Lesson video

Welcome back, I'm Mr. Hutchinson, this is history and we've been learning all about 20th century conflict.

We learned about the buildup to the First World War the treaty of Versailles, the rise of antisemitism and Hitler in the 1930s, the Second World War, the Cold War.

And we're getting to the end of the Cold War today or maybe some historians argue we're still in a Cold War.

There are still these icy tensions between Russia and the USA.

And that's one of the reasons I think it's really important to study history and to understand what's happened in the past, because it helps you to make sense of the world right now.

So as you're watching the news you're now going to be better informed, because you've worked hard during these lessons.

You're going to know the histories of these nations and the conflicts and the agreements between the different countries.

And so, I think it's really important that we learn all of this.

And I'm really proud of you for sticking with it.

Even though the lessons are hard.

Sometimes they're long, you're getting right through to the end of them and you should feel really proud of that.

So don't give up.

This is our last lesson on 20th century conflict.

We're going to write an essay next week just like you did earlier in the unit.

You did a great, great job, some fantastic pieces of work, sharing some of my secondary teacher friends who are saying, "This is better than GCSE stuff that we get through." And so, you're going to do an even better job 'cause you know even more now next week.

But first of all, we have to find out how the Cold War ended.

And so, our lesson today is going to be answering this question.

Why did the USSR and communism in Eastern Europe collapse? Why did it end? This happened 1989, 1991, the late '80s.

So quite recently, and there's a good chance your parents or your grandparents will remember this.

And so, please do speak to them about this.

Say, "I've been learning about the Cold War.

I've been learning about the end of the Cold War.

Do you remember this happening in the news?" It's one of the beauties of learning recent history.

There are people alive today to talk about it.

So in today's lesson, we're going to learn about first of all, a war, the Soviet-Afghanistan War, then we'll learn about somebody called Gorbachev, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the reforms that he brought in.

Then I'm going to ask you to write a sort of persuasive speech to bring everything together.

So let's dive straight in.

The Soviet-Afghanistan War.

Before we do that, let's just recap.

We know that there have already been hot flashes or proxy wars.

That's North Korea and South Korea.

We learnt about the Korean War, a proxy war.

Proxy means something that's representing something else that's standing for something else.

And so, this war between North Korea and South Korea was a proxy war.

It was between people in North Korea and South Korea but really it was communism versus capitalism.

We also learnt about the war in Vietnam, a similar thing.

So, we already know about some of those proxy wars that have taken place.

Those weren't the only proxy wars, okay? The Cold War affected nations across the world.

The inference of the United States and the USSR, using those nations and the people within them to fight their ideology, took place over decades.

In some places it's still going on.

Those wars, these proxy wars are still going on.

Some of them ended just recently.

And many of those places were really, they were just developing, they perhaps just gained their independence following the war, the Second World War from some sort of empire.

So the British Empire, Britain colonised lots of countries using weapons they through force took over other countries.

And after the Second World War those countries were granted independence.

And because of that, they needed support, financial support and the USSR, the USA used that opportunity to exploit that time and give lots of weapons and money to get them to fight their wars.

I can't list all of the countries, because there were dozens and dozens and dozens that were affected, but Somalia, Ethiopia, China.

What's now the Democratic Republic of the Congo was called just the Republic of the Congo then.

Angola, another Western African country, South Africa, Greece, Namibia, Cuba, Laos, Nicaragua, Greece, sorry, that's an error, Greece, again.

Malaysia, Indochina or the Vietnamese Wars, another name for that, is the Indochinese Wars, and Afghanistan and dozens, dozens more.

So many nations affected by this ideological difference.

And although there is no direct fighting on the USSR soil or USA soil, there's lots of fighting's in those countries which were devastated by the effects of the war.

So why? Why was that the case? Why didn't the USA and the USSR just fight each other directly? Why did they use this system of proxy wars and devastate these other nations instead? See if you can answer this question, why do the USSR and the USA support proxy wars instead of direct fighting? And I've got a few sentence starters to help you here.

