What was the Soviet Union? Rise and fall of the USSR

The Soviet Union, or USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), was a communist state that covered about a sixth of the world's land, from Eastern Europe to the Pacific, between 1922 and 1991. It was a federation of 15 republics on paper and a one-party dictatorship in practice, ruled by the Communist Party from Moscow. It was the United States' rival in the Cold War, and it broke apart into 15 independent countries in December 1991.

In short

• It was born from the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, founded as a union in 1922, and run as a one-party state with a planned economy.
• Under Stalin it industrialized at enormous human cost, then bore the heaviest losses of World War II and emerged a nuclear superpower.
• It collapsed in 1991 when a stagnant economy, Gorbachev's reforms and the republics' demands for independence came together.

How did the Soviet Union begin?

In 1917, in the middle of World War I, Russia's tsar was overthrown in February, and in October the Bolsheviks, a Marxist party led by Vladimir Lenin, seized power in Petrograd. A civil war followed, between the Bolsheviks' Red Army and an array of opponents, the Whites, backed at times by foreign troops. By 1921 the Bolsheviks had largely won.

On 30 December 1922, the Bolshevik-ruled republics of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the Transcaucasus signed a treaty forming the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. "Soviet" means council, after the workers' councils of 1917. The new state's founding idea was communism: a society without private ownership of land and industry, to be reached through a party that ruled in the workers' name. In practice the party allowed no rivals, and its top body, the Politburo, made the decisions.

What was life like under Stalin?

Lenin died in January 1924, and by the end of the 1920s Joseph Stalin had outmaneuvered his rivals to rule alone. He launched Five-Year Plans to turn a peasant country into an industrial one, setting targets for steel, coal and machinery from the center. Factories and cities grew at great speed.

The countryside paid. From 1929 the state forced peasants into collective farms and deported about 5 million people branded kulaks, better-off peasants, according to the Library of Congress. Grain was requisitioned even as harvests failed. The famine of 1930 to 1933 killed an estimated 5.7 to 8.7 million people across the Soviet Union. In Ukraine, where it is called the Holodomor, recent scholarship puts the dead at roughly 3.5 to 5 million, and Ukraine and 33 other UN member states have recognized it as a genocide; historians still disagree over how far it was aimed at Ukrainians as a nation.

In the Great Terror of 1936 to 1938, the secret police, the NKVD, arrested well over a million people. Its own records count 681,692 executions; scholars estimate 700,000 to 1.2 million deaths in all. Millions more passed through the Gulag, a network of forced-labor camps, over Stalin's rule.

What did the war and the Cold War do to it?

In August 1939 Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler and divided Eastern Europe with him, part of the road to World War 2. On 22 June 1941 Germany invaded anyway. The war on the Eastern Front was the largest and deadliest in history. The National WWII Museum estimates 24 million Soviet dead, soldiers and civilians, more than any other country. The Red Army reached Berlin in 1945.

The Soviet Union came out of the war a superpower, in control of Eastern Europe and soon armed with its own atomic bomb, tested in 1949. It installed communist governments from East Germany to Bulgaria and crushed revolts in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Its rivalry with the United States, the Cold War, ran for four decades, through the Berlin crises, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the space race, in which Sputnik in 1957 and Yuri Gagarin in 1961 were Soviet firsts.

After Stalin's death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev denounced his crimes in a secret speech in 1956 and released many prisoners. Under Leonid Brezhnev, from 1964 to 1982, the system settled into what later Soviet leaders called "stagnation": stable, repressive, and slowing. Growth faded, shortages were constant, and military spending took a large share of the economy. In December 1979 Soviet troops entered Afghanistan, a war that lasted until 1989.

Why did the Soviet Union collapse?

No single cause did it. Several pressures built at once, and the attempt to fix them released them.

Pressure	What happened
The economy	Central planning could build steel mills but not consumer goods or computers; growth slowed for decades; the fall in world oil prices in 1986 cut export income
Gorbachev's reforms	From 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev tried perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness); open criticism and partial market reforms weakened the party's control without fixing the economy
Nationalism	Given room to speak, the republics demanded autonomy, then independence, starting with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania
The empire in Eastern Europe	Gorbachev did not send tanks when Eastern Europe's communist governments fell in 1989, which showed that Moscow would no longer hold its sphere by force
Shocks	The [[what-happened-at-chernobyl

The end came fast. In January 1991 Soviet troops killed protesters in Lithuania and Latvia. On 19 August 1991, hard-line communists tried to seize power and stop a new treaty that would have loosened the union. The coup collapsed in three days, faced down in Moscow by crowds and by Boris Yeltsin, the elected president of the Russian republic. Republic after republic declared independence. On 1 December, Ukraine voted for independence by a large majority. On 8 December, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus agreed that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and formed a Commonwealth of Independent States. Gorbachev resigned on 25 December 1991, as the State Department's historians record, and the Soviet flag came down over the Kremlin that night.

Still argued

Historians weigh the causes differently. Some put the economy first: a planned system that could not innovate was bound to fail. Others argue the system could have limped on for decades and that Gorbachev's choices, to reform politics before the economy and to refuse to use force, brought it down. A third view stresses the republics' nationalism, since the union broke along their borders. Some also credit US pressure under Ronald Reagan, a claim others say overstates outside influence on an internal collapse.

What did the Soviet Union leave behind?

Fifteen countries took its place, from Russia, the largest, to Estonia, the smallest by population. The 1990s brought economic collapse, hyperinflation and falling life expectancy across much of the former union. The Soviet Union also left nuclear weapons in four of the new states, which Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine handed over to Russia by 1996, and borders that were drawn as internal lines and became international ones.

Its legacy is still argued in the countries that made it up, between memories of victory in 1945, space flight and security, and memories of famine, the Gulag and occupation. Telling these apart, and checking each against the archives that opened after 1991, is the kind of work described in how historians know the past.

Check yourself

• Without looking back: what were the Soviet Union's founding idea and its actual system of government, and how did they differ?
• Why did Stalin's collectivization lead to famine?
• Name three pressures that brought the Soviet Union down in 1991, and explain how Gorbachev's reforms affected each.

Sources

• The collapse of the Soviet Union — Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State
• Internal workings of the Soviet Union, Revelations from the Russian Archives — Library of Congress
• Research starters: worldwide deaths in World War II — The National WWII Museum
• Soviet famine of 1930–1933 — Wikipedia
• Great Purge — Wikipedia