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144-521: During the history of the Soviet Union , different doctrines and practices on ethnic distinctions within the Soviet population were applied at different times. Minority national cultures were never completely abolished. Instead the Soviet definition of national cultures required them to be " socialist by content and national by form", an approach that was used to promote the official aims and values of

288-515: A crisis with the United States over the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba . An agreement was made with the United States to remove nuclear missiles from both Cuba and Turkey , concluding the crisis. This event caused Khrushchev much embarrassment and loss of prestige, resulting in his removal from power in 1964. The history of the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982, referred to as

432-611: A community of all Russian citizens has met with opposition. In December 2010, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev pointed out the lack of an all-Russian unifying idea as a problem during a discussion in the State Council and proposed multiethnic patriotism as a replacement for the idea of "the Soviet people". History of the Soviet Union The history of the Soviet Union (USSR) (1922–91) began with

576-454: A complex shift in political, cultural, and economic life in the country. This included some openness and contact with other nations and new social and economic policies with more emphasis on commodity goods, allowing a dramatic rise in living standards while maintaining high levels of economic growth. Censorship was relaxed as well. Khrushchev's reforms in agriculture and administration, however, were generally unproductive. In 1962, he precipitated

720-932: A conference of plenipotentiary delegations from the Russian SFSR , the Transcaucasian SFSR , the Ukrainian SSR , and the Byelorussian SSR approved the Treaty on 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 Congress of Soviets of the USSR and signed by the heads of

864-481: A decisive Soviet victory, contributing to the unconditional surrender of Japan and the end of World War II. Soviet soldiers committed mass rapes in occupied territories, especially in Germany . The wartime rapes were followed by decades of silence. According to historian Antony Beevor , whose books were banned in 2015 from some Russian schools and colleges, NKVD (Soviet secret police) files have revealed that

1008-427: A disastrous effect on the military. The campaigns also affected many other categories of the society: intelligentsia , wealthy peasants —especially those lending out money or wealth ( kulaks )—and professionals. As the scope of the purge widened, the omnipresent suspicion of saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries began affecting civilian life. The purge reached its peak between September 1936 and August 1938 under

1152-536: A double team of interrogators. Bukharin's confession in particular became subject of much debate among Western observers, inspiring Koestler's acclaimed novel Darkness at Noon and philosophical essay by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror . His confessions were somewhat different from others in that while he pleaded guilty to "sum total of crimes", he denied knowledge when it came to specific crimes. Some astute observers noted that he would allow only what

1296-513: A fabricated confession by the interrogators. After the interrogations the files were submitted to NKVD troikas, which pronounced the verdicts in the absence of the accused. During a half-day-long session a troika went through several hundred cases, delivering either a death sentence or a sentence to the Gulag labor camps. Death sentences were immediately enforceable. The executions were carried out at night, either in prisons or in secluded areas run by

1440-407: A famine that caused between 3 and 10 million deaths. Coal production decreased from 27.5 million tons (1913) to 7 million tons (1920), while overall factory production also declined from 10,000 million roubles to 1,000 million roubles. According to the noted historian David Christian , the grain harvest was also slashed from 80.1 million tons (1913) to 46.5 million tons (1920). On 28 December 1922,

1584-651: A limited scale. Great Purge The Great Purge , or the Great Terror ( Russian : Большой террор , romanized :  Bol'shoy terror ), also known as the Year of '37 ( 37-й год , Tridtsat' sed'moy god ) and the Yezhovshchina ( Ежовщина [(j)ɪˈʐofɕːɪnə] , lit.   ' period of Yezhov ' ), was a political purge in the Soviet Union that took place from 1936 to 1938. It sought to consolidate Joseph Stalin 's power over

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1728-789: A massive scale as victims of the repression. In addition to ordinary citizens, prominent members of the Communist Party were also targets for the purges. The purge of the Party was accompanied by the purge of the whole society. Soviet historians organize the Great Purge into three corresponding trials. The following events are used for the demarcation of the period: Between 1936 and 1938, three very large Moscow trials of former senior Communist Party leaders were held, in which they were accused of conspiring with fascist and capitalist powers to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders, dismember

1872-481: A military alliance with Britain and France against Germany failed, the Soviet Union made a dramatic shift towards Nazi Germany. Almost a year after Britain and France had concluded the Munich Agreement with Germany, the Soviet Union made agreements with Germany as well, both militarily and economically during extensive talks . Unlike the case of Britain and France, the Soviet Union's agreement with Germany,

2016-681: A military alliance, the Warsaw Pact , in 1955, and an economic organization, Council for Mutual Economic Assistance or Comecon , a counterpart to the European Economic Community (EEC), from 1949 to 1991. Although nominally a "defensive" alliance, the Warsaw Pact's primary function was to safeguard the Soviet Union's hegemony over its Eastern European satellites, with the Pact's only direct military actions having been

2160-539: A new constitution that was praised by supporters around the world as the most democratic constitution imaginable, though there was some skepticism. American historian J. Arch Getty concludes: "Many who lauded Stalin's Soviet Union as the most democratic country on earth lived to regret their words. After all, the Soviet Constitution of 1936 was adopted on the eve of the Great Terror of the late 1930s;

2304-711: A number of assassination attempts on Bolshevik senior leaders and organized insurrections against the Soviet government. The federalization of Russia was promulgated in the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia in November, not including the detached borderlands. In December, the Bolsheviks signed an armistice with the Central Powers , though by February 1918, fighting had resumed. In March,

2448-483: A number of the Soviet Union's diaspora nationalities: the Finnish , Latvian , Estonian , Bulgarian , Afghan , Iranian , Greek , and Chinese . Of the operations against national minorities, it was the largest one, second only to the "Kulak Operation" in terms of the number of victims. According to Timothy Snyder , ethnic Poles constituted the largest group of victims in the Great Terror, comprising less than 0.5% of

2592-474: A prelude to fully developing socialism in the country, the Soviet government permitted some private enterprise to coexist alongside nationalized industry in the 1920s, and total food requisition in the countryside was replaced by a food tax. From its creation, the government in the Soviet Union was based on the one-party rule of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) . The stated purpose was to prevent