So you might like to say, "The USA and the USSR supported proxy wars by.

." How did they do that? "They did this because.

." Why did they do that? "Furthermore, these two superpowers.

." What else? What were the main reasons? You should be able to think of at least two.

So, pause the video and write your best paragraph for that now.

Super, I've had a go at this.

I don't want you having all of the fun.

I love answering these questions as well to try and get it straight in my mind.

So this is the answer that I put.

The USA and the USSR supported proxy wars by giving weapons and money to groups that would fight for their ideology.

I might put groups in other countries.

They did this because they wanted their system of government and economic system in as many countries as possible.

Furthermore, these two superpowers were unable to directly attach one another, because they both had nuclear capability.

They both had those nuclear bombs.

Remember, the mutually assured destruction.

Mutually, it will happen to both of them.

Assured, it would definitely happen.

Destruction, they will be completely destroyed.

MAD, mutually, assured, destruction, MAD.

They can't directly attack each other because of their nuclear bombs.

And we saw that they stockpiled tens of thousands of them.

So they used other nations to fight instead.

So we're going to focus on just one of these today.

We could focus on any of them.

We're going to focus on this one, Afghanistan which is particularly important.

So there's a map here of the Middle East and Europe.

And see if you can spot Afghanistan.

Can you pick it out? How quickly can you find it? Well done if you've spotted it there, here's Afghanistan in the Middle East, United Kingdom where we are here, all of Europe over here and Afghanistan, Middle Eastern country.

And you'll notice Russia is just here.

This huge, huge, huge, huge country here and Kazakhstan an independent state now.

But Kazakhstan was part of the Soviet Union.

It was a Soviet state, so the USSR in the 1950s and through to the late 1980s was part of the same group there, the Soviet Union and they had a direct, so they had a direct link through here to Afghanistan.

We'll just need to meet a few key leaders during this period of the Soviet-Afghanistan War, happened in 1979.

And so, the president of the United States at this point was called Ronald Reagan.

There was a new leader in 1979 of the Soviet Union called Leonid Brezhnev.

So, he was general secretary.

But we know that general secretary means leader.

It's their equivalent of prime minister or president although that there were no elections, chosen by his party to lead the nation.

And then, another leader that we need to find out about from this Soviet-Afghanistan War, is somebody called Osama Bin Laden.

And he was a leader in a group called the Mujahideen.

And that was an Islamic group who were designated as a rebel group in Afghanistan, who fought against the Soviets.

We'll find out a bit more about exactly what was going on there.

But these were some leaders in the different nations.

Osama Bin Laden, Brezhnev and Ronald Reagan.

United States, the USSR, or the Soviet Union, and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.

So, I'm just going to jumble them up to make sure that you can remember these different people.

So just see now, if you can use your finger on the screen can you match up Brezhnev, his picture with his title there? Can you match up the president of United States, Ronald Reagan with his picture and Osama Bin Laden, one of the leaders of the Mujahideen with his picture? Did you get those right? There are leaders that we need to sort of have in our head as we sort of pick our way through this war.

So let's go back to our map.

We've got Russia and Kazakhstan which was a Soviet state, Afghanistan just down here.

So let's zoom into Afghanistan.

See the shape of this country here.

And I'm going to show you a diagram of the map of Afghanistan there.

As you can see, same nation.

And the Soviet Union in 1979, chose to invade.

They wanted Afghanistan to be one of their Soviet States.

They'd already had some sort of leaders.

Afghanistan had been a monarchy, and had a king and the Soviet Union wanted to put a communist party in place in Afghanistan, for it to be another member of their Soviet Union.

They've already got lots of the Eastern European states that some of these starting states down here, and they wanted Afghanistan to be one as well.

And so, they were sending in through this air bridge, they were sending planes in and troops in and tanks in and these red lines showed the Soviet invasion.

The Soviet invasions here, and they've taken this dark grey area.

And they're trying to take over all of Afghanistan, but there's a problem, well, there were a few problems, but there's a problem with this Soviet strategy.

