The
Soviet Union, officially the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (
USSR), was a
transcontinental country that spanned much of
Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. It was a successor state to the
Russian Empire that was nominally organized as a
federal union of
fifteen national republics, the largest and most populous of which was the
Russian SFSR; in practice both
its government and
economy were highly
centralized until its final years. As a
one-party state governed by the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, it was a flagship
communist state.
The Soviet Union's roots lay in the
October Revolution of 1917, which saw the
Bolsheviks overthrow the
Russian Provisional Government that formed earlier that year following the
February Revolution that had
dissolved the Russian Empire. The new government, led by
Vladimir Lenin, established the
Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), the world's first constitutionally
socialist state. The revolution was not accepted by all within the
Russian Republic, resulting in the
Russian Civil War between the Bolsheviks and the anti-communist
Whites. As the war progressed in the Bolsheviks' favor, the RSFSR began to incorporate land acquired from the war into various puppet states, which were
merged into the Soviet Union in December 1922. Following
Lenin's death in 1924,
Joseph Stalin came to power, inaugurating a period of
rapid industrialization and
forced collectivization that led to significant economic growth, but also contributed to a
famine in 1930 to 1933 that killed millions. The
forced labour camp system of the
Gulag was also expanded in this period. During the late 1930s, Stalin conducted the
Great Purge to remove actual and perceived opponents, resulting in mass death, imprisonment, and deportation. In 1939, the USSR and Nazi Germany signed
a nonaggression pact despite their ideological incongruence; nonetheless, in 1941, Nazi 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 in 1945, suffering an estimated 27
million casualties, which accounted for the majority of
Allied losses. In the
aftermath of the war, the Soviet Union consolidated the territory occupied by the
Red Army, forming various
satellite states, and undertook rapid economic development which cemented its status as a
superpower.
Following World War II, ideological tensions with the
United States eventually led to the
Cold War. The American-led
Western Bloc coalesced into
NATO in 1949, prompting the Soviet Union to form its own military alliance, commonly known as the
Warsaw Pact, in 1955. Neither side ever engaged in direct military confrontation, and instead fought on an ideological basis and through
proxy wars. In 1953, following
Stalin's death, the Soviet Union undertook a campaign of
de-Stalinization under the leadership of
Nikita Khrushchev, which saw reversals and rejections of Stalinist policies. This campaign caused
tensions with Communist China. During the 1950s, the Soviet Union rapidly expanded
its efforts in space exploration and took an early lead in the
Space Race with the
first artificial satellite, the
first human spaceflight, the
first space station, and the
first probe to land on another planet (
Venus). The
Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was the closest the
Cold War came to escalating into full-scale
nuclear war.
The 1970s saw a brief
détente in the
Soviet Union's relationship with the United States, but tensions emerged again following the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. In the mid-1980s, the last Soviet leader,
Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform the country through his policies of
glasnost and
perestroika. In 1989, various countries of the Warsaw Pact
overthrew their Soviet-backed regimes, and
nationalist and
separatist movements erupted across the entire Soviet Union. In 1991, amid efforts to reform and
preserve the country as a
renewed federation, an attempted
coup d'état against Gorbachev by hardline communists prompted the three most populous and economically developed republics—Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus—to secede from the Union. On December 26, Gorbachev officially recognized the
dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Boris Yeltsin, the leader of the RSFSR, oversaw its reconstitution into the
Russian Federation, which became the Soviet Union's successor state; all other republics emerged as fully independent
post-Soviet states.
During its existence, the Soviet Union produced many significant
social and technological achievements and innovations. It had the world's
second-largest economy and largest standing military. An
NPT-designated 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 as well as one of the
five permanent members of the
United Nations Security Council. Before its dissolution, the USSR was one of the world's two superpowers through its hegemony in Eastern Europe, global diplomatic and ideological influence (particularly in the
Global South), military and economic strengths, and
scientific accomplishments. (
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