UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS
Coat of arms of the Soviet Union 1
The flag of the Soviet Union The
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (
USSR ), commonly known as the
Soviet Union , was a
transcontinental country that spanned much of
Eurasia from 1922 until
it dissolved in 1991. During its existence, it was the
largest country by area , extending across
eleven time zones and sharing
borders with twelve countries , and the
third-most populous country . An overall successor to the
Russian Empire , it was nominally organized as a
federal union of
national republics , the largest and most populous of which was the
Russian SFSR . In practice,
its government and
economy were
highly centralized . As a
one-party state governed by the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), it was a flagship
communist state . 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 socialist state . The revolution was not accepted by all within the Russian Republic , resulting 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, Joseph Stalin came to power, inaugurating rapid industrialization and forced collectivization that led to significant economic growth but contributed to a famine between 1930 and 1933 that killed millions. The Soviet forced labour camp system of the Gulag was expanded. During the late 1930s, Stalin's government conducted the Great Purge to remove opponents, resulting in mass death, imprisonment, and deportation. In 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a nonaggression pact , but 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 , suffering an estimated 27 million casualties , which accounted for most Allied losses. In the aftermath of the war , the Soviet Union consolidated the territory occupied by the Red Army , forming satellite states , and undertook rapid economic development which cemented its status as a superpower .
Geopolitical tensions with the United States 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, the Warsaw Pact , in 1955. Neither side 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 Nikita Khrushchev , which saw reversals and rejections of Stalinist policies. This campaign caused tensions with Communist China . During the 1950s, the Soviet Union expanded its efforts in space exploration and took a 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 . In 1985, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev , sought to reform the country through his policies of glasnost perestroika overthrew their Soviet-backed regimes , and nationalist and separatist movements erupted across the Soviet Union. In 1991, amid efforts to preserve the country as a renewed federation , an attempted coup against Gorbachev by hardline communists prompted the largest republics—Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus—to secede. On 26 December, Gorbachev officially recognized the dissolution of the Soviet Union . Boris Yeltsin , the leader of the Russian SFSR , 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 Soviet Union 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. (
Full article... )
Entries here consist of Good and Featured articles, which meet a core set of high editorial standards. Left to right, top to bottom:
Memorial to the deportation in
Eupatoria ;
candle-lighting ceremony in
Kyiv ;
memorial rally in
Taras Shevchenko Park ;
cattlecar similar to the type used in the deportation;
maps comparing the demographics of
Crimea in 1939 and 2001
The deportation of the Crimean Tatars Crimean Tatar : Qırımtatar halqınıñ sürgünligi , Cyrillic : Къырымтатар халкъынынъ сюргюнлиги) or the Sürgünlik ethnic cleansing and the cultural genocide of at least 191,044 Crimean Tatars that was carried out by Soviet Union authorities from 18 to 20 May 1944, supervised by Lavrentiy Beria , chief of Soviet state security and the secret police , and ordered by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin . Within those three days, the NKVD used cattle trains to deport the Crimean Tatars, even Soviet Communist Party members and Red Army members, from Crimea to the Uzbek SSR , several thousand kilometres away. They were one of several ethnicities that were subjected to Stalin's policy of population transfer in the Soviet Union .
Officially, the Soviet government presented the deportation as a policy of collective punishment , based on its claim that some Crimean Tatars collaborated with Nazi Germany in World War II, despite the fact that the 20,000 who collaborated with the Axis powers were half the 40,000 who served in the Soviet Red Army. Several modern scholars believe rather that the government deported them as a part of its plan to gain access to the Dardanelles and acquire territory in Turkey , where the Turkic ethnic kin of the Tatars lived, or remove minorities from the Soviet Union's border regions. By the end of the deportation, not a single Crimean Tatar lived in Crimea, and 80,000 houses and 360,000 acres of land were left abandoned. Nearly 8,000 Crimean Tatars died during the deportation, and tens of thousands subsequently perished due to the harsh living conditions in which they were forced to live during their exile. After the deportation, the Soviet government launched an intense detatarization campaign in an attempt to erase the remaining traces of Crimean Tatar existence. (Full article...
A shiny ball with four sticks
The Soviet Union's Sputnik 1 (replica pictured) was the first artificial satellite to be put into the Earth 's orbit, an event that began the Space Race .
“
Complete equality of rights for all nations; the right of nations to self-determination; the unity of the workers of all nations—such is the national program that Marxism, the experience of the whole world, and the experience of Russia, teach the workers.
