions were brought back for those Soviet citizens who dared to challenge the new dictator.
No matter how true the rumors that circulated in the west were, it furthered the atmosphere of confrontation that had grown through the Brezhnev Era and arms race, a far cry from the détente of the Khrushchev years. Perceiving the other as the aggressor, the United States and the Soviet Union began pouring even more funds into the growing expenses of the arms sector. Although both American and Soviet leaders proclaimed that the enemy was weakening and victory was inevitable, to many observers, it seemed like the United States and the Soviet Union were on the course of destruction.