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May 18, 2020 · Another myth is that the Soviet Union’s role in the Second World War began on 22 June 1941, when the Wehrmacht attacked the USSR. In reality, the Soviet Union was a leading participant from the very start, colluding for nearly two years with Nazi Germany.
- The Russian Revolution and The Birth of The Soviet Union
- Joseph Stalin
- The Great Purge
- The Cold War
- Khrushchev and De-Stalinization
- Sputnik and The Soviet Space Program
- Mikhail Gorbachev
- Collapse of The Soviet Union
- Sources
The Soviet Union had its origins in the Russian Revolution of 1917. Radical leftist revolutionaries overthrew Russia’s Czar Nicholas II, ending centuries of Romanov rule. The Bolsheviks established a socialist state in the territory that was once the Russian Empire. A long and bloody civil war followed. The Red Army, backed by the Bolshevik governm...
Georgian-born revolutionary Joseph Stalinrose to power upon Lenin’s death in 1924. The dictator ruled by terror with a series of brutal policies, which left millions of his own citizens dead. During his reign—which lasted until his death in 1953—Stalin transformed the Soviet Union from an agrarian society to an industrial and military superpower. S...
Amid confusion and resistance to collectivization in the countryside, agricultural productivity dropped. This led to devastating food shortages. Millions died during the Great Famine of 1932-1933. For many years the USSR denied the Great Famine, keeping secret the results of a 1937 census that would have revealed the extent of loss. The Ukrainian f...
Following the surrender of Nazi Germany at the end of World War II, the uncomfortable wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States and Great Britain began to crumble. The Soviet Union by 1948 had installed communist-leaning governments in Eastern European countries that the USSR had liberated from Nazi control during the war. The...
After Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchevrose to power. He became Communist Party secretary in 1953 and premier in 1958. Khrushchev’s tenure spanned the tensest years of the Cold War. He instigated the Cuban Missile Crisisin 1962 by installing nuclear weapons just 90 miles from Florida’s coast in Cuba. At home, however, Khrushchev initiated a...
The Soviets initiated rocketry and space exploration programs in the 1930s as part of Stalin’s agenda for building an advanced, industrial economy. Many early projects were tied to the Soviet military and kept secret, but by the 1950s, space would become another dramatic arena for competition between dueling world superpowers. On October 4, 1957, t...
A longtime Communist Party politician, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. He inherited a stagnant economy and a crumbling political system. He introduced two sets of policies he hoped would reform the political system and help the USSR become a more prosperous, productive nation. These policies were called glasnost and perestroika. Gorbachev’...
During the 1960s and 1970s, the Communist Party elite rapidly gained wealth and power while millions of average Soviet citizens faced starvation. The Soviet Union’s push to industrialize at any cost resulted in frequent shortages of food and consumer goods. Bread lines were common throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Soviet citizens often did not have a...
Guns or butter problems of the Cold War. CIA Library. Revelations from the Russian Archives. Library of Congress. Sputnik, 1957. U.S. Department of State Office of the Historian.
The Soviet Union had experienced internal stagnation and ethnic separatism. Although highly centralized until its final years, the country was made up of 15 top-level republics that served as the homelands for different ethnicities. Annexation of at least 3 of them by Soviet Union during the World War II was never fully recognized (Baltic ...
Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, the Soviet Union ranked as one of the world’s top producers of energy resources such as oil and natural gas, and exports of those commodities played a vital role in shoring up the world’s largest command economy. When oil plunged from $120 a barrel in 1980 to $24 a barrel in March 1986, this vital lifeline to external capital dried up.
Dec 21, 2021 · Washington, D.C., December 21, 2021 – On Christmas Day 30 years ago, the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, stepped down and the hammer-and-sickle flags over the Kremlin were replaced with the red-white-and-blue of the Russian Federation. Triumphalists and conspiracy theorists ever since have attributed this epochal event to ...
Apr 17, 2018 · Photos: 7 Decades of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union, founded in 1922 on Marxist‑socialist principles, became one of the biggest and most powerful nations in the world—before its fall and ...
Dec 24, 2021 · The collapse meant thousands of Soviet nuclear weapons were spread across four of the newly formed states, including Russia and Ukraine. Russia kept its nukes. Ukraine gave up its arsenal in 1994 ...
