Soviet Union
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The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR or Soviet Union) was a communist country with a totalitarian regime that existed from 1917 until 1991. It 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). 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 all associated republics gained independence Russia, remains 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 Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) 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 legislative 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 expelling them from the party or bringing them to trial for counter-revolutionary activities.
In the winter of 1922, at the end of the civil war, the sailors from the naval base on Kronstadt Island, who had been stalwart supporters of the Bolsheviks during the civil war revolted against the new regime. The Red Army crossed the ice over the frozen Baltic Sea and quickly crushed the Kronstadt Rebellion but Lenin's leadership realized it was time for a "strategic retreat" from hard-line Communism.
This led to the establishment of the New Economic Policy (NEP) which allowed for a brief and limited respite from the total control by the party over personal and economic life. Small private businesses were allowed to fluorish and restrictions on political activity were somewhat eased. Perhaps the most notable aspect of this period was the conspicuous consumption by the few who managed to become wealthy. At the time, many in the west saw this as the beginning of the end of the "red menace."
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, when he ended the NEP and brought the entire economy under strict state control, until his death in 1953. Stalin replaced Lenin's market socialist "New Economic Policy" with a Five-Year Plan, which called for a highly ambitious program of heavy industrialization and collectivization of agriculture. In spite of early breakdowns and failures, the first Five-Year Plan achieved amazing results, mainly because of the heroic sacrifices of the common people. Russia, an inert sleeping giant before 1914, now became industrialized at an unbelievable speed, far surpassing Germany’s pace of industrialization in the nineteenth century and Japan’s earlier in the twentieth.
With industrialization came social advancement. Most observers in the 1920s credited the Stalin regime with abandoning the tsarist policy of persecuting national minorities in favor of a policy of tolerance toward the more than two hundred minority groups in the Soviet Union. Another feature of the Stalin regime that received praise was the extension of medical services. Campaigns were carried out against typhus, cholera, and malaria; the number of doctors was increases as rapidly as facilities and training would permit; and death and infant mortality rates steadily decreased.
From 1921 until 1954, during the period of state-guided, forced industrialization, 3.7 million people were sentenced for counter-revolutionary 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 (known throughout the former USSR as the Great Patriotic 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-aggression 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). At first, Stalin refused to believe that the Germans had invaded and issued no orders to defend the union. Meanwhile, the generals were afraid to act independently for fear of being purged by Stalin's terror machine. This is why the USSR was at first ineffective against the advancing Nazi forces. However, once Stalin recovered from the initial shock, the Soviet Red Army put up fierce resistance.
It is however documented that Germany received notice of a planned attack by the Soviet Union. Some Russian military men as well have recently stated that Stalin's Red Army was in offensive position and ready to strike Germany. Stalin did not allow the thus surprised offensively positioned Red Army to retreat, and large numbers of soldiers were surrounded and taken as prisoners of war. The Germans reached the outskirsts of Moscow in December, but were stopped by an early winter and a Soviet counter-offensive. At the battle of Stalingrad in 1942-43, after sacrificing an estimated 1 million men, the Red Army was able to regain the initiative of the war. With military equipment aid of their allies, the Soviet forces were able to regain their lost territory and push their over-stretched enemy back to Germany itself.
From the end of 1944 to 1949 large sections of eastern Germany came under Stalin's Soviet Union occupation and on May 2nd 1945, the capital city Berlin was taken, while over fifteen million Germans were removed from eastern Germany and pushed into central Germany (later called GDR German Democratic Republic) and western Germany (later called FRG Federal Republic of Germany). Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Czech etc. were then moved onto German land. Although these expulsions of population of eastern Germany and the illegal takeover of land have been documented for decades, these facts have been downplayed by Stalin's Allies for decades and are scarcely known.
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 party 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.
Before the Cold War, longstanding disparities in the productive capacities, developmental levels, and geopolitical strength existed between East and West. The “East”, in many respects, had been “behind” the “West” for centuries. As a result, reciprocating Western military build-ups during the Cold War placed an uneven burden on the Soviet economy, forcing them allocate a disproportionately large share of their resources to the defense sector.
Gorbachev thus responded to the breakdown of Détente and Regan’s military build-up. The Soviets simply could not afford to outspend the West. 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. The USSR organized its satellite 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
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