With the pace of the 1950’s Cold War increasing, alongside the the space race and the Berlin Wall, the decision to join forces with Cuba and build missile sites there brings the world to the brink of disaster. While the Cuban Missile Crisis is averted and a peace settlement reached, not long after JFK is assassinated in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald, a US Marine veteran who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959.
The Soviet Union was officially formed in 1922, a country, a political experiment, an ideal, a great scar across history. Officially known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR was a one-party state, governed, controlled, and tormented by a single party rule. That of the Communist Party. Complicated, contradictory figureheads would come and go, men who held this impossible country it seemed by sheer will. Stalin the despot-hero whose cruelty knew few bounds who united a nation to defeat Hitler. Khrushchev the crafty libertarian, who preached reform yet allowed an arms race to escalate. Brezhnev, that unreadable member to the old guard, sending history backwards. And of course Gorbachev, who brought vast change, modernisation, and détente, yet saw the Soviet Union collapse under his rule – the untenable nation. The 20th century was shaped by its convulsions, its purges, its wars, and its leaders.
