Soviet involvement in regime change

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Soviet involvement in regime change turned personal when Josip Broz Tito wrote to Joseph Stalin: 'Stop sending people to kill me.' Yugoslav security forces had already captured five Soviet agents. One carried a bomb; another carried a rifle. Tito added that if the killings continued, he would send a single assassin to Moscow and would not need to send a second.

  At its largest scale, Soviet foreign intervention encompassed overt military invasions, covert coups, proxy wars on three continents, and the installation of Soviet-aligned governments. One study counted 36 Soviet and Russian interventions in foreign elections alone, between 1946 and 2000.

  The Soviet Union ratified the UN Charter in 1945, binding itself to Article 2(4). That article prohibits the threat or use of force in international relations. That legal commitment ran alongside decades of precisely the conduct it banned. How a state navigates that contradiction, and what happens to the countries caught inside it, is what this documentary examines.

• 2. Building the Bloc

  ›

  In Hungary's 1945 parliamentary election, the Independent Smallholders Party won 57 percent of the vote. The Hungarian Communist Party took just 17 percent. Soviet occupation forces refused to let the winning party govern.

  Across Eastern Europe between 1944 and 1949, the pattern repeated with only local variations. Communists entered coalition governments, took control of interior ministries and police forces, then eliminated their partners. In Hungary, the State Protection Authority, known by its Hungarian initials as AVO, was established to enforce the new order. By February 1947 the security police had begun targeting members of the Independent Smallholders Party and the National Peasants Party. The Social Democrats were forced to merge with the communists in June 1948, forming the Hungarian Working People's Party. By 1949, Hungarian voters were presented with only a single list of candidates.

  Soviet representatives pressured Romania's King Michael I in March 1945, demanding the appointment of Petru Groza as prime minister. The communist-dominated alliance then won the 1946 general election, an outcome the opposition attributed to widespread fraud. The king was forced to abdicate, the monarchy was abolished, and the Parliament declared the Romanian People's Republic. The Soviet Army remained in Romania until 1958.

  Soviet forces invaded Bulgaria in September 1944, and the communist Fatherland Front seized power almost simultaneously. The new government's People's Court executed between 1,000 and 3,000 people, including former officials, war criminals, and monarchists. Tsar Simeon II was sent into exile. Following the 1946 Bulgarian republic referendum, Georgi Dimitrov led the country as the People's Republic of Bulgaria.

  The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia had won 38 percent of the vote in the 1946 parliamentary election through legitimate means. When the party staged a coup in early 1948, Defence Minister Ludvik Svoboda confined the army to its barracks. President Edvard Benes, facing the prospect of Soviet military intervention and civil war, surrendered and resigned.

  After the Soviet invasion of September 1939, roughly 13.5 million Polish citizens in the occupied territories were made Soviet subjects. Show elections run by the NKVD were used to legitimize the annexation. Hundreds of thousands were deported to Siberia in four major waves between 1939 and 1941. The postwar border settlement at the Yalta Conference of February 1945 allowed the Soviet Union to absorb most of the territory it had earlier claimed. That territory had been designated under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

  The last military remnant of the Soviet presence in the Baltic states ended in October 1999. That month, the final Russian soldier left Baltic soil when the Skrunda-1 radar station in Latvia was decommissioned.

• 3. Wars by Proxy

  ›

  In the Spanish Civil War, the Republican government paid for Soviet weapons with 510 tonnes of Bank of Spain gold transferred directly to Moscow. Stalin maintained an official policy of non-intervention while circumventing the League of Nations embargo covertly. Soviet arms shipments used false flags to evade detection by the Nationalist side.

  Many rifles and field guns provided to the Republicans were old and obsolete, some dating back to the 1860s. The T-26 and BT-5 tanks were modern and effective in combat. Soviet aircraft, however, proved inferior to the German-supplied planes by the end of the war. The USSR sent between 2,000 and 3,000 military advisers to Spain, with never more than 500 Soviet troops present at any single time.

