Soviet Union
The Soviet Union was a communist country with a totalitarian regime that existed from 1917 until 1991. The official name was The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.). The country stretched from the Baltic and Black Seas to the Pacific Ocean. In its final years it consisted of 15 Soviet Socialist Republics (SSRs). Russia was by far the largest Republic in the Soviet Union in terms of both land area and population, and also dominated it politically and economically.
During the period of its existence, the Soviet Union was by area (22,402,200 sq. km) perhaps the largest countries, or empires, the world had ever seen. It was also one of the most diverse, with more than 100 distinct national ethnicities living within its borders. The total population was estimated at ca. 272 million in 1985. The Soviet Union was so large, in fact, that even after many associated republics gained independence, the Soviet Union's successor, Russia, remained easily the largest country by area (with Canada second), and remained quite ethnically diverse, including, e.g., minorities of Tatars, Udmurts, and many other non-Russian ethnicities.
The first leader of the Soviet Union was Vladimir Lenin, who led the Communists (then called Bolsheviks) to power in the Russian Revolution of 1917. The new government did not get an easy start. With the newly formed Red Army in disarray, the Soviet Union had to pull out of World War I. The peace treaty with Germany, the so-called Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, made the union hand over most of the area of the Ukraine and Belarus. The opponents of communism within and without the union did not accept the new government, and this led to all-out civil war, which lasted until 1922.
After the revolution, the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) quickly became the only legal political party. The governing of the country was, in theory, to be done by local and regional democratically elected soviets. In practice, however, each level of government was controlled by its corresponding party group. The highest legislate body was the Supreme Soviet. The highest executive body was the Politburo. (More about the political organization of the USSR can be found on Organization_of_the_Communist_Party_of_the_USSR.)
The state relied heavily on controlling its citizens with the secret police. Already in December 1917, the Cheka was founded. Later it changed names to GPU, OGPU, MVD, NKVD and finally KGB. The secret police was responsible for finding any political dissidents and expel them from the party or bring them to trial for counter-revolutionary activites.
After Lenin died in 1924, power gradually consolidated in the hands of Joseph Stalin, who led the Soviet Union until his death in 1953. Stalin was the supreme leader from 1929 until 1953. From 1921 until 1954 3.7 million people were sentenced for counter-revolutional crimes, including 0.6 million sentenced to death, 2.4 million sentenced to prison and labor camps, and 0.8 million sentenced to expatriation. See Gulag.
The second world war caught the Soviet military unprepared. A widely held belief is that this was caused by a large number of the senior officers being sent to prison in the Great Purges of 1936-1938. To secure Soviet influence over Eastern Europe and perhaps buy some time, Stalin arranged the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a non-agression pact with Germany on August 23, 1939. A secret addition to the pact gave Eastern Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Finland to the USSR, and Western Poland and Lithuania to Germany. Germany invaded Poland on September 1st, USSR followed on September 17th. On November 30th, USSR attacked Finland in what is called the Winter War.
On June 22nd 1941, however, Hitler broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union (see Operation Barbarossa). Under Stalin's leadership the Soviet Red Army put up fierce resistance, but were at first ineffective against the advancing Nazi forces. The army was not allowed to retreat, and large numbers of soldiers were surrounded and taken as prisoners of war. The Germans reached the outskirts of Moscow in December, but were stopped by the winter and a Soviet counter-offensive. At the battle of Stalingrad in 1942-1943, after sacrificing an estimated 1 million men, the Red Army were able to regain the initiative of the war. From then on, the Soviet forces were able to regain their lost territory and push their over-stretched enemy back to Germany itself. On May 2nd 1945, the city of Berlin was taken.
Later Soviet leaders such as Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev were unable to consolidate power as Stalin had done, and served more as functionaries of the state rather than as dictators. During Brezhnev's time in office the ill-fated Soviet invasion to support the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was initiated, in December 1979.
Mikhail Gorbachev became head of the Soviet Union in 1985 and attempted to preserve the collapsing Communist regime by reducing tensions with the United States and lessening the extent of political persecution, but without abandoning the core Communist tenet of centralized bureaucratic control of the economy. His two key policies were Glasnost -openness, and Perestroika -restructuring. These attempts failed, and the collapse of the Soviet Union occurred in 1991.
From 1945 until the collapse, The Soviet Union fought a Cold War with the USA for world domination. USSR organized its fellow communist countries in Eastern Europe (Czechoslovakia, German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania) in the Warsaw pact to counter the perceived threat from the Western European countries, organized in the NATO pact. The USSR also supported a number of pro-communist / anti-USA regimes around the world, most notably Cuba, Libya, and Syria.
Related topics: Communism -- Socialism -- Kishka -- World War I -- Russian Civil War -- World War II -- Genocide -- Red Army