This is a picture of Afghanistan.

Beautiful, beautiful country with the most amazing people.

I'm lucky enough to actually teach some people from Afghani heritage and their families talked to me about how beautiful this country is all the time and how wonderful the people there are.

And you'll see that it's a very mountainous country.

Let's look at the geography.

It's very mountainous.

And there are lots and lots of mountains.

It's also a very hot country.

It's a very hot country and it's a very mountainous country.

And the people of Afghanistan had their own way of life.

They had their own culture, their own values their own way of doing things.

And that wasn't the same as communism.

And it wasn't the same as the Soviet values, their ideology.

So when the Soviet Union sent in tanks and soldiers to try to say, "You need to be a communist country too," the people of Afghanistan said, "No." And they knew their territory better than the Soviet Union.

And they were able to use something called guerrilla warfare.

Guerrilla warfare, so not gorilla as in a monkey, it's a different spelling.

Guerrilla warfare is using tactics where you use the land to your advantage.

And so, the rebel groups, rebel is perhaps not the right word, but it's the word that tends to be used, because it was the Afghanis, it was their country, but they were rebelling against the Soviet invasion.

The rebel groups would be able to fight with the Soviet troops.

If they started to lose because the Soviets had better weaponry, they could retreat into the mountains, which they knew really well, the Soviet tanks couldn't follow, and there were complex cave networks, and they could go into those cave networks or into the areas that they know really well and just sort of hide out and then only emerge when the threat's gone.

And so, it was very, very difficult for the Soviets to actually gain any traction and win this war in Afghanistan, as they wanted to.

It wasn't the only reason.

So, I'm going to put a few reasons that the Soviet Union, they started this invasion in 1979, it lasted for 10 years this war and the Soviets weren't able to defeat the Afghani people who were saying, "No, we don't want communism thank you very much." So, if some of these reasons are the rebel groups within Afghanistan were supported by the USA, both in terms of weapons and money.

So, the Mujahideen led in part, by Osama Bin Laden who would later go on to actually attack the USA and mastermind the Twin Tower events, the 911 Twin Tower attacks in New York city.

Osama Bin Laden back then was fighting the Soviet Union.

And so, the USA gave the Mujahideen and other rebel groups, lots of money and lots of weapons.

So they were very well-equipped to attack the Soviets.

Afghanistan was extremely hot, it was mountainous, the Soviet equipment, their tanks, their weapons, their clothing, their soldiers, they weren't prepared for that sort of climate and that sort of geography.

It was different to what they were used to in Russia.

And they weren't really prepared to fight in those conditions.

Those mountains allowed that guerrilla warfare of not direct, prolonged battles, but a bit of fighting, a few attacks and then retreating back.

The war was really, really expensive.

Any war's really expensive.

This war's really, really expensive, especially 'cause it went on for so long.

It needed essential equipment, it was quite far away.

And the Soviet Union at this point was not doing well economically.

It was really struggling to move forward economically.

And lastly, that communist ideology clashed with the culture and values of the people of Afghanistan.

They were really hostile towards it.

They didn't welcome the Soviet army coming in, the Red Army, the USSR army coming in and saying, "Okay, I guess you can be in charge." Really clashed with their culture and ideals.

So they rejected it and were very hostile towards it.

So have a look at those different reasons that the Soviet Union was unable to defeat the rebels in inverted commas there in Afghanistan.

What do you think is probably the most important reason? And what do you think is the least important reason in resulting in the Soviet Union not defeating the rebels in Afghanistan? See if you can put them in order.

Write them out in order.

Pause the video and write them out in order.

The most important at the top and the least important at the bottom.

Pause the video and do that now.

Super, there's no right or wrong answer to that.

I'd love to hear your justification's why you think one was more important than the other.

But make sure that you do have those written out, 'cause it'll help you to think about those reasons in your head.

And there's similar reasons for lots of wars in proxy wars within the Cold War in terms of whether they were successful or not.