”
Pavel Dmitrievich Turchaninov (‹The template Lang-rus considered for deletion .› Russian: Па́вел Дми́триевич Турчани́нов IPA: [ˈpavʲɪl ˈdmʲitrʲɪjɪvʲɪtɕ tʊrtɕɪˈnʲinəf] Lev Chernyi ‹The template Lang-rus considered for deletion .› Russian: Лев Чёрный IPA: [ˈlʲef ˈtɕɵrnɨj] ⓘ Russian individualist anarchist . Having joined the anarchist movement during the Russian Revolution of 1905 , during which he developed his individualist theory of "associational anarchism", Chernyi was arrested and exiled to Siberia for his revolutionary activities. After several escape attempts, one of which resulted in mutinous exiles capturing Turukhansk , he managed to flee to Paris , where he stayed until the Russian Revolution of 1917 . After returning to Russia, he acted as secretary for the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups and organised the Black Guards , the federation's armed wing. As political repression against anarchists intensified after the Bolsheviks took power, Chernyi joined an underground anarchist group, which bombed a Russian Communist Party meeting. In 1921, Chernyi and Fanya Baron were arrested on charges of counterfeiting and were executed by shooting by the Cheka . (Full article...
The following are images from various Soviet Union-related articles on Wikipedia.
Image 1 Petrograd
Milrevcom proclamation about the deposing of the
Russian Provisional Government (from
October Revolution )
Image 2 A scene from the July Days. The army has just opened fire on street protesters. (from
October Revolution )
Image 3 Russian troops in trenches awaiting a German attack (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 4 Soviet leader
Nikita Khrushchev (left) with US President
John F. Kennedy in Vienna, 3 June 1961 (from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 5 Russian troops meeting German troops in No Man's Land (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 6 "Pogrom in the Winter Palace" by
Ivan Vladimirov (from
October Revolution )
Image 7 American, British, and Japanese Troops parade through Vladivostok in armed support to the White Army. (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 8 Soldiers marching in
Petrograd , March 1917 (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 9 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
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 10 Changes in national boundaries after the end of the Cold War (from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 11 European theatre of the
Russian Civil War in 1918 (from
October Revolution )
Image 12 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
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 13 The
Russian famine of 1921–22 killed an estimated 5 million people.
(from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 14 Revolutionaries protesting in February 1917 (from
Russian Revolution )
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 Lenin ,
Trotsky and
Kamenev celebrating the second anniversary of the October Revolution (from
October Revolution )
Image 17 Provisional Government 's volunteer soldiers secure Petrograd's
Palace Square with the
Austin Armoured Car , summer 1917. (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 18 Red Guard unit of the Vulkan factory in Petrograd, October 1917 (from
October Revolution )
Image 19 The 2nd Moscow Women Death Battalion protecting the Winter Palace as the last guards of the stronghold (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 20 Map 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 km
2 ) (from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 22 Lenin ,
Trotsky , and
Kamenev celebrating the second anniversary of the
October Revolution (from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 23 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
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 24 Soviet 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 26 Revolutionaries attacking the tsarist police in the early days of the February Revolution (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 27 A revolutionary meeting of Russian soldiers in March 1917 in Dalkarby of
Jomala ,
Åland (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 29 The
Pan-European Picnic took place in August 1989 on the Hungarian-Austrian border. (from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 30 Anniversary of October Revolution in
Riga , Soviet Union in 1988 (from
October Revolution )
Image 31 Mikhail Gorbachev in one-to-one discussions with US President
Ronald Reagan (
left ), 1985 (from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 32 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
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 33 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 35 The New York Times headline from 9 November 1917 (from
October Revolution )
Image 36 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
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 37 Cruiser
Aurora (from
October Revolution )
Image 38 Bolshevik (1920) by
Boris Kustodiev (from
October Revolution )
Image 39 The
Battle of Stalingrad , considered by many historians as a decisive turning point of World War II (from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 41 Murder of the Romanov family,
Le Petit Journal (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 43 Meeting before the Russian wire entanglements (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 44 Forward gun of
Aurora that fired the signal shot (from
October Revolution )
Image 45 Russian Civil War in the European part of Russia (from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 46 Internally displaced Azerbaijanis from
Nagorno-Karabakh , 1993 (from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 47 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 )
Selected anniversaries for April
(auto generated)
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.
2020-09-16 165855 Soviet submarine B-515
Alexei Leonov
Field Marshall 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 Marshall 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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