UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS
Coat of arms of the Soviet Union 1
The flag of the Soviet Union
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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The
5th Mechanised Corps was a
mechanised corps of the
Red Army , formed on three occasions. It was first formed in 1934 and was converted into the
15th Tank Corps in 1938. It was reformed in the Far East in 1940 and moved west before the
German invasion of the Soviet Union . It fought in the
First Battle of Smolensk , losing large numbers of tanks in the Lepel counterattack. The corps was encircled in the Smolensk pocket and after breaking out was disbanded in late August 1941. Its third formation, from elements of the
22nd Tank Corps , occurred in September 1942. The corps fought in:
Operation Little Saturn ,
Operation Gallop , the
Second Battle of Smolensk , the
Dnieper–Carpathian Offensive , and the
Second Jassy–Kishinev Offensive . In September 1944, it became the
9th Guards Mechanised Corps . (
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“
I could have gone on flying through space forever.
”
—
Yuri Gagarin , reported in
Kerrod, Robin (2004). Dawn of the Space Age . Gareth Stevens. p. 1968. ISBN 0836857127 .
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The following are images from various Soviet Union-related articles on Wikipedia.
Image 2 Russian Civil War in the European part of Russia (from
Soviet Union )
Image 3 Petrograd
Milrevcom proclamation about the deposing of the
Russian Provisional Government (from
October Revolution )
Image 4 Internally displaced Azerbaijanis from
Nagorno-Karabakh , 1993 (from
Soviet Union )
Image 5 A scene from the July Days. The army has just opened fire on street protesters. (from
October Revolution )
Image 6 From 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
Soviet Union )
Image 7 Bolshevik (1920) by
Boris Kustodiev (from
October Revolution )
Image 8 Provisional Government 's volunteer soldiers secure Petrograd's
Palace Square with the
Austin Armoured Car , summer 1917. (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 9 Soldiers marching in
Petrograd , March 1917 (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 10 Residents 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
Soviet Union )
Image 11 European theatre of the
Russian Civil War in 1918 (from
October Revolution )
Image 12 The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly on 6 January 1918. The
Tauride Palace is locked and guarded by
Trotsky ,
Sverdlov ,
Zinoviev , and
Lashevich . (from
October Revolution )
Image 13 On 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
Soviet Union )
Image 14 Country 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
Soviet Union )
Image 15 The elections to the
Constituent Assembly took place in November 1917. The Bolsheviks won 24% of the vote. (from
October Revolution )
Image 16 Dissolution of the elected
Russian Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviks on 6 January 1918 (from
Soviet Union )
Image 18 Forward gun of
Aurora that fired the signal shot (from
October Revolution )
Image 21 Nikolai Podgorny visiting
Tampere ,
Finland on 16 October 1969 (from
Soviet Union )
Image 22 Stalin 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
Soviet Union )
Image 23 Meeting before the Russian wire entanglements (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 24 "Pogrom in the Winter Palace" by
Ivan Vladimirov (from
October Revolution )
Image 25 American, British, and Japanese Troops parade through Vladivostok in armed support to the White Army. (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 26 Mikhail Gorbachev in one-to-one discussions with US President
Ronald Reagan (
left ), 1985 (from
Soviet Union )
Image 27 The
Pan-European Picnic took place in August 1989 on the Hungarian-Austrian border. (from
Soviet Union )
Image 28 Red Guard unit of the Vulkan factory in Petrograd, October 1917 (from
October Revolution )
Image 29 Soviet general secretary
Leonid Brezhnev and US President
Jimmy Carter sign the
SALT II arms limitation treaty in Vienna on 18 June 1979. (from
Soviet Union )
Image 30 Construction of the bridge through the
Kolyma (part of the
Road of Bones from
Magadan to
Jakutsk ) by the prisoners of
Dalstroy (from
Soviet Union )
Image 31 The 2nd Moscow Women Death Battalion protecting the Winter Palace as the last guards of the stronghold (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 32 The
Soviet famine of 1930–1933 , with areas where the effects of famine were most severe shaded (from
Soviet Union )
Image 33 U.S.
Lend Lease shipments to the USSR. During the war the USSR provided an unknown number of shipments of rare minerals to the US Treasury as a form of cashless
repayment of Lend-Lease . (from
Soviet Union )
Image 34 A revolutionary meeting of Russian soldiers in March 1917 in Dalkarby of
Jomala ,
Åland (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 35 Murder of the Romanov family,
Le Petit Journal (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 36 The New York Times headline from 9 November 1917 (from
October Revolution )
Image 37 Lenin ,
Trotsky and
Kamenev celebrating the second anniversary of the October Revolution (from
October Revolution )
Image 38 T-80 tank on
Red Square during the
August Coup (from
Soviet Union )
Image 39 Anniversary of October Revolution in
Riga , Soviet Union in 1988 (from
October Revolution )
Image 40 The
Battle of Stalingrad , considered by many historians as a decisive turning point of World War II (from
Soviet Union )
Image 41 The
Russian famine of 1921–22 killed an estimated 5 million people.
(from
Soviet Union )
Image 42 The dissolution of the
Constituent Assembly on 6 January 1918. The
Tauride Palace is locked and guarded by
Trotsky ,
Sverdlov ,
Zinoviev and
Lashevich . (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 43 Lenin ,
Trotsky and
Kamenev celebrating the second anniversary of the
October Revolution (from
Soviet Union )
Image 44 Soviet leader
Nikita Khrushchev (left) with US President
John F. Kennedy in Vienna, 3 June 1961 (from
Soviet Union )
Image 45 Russian
peasants holding
banners of Lenin (left),
Marx (centre) and Trotsky (right) in early
Soviet Russia . (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 46 Changes in national boundaries after the end of the Cold War (from
Soviet Union )
Image 47 Map showing greatest territorial extent of the Soviet Union and the 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 km
2 ) (from
Soviet Union )
Image 49 Russian troops in trenches awaiting a German attack (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 50 Russian troops meeting German troops in No Man's Land (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 51 Revolutionaries protesting in February 1917 (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 52 Revolutionaries attacking the tsarist police in the early days of the February Revolution (from
Russian Revolution )
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