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 Soviet Union played a decisive role in defeating the Axis powers as part of the Allies, while extending its sphere of influence to 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 and continuing wars and insurgencies.

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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Lysenkoism was a pseudoscientific political campaign led by the Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko against genetics and science-based agriculture in the mid-20th century, rejecting natural selection in favour of a form of Lamarckism, as well as expanding upon the techniques of vernalization and grafting.

More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the Soviet campaign to suppress scientific opponents. The president of the Soviet Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, who had been Lysenko's mentor, but later denounced him, was sent to prison and died there, while Soviet genetics research was effectively destroyed. Research and teaching in the fields of neurophysiology, cell biology, and many other biological disciplines were harmed or banned. (Full article...)

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Credit: ITAR-TASS

Originally a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin became Mikhail Gorbachev's political enemy, and later, the first President of the Russian Federation.

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... that the Gorno-Altai Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic lasted for only nine months as an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which turned it into the Altai Republic?

... that in the Ukrainian-Soviet War (1917-1922) the Ukrainians fought for their independence first from the Russian Empire, and then the Soviet Union?

... that the Soviet 383rd Rifle Division was originally comprised completely of miners, from the Ukrainian Donets Basin?

... that Valentin Pavlov, the Prime Minister of the Soviet Union and de facto Chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers, was involved in the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev?

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“

Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain — at least in a poor country like Russia — and his vanity begins to swell out like his tires. In America it takes an automobile to produce this effect.

”

— Leon Trotsky, talking about the national question

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Photo portrait, before 1951

Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess (16 April 1911 – 30 August 1963) was a British diplomat and Soviet double agent, and a member of the Cambridge Five spy ring that operated from the mid-1930s to the early years of the Cold War era. His defection in 1951 to the Soviet Union, with his fellow spy Donald Maclean, led to a serious breach in Anglo-United States intelligence co-operation, and caused long-lasting disruption and demoralisation in Britain's foreign and diplomatic services.

Born into an upper middle class family, Burgess was educated at Eton College, the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, and Trinity College, Cambridge. An assiduous networker, he embraced left-wing politics at Cambridge and joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. Burgess was recruited by Soviet intelligence in 1935, on the recommendation of the future double agent Harold "Kim" Philby. After leaving Cambridge, Burgess worked for the BBC as a producer, briefly interrupted by a short period as a full-time MI6 intelligence officer, before joining the Foreign Office in 1944. (Full article...)

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General images

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

Image 1From 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 2The Petrograd Soviet Assembly meeting in 1917 (from Russian Revolution)
Image 3Soldiers blocking Narva Gate on Bloody Sunday (from Russian Revolution)
Image 4Lenin, Trotsky and Kamenev celebrating the second anniversary of the October Revolution (from October Revolution)
Image 5Soviet painting Vladimir Lenin, by Isaac Brodsky (from Russian Revolution)
Image 6T-80 tank on Red Square during the August Coup (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 7The New York Times headline from 9 November 1917 (from October Revolution)
Image 8Changes in national boundaries after the end of the Cold War (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 9Mikhail Gorbachev in one-to-one discussions with US President Ronald Reagan (left), 1985 (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 10Bolshevik (1920) by Boris Kustodiev (from October Revolution)
Image 11Five 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 12Stalin 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 13"Pogrom in the Winter Palace" by Ivan Vladimirov (from October Revolution)
Image 14The Russian famine of 1921–22 killed an estimated 5 million people.
(from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 15Russian troops in trenches awaiting a German attack (from Russian Revolution)
Image 16The Pan-European Picnic took place in August 1989 on the Hungarian-Austrian border. (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 17Meeting before the Russian wire entanglements (from Russian Revolution)
Image 18Lenin, Trotsky, and Kamenev celebrating the second anniversary of the October Revolution (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 19The Battle of Stalingrad, considered by many historians as a decisive turning point of World War II (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 20Nikolai Podgorny visiting Tampere, Finland on 16 October 1969 (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 21A revolutionary meeting of Russian soldiers in March 1917 in Dalkarby of Jomala, Åland (from Russian Revolution)
Image 22A detachment of Red Guard sailors who dissolved the Constituent Assembly (from October Revolution)
Image 23The elections to the Constituent Assembly took place in November 1917. The Bolsheviks won 24% of the vote. (from October Revolution)
Image 24European theatre of the Russian Civil War in 1918 (from October Revolution)
Image 25A scene from the July Days. The army has just opened fire on street protesters. (from October Revolution)
Image 26Provisional Government's volunteer soldiers secure Petrograd's Palace Square with the Austin Armoured Car, summer 1917. (from Russian Revolution)
Image 27Internally displaced Azerbaijanis from Nagorno-Karabakh, 1993 (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 28On 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 29Map 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 30Red Guard unit of the Vulkan factory in Petrograd, October 1917 (from October Revolution)
Image 31The 2nd Moscow Women Death Battalion protecting the Winter Palace as the last guards of the stronghold (from Russian Revolution)
Image 32Petrograd Milrevcom proclamation about the deposing of the Russian Provisional Government (from October Revolution)
Image 33Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (left) with US President John F. Kennedy in Vienna, 3 June 1961 (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 34Forward gun of Aurora that fired the signal shot (from October Revolution)
Image 35Russian Civil War in the European part of Russia (from History of the Soviet Union)
Image 36Soviet 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 37A poster depicting the effect of the Revolution on the life of a peasant, 1920. From the collections of RGASPI (from Russian Revolution)
Image 38Country 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 39A detachment of Red Guard sailors who dissolved the Constituent Assembly (from Russian Revolution)
Image 40Revolutionaries attacking the tsarist police in the early days of the February Revolution (from Russian Revolution)
Image 41Residents 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 42American, British, and Japanese Troops parade through Vladivostok in armed support to the White Army. (from Russian Revolution)
Image 43Soldiers marching in Petrograd, March 1917 (from Russian Revolution)
Image 44Murder of the Romanov family, Le Petit Journal (from Russian Revolution)
Image 45Cruiser Aurora (from October Revolution)
Image 46Revolutionaries protesting in February 1917 (from Russian Revolution)
Image 47Anniversary of October Revolution in Riga, Soviet Union in 1988 (from October Revolution)
Image 48Russian troops meeting German troops in No Man's Land (from Russian Revolution)

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Selected anniversaries for October

USSR Constitution Day - 7 October - arguably the largest celebration of the year. Most of the traditions that were originally associated with Christmas in Russia (Father Frost, a decorated fir-tree) moved to New Year's Eve after the Revolution and are associated with New Year's Eve to this day.

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More Did you know (auto generated)

... that Nicolae Moromete, who tortured prisoners of the Romanian communist regime in the 1950s, fought the Soviet Union in World War II?
... that in the 1917 Moscow District Duma elections, the Bolshevik Party won 97 percent of the votes of the soldiers at the heavy artillery workshops?
... 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 Polish prisoners of war in World War II were held not only by Nazi Germany but also by the Soviet Union?
... that Panas Saksahansky's production of Othello served as the basis for later performances in Ukraine and throughout the Soviet Union?
... that Wu Zhong was recognized as the youngest general in the Chinese People's Liberation Army after the first holder was stripped of the title following his emigration to the Soviet Union?

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This is a list of recognized content, updated weekly by JL-Bot (talk · contribs) (typically on Saturdays). There is no need to edit the list yourself. If an article is missing from the list, make sure it is tagged (e.g. {{WikiProject Soviet Union}}) or categorized correctly and wait for the next update. See WP:RECOG for configuration options.

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List of spacewalks and moonwalks 1965–1999

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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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