Soviet Union

The Soviet Union – officially called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ( USSR ) – was a Marxist-Leninist federal state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991. ^[1]

The USSR was born as a union of four Soviet socialist republics, formed after the October Revolution of 1917 , and grew to 15 by 1956 .

The geographical boundaries of the Soviet Union varied over time, but after World War II , from 1945 until the dissolution, the boundaries corresponded roughly to those of defunct Imperial Russia, with the notable exclusions of Poland , most of Finland , and Alaska .

It was often improperly referred to as Russia , as its largest and most dominant constituent state. From 1945 to 1991, in the period known as the Cold War , the Soviet Union and the United States were the two world superpowers that dominated the global agenda of economic policy, foreign affairs, military operations, cultural exchange, scientific progress including the initiation of space exploration, and sports (including the Olympic Games ).

Beyond the errors that led to its disappearance, this country played an essential role in the defeat of fascism and in the advancement of humanity towards new, more just and supportive forms of social organization.

Summary

[ disguise ]

• 1 History
  • 1 The Revolution and the founding of the Soviet state
  • 2 Unification of the Soviet republics
  • 3 Stalin’s Government
  • 4 The USSR and the Second World War
  • 5 Governments after Stalin
  • 6 Gorbachev’s reforms and the dissolution of the USSR
• 2 Geography
• 3 Economy
• 4 Demographics
• 5 Culture
• 6 Sources

History

The Soviet Union was established in December 1922 as the Union of the Soviet Republics of Russia (known as Bolshevik Russia), Ukraine , Belarus and Transcaucasia governed, the first three, by Bolshevik parties and the last by the Menshevik .

The Revolution and the founding of the Soviet state

First flag of the Soviet Union , it was created in 1923 and remained until 1953

The Great October Revolution was one of the most relevant and transcendental events of the 20th century , it was a true revolution that shook the world, where the brilliant leading role of Lenin and his Marxist conception that gave rise to the Bolshevik Party stood out .

Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov Lenin

The popular uprising in Petrograd culminated in the overthrow of the imperial government in March 1917.

To ensure the rights of the working class, workers’ assemblies, known as Soviets , were born throughout the country. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, pressed for a socialist revolution both in these assemblies and in the streets, overthrowing the Provisional Government on November 7 , October 25 according to the Julian Calendar , 1917 and handing power to the soviets of workers, soldiers and peasants.

Only after the long and bloody Russian Civil War of 1918 – 1921 , during which the first Soviet Constitution of 1918 was approved, did the new Soviet power take hold.

Unification of the Soviet republics

On December 29 , 1922, a conference of plenipotentiary delegations from Russia, Transcaucasia, Ukraine and Belarus approved the Treaty of the Creation of the USSR and the Declaration of the Creation of the USSR, forming the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

These two documents were confirmed by the first Soviet Congress of the USSR and signed by the heads of the delegations Mikhail Kalinin , Mikha Tskhakaya , Mikhail Frunze and Grigory Petrovsky , and Aleksandr Chervyakov respectively on December 30 , 1922. On February 1 , 1924 The USSR was recognized by the first world power of the time, the British Empire.

Stalin’s government

Joseph Stalin

Lenin’s untimely death in January 1924 sparked a bitter struggle for power. The main antagonists were Trotsky and Joseph Stalin , then general secretary of the party, who proclaimed themselves legitimate heirs of Lenin. Thanks to his control over the party apparatus, Stalin managed to obtain the support of the majority of party members and thus consolidate his power. In November 1927, after an internal referendum, the party completely repudiated the political ideas of Trotsky, who was expelled from it and had to go into exile in Alma Atá (present-day Almaty, in Kazakhstan). Two years later, Trotsky was banished from the USSR. There were rumors of a secret alliance between Trotsky and the German and Japanese governments that offered them some Soviet territories to help him assume power in the rest of Russia. It is possible that it was the fascists who spread these rumors. ^[2] In 1940 he was murdered in Mexico at the hands of a Soviet agent.

In 1929, Stalin was recognized as the top leader of the party and state. From that moment on he began the series of purges that would characterize the years of his mandate, and that first affected his former allies during the struggle with Trotsky. These leaders, especially Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin and Alexei Ivanovich Rykov, were expelled from the highest organs of the party.

In foreign policy, the Molotov-Ribentrop pact: On August 23 , 1939 , the Soviet Union and Germany signed a non-aggression pact in Moscow , in which, in addition, in a secret additional protocol: that it was territorial and political reorganization of the areas belonging to the Polish state, the Soviet and German spheres of influence are limited approximately to the line of the Narev, Vistula and San rivers. ^[3] The NSDAP prepared to negotiate over Western Ukraine with the Polish government but not with the Soviets. Western Ukraine is situated entirely within the Soviet sphere of influence as the protocol defined it. General Franz Halder wrote in his entry that the fascists discussed the formation of an independent state in western Ukraine. The Soviets would anticipate a negotiated settlement that would leave a remnant Polish state between Germany and the Soviet boundary. Most of western Poland would have continued as part of reduced Poland. ^[4]

“I think that the imperialist plans to launch Hitler against the USSR would never have justified Hitler’s pact with Stalin, it was very harsh. The communist parties, which were characterized by discipline, were all forced to defend the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact bleed politically”.

