Stroika

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It is some twenty-seven years since the Berlin Wall fell. The millennial generation may have little to no knowledge of the Soviet Union. For others, perhaps those that are older, the world was a very different place when the Soviet Union challenged the West, seemingly everywhere, and battle tanks massed along the Iron Curtain that divided Western from Eastern Europe. The Cold War saw the world on a nuclear knife-edge balanced between two competing ideologies. It is strange today to think of a divided Germany, the Berlin Wall itself, and that people died trying to cross it to the West.

Stroika, a fiction that foreshadows the real events of August 1991, is set at a time of massive change, when the old Soviet Union was making way for the new and the Soviet Army was increasingly bogged down in an unwinnable conflict in Afghanistan. After only one year in office, the ailing Konstantin Chernenko was succeeded in 1985 as general secretary by the Politburo’s youngest member. Mikhail Gorbachev had very different ideas to his predecessors. In 1986 he launched glasnost (openness) and in January of the following year his perestroika (restructuring) programme. Only by these means – open discussion and reform of the economic and political system – could, he argued, the communist system be saved. In the end, Gorbachev unwittingly set in motion a train of events that ultimately brought the Soviet Union to its knees and eventual collapse.

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