  Stalin's ambitions in Spain went beyond supporting the Republican side. His NKVD operated actively inside Republican territory, targeting anti-Stalinist factions. Catalan Trotskyist Andreu Nin, socialist journalist Mark Rein, and left-wing academic Jose Robles were assassinated in Soviet operations. Key operatives included Vittorio Vidali, Iosif Grigulevich, Mikhail Koltsov, and Aleksandr Mikhailovich Orlov. Orlov later defected to the United States.

  In the Congo, Soviet involvement began after Belgium, the United States, and other countries overthrew Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1960. Supporters of Lumumba formed the Free Republic of Congo in the eastern city of Stanleyville, backed by Moscow. The Soviet Union transported weapons by air to Juba in allied Sudan, from where Sudanese forces carried them into the Congo. Southern Sudanese Anyanya insurgents ambushed those supply convoys and took the weapons for themselves. The CIA allied with the Anyanya. The Congolese government expelled Soviet embassy personnel in July 1964.

  In Rhodesia, two Marxist guerrilla organizations simultaneously fought the white minority government of Ian Smith. The Soviet Union supported ZAPU, the Zimbabwe African People's Union, which organized primarily in urban areas. About 1,400 Soviet instructors, along with 700 East Germans and 500 Cubans, were deployed in support of ZAPU's armed wing, ZIPRA. The other main organization, ZANU, received support from China rather than the Soviet Union. The two groups sometimes fought each other in addition to the Rhodesian government.

  During the Vietnam War, some 3,300 Soviet military experts were deployed to Southeast Asia. Among them were spetsnaz special forces conducting reconnaissance missions. Soviet personnel helped test sophisticated radar and missile systems directly against American aircraft. Soviets recovered at least two significant pieces of American intelligence equipment: a cryptographic code machine and an F-111A escape capsule. That capsule is now on display in a Moscow museum.

  In the 1980 elections in Zimbabwe, ZAPU failed to win a majority against ZANU. The two organizations merged into ZANU-PF in 1987.

• 4. Crackdowns Within

  ›

  Under orders from Soviet defence minister Georgy Zhukov, Soviet Army tanks entered Budapest in October 1956. The trigger was a protest movement demanding free elections, independent courts, and an inquiry into abuses under the Stalinist leader Matyas Rakosi. Demonstrators attacked the Hungarian Parliament Building and the government collapsed.

  The new government disbanded the State Protection Authority, declared its intention to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact, and pledged to restore free elections. Those three commitments sealed its fate. The Soviet Politburo ordered a large military force back into Budapest and across the country. Around 200,000 Hungarians fled the country. Some 26,000 were put on trial by the Soviet-installed Janos Kadar government; of those, 13,000 were imprisoned. Imre Nagy, along with Pal Maleter and Miklos Gimes, was executed after secret trials in June 1958.

  By January 1957 the Kadar government had suppressed all public opposition. The violence alienated many Western Marxists. At the same time, it strengthened communist control across all European communist states, cultivating the perception that communism was both irreversible and monolithic.

  In April 1968, Czechoslovak leader Alexander Dubcek launched what he called an Action Program of liberalizations. The program promised greater freedom of press and speech, consumer-focused economic reforms, and limits on secret police power. The possibility of a multiparty government was on the table. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and others in the Kremlin grew alarmed.

  On the 3rd of August 1968, six Warsaw Pact nations signed the Bratislava Declaration. The document reaffirmed unshakable fidelity to Marxism-Leninism and declared an implacable struggle against bourgeois ideology. On the night of the 20th-the 21st of August, armies from four Warsaw Pact countries invaded Czechoslovakia. An estimated 70,000 Czechs fled immediately; the total eventually reached 300,000.

  In April 1969, Dubcek was removed as first secretary and replaced by Gustav Husak. Husak reversed every reform Dubcek had introduced. He purged liberal members from the Communist Party and reinstated police powers. Political commentary in mainstream media was banned for anyone without what the government called 'full political trust.' The Brezhnev Doctrine, asserting a Soviet right to intervene when any Eastern Bloc state moved toward capitalism, had been applied in its fullest form.

  Mao Zedong's People's Republic of China condemned both the Soviet Union and the United States as imperialists following the invasion. That condemnation from the world's most populous communist nation reflected how severely Moscow's international standing had been damaged.