Fidel Castro

The USSR and World War II

Once the Second World War began , however, and Hitler considering that the fall of England was imminent, he ordered an attack on the Soviet Union, making the pact a dead letter. On December 18 , 1940 , the German command decided that the invasion of the USSR ( Operation Barbarossa ) would take place in April 1941 , but it could only be carried out on June 22 of that year, when the attack on Soviet territory began with more than 3,000,000 German soldiers. The invasion took Stalin by complete surprise even though he had sufficient background through various sources of his own intelligence (such as Soviet agent Richard Sorge) that it was imminent. Since the beginning of the invasion, the war was called the Great Patriotic War or Great Patriotic War by the Soviet people .

Initially German forces advanced rapidly across the western plains of the USSR, causing immense casualties in human and material resources to the Red Army . However, the Soviet resistance frustrated the attempts to take Leningrad and Moscow, the latter in November-December 1941. The non-occupied part of the country was transformed into a continuous production zone to ensure resistance and victory, while in the areas occupied by the Nazis the guerrilla resistance was burning.

The Red Army stopped the Nazi offensive at the Battle of Stalingrad , from late 1942 to early

Red Army parade following the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany .

of 1943 , to then definitively damage it in the Battle of Kursk , being the major decisive point, and advanced through Eastern and Central Europe to Berlin until the taking of Berlin and the unconditional surrender of Germany on May 8, 1945. ^[5]

Later, the USSR was a decisive part in the defeat of militarist Japan and the liberation of northern China and the Korean peninsula. Although devastated by the war, the USSR emerged from the conflict as a recognized superpower and enormous prestige, having been the country that withstood the attack of 80% of the German forces and their allies, suffering more than 27 million casualties, among civilians and military.

During the immediate postwar period, the Soviet Union first rebuilt and then expanded its economy. The Soviet Union helped post-war reconstruction in the countries of Eastern Europe , founded the Warsaw Pact in 1955 , later the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, helped the nascent People’s China economically and saw its influence grow elsewhere. of the world. Meanwhile, Cold War imperialist policy cast the Soviet Union’s wartime allies, the United Kingdom and the United States, as enemies.

Post-Stalin governments

Nikita Khrushchev

Joseph Stalin died on March 5 , 1953 . After his death, his successor, Nikita Khrushchev , presented to the plenary session of the 20th congress of the Communist Party in 1956 , a report with the political errors and crimes committed by Stalin, lamenting his cult of personality and initiating a destalinization campaign.

The Soviet Union unleashed enormous scientific and technological potential, launching the first artificial satellite Sputnik 1 , the first living being to travel into space is Laika, and later, the first human being to be in Earth’s orbit, Yuri Gagarin .

Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman to fly in space aboard Vostok 6 on June 16 , 1963 , and Alexei Leonov became the first person to walk in space on March 18 , 1965 . Khrushchev retired in 1964 . The enormous effort made to achieve nuclear parity with the United States contributed to bleeding the Soviet economy and, together with other errors, caused industry and agriculture to stagnate.

After Khrushchev, there followed another period of rule by the Committee or collective command that lasted until Leonid Brezhnev established himself in the early 1970s as the preeminent figure in Soviet political life.

In the field of sports, it became the first world power, the Soviet Union organized the 1980 Olympic Games , based in Moscow . There was a boycott of the event by the United States : within the framework of the Cold War and in protest at the entry of Soviet troops into Afghanistan , the Americans decided not to attend the Olympic Games, at the same time trying to persuade their allies to that they did not attend either. In total, 65 countries abstained from participating, mainly due to American pressure.

Gorbachev’s reforms and the dissolution of the USSR

Gorbachev with Reagan signing the INF Treaty, in Washington DC , in 1987 .

After the death of Leonid Brezhnev and after the quick succession of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko , Mikhail Gorbachev was appointed leader of the USSR. Gorbachev began to implement significant changes in the economy, Perestroika and Glasnost policy, unleashing opportunist forces that with the encouragement of the West worked to disintegrate the USSR and the return of its members – especially Russia – to capitalism. The distancing of the Communist Party and its leadership from the workers favored this process.

The movement that definitively brought down the USSR came from Russia, the nation that had built the tsarist empire, predecessor of the Soviet state. In May 1990 , Boris Yeltsin , who had been expelled from the CPSU in 1987 , was elected president of the Russian Parliament. From that position of power, Yeltsin promoted measures that precipitated the end of the Soviet Union.