So in 1985, halfway through this war, Brezhnev is no longer in charge, Ronald Reagan is still in charge of the United States but a new Russian leader called Mikhail Gorbachev, and he's still alive today, becomes in charge of the Soviet Union.

The prime minister of Great Britain at this point was called Margaret Thatcher.

So we're in the mid-'80s now, 1985, and Mikhail Gorbachev becomes in charge of the Soviet Union.

And he puts two things in place.

He decides that he wants to reform the Soviet Union.

So Gorbachev's in charge now of the USSR.

And he says, "We need to change.

This isn't working." We had a revolution in 1917, that was so, so, so long ago.

And we promise people that under communism, life will be better, and life has not got better for lots and lots of people.

Lots of people have died and lots of people had hard lives.

Our standard of living is still not as good as those people in the West, became difficult to sell the Soviet ideal to the people, because they'd seen over decades things not really improving.

And the USSR didn't have the economy to keep up with the Western states.

They weren't able to build weapons or provide money for their country in the same way that the United States and Western countries were.

And so Gorbachev said, "Things have to change." He didn't necessarily wanted to reject communism.

He said he still wants to be a communist, he was still a communist, but it needed to be different.

And so, some of his reforms, glasnost, so two Russian terms, glasnost I remember this like glass, this is like transparency.

He's changing the culture so that it's more transparent so that people within Russia can see what things are like elsewhere in the world, and they're more honest and open with their people.

And then perestroika, political reform.

So changing the way that politics works and the economy works to try and make life better for people within Russia, within communism.

So here are a few things that he did.

He stopped building so many nuclear weapons.

He said, "We've already got loads.

We can never keep up with America.

They've got far more money than us.

And they're really, really expensive." He did allow some private trading between individuals.

So you know that within communism the idea was that everything that was earned went to the state and then distribute amongst the state.

People can't privately trade with each other and one person become richer than somebody else.

Gorbachev says, "Well, maybe we can allow a little bit of that.

Maybe we can allow a little bit more private trade.

We're still mainly a communist economy but a little bit of private trade." Anybody who is corrupt within the political system, no, there's no democracy, so people can't vote out leaders.

In democratic nations, if you think that somebody is not being honest then at the next election, they can be voted out.

That can't happen in the USSR.

And so, some people would become very corrupt and it became impossible for the people of the USSR to vote them out.

So Gorbachev kicked them out.

He said, "If you're corrupt, then you're not going to be in the government anymore." He began to end the war in Afghanistan.

He said, "This is too expensive.

We're losing it.

We shouldn't be there in the first place." So he ended the war in Afghanistan.

He allowed greater freedom of information.

So he allowed the BBC to be broadcast in the USSR for the first time, so that people could understand what the rest of the world was like.

And crucially, he stopped the Red Army from supporting communist leaders in Eastern Europe.

So there were elections in Eastern Europe, but the communist party stood and the Red Army would go along to support the communist party which meant that in reality, it wasn't a fair election, because the people would feel so scared that they had to vote communism.

And the political leaders that would challenge the communist party could be attacked by the Red Army, by the soldiers.

And so, they didn't feel safe to challenge the communists either.

And Gorbachev stopped that.

He said, "We're going to stop interfering.

And we're going to sending the Red Army.

And we're going to let the Eastern European countries choose the party that they actually want to lead them." Now, what this led to was those Eastern European countries gradually choosing to reject communism and choose different leaders and different parties.

And this began the unravelling of the Soviet Union.

So the Soviet Union began to fall apart, because a lot of the Soviet states now that the Red Army wasn't enforcing the elections anymore, the Eastern European countries chose different parties.

And so, the USSR really started to become restricted.

This led to Gorbachev winning the Nobel Peace Prize oh look, that's exciting, it's span, because it's such an important prize.

So the Nobel Peace Prize, a global prize given every year to the person or the people who have done most to promote world peace.

And because Gorbachev started to stop the USSR fighting in other countries and interfering with elections he was given the Nobel Peace Prize.

