Union of Soviet Socialist Republics



The Soviet Union (Russian Советский Союз, romanized as Sovietsky Soyuz), officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR or U.S.S.R; Russian Сою́з Сове́тских Социалисти́ческих Респу́блик, romanized as Soyuz Sovietskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik) was a Communist country spanning the European and Asian continents, from the Baltic and Black seas in the West to the Okhotsk sea in the East.

Soviet Union has an area of 8,649,538 sq mi (22,402,200 km2) and a population of 293,047,571. The average density is caculated to be ~ 33.9 /sq mi (13.9/km2).

It consisted of 15 Soviet Socialist Republics (soyuznye respubliki) from 1956 until its end. Its government and economy was highly centralised.

History


After defeating the Provisional Government of Russia, the Bolsheviks unified the Russian, Byelorussian, Ukrainian, Bukhara and Transcaucasian SSRs.

After Lenin died, Stalin struggled to came to power and started a rapid industrialisation of the country.

After stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet Union went under a process of de-Stalinization under Nikita Khrushchev, and achieved many successes.

After Nikita Khrushchev was removed from office, due to a reform that introduced collective leadership, subsequent leaders (Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko) did not have much power, and when Mikhail Gorbachev acceded to the position, the Soviet Union has already fall into a crisis.

He tried to reform, but faced opposition from both the people and the party. Yet, he created the opportunity for the republics to proclaim independence, and the Soviet Union eventually falls under the leadership of Vladimir Ivashko.

The Lenin years
After taking over Russia and forming the USSR they began to spread communism, in to neighboring states. The Bolsheviks helped in the creation of the short lived Braverian-Munich SSR of 1919 and the long term take over of Mongolia by communists in 1924.

Both Bukhora (mostly in today's Uzbekistan) and Tanu Tuva (in Siberia directly nort west of Mongolia) became communist states under Bolshevik influence in the early 1920's as well. Bukhara soon joins the USSR.

The Stalin years
Field Marshal Joseph Stalin sign the Molotov - Ribbentrop Pact which led to occupation of Western Poland (now part of Belarus and Ukraine), the Baltic states, some Romanian districts and Finland’s the Karelian province. The locals either fled abroad, slavishly obeyed government orders or were moved to Gulag prison and/or labour concentration camps.

The USSR fought a bloody war with Nazi Germany after the Nazis invaded the USSR in 1941 The Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 as the Soviets and now successor states call it, killed about 25,000,000 Soviets, 3,000,000 Germans, 250,000 Romanians and 150,000 Hungarians by it's end. The USSR was so traumatised and fearful that it thought only the occupation of neighboring states like Poland and treating penitential threats like the USA was the only way could their stop a new invasion of the nation. The Baltic states were formally annexed to the USSR to Anglo-French disgust.

Tannu Tuva SSR joined the USSR in 1944.

Between 1945 and 1948, communist governments were set up as puppet and client regimes in Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany (Yugoslavia and Albania already got an interim communist government before the war's end). Stalin, who was clinically paranoid by this time, finally died in 1953.

Khrushchev era
Khrushchev took power and start simultaneous reforms. However, the big loss in war didn't seem to have been fully reverted, and economic poorness began to swallow the nation. Many projects worked well, but others were major flops. In the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, a spontaneous nationwide pro-democracy revolt had occurred and the Soviet Union invaded Hungary to re-assert its control.

Brezhnev era
In 1968, the USSR repressed the pro-democracy Prague Spring by organizing the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. Détente then occurred in several East-West summits between Brezhnev and America's president Nixon. A add-mixture of corruption, fear, incompetence, government dictates, wastefulness and in inefficacy gradually undermined the Soviet state from within after the mid 1970's.

Gorbachev era
By the early 1980s the declining Soviet economy got a big hit, thus affecting the whole block. In Poland, more than 60% of population lived in poverty, and inflation, measured by black-market rate of the U.S. dollar, was 1,500% in the period 1982 – 1987. Poland later became the cradle of the Revolutions of 1989.

Also see

 * Estonian oil shale industry
 * Baltic Way
 * Narva Power Plants
 * Singing Revolution
 * The "Baltic Chain" demonstration on August 23, 1989
 * Russia
 * Life under communism
 * FK Panerys Vilnius

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