Portal:Soviet Union

UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS

Introduction

The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from its formation in 1922 until its dissolution in 1991. It was the world's third-most populous country, the largest by area, and bordered twelve other countries. A diverse multinational state, it was organized as a federal union of national republics, with the largest and most populous being the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (SFSR). The world's flagship communist state, it was governed by the Communist Party under Marxism–Leninism, through soviet councils. The Soviet economy was also centrally planned. Its capital and largest city was Moscow.

The Soviet Union's roots lay in the October Revolution of 1917. The new government, led by Vladimir Lenin, established the Russian SFSR, the world's first constitutionally communist state. Following the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War, the Russian SFSR and its subordinate republics were merged into the Soviet Union in 1922. Following Lenin's death in 1924, a six-year power struggle saw Joseph Stalin emerge as the country's undisputed personalist ruler. He initiated rapid industrialization and forced collectivization that led to significant growth, but contributed to a devastating famine in the 1930s that killed millions. The Soviet forced labour camp system, known as the Gulag, was expanded. During the late 1930s, Stalin's government conducted the Great Purge to eliminate opposition, resulting in deportations, executions, and the Moscow trials. Failing to build an anti-Nazi coalition in Europe, the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany in 1939. However, in 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union in the largest land invasion in history, opening the Eastern Front of World War II. The Soviets played a decisive role in defeating the Axis powers as part of the Allies, while conquering much of Central and Eastern Europe. With around 27 million casualties, it suffered the most deaths of any country in World War II. In the war's aftermath, the Soviet Union consolidated the territories occupied by the Red Army into satellite states and undertook rapid economic development, cementing its status as a superpower.

Geopolitical tensions with the United States led to the Cold War. The US-led Western Bloc coalesced into the NATO military alliance in 1949, prompting the Eastern Bloc to form the Warsaw Pact in 1955. With little direct combat, the blocs engaged in ideological and proxy wars. In 1953, following Stalin's death, Nikita Khrushchev initiated a campaign of de-Stalinization, which led to ideological tensions with communist China, under Mao Zedong, and culminated in an acrimonious split. The Soviet military suppressed uprisings in East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, while the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis narrowly averted a global conflict. Under Leonid Brezhnev, prosperity shifted toward stagnation, although relations with the US eased. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev sought reform through his policies of glasnost and perestroika. In 1989, most Warsaw Pact countries overthrew their Soviet-backed regimes, effectively ending the Eastern Bloc. Nationalist movements across the Soviet republics declared sovereignty, and in 1991, a successful referendum to establish a renewed federation was followed by a failed coup by hardliners. This prompted Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus to secede. On 26 December, Gorbachev officially recognized the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian SFSR, oversaw its reconstitution into the Russian Federation, the Soviet Union's successor state. All fifteen republics became independent states; all except the Baltic states joined the Commonwealth of Independent States. The post-Soviet states experienced a humanitarian disaster.

The Soviet Union was one of the world's two superpowers, with hegemony in Eastern Europe, global diplomacy, ideological influence (particularly in the Global South), military might, economic strength, and scientific and technological accomplishments. Its space program made significant achievements in the Space Race. It had the world's second-largest economy and the largest standing military. As a nuclear state, it wielded the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world. As an Allied nation, it was a founding member of the United Nations and one of five permanent members of its Security Council. (Full article...)

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Soviet anti-aircraft gunners on the
roof of the Hotel Moskva

The Battle of Moscow was a military campaign that consisted of two periods of strategically significant fighting on a 600 km (370 mi) sector of the Eastern Front during World War II, between October 1941 and January 1942. The Soviet defensive effort thwarted Germany's attack on Moscow, the capital and largest city of the Soviet Union. Moscow was one of the primary military and political objectives for Axis forces in their invasion of the Soviet Union.

The German strategic offensive, named Operation Typhoon, called for two pincer offensives, one to the north of Moscow against the Kalinin Front by the 3rd and 4th Panzer Armies, simultaneously severing the Moscow–Leningrad railway, and another to the south of Moscow Oblast against the Western Front south of Tula, by the 2nd Panzer Army, while the 4th Army advanced directly towards Moscow from the west. (Full article...)

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Credit: Deutsche Fotothek

Statues of Joseph Stalin often portrayed him as a person very close to Vladimir Lenin.

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... that the proposals for a new Crimean flag after the collapse of the Soviet Union included a white flag with seven rainbow colors at the top and a blue-white-red tricolor design, which was officially adopted in 1999?

... that tickets bought for the ceremonial opening of Kiev Republican Stadium scheduled for June 22, 1941 were still valid 7 years later, as the event was "postponed until after the Victory" due to the Nazi invasion to the USSR?

... that the massacre in Vinnytsia by the Soviet secret police NKVD in the purges of 1937-1938 was investigated in 1943 during the German invasion of Ukraine and used in the propaganda war against the Soviet Union?