Powerless and abandoned by almost everyone, Gorbachev resigned as President of the USSR on December 25 , 1991 . The Soviet red flag was lowered in the Moscow Kremlin , the Russian flag replaced it.

Russia took over from the USSR on the international scene: the embassies, the permanent seat on the Security Council and control of Soviet nuclear weapons. The end of the Cold War was announced, but the United States took the opportunity to impose its hegemony in a unipolar world.

Geography

The Soviet Union occupied the eastern portion of the European continent and the northern portion of the Asian continent. Most of the country lay north of 50° north latitude and covered a total area of ​​approximately 22,402,200 square kilometers. Due to the large size of the state, the climate varied greatly, from subtropical and continental to subarctic and polar. 11% of the land was arable, 16% was grassland and pasture, 41% forest, and 32% was declared “other” (including tundra).

The Soviet Union measured about 10,000 kilometers (6,200 mi) from Kaliningrad , in the west, to Ratmanova Island ( Diomedes Islands ), in the Bering Strait , roughly equivalent to the distance from Edinburgh , Scotland , east of Nome , Alaska. From the tip of the Taimir Peninsula in the Arctic Ocean to the Central Asian town of Kushka near the Afghan border, there are almost 5,000 kilometers of terrain, much of it rugged and inhospitable. The entire width of the continental United States would fall between the extreme northern and southern borders of the Soviet Union.

Economy

Before its dissolution, the Soviet Union was the second most powerful economy in the world, after the United States. ^[6] The government established its economic priorities through centralized economics, a system under which administrative decisions, rather than the market, determine resource allocation and prices.

After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the country grew from a largely underdeveloped peasant society with minimal industry to the second largest industrial power in the world. According to Soviet statistics, the country’s industrial production in the world grew from 5.5% to 20% between 1913 and 1980 .

The Bolsheviks began a program of collectivization of Soviet agriculture to increase food production. The agronomicist Pavel Pantelimonovich Luk’ianenko bred a crop that was called Bezostaia-1 , a product that resents many temporary and diseased conditions. It was planted in large areas: at least 13 million hectares by the 1960s and 18 million by 1972. ^[7] By 1976 the average caloric consumption of the population was 3,330. ^[8] The AIC alleged in 1983 that the Soviets consumed an amount of food identical to that of Americans, although the Soviet diet was perhaps more nutritious. He set the caloric intake to 3,280 daily. ^[9]

Demography

The Soviet Union was one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world, with more than 150 clear ethnicities within its borders. The total population was estimated at 293 million inhabitants in 1991, having been the third most populous country in the world after China and India for decades.

In the last years of the Soviet Union, the ethnicities of the country were: Russians (50.78%), followed by Ukrainians (15.48%), Uzbeks (5.84%). Other ethnic groups include Armenians, Belarusians, Georgians, Germans, Ossetians, Romanians, Moldovans, Tajiks, Greeks, Hungarians, Poles, Gypsies, Lithuanians, Bulgarians, Latvians, Turks, Tatars, Bashkirs, Chinese, Chuvash, Jews, Kazakhs, Azerbaijanis, Caucasian peoples, Uralic peoples, Mongols, Tuvans, Semitic peoples, Yakuts, Ketos, Koreans, Cubans, only 1.6% of the population does not come from Russia. Mainly because of differences in birth rates between Soviet nationalities, the proportion of the Russian population was steadily declining in the postwar period. ^[10]

Culture

Soviet culture went through several stages during the 70 years of its existence. During the first eleven years of the Revolution ( 1918 – 1929 ), there was wide freedom and artists experimented with several different styles in an effort to find a distinctive Soviet artistic style. Lenin wanted art to be accessible to the Russian people.

The government encouraged a variety of trends. In art and literature, numerous schools, some traditional and others radically experimental, proliferated. The writers Maxim Gorky and Vladimir Mayakovsky were active during this period. The cinema received support from the State; Many of cinematographer Sergei Eisenstein ‘s best works date from this period.

Later, during the era of Joseph Stalin, Soviet culture was characterized by government support for socialist realism, with other tendencies seriously repressed, with rare exceptions (for example the works of Mikhail Bulgakov ).

In the 1950s and 1960s greater experimentation in art forms became permitted again. Many protagonists of the author Yuri Trifonov ‘s novels referred to problems of everyday life. The architecture focused primarily on functional design in contrast to the highly ornate style of the Stalin era.

The major forums for public dispute, criticism and the formation of public opinion were the media, specialized newspapers and conferences. The media was the major forum for opposing opinions with Pravada and Izvestia varying more freely as social critics than the weekly newspapers. The Soviet press abounded with public disputes on many subjects. Only the Communist Party as an institution, the existence of the militia, socialism as a system and communism, the idea of ​​unity between the Party and the people and the highest political leaders as people were prohibited subjects in the press.