2736-711: A resolution in favour of the Bolshevik demand for the transfer of power to the Soviets. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin , pushed for communist revolution in the Soviets and on the streets, adopting the slogan of "All Power to the Soviets" and urging the overthrow of the Provisional Government. On 7 November 1917, Bolshevik Red Guards stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd, arresting

2880-458: A result, no further radical economic reforms were implemented during the Brezhnev era, leading to economic stagnation by the early-to-mid-1970s. By Brezhnev's death in 1982, Soviet economic growth had nearly come to a standstill. During this period, Brezhnev consolidated power, and by the early 1970s, he had established himself as the preeminent Soviet leader. The stabilization policy established

3024-692: A ruling gerontocracy , and political corruption became increasingly prevalent. Despite this, Brezhnev never launched any large-scale anti-corruption campaigns. The Soviet Union, thanks to the military buildup of the 1960s, solidified its status as a superpower during Brezhnev's rule. However, this era was also marked by the Era of Stagnation , a period characterized by economic, political, and social decline, which persisted under Brezhnev's successors, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko . The Brezhnev Era also witnessed significant international actions, including

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3168-735: A third short-lived leader, in 1985, the Soviets turned to the next generation and selected Mikhail Gorbachev . In addition to the failing economy, the prolonged war in Afghanistan led to increased public dissatisfaction with the Communist government. Also, the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 added motive force to Gorbachev's reforms. He made significant changes in the economy and party leadership, called perestroika . His policy of glasnost freed public access to information after decades of heavy government censorship. Gorbachev also moved to end

3312-526: A turning point in the war. After Stalingrad, Soviet forces drove through Eastern Europe to Berlin before Germany surrendered in 1945 . The German Army suffered 80% of its military deaths in the Eastern Front. Harry Hopkins , a close foreign policy advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt, spoke on 10 August 1943 of the USSR's decisive role in the war, saying that "While in Sicily the forces of Great Britain and

3456-426: Is debated by historians, but there is consensus that Kirov's death was the flashpoint at which Stalin decided to take action and begin the purges. Some later historians came to believe that Stalin arranged the murder, or at least that there was sufficient evidence to reach such a conclusion. Kirov was a staunch Stalin loyalist, but Stalin may have viewed him as a potential rival because of his emerging popularity among

3600-513: The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty , while simultaneously building up Soviet military might. In 1977, the third Soviet Constitution was unanimously adopted. One of the Soviet economy's key strengths during this period was its vast oil and gas reserves. The quadrupling of world oil prices during the 1973 oil crisis and another rise in the late 1970s made the energy sector the chief driver of the Soviet economy. This revenue

3744-617: The Bolshevik Initial Decrees , government documents signed by Vladimir Lenin. One of the most prominent breakthroughs was the GOELRO plan , which envisioned a major restructuring of the Soviet economy based on total electrification of Russia. The plan became the prototype for subsequent Five-Year Plans and was fulfilled by 1931. After the economic policy of ' War communism ' during the Russian Civil War, as

3888-562: The Central Committee and forced into exile. In 1928, Stalin introduced the first five-year plan for building a socialist economy . In place of the internationalism expressed by Lenin throughout the revolution, it aimed to build Socialism in One Country . In industry, the state assumed control over all existing enterprises and undertook an intensive program of industrialization . In agriculture , rather than adhering to

4032-556: The Communist Party of the Soviet Union and aimed at removing the remaining influence of Leon Trotsky within the Soviet Union. The term great purge was popularized by the historian Robert Conquest in his 1968 book The Great Terror , whose title was an allusion to the French Revolution 's Reign of Terror . The purges were largely conducted by the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), which functioned as

4176-653: The Empire of Japan in 1938 and 1939. However, in April 1941, the USSR signed the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact with Japan, which the Soviets would unilaterally break in 1945, recognizing the territorial integrity of Manchukuo , a Japanese puppet state . The pact ensured Japan would not enter the World War II against the USSR on the side of Germany later. On 1 September, Germany invaded Poland and on

4320-612: The Gulag labor camps . The NKVD targeted certain ethnic minorities such as the Volga Germans , and Soviet citizens of Polish origin, who were subjected to forced deportation and extreme repression. Throughout the purge, the NKVD sought to strengthen control over civilians through fear, and frequently used imprisonment, torture, violent interrogation, and executions during its mass operations . In 1938, Stalin reversed his stance on

4464-486: The Khrushchev Thaw . However, the subsequent era under Leonid Brezhnev , referred to as the Era of Stagnation , was marked by economic decline, political corruption, and a rigid gerontocracy . Despite efforts to maintain the Soviet Union's superpower status, the economy struggled due to its centralized nature, technological backwardness, and inefficiencies. The vast military expenditures and burdens of maintaining

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4608-491: The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (signed on 23 August 1939), included a secret protocol that paved the way for the Soviet invasion of Eastern European states and occupation of their territories . The pact made possible the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia , Bessarabia, northern Bukovina , and eastern Poland . In the far east, the Soviet military won several decisive victories during border clashes with

4752-921: The Russian Constituent Assembly and to continue fighting on the side of the Entente in World War I. At the same time, workers' councils , known in Russian as ' Soviets ', sprang up across the country, and the most influential of them, the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies , shared power with the Provisional Government. Membership of the Bolshevik party had risen from 24,000 members in February 1917 to 200,000 members by September 1917. 50,000 workers had passed

4896-609: The Russian Empire began with the 1825 Decembrist revolt . Although serfdom was abolished in 1861, it was done on terms unfavourable to the peasants and served to encourage revolutionaries. A parliament, the State Duma , was established in 1906 after the Russian Revolution of 1905 , but Emperor Nicholas II resisted attempts to move from absolute to a constitutional monarchy . Social unrest continued and

5040-516: The Russian SFSR convened a newly elected Congress of People's Deputies. Boris Yeltsin was elected its chairman. On 12 June 1990, the Congress declared Russia's sovereignty over its territory and proceeded to pass laws that attempted to supersede some of the Soviet laws. After a landslide victory of Sąjūdis in Lithuania, that country declared its independence restored on 11 March 1990, citing

5184-551: The Russian SFSR , and Joseph Stalin , of the Transcaucasian SFSR . In February 1924, the USSR was recognized by the United Kingdom. The same year, a Soviet Constitution was approved, legitimizing the December 1922 union. According to Archie Brown the constitution was never an accurate guide to political reality in the USSR. For example, the fact that the Party played the leading role in making and enforcing policy