• 5. The Winter Miscalculation

  ›

  On the 30th of November 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland. The League of Nations judged the attack illegal and expelled the Soviet Union from the organization. Finland, against expectations, did not fall quickly.

  Finland repelled Soviet attacks for more than two months. Temperatures dropped as low as minus 43 degrees Celsius. Soviet forces suffered severe casualties and strategic setbacks. The League's condemnation left Moscow internationally isolated at a moment of acute military embarrassment.

  Before the invasion, the Soviet Union had established a puppet government to administer the country it expected to conquer: the Finnish Democratic Republic. When the conquest failed to materialize, the Soviets quietly dissolved that government in late January 1940. Negotiations for a genuine peace began.

  The Moscow Peace Treaty was signed on the 13th of March 1940. Finland ceded 9 percent of its territory, representing 13 percent of its national economy. Soviet territorial gains exceeded even their original pre-war demands. Finland retained its sovereignty.

  Adolf Hitler drew a direct conclusion from the Red Army's poor performance. He became convinced that an attack on the Soviet Union would succeed. Germany launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, fifteen months after the Moscow Peace Treaty was signed. The Continuation War had begun.

• 6. The Asian Arc

  ›

  Roman Ungern von Sternberg had conquered Mongolia completely by February 1921 before the Bolsheviks moved against him. He had abandoned the losing White Army and led his own forces into the country in 1920, restoring Bogd Khan to power. The Mongolian People's Party then requested Soviet intervention.

  The Bolsheviks invaded from multiple directions in August 1921. Sternberg fought back, marching his army into the USSR itself before being captured and killed on the 15th of September 1921. The Soviets left Bogd Khan on the throne as a constitutional monarch while occupying the country. When Bogd Khan died in 1924, the Mongolian Revolutionary government declared that no reincarnations would be recognized. The People's Republic of Mongolia was proclaimed and would remain in power until 1992.

  The territory of Tannu Uriankhai, known as Tuva, had become a Soviet protectorate after the fall of the Qing dynasty. In January 1929, five graduates of the Communist University of the Toilers of the East launched a coup with Soviet support. They deposed Prime Minister Donduk Kuular. Kuular was a former Lama who had made Buddhism the state religion and resisted Soviet collectivization policies. He was imprisoned and later executed. His successor, Salchak Toka, implemented collectivization immediately. A purge followed against aristocrats, Buddhists, intellectuals, and other dissidents, along with the destruction of many monasteries.

  In August 1945, Soviet forces invaded Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state in northeast China. When they withdrew in March 1946, they left most of Manchuria to the Chinese Communists. They also handed the Communist Party most of the weapons captured from the Japanese. Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China in October 1949. The last Nationalist forces were driven off the mainland by May 1950.

  In Korea, the Soviet Union blocked United Nations elections in the north of the peninsula in 1948. Kim Il Sung's North Korean People's Army invaded South Korea in June 1950. The Korean Armistice Agreement was signed in July 1953, shortly after the death of Joseph Stalin. Stalin had been insisting that the North Koreans continue fighting.

  On the 25th of December 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia to remove the Khmer Rouge government of Pol Pot. The Soviet Union backed the invasion with $1.4 billion in military aid, which peaked at $1.7 billion per year between 1981 and 1985. Moscow also provided Vietnam with $5.4 billion to help fund its third five-year economic plan. The Soviets covered 90 percent of Vietnam's demand for raw materials and supplied 70 percent of its grain imports. At the United Nations, Soviet delegates vetoed multiple resolutions attempting to penalize Vietnam with sanctions.

  By 1986, Moscow announced reductions in aid to friendly nations. Soviet leaders had privately been dissatisfied with how Hanoi managed the stalemate in Cambodia. For Vietnam, the cuts meant losing 20 percent of its economic aid and one-third of its military aid.

  In December 1979, Operation Storm-333 overthrew Afghan leader Hafizullah Amin and installed Babrak Karmal in his place. The ensuing Soviet-Afghan War lasted until Soviet forces withdrew in 1989. Between 6.5 and 11.5 percent of Afghanistan's 1979 population of 13.5 million people is estimated to have died from the conflict. The government installed in Kabul survived until 1992. That year, the People's Republic of Mongolia also ended the Soviet-aligned political order first imposed on it in 1924.