... that the 1973 Soviet economic reform initiated by Alexei Kosygin, the Premier of the Soviet Union, tried to reduce the powers of the central Ministries?

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“

Nobody lives just on their wages.

”

— Leonid Brezhnev, talking about his handling of political corruption

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George Abramovich Koval (Russian: Жорж (Георгий) Абрамович Коваль, IPA: [ˈʐorʐ (ɡʲɪˈorɡʲɪj) ɐˈbraməvʲɪtɕ kɐˈvalʲ] ^ⓘ, Zhorzh Abramovich Koval; December 25, 1913 – January 31, 2006) was an American engineer who acted as a Soviet intelligence officer for the Soviet atomic bomb project. Koval's infiltration of the Manhattan Project as a GRU (Soviet military intelligence) agent reduced the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop nuclear weapons.

Koval was born in Sioux City, Iowa, to Jewish emigrants from the part of the Russian Empire that is now Belarus. As an adult, he traveled with his parents to the Soviet Union to settle in the Jewish Autonomous Region near the Chinese border. Koval was recruited by the GRU, trained, and assigned the code name DELMAR. He returned to the United States in 1940 and was drafted into the U.S. Army in early 1943. Koval worked at atomic research laboratories and, according to the Russian government, relayed back to the Soviet Union information about the production processes and volumes of the polonium, plutonium, and uranium used in American atomic weaponry, and descriptions of the weapon production sites. In 1948, Koval left on a European vacation but never returned to the United States. In 2000, the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation awarded Koval with a military decoration "For Service in Military Intelligence" for his service for the GRU. That year, he gathered his pupils for some sort of celebration and finally admitted that he was a Russian spy in the 1940s. On November 2, 2007, Russian president Vladimir Putin posthumously awarded Koval the Hero of the Russian Federation decoration for his service. (Full article...)

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General images

The following are images from various Soviet Union-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1Russian troops meeting German troops in No Man's Land (from Russian Revolution)
Image 2Lenin, Trotsky and Kamenev celebrating the second anniversary of the October Revolution (from October Revolution)
Image 3Soldiers marching in Petrograd, March 1917 (from Russian Revolution)
Image 4T-80 tank on Red Square during the August Coup (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 5The elections to the Constituent Assembly took place in November 1917. The Bolsheviks won 24% of the vote. (from October Revolution)
Image 6Russian Civil War in the European part of Russia (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 7The Russian famine of 1921–22 killed an estimated 5 million people.
(from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 8The Pan-European Picnic took place in August 1989 on the Hungarian-Austrian border. (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 9Five Marshals of the Soviet Union in 1935. Only two of them—Budyonny and Voroshilov—survived the Great Purge. Blyukher, Yegorov and Tukhachevsky were executed. (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 10On 21 December 1991, the leaders of 11 former Soviet republics, including Russia and Ukraine, agreed to the Alma-Ata Protocols, formally establishing the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 11Provisional Government's volunteer soldiers secure Petrograd's Palace Square with the Austin Armoured Car, summer 1917. (from Russian Revolution)
Image 12A detachment of Red Guard sailors who dissolved the Constituent Assembly (from October Revolution)
Image 13Soviet painting Vladimir Lenin, by Isaac Brodsky (from Russian Revolution)
Image 14The Battle of Stalingrad, considered by many historians as a decisive turning point of World War II (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 15American, British, and Japanese Troops parade through Vladivostok in armed support to the White Army. (from Russian Revolution)
Image 16A poster depicting the effect of the Revolution on the life of a peasant, 1920. From the collections of RGASPI (from Russian Revolution)
Image 17The 2nd Moscow Women Death Battalion protecting the Winter Palace as the last guards of the stronghold (from Russian Revolution)
Image 18From left to right, the Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill confer in Tehran, 1943 (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 19Lenin, Trotsky, and Kamenev celebrating the second anniversary of the October Revolution (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 20A detachment of Red Guard sailors who dissolved the Constituent Assembly (from Russian Revolution)
Image 21Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (left) with US President John F. Kennedy in Vienna, 3 June 1961 (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 22The New York Times headline from 9 November 1917 (from October Revolution)
Image 23Revolutionaries attacking the tsarist police in the early days of the February Revolution (from Russian Revolution)
Image 24Murder of the Romanov family, Le Petit Journal (from Russian Revolution)
Image 25Bolshevik (1920) by Boris Kustodiev (from October Revolution)
Image 26Revolutionaries protesting in February 1917 (from Russian Revolution)
Image 27"Pogrom in the Winter Palace" by Ivan Vladimirov (from October Revolution)
Image 28Russian troops in trenches awaiting a German attack (from Russian Revolution)
Image 29Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria with Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, on his lap. As head of the NKVD, Beria was responsible for many political repressions in the Soviet Union. (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 30Country emblems of the Soviet Republics before and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union (the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (fifth in the second row) no longer exists as a political entity of any kind and the emblem is unofficial.) (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 31Soldiers blocking Narva Gate on Bloody Sunday (from Russian Revolution)
Image 32Petrograd Milrevcom proclamation about the deposing of the Russian Provisional Government (from October Revolution)
Image 33Internally displaced Azerbaijanis from Nagorno-Karabakh, 1993 (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 34Changes in national boundaries after the end of the Cold War (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 35Nikolai Podgorny visiting Tampere, Finland on 16 October 1969 (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 36Meeting before the Russian wire entanglements (from Russian Revolution)
Image 37Red Guard unit of the Vulkan factory in Petrograd, October 1917 (from October Revolution)
Image 38Mikhail Gorbachev in one-to-one discussions with US President Ronald Reagan (left), 1985 (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 39The Petrograd Soviet Assembly meeting in 1917 (from Russian Revolution)
Image 40Forward gun of Aurora that fired the signal shot (from October Revolution)
Image 41Cruiser Aurora (from October Revolution)
Image 42Residents of Leningrad leave their homes destroyed by German bombing. About 1 million civilians died during the 871-day Siege of Leningrad, mostly from starvation. (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 43Map showing the greatest territorial extent of the Soviet Union and the sovereign states that it dominated politically, economically and militarily in 1960, after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 but before the official Sino-Soviet split of 1961 (total area: c. 35,000,000 km²) (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 44Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev and US President Jimmy Carter sign the SALT II arms limitation treaty in Vienna on 18 June 1979. (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 45European theatre of the Russian Civil War in 1918 (from October Revolution)
Image 46A scene from the July Days. The army has just opened fire on street protesters. (from October Revolution)
Image 47Anniversary of October Revolution in Riga, Soviet Union in 1988 (from October Revolution)
Image 48A revolutionary meeting of Russian soldiers in March 1917 in Dalkarby of Jomala, Åland (from Russian Revolution)