5328-515: The Soviet–Afghan War beginning in 1979, which effectively ended the period of détente with the West. The long period of Brezhnev's rule culminated in his death on 10 November 1982. By this time, the Soviet Union had become increasingly stagnant, with an ageing leadership resistant to change and a deteriorating economy. Moreover, the Soviet Union's failure to modernize its economy, particularly in

5472-724: The Trial of the Twenty-One , is the most famous of the Soviet show trials, because of persons involved and the scope of charges which tied together all loose threads from earlier trials. Meant to be the culmination of previous trials, it included 21 defendants alleged to belong to the "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites", supposedly led by Nikolai Bukharin, the former chairman of the Communist International , former premier Alexei Rykov , Christian Rakovsky , Nikolai Krestinsky , and Genrikh Yagoda , recently disgraced head of

5616-504: The Tsarist regime , former members of political parties other than the communist party, etc.). They were to be executed or sent to Gulag prison camps extrajudicially, under the decisions of NKVD troikas. The following categories appear to have been on index-cards, catalogues of suspects assembled over the years by the NKVD and were systematically tracked down: "ex-kulaks" previously deported to " special settlements " in inhospitable parts of

5760-495: The interior ministry and secret police of the USSR. Starting in 1936, the NKVD under chief Genrikh Yagoda began the removal of the central party leadership, Old Bolsheviks , government officials, and regional party bosses . Soviet politicians who opposed or criticized Stalin were removed from office and imprisoned or executed by the NKVD. Eventually, the purges were expanded to the Red Army and military high command, which had

5904-667: The murder of the former emperor and his family , and the famine of 1921–1922 , which killed about five million people. Although Lenin had declared his support for the principle of self-determination , the party became centralized and the independent Soviet republics were subordinated to Soviet Russia. In March 1921, the Treaty of Riga was signed with the Republic of Poland , splitting territories in Belarus and Ukraine , and putting an end to Lenin's westward offensive against capitalism. In Estonia , Finland , Latvia , and Lithuania ,

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6048-706: The "commission" authorized by the Politburo and gave assurances that death sentences would not be carried out. After the trial, Stalin not only broke his promise to spare the defendants, he had most of their relatives arrested and shot. In May 1937, the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials , commonly known as the Dewey Commission, was set up in

6192-522: The "thoroughly democratic" elections to the first Supreme Soviet permitted only uncontested candidates and took place at the height of the savage violence in 1937. The civil rights, personal freedoms, and democratic forms promised in the Stalin constitution were trampled almost immediately and remained dead letters until long after Stalin's death." Stalin's Great Purge resulted in the detainment or execution of many ' Old Bolsheviks ' who had participated in

6336-399: The 'lead by example' policy advocated by Lenin, forced collectivization of farms was implemented all over the country. Famines ensued as a result, causing deaths estimated at three to seven million; surviving kulaks (wealthy or middle-class peasants) were persecuted, and many were sent to Gulags to do forced labor . Social upheaval continued in the mid-1930s. Despite the turmoil of

6480-458: The 17th the Soviet Union invaded Poland as well. On 6 October, Poland fell and part of the Soviet occupation zone was then handed over to Germany. On 10 October, the Soviet Union and Lithuania signed an agreement whereby the Soviet Union transferred Polish sovereignty over the Vilna region to Lithuania, and on 28 October the boundary between the Soviet occupation zone and the new territory of Lithuania

6624-577: The 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia to suppress the Prague Spring reforms. Brezhnev justified this and future interventions with the Brezhnev Doctrine , which stated that any threat to Soviet rule in a Warsaw Pact state was a threat to all Warsaw Pact states, thus justifying military intervention. Brezhnev presided over a period of détente with the West, leading to treaties on arms control such as SALT I , SALT II , and

6768-531: The Brezhnev Era, covers the period of Leonid Brezhnev 's rule of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). This period began with high economic growth and soaring prosperity but ended with a much weaker Soviet Union facing social, political, and economic stagnation. The average annual income stagnated because needed economic reforms were never fully carried out. Following the ousting of Nikita Khrushchev on 14 October 1964, Brezhnev replaced him as First Secretary , and Alexei Kosygin took over as Chairman of

6912-406: The Cold War. In 1988, the USSR abandoned its war in Afghanistan and began to withdraw its forces. In the following year, Gorbachev refused to interfere in the internal affairs of the Soviet satellite states , which paved the way for the Revolutions of 1989 . In particular, the standstill of the Soviet Union at the Pan-European Picnic in August 1989 then set a peaceful chain reaction in motion, at

7056-455: The Comecon supplied aid to the eventually victorious Chinese Communist Party , and its influence grew elsewhere in the world. Fearing its ambitions, the Soviet Union's wartime allies, the United Kingdom and the United States, became its enemies. In the ensuing Cold War, the two sides clashed indirectly in proxy wars . Stalin died on 5 March 1953. Without a mutually agreeable successor, the highest Communist Party officials initially opted to rule

7200-410: The Communist parties that ruled the satellite states, and they followed orders from the Kremlin. Historian Mark Kramer concludes: "The net outflow of resources from eastern Europe to the Soviet Union was approximately $ 15 billion to $ 20 billion in the first decade after World War II, an amount roughly equal to the total aid provided by the United States to western Europe under the Marshall Plan ." Later,

7344-433: The Council of Ministers. Anastas Mikoyan , and later Nikolai Podgorny , became Chairmen of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet . Alongside Andrei Kirilenko as organisational secretary, and Mikhail Suslov as chief ideologue, this group formed a reinvigorated collective leadership , which contrasted in form with the autocracy that characterized Khrushchev's rule. The collective leadership initially focused on stabilizing

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7488-447: The Eastern Bloc, further strained the Soviet economy. In the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev 's policies of Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (restructuring) aimed to revitalize the Soviet system but instead accelerated its unraveling. Nationalist movements gained momentum across the Soviet republics , and the control of the Communist Party weakened. The failed coup attempt in August 1991 against Gorbachev by hardline communists hastened