And he said this much later too, in 2004, he said this, he said, "I think we all lost the Cold War, particularly the Soviet Union.

We each lost $10 trillion.

We only won when the Cold War ended." And it ended officially when Gorbachev resigned.

So, Gorbachev resigned and the USSR was officially dissolved, it was legally dissolved, it was no longer a nation, it was no longer a union.

And just before that, for example, the Berlin wall was torn down, and because it was recognised that people from Eastern Germany and Eastern Berlin wanted to be able to live the same sort of life.

And so, you can see this showed the communist regime, as it was implemented in Eastern Europe, it wasn't working and people had rejected it and Gorbachev allowed it to be rejected and resigned and said, "I'm not in charge anymore, and the whole thing doesn't exist anymore." And he said, "Nobody won the Cold War." It wasn't that the USSR lost by him by him dissolving it.

He said, "Nobody won the Cold War." So let's stick with that idea and dig a little bit deeper.

Gorbachev says there were no winners in the Cold War.

I'd like you to write a speech and you're going to argue either, that's correct.

You're going to argue, there were no winners in the Cold War, and here's why.

Or you're going to argue against that and say, "I think there were winners or there was a winner in the Cold War." Based on everything that you know about the Cold War the different conflicts, the different ideologies, do you think that there were winners, do you think there was a winner, or do you think, do you agree with Gorbachev that there were no winners? So here's some of the things that I'd like you to do.

I've given you a sort of starter here.

You might say, for example, "I believe there were clear winners during the Cold War." More specifically, there was a single winner of who?" There are three reasons that I consider that whoever that is to have emerged victorious.

That's how you could start it.

You could take the opposite approach.

You could say, "I believe there were no winners in the Cold War," just as Gorbachev says, "Here are my reasons for that." And so, you need to be really persuasive.

I want you to see if you can persuade me that you're right that either there were no winners or that there were winners, and you're going to disagree.

There's tens of thousands of you watching this video.

You're going to disagree with each other.

So let's have that debate.

What do we think? You're already knowledgeable now, you're already well-informed so use that knowledge to come up to your conclusion, right? Your speech, knowledge is power.

The more you know, the more persuasive you can be.

You've got a voice and you can be heard.

Use that knowledge to good effect by writing this speech now.

Use persuasive language, use your factual events that you know about from this period to back it up and make sure always justifying using evidence, justify your points.

Don't just say, "Oh, I just think this," justify it, "I think this because.

This is clearly shown by.

." Use your knowledge.

So pause the video and have a go at writing that speech now.

It's going to take you a little while, but that's okay, because you've got loads to say and you're going to have a really great speech at the end of it that you're going to be really proud of.

And I can't wait to read them.

Pause the video and write your speech now.

Super, so that brings us to the end of the lesson.

And now the USSR has collapsed, the Cold War is over or extensively over.

That means it's believed to be over, but maybe not.

It's come to the end of the Cold War and the end of our learning on 20th century conflict.

Does that mean that there were no more conflicts? Of course not.

There were further conflicts.

There are still ongoing conflicts across the world right now.

And hopefully, you're a bit better informed now about some of those conflicts and about some of the, when you see different countries perhaps being a little bit hostile to each other in the news or political leaders being hostile to each other.

You'll be able to say, "Hmm, this makes sense, 'cause I know about the recent history of these different nations and leaders." I'd love to see your speech.

I'd love to see the rest of your work.

So, remember that you can share that with me.

To do that, you need to ask your parents or carers to take a picture.

It needs to be your parents or carers.

You shouldn't have a Twitter account.

And so, if you send it through to me, I won't reply to it.

Sorry, it needs to be your parent or carer that takes the photo and they share it to Twitter.

So ask them to do that.

It'll only take them a minute or two.

Post it on Twitter put OakNational#ONAYear6 and I'll be able to see that and shout out in a future video.

If you ask them to put, "I give permission," then I'll know that you give permission for it to be shown in a video, which means that tens of thousands of other children and year sixes will be able to see your work.

How cool?.