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Selected anniversaries for August

August coup attempt - 19 to 21 August 1991 - was an attempt by a group of members of the Soviet Union's government to take control of the country from Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev.

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More Did you know (auto generated)

... that the editors of the Red Army newspaper Qьzьl Armies were seen as opponents of the reform to introduce a Latin script for the Tatar language?
... that agronomist Oliver Golden remained in the Soviet Union after his delegation of cotton experts returned to the United States?
... that the Praga E-55 was abandoned due to the Czech aircraft industry being directed to concentrate on licensed production of Soviet aircraft?
... that the Lviv branch of the Ukrderzhnatsmenvydav was the main publisher of Polish literature in the Soviet Union by 1941?
... that the Vulcan Bridge, a bridge in Vulcan, West Virginia, was constructed after the mayor requested financial aid from the Soviet Union?
... that the first model of cosmic inflation was formulated by a Soviet physicist but initially remained unknown outside the Soviet Union?

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2020-09-16 165855 Soviet submarine B-515
Alexei Leonov
Field Marshal Keitel signs German surrender terms in Berlin 8 May 1945 - Restoration
German instrument of surrender2
Instrument of surrender Japan2
Mamoru Shigemitsu signs the Instrument of Surrender, officially ending the Second World War
Maxim Gorky LOC Restored edit1
Moscow Elektrozavodskaya metro station asv2018-09
Prokofieff (i.e. Prokofiev) LCCN2014708419 Crop 2
RUS-2016-Murmansk-Icebreaker Lenin 01
Raising a flag over the Reichstag - Restoration
Russian Imperial Family 1913
USS Yorktown collision
Yalta Conference (Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin) (B&W)
Yuri Gagarin (1961) - Restoration
Yury Pen - Portrait of Marc Chagall

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German instrument of surrender2 (2009-05-07)
Instrument of surrender Japan2 (2009-09-02)
Yalta Conference (Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin) (B&W) (2010-05-08)
USS Yorktown collision (2011-02-12)
Maxim Gorky LOC Restored edit1 (2013-03-28)
Yuri Gagarin (1961) - Restoration (2020-03-09)
Alexei Leonov (2020-03-18)
Field Marshal Keitel signs German surrender terms in Berlin 8 May 1945 - Restoration (2020-05-08)
RUS-2016-Murmansk-Icebreaker Lenin 01 (2020-06-08)
Moscow Elektrozavodskaya metro station asv2018-09 (2022-02-26)
Russian Imperial Family 1913 (2022-07-17)
Mamoru Shigemitsu signs the Instrument of Surrender, officially ending the Second World War (2022-09-02)
2020-09-16 165855 Soviet submarine B-515 (2023-04-18)
Prokofieff (i.e. Prokofiev) LCCN2014708419 Crop 2 (2023-07-25)
Raising a flag over the Reichstag - Restoration (2025-05-02)

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