7632-412: The German invasion of 1941. For this reason, the USSR sought to cement its control of the region by transforming the Eastern European countries into satellite states, dependent upon and subservient to its leadership. As a result, Soviet military forces were used to suppress an anti-communist uprising in Hungary in 1956. In the late 1950s, a confrontation with China regarding the Soviet rapprochement with

7776-409: The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 starting what is known in Russia and some other post-Soviet states as the Great Patriotic War . The Red Army stopped the seemingly invincible German Army at the Battle of Moscow . The Battle of Stalingrad , which lasted from late 1942 to early 1943, dealt a severe blow to Germany from which they never fully recovered and became

7920-406: The Moscow Trials to be frame-ups." In the second trial, Karl Radek testified that there was a "third organization separate from the cadres which had passed through [Trotsky's] school," as well as "semi-Trotskyites, quarter-Trotskyites, one-eighth-Trotskyites, people who helped us, not knowing of the terrorist organization but sympathizing with us, people who from liberalism, from a Fronde against

8064-428: The NKVD was the largest of this kind. The Polish operation claimed the largest number of the NKVD victims: 143,810 arrests and 111,091 executions according to records. Snyder estimates that at least eighty-five thousand of them were ethnic Poles. The remainder were 'suspected' of being Polish, without further inquiry. Poles comprised 12.5% of those who were killed during the Great Terror, while comprising only 0.4% of

8208-447: The NKVD and located as a rule on the outskirts of major cities. The "Kulak Operation" was the largest single campaign of repression in 1937–38, with 669,929 people arrested and 376,202 executed, more than half the total of known executions. A series of mass operations of the NKVD was carried out from 1937 through 1938 targeting specific nationalities within the Soviet Union, on the order of Nikolai Yezhov . The Polish Operation of

8352-400: The NKVD. Although an Opposition Bloc led by Trotsky and with zinovievites really existed, Pierre Broué asserts that Bukharin was not involved. Differently from Broué, one of his former allies, Jules Humbert-Droz , said in his memoirs that Bukharin told him that he formed a secret bloc with Zinoviev and Kamenev in order to remove Stalin from leadership. The fact that Yagoda was one of

8496-457: The October Revolution. According to declassified Soviet archives, the NKVD arrested more than one and a half million people in 1937 and 1938, of whom 681,692 were shot. Over those two years, there were an average of over one thousand executions a day. Scholars estimate the total death toll for the Great Purge (1936–1938), including fatalities attributed to prison conditions, to be roughly 700,000-1.2 million. In 1939, after attempts to form

8640-456: The Party, gave us this help." By the "third organization," he meant the last remaining former opposition group called the Rightists , led by Bukharin, whom he implicated by saying: I feel guilty of one thing more: even after admitting my guilt and exposing the organisation, I stubbornly refused to give evidence about Bukharin. I knew that Bukharin's situation was just as hopeless as my own, because our guilt, if not juridically, then in essence,

8784-407: The Provisional Government leaders and Lenin declared that all power was now transferred to the Soviets. This event would later be officially known in Soviet bibliographies as the " Great October Socialist Revolution ". Bolshevik figures such as Anatoly Lunacharsky , Moisei Uritsky , and Dmitry Manuilsky agreed that Lenin's influence on the Bolshevik party was decisive but the October insurrection

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8928-414: The Reds were defeated, while the Red Army managed to occupy Armenia , Azerbaijan , and Georgia in the Caucasus . Additionally, the forced requisition of food by the Soviet government led to substantial resistance, of which the most notable was the Tambov Rebellion , ultimately put down by the Red Army. The civil war had a devastating impact on the economy. A black market emerged in Russia, despite

9072-426: The Soviet Union and calming Soviet society . They also sought to accelerate economic growth, which had slowed considerably during Khrushchev's final years in power. In 1965, Kosygin initiated several economic reforms aimed at decentralizing the Soviet economy. These reforms initially spurred economic growth, but hard-liners within the Party halted them, fearing that they would undermine the Party's prestige and power. As

9216-405: The Soviet Union and restore capitalism. These trials were highly publicized and extensively covered by the outside world, which was mesmerized by the spectacle of Lenin's closest associates confessing to most outrageous crimes and begging for death sentences: It is now known that the confessions were given only after great psychological pressure and torture had been applied to the defendants. From

9360-479: The Soviet Union jointly through a troika headed by Georgy Malenkov . This did not last, however, and Nikita Khrushchev eventually won the ensuing power struggle by the mid-1950s. In 1956, he denounced Joseph Stalin and proceeded to ease controls over the party and society. This was known as de-Stalinization . Moscow considered Eastern Europe to be a critically vital buffer zone for the forward defence of its western borders, in case of another major invasion such as

9504-417: The Soviet economy in the late 1920s, veteran Bolsheviks no longer thought necessary the "temporary" wartime dictatorship, which had passed from Lenin to Stalin. Stalin's opponents inside the Communist Party chided him as undemocratic and lax on bureaucratic corruption. This opposition to current leadership may have accumulated substantial support among the working class by attacking the privileges and luxuries

9648-452: The Soviet government desired to put Trotsky on trial during the purge, his exile prevented this. Trotsky survived the purge, though he would be assassinated in 1940 by the NKVD on the orders of Stalin. Following the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, a power vacuum opened in the Communist Party, the ruling party in the Soviet Union (USSR). Various established figures in Lenin's government attempted to succeed him. By 1928, Joseph Stalin,

9792-449: The Soviets ended their involvement in the war and signed a separate peace treaty, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk . After the defeat of the Germans in the war, Lenin sought the creation of formally independent Soviet republics in the territories that were being vacated by the German Army. A long and bloody civil war ensued between the Reds and the Whites , ending in 1921–1922 with the Reds' victory. It included foreign intervention ,

9936-399: The USSR constitution. On 7 April 1990, a law was passed allowing a republic to secede if more than two-thirds of its residents voted for it in a referendum. Many held their first free elections in the Soviet era for their own national legislatures in 1990. Many of these legislatures proceeded to produce legislation contradicting the Union laws in what was known as the ' War of Laws '. In 1989,

10080-468: The USSR through the Persian Corridor alone were sufficient, by US Army standards, to maintain sixty combat divisions in the line. During the immediate post-war period, the Soviet Union rebuilt and expanded its economy, while maintaining its strictly centralized control . It took effective control over most of the countries of Eastern Europe (except Yugoslavia and later Albania ), turning them into satellite states . The USSR bound its satellite states in

10224-427: The Union. However, by December all except Russia and Kazakhstan had formally declared independence. During this time, Yeltsin took over what remained of the Soviet government, including the Moscow Kremlin . The final blow was struck on 1 December when Ukraine, the second-most powerful republic, voted overwhelmingly for independence . Ukraine's secession ended any realistic chance of the country staying together even on

10368-508: The United States are being opposed by 2 German divisions, the Russian front is receiving attention of approximately 200 German divisions." Up to 34 million soldiers served in the Red Army during World War II, 8 million of which were non-Slavic minorities . The USSR suffered greatly in the war, losing around 20 million people (modern Russian sources put the number at 26.6 million). This includes 8.7 million military deaths. The majority of

10512-656: The United States by supporters of Trotsky, to establish the truth about the trials. The commission was headed by the noted American philosopher and educator John Dewey . Although the hearings were obviously conducted with a view to proving Trotsky's innocence, they brought to light evidence which established that some of the specific charges made at the trials could not be true. For example, Georgy Pyatakov testified that he had flown to Oslo in December 1935 to "receive terrorist instructions" from Trotsky. The Dewey Commission established that no such flight had taken place. Another defendant, Ivan Smirnov , confessed to taking part in

10656-688: The United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, chose to recognize Stalin's Communist government formally and negotiated a new trade agreement between the two countries. In September 1934, the country joined the League of Nations . After the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the USSR actively supported the Republican forces against the Nationalists , who were supported by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany . In December 1936, Stalin unveiled

10800-559: The United States: launching the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1 in 1957; a living dog named Laika in 1957; the first human being, Yuri Gagarin in 1961; the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963; Alexei Leonov , the first person to walk in space in 1965; the first soft landing on the Moon by spacecraft Luna 9 in 1966; and the first Moon rovers, Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2 . Khrushchev initiated ' The Thaw ',

10944-587: The West, and what Mao Zedong perceived as Khrushchev's revisionism , led to the Sino–Soviet split . This resulted in a break throughout the global Marxist–Leninist movement, with the governments in Albania , Cambodia , and Somalia choosing to ally with China. During this period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the USSR continued to realize scientific and technological exploits in the Space Race , rivaling

11088-410: The accounts of former OGPU officer Alexander Orlov and others, the methods used to extract the confessions are known: such tortures as repeated beatings, simulated drownings, making prisoners stand or go without sleep for days on end, and threats to arrest and execute the prisoners' families. For example, Kamenev's teenage son was arrested and charged with terrorism. After months of such interrogation,

11232-540: The accused is not essential. The confession of the accused is a medieval principle of jurisprudence" in a trial that was based solely on confessions. He finished his last plea with the words: [T]he monstrousness of my crime is immeasurable especially in the new stage of struggle of the U.S.S.R. May this trial be the last severe lesson, and may the great might of the U.S.S.R. become clear to all. Romain Rolland and others wrote to Stalin seeking clemency for Bukharin, but all

11376-471: The accused showed the speed at which the purges were consuming their own. It was now alleged that Bukharin and others sought to assassinate Lenin and Stalin from 1918, murder Maxim Gorky by poison, partition the USSR and hand its territories to Germany, Japan, and Great Britain, and other charges. Even previously sympathetic observers who had accepted the earlier trials found it more difficult to accept these new allegations as they became ever more absurd, and

11520-487: The assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934, at a time when he had already been in prison for a year. The Dewey Commission later published its findings in a 422-page book titled Not Guilty . Its conclusions asserted the innocence of all those condemned in the Moscow Trials. In its summary, the commission wrote Independent of extrinsic evidence, the Commission finds: The commission concluded: "We therefore find

11664-524: The basis of denunciations or because they were related to, were friends with or knew people already arrested. Engineers, peasants, railwaymen, and other types of workers were arrested during the "Kulak Operation" based on the fact that they worked for or near important strategic sites and factories where work accidents had occurred due to "frantic rhythms and plans". During this period the NKVD reopened these cases and relabeled them as "sabotage" or "wrecking." The Orthodox clergy , including active parishioners,

11808-642: The brunt of the war, Roosevelt's advisor Harry Hopkins felt that American aid to the Soviets would hasten the war's conclusion. Roughly 17.5 million tons of military equipment, vehicles, industrial supplies, and food were shipped from the Western Hemisphere to the USSR, 94% coming from the US. For comparison, a total of 22 million tons landed in Europe to supply American forces from January 1942 to May 1945. It has been estimated that American deliveries to

11952-440: The collapse of the Soviet Union, which formally dissolved on December 26, 1991, ending nearly seven decades of Soviet rule. The legacy of the Soviet Union is complex, leaving behind significant industrial achievements, military prowess, cultural influence, and an impact on global politics, but also a record of repression, economic inefficiencies, and the suppression of political and personal freedoms. Modern revolutionary activity in

12096-619: The conflict. The Soviet Union emerged as one of the world's two superpowers, leading the Eastern Bloc in opposition to the Western Bloc during the Cold War . This period saw the USSR engage in an arms race, the Space Race , and proxy wars around the globe. The post-Stalin leadership, particularly under Nikita Khrushchev , initiated a de-Stalinization process, leading to a period of liberalization and relative openness known as

12240-614: The country ( Siberia , the Urals , Kazakhstan, and the Far North ), former tsarist civil servants, former officers of the White Army , participants in peasant rebellions, members of the clergy, persons deprived of voting rights, former members of non-Bolshevik parties, ordinary criminals, like thieves, known to the police and various other "socially harmful elements". However, a large number of people were arrested at random in sweeps, on

12384-568: The country as threatened from within by fascist spies. From the October Revolution onward, Lenin had used repression against perceived and legitimate enemies of the Bolsheviks as a systematic method of instilling fear and facilitating control over the population in a campaign called the Red Terror . As the Russian Civil War drew to a close, this campaign was relaxed although the secret police did remain active. From 1924 to 1928,

12528-407: The defendants were driven to despair and exhaustion. Zinoviev and Kamenev demanded, as a condition for "confessing", a direct guarantee from the Politburo that their lives and that of their families and followers would be spared. This offer was accepted, but when they were taken to the alleged Politburo meeting, only Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov , and Yezhov were present. Stalin claimed that they were

12672-522: The delegations, Mikhail Kalinin , Mikhail Tskhakaya , Mikhail Frunze , Grigory Petrovsky , and Alexander Chervyakov , on 30 December 1922. The formal proclamation was made from the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. An intensive restructuring of the economy, industry, and politics of the country began in the early days of Soviet power in 1917. A large part of this was done according to

12816-634: The end of which the Eastern Bloc collapsed. With the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and with East and West Germany pursuing re-unification, the Iron Curtain between the West and Soviet-occupied regions came down. At the same time, the Soviet republics started legal moves towards potentially declaring sovereignty over their territories, citing the freedom to secede in Article 72 of

12960-534: The estimated number of "kulaks" and "criminals" in their districts. These individuals were to be arrested and executed, or sent to the gulag camps. The party chiefs complied and produced these lists within days, with figures which roughly corresponded to the individuals who were already under secret police surveillance. On 30 July 1937, the NKVD Order No. 00447 was issued, directed against "ex-kulaks" and other "anti-Soviet elements" (such as former officials of

13104-523: The field of computerization, further hindered its competitiveness with Western powers. Two developments dominated the decade that followed: the increasingly apparent crumbling of the Soviet Union's economic and political structures, and the patchwork attempts at reforms to reverse that process. Kenneth S. Deffeyes argued in Beyond Oil that the Reagan administration encouraged Saudi Arabia to lower

13248-412: The first three into fervent anti-communists eventually. To them, Bukharin's confession symbolized the depredations of communism, which not only destroyed its sons but also conscripted them in self-destruction and individual abnegation. On the first day of trial, Krestinsky caused a sensation when he repudiated his written confession and pleaded not guilty to all the charges. However, he changed his plea

13392-483: The human cost of the first five-year plan and the collectivization of agriculture . From 1930 onwards, the Party and police officials feared the "social disorder" caused by the upheavals of forced collectivization of peasants and the resulting famine of 1932–1933 , as well as the massive and uncontrolled migration of millions of peasants into cities. The threat of war heightened Stalin's and generally Soviet perception of marginal and politically suspect populations as

13536-616: The hundreds of thousands, and possibly as many as two million. The Soviet Union was greatly assisted in its wartime effort by the United States via Lend-Lease . In total, the U.S. deliveries to the USSR through Lend-Lease amounted to $ 11 billion in materials: over 400,000 jeeps and trucks; 12,000 armored vehicles (including 7,000 tanks, about 1,386 of which were M3 Lees and 4,102 M4 Shermans ); 11,400 aircraft (of which 4,719 were Bell P-39 Airacobras , 3,414 were Douglas A-20 Havocs and 2,397 were Bell P-63 Kingcobras ) and 1.75 million tons of food. As Soviet soldiers were bearing

13680-661: The ideals of the Bolshevik Revolution and ended in dissolution amidst economic collapse and political disintegration. Established in 1922 following the Russian Civil War , the Soviet Union quickly became a one-party state under the Communist Party . Its early years under Lenin were marked by the implementation of socialist policies and the New Economic Policy (NEP), which allowed for market-oriented reforms. The rise of Joseph Stalin in

13824-508: The illegality of the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states . Soviet forces attempted to halt the secession by crushing popular demonstrations in Lithuania ( Bloody Sunday ) and Latvia ( The Barricades ), as a result of which numerous civilians were killed or wounded. However, these actions only bolstered international support for the secessionists. A referendum for the preservation of the USSR

13968-413: The invasions of its own member states to keep them from breaking away. The USSR concentrated on its own recovery, seizing and transferring most of Germany's industrial plants, and it exacted war reparations from East Germany , Hungary , Romania , and Bulgaria using Soviet-dominated joint enterprises. It also instituted trading arrangements deliberately designed to favour the country. Moscow controlled

14112-466: The kulaks (i.e., wealthy peasants that owned farmland) in a policy called dekulakization . The kulaks responded by destroying crop yields and other acts of sabotage against the Soviet government. The food shortage led to a mass famine across the USSR and slowed the Five Year Plan. A distinctive feature of the Great Purge was that, for the first time, members of the ruling party were included on

14256-590: The late 1920s ushered in an era of intense centralization and totalitarianism. Stalin's rule was characterized by the forced collectivization of agriculture , rapid industrialization , and the Great Purge , which eliminated perceived enemies of the state. The Soviet Union played a crucial role in the Allied victory in World War II , but at a tremendous human cost, with millions of Soviet citizens perishing in

14400-532: The late 1930s, however, the policy was changed to a more active promotion of the Russian language and later to more overt Russification , which accelerated in the 1950s, especially in Soviet education . Although some assimilation did occur, it did not on the whole succeed. The continued development of the many national cultures in the Soviet Union led to the drafting of the New Union Treaty in 1991 and

14544-891: The late 1940s. A member of the United Nations at its foundation in 1945, the country became one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council , which gave it the right to veto any of its resolutions. The USSR, in fulfillment of its agreement with the Allies at the Yalta Conference , broke the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact in April 1945 which Japan had been honoring despite their alliance with Germany, and invaded Manchukuo and other Japan-controlled territories on 9 August 1945. This conflict ended with

14688-556: The late stages of the Purge rather than deliberate discrimination in sentencing). The wives and children of those arrested and executed were dealt with by the NKVD Order No. 00486 . The women were sentenced to forced labour for 5 or 10 years. Their minor children were put in orphanages. All possessions were confiscated. Extended families were purposely left with nothing to live on, which usually sealed their fate as well, affecting up to 200,000–250,000 people of Polish background depending on

14832-415: The leadership knew what was happening, but did little to stop it. It was often rear echelon units who committed the rapes. According to professor Oleg Rzheshevsky, "4,148 Red Army officers and many privates were punished for committing atrocities". The exact number of German women and girls raped by Soviet troops during the war and occupation is uncertain, but historians estimate their numbers are likely in

14976-427: The leadership of Nikolai Yezhov , hence the name Yezhovshchina . The campaigns were carried out according to the general line of the party , often by direct orders of the politburo headed by Stalin. Hundreds of thousands of people were accused of various political crimes (espionage, wrecking , sabotage , anti-Soviet agitation , conspiracies to prepare uprisings and coups). They were executed by shooting or sent to

15120-472: The leading defendants were executed except Rakovsky and two others (who were killed in NKVD prisoner massacres in 1941). Despite the promise to spare his family, Bukharin's wife, Anna Larina , was sent to a labor camp, but she survived to see her husband posthumously rehabilitated a half-century later by the Soviet state under Mikhail Gorbachev in 1988. On 2 July 1937, in a top secret order to regional Party and NKVD chiefs Stalin instructed them to produce

15264-521: The losses were ethnic Russians , followed by ethnic Ukrainians . Approximately 2.8 million Soviet POWs died of starvation, mistreatment, or executions in just eight months of 1941–42. More than 2 million people were killed in Belarus during the three years of German occupation , almost a quarter of the region's population, including around 550,000 Jews in the Holocaust in Belarus . During

15408-474: The mass repression – including incarceration in the Gulag system – dropped significantly. By 1929, Stalin had defeated his political opponents and gained full control over the party. He organized a committee to begin the process of industrialization of the Soviet Union. Backlash against industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture escalated, which prompted Stalin to increase police presence in rural areas. Soviet authorities increased repression against

15552-556: The mid-to-late 1930s, the country developed a robust industrial economy in the years preceding World War II . Closer cooperation between the USSR and the West developed in the early 1930s. From 1932 to 1934, the country participated in the World Disarmament Conference . In 1933, diplomatic relations between the United States and the USSR were established when in November, the newly elected President of

15696-422: The moderates. The 1934 Party Congress elected Kirov to the central committee with only three votes against, the fewest of any candidate, while Stalin received 292 votes against. After Kirov's assassination, the NKVD charged the ever-growing group of former oppositionists with Kirov's murder as well as a growing list of other offenses, including treason, terrorism, sabotage, and espionage. Another justification for

15840-524: The new form of Party organization, the Politburo, and Stalin in particular, were the sole dispensers of ideology. This required the elimination of all Marxists with different views, especially those among the prestigious "old guard" of revolutionaries. As the purges began, the government (through the NKVD) shot Bolshevik heroes, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Béla Kun , as well as the majority of Lenin's Politburo, for disagreements in policy. The NKVD attacked

15984-660: The next day after "special measures", which dislocated his left shoulder among other things. Anastas Mikoyan and Vyacheslav Molotov later claimed that Bukharin was never tortured, but it is now known that his interrogators were given the order "beating permitted", and were under great pressure to extract confession out of the "star" defendant. Bukharin initially held out for three months, but threats to his young wife and infant son, combined with "methods of physical influence" wore him down. But when he read his confession amended and corrected personally by Stalin, he withdrew his whole confession. The examination started all over again, with

16128-403: The party's General Secretary, had triumphed over his opponents and gained control of the party. Initially, Stalin's leadership was widely accepted; his main political adversary, Trotsky, was forced into exile in 1929, and Stalin's doctrine of " socialism in one country " became enshrined party policy. However, in the early 1930s, party officials began to lose faith in his leadership, largely due to

16272-465: The party. In this atmosphere of doubt and suspicion, the popular high-ranking official Sergei Kirov was assassinated . The assassination, in December 1934, led to an investigation that revealed a network of party members supposedly working against Stalin, including several of Stalin's rivals. Many of those arrested after Kirov's murder, high-ranking party officials among them, also confessed plans to kill Stalin himself. The validity of these confessions

16416-576: The passport regime", etc. were also dealt with in a summary way. In Moscow, for example, nearly one third of the 20,765 persons executed on the Butovo firing range were charged with a non-political criminal offence. To carry out the mass arrests, the 25,000 officers of the State Security personnel of NKVD were complemented with units of ordinary police, and Komsomol ( Young Communist League ) and civilian Communist Party members. Seeking to fulfill

16560-476: The population. Overall, national minorities targeted in these campaigns composed 36% of the victims of the Great Purge, despite being only 1.6% of the Soviet Union's population. 74% of ethnic minorities arrested during the Great Purge were executed while those sentenced during the Kulak Operation had only a 50% chance of being executed, (though this may have been due to the Gulag camp's lack of space in

16704-404: The potential source of an uprising in case of invasion. Stalin began to plan for the preventive elimination of such potential recruits for a mythical "fifth column of wreckers, terrorists and spies." The term " purge " in Soviet political slang was an abbreviation of the expression purge of the Party ranks . In 1933, for example, the Party expelled some 400,000 people. But from 1936 until 1953,

16848-418: The price of oil to the point where the Soviets could not make a profit selling their oil, and resulted in the depletion of the country's hard currency reserves. Brezhnev's next two successors, transitional figures with deep roots in his tradition, did not last long. Yuri Andropov was 68 years old and Konstantin Chernenko 72 when they assumed power; both died in less than two years. In an attempt to avoid

16992-514: The purge expanded to include almost every living Old Bolshevik leader except Stalin and Kalinin . No other crime of the Stalin years so captivated Western intellectuals as the trial and execution of Bukharin, who was a Marxist theorist of international standing. For some prominent communists such as Bertram Wolfe , Jay Lovestone , Arthur Koestler , and Heinrich Brandler , the Bukharin trial marked their final break with communism, and even turned

17136-399: The purge was to remove any possible "fifth column" in case of a war. Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich , participants in the repression as members of the Politburo, maintained this justification throughout the purge; they each signed many death lists. Stalin believed war was imminent, threatened both by an explicitly hostile Germany and an expansionist Japan. The Soviet press portrayed

17280-513: The purges, criticized the NKVD for carrying out mass executions, and oversaw the execution of Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov , who headed the NKVD during the purge years. Scholars estimate the death toll for the Great Purge (1936–1938) to be roughly 700,000-1.2 million. Despite the end of the Great Purge, the widespread surveillance and atmosphere of mistrust continued for decades. Similar purges took place in Mongolia and Xinjiang . While

17424-419: The quotas, the police rounded up people in markets and train stations, with the purpose of arresting "social outcasts". Local units of the NKVD, in order to meet their "casework minimums" and force confessions out of arrestees worked long uninterrupted shifts during which they interrogated, tortured and beat the prisoners. In many cases those arrested were forced to sign blank pages which were later filled in with

17568-625: The republics. In August 1991, Latvia and Estonia immediately declared the restoration of their full independence (following Lithuania's 1990 example). Gorbachev resigned as general secretary in late August, and soon afterwards, the party's activities were indefinitely suspended—effectively ending its rule. By the fall, Gorbachev could no longer influence events outside Moscow, and he was being challenged even there by Yeltsin, who had been elected President of Russia in July 1991. The remaining 12 republics continued discussing new, increasingly looser, models of

17712-430: The return of capitalist exploitation, and that the principles of democratic centralism would be the most effective in representing the people's will in a practical manner. The debate over the future of the economy provided the background for a power struggle in the years after Lenin's death in 1924. Initially, Lenin was to be replaced by a ' troika ' consisting of Grigory Zinoviev of the Ukrainian SSR , Lev Kamenev , of

17856-513: The same time, according to the sociologist T.N. Zaslavskaya, it "did not solve the main task associated with the typological identification of Soviet society". Some historians evaluating the Soviet Union as a colonial empire ( Soviet empire ), applied the " prison of nations " idea to the USSR. Thomas Winderl wrote: "The USSR became in a certain sense more a prison-house of nations than the old Empire had ever been." In an interview with Euronews in 2011, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev recalled

18000-446: The size of their families. National operations of the NKVD were conducted on a quota system using album procedure . The officials were mandated to arrest and execute a specific number of so-called "counter-revolutionaries", compiled by administration using various statistics but also telephone books with names sounding non-Russian. The Polish Operation of the NKVD served as a model for a series of similar NKVD secret decrees targeting

18144-418: The state offered to its high-paid elite. The Ryutin affair seemed to vindicate Stalin's suspicions. Ryutin was working with the even larger secret Opposition Bloc in which Leon Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev participated, and which later led to both of their deaths. Stalin enforced a ban on party factions and banned those party members who had opposed him, effectively ending democratic centralism . In

18288-456: The state. The goal was always to cement the nationalities together in a common state structure. In the 1920s and the early 1930s, the policy of national delimitation was used to demarcate separate areas of national culture into territorial-administrative units, and the policy of korenizatsiya (indigenisation) was used to promote involvement non-Russian nationalities in government on all levels and strengthen non-Russian languages and cultures. By

18432-466: The subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union . Assessments of the success of the creation of the new community are divergent. On the one hand, the ethnologist V. A. Tishkov and other historians believe that "for all the socio-political deformities, the Soviet people represented a civil nation." The philosopher and sociologist B. A. Grushin noted that sociology in the USSR "recorded a unique historical type of society that had already gone into oblivion". At

18576-577: The supporters, friends, and family of these "heretical" Marxists, whether they lived in Russia or not. The NKVD nearly annihilated Trotsky's family before killing him in Mexico; the NKVD agent Ramón Mercader was part of an assassination task force put together by Special Agent Pavel Sudoplatov , under the personal orders of Stalin. By 1934, several of Stalin's rivals, such as Trotsky, began calling for Stalin's removal and attempted to break his control over

18720-459: The term changed its meaning, because being expelled from the Party came to mean almost certain arrest, imprisonment, and often execution. The political purge was primarily an effort by Stalin to eliminate challenge from past and potential opposition groups, including the left and right wings led by Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin , respectively. Following the Civil War and reconstruction of

18864-418: The threat of martial law against profiteering. The ruble collapsed, with barter increasingly replacing money as a medium of exchange and, by 1921, heavy industry output had fallen to 20% of 1913 levels. 90% of wages were paid with goods rather than money. 70% of locomotives were in need of repair , and food requisitioning, combined with the effects of seven years of war and a severe drought, contributed to

19008-542: The treaty, however, was interrupted by the August Coup —an attempted coup d'état by hardline members of the government and the KGB who sought to reverse Gorbachev's reforms and reassert the central government's control over the republics. After the coup collapsed, Russian president Yeltsin was seen as a hero for his decisive actions, while Gorbachev's power was effectively ended. The balance of power tipped significantly towards

19152-482: The use of the term "Soviet people" as a "unified community" in the Soviet Union but added that "these constructions were largely theoretical". In contrast to Soviet national identity politics, which declared the Soviet people as a supranational community, the post-Soviet Russian Constitution speaks of a "multinational people of the Russian Federation ". From the outset, the idea of the "Russian nation" as

19296-590: The war, the country together with the United States, the United Kingdom and China were considered the Big Four Allied powers, and later became the Four Policemen that formed the basis of the United Nations Security Council . It emerged as a superpower in the post-war period. Once denied diplomatic recognition by the Western world, the USSR had official relations with practically every country by

19440-498: Was aggravated during World War I by military defeat and food shortages in major cities. A spontaneous popular demonstration in Petrograd on 8 March 1917, demanding peace and bread, culminated in the February Revolution and the abdication of Nicholas II and the imperial government. The tsarist autocracy was replaced by the social-democratic Russian Provisional Government , which intended to conduct elections to

19584-565: Was carried out according to Trotsky's , not to Lenin's plan. The initial stage of the October Revolution which involved the assault on Petrograd occurred largely without any human casualties . Lenin's government instituted a number of progressive measures such as universal education , universal healthcare , and equal rights for women . Conversely, the bloody Red Terror was initiated to shut down all opposition, both perceived and real. The terror also arose in response to

19728-416: Was held on 17 March 1991 in nine republics (the remainder having boycotted the vote), with the majority of the population in those republics voting for preservation of the Union in the form of a new federation. The referendum gave Gorbachev a minor boost. In the summer of 1991, the New Union Treaty , which would have turned the country into a much looser Union, was agreed upon by eight republics. The signing of

19872-435: Was in written confession and refuse to go any further. The result was a curious mix of fulsome confessions (of being a "degenerate fascist" working for "restoration of capitalism") and subtle criticisms of the trial. One observer noted that after disproving several charges against him, Bukharin "proceeded to demolish or rather showed he could very easily demolish the whole case." He continued by saying that "the confession of

20016-608: Was named the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union . Lenin had appointed Stalin the head of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate , which gave Stalin considerable power. By gradually consolidating his influence and isolating and outmaneuvering his rivals within the party , Stalin became the undisputed leader of the country and, by the end of the 1920s, established a totalitarian rule. In October 1927, Zinoviev and Leon Trotsky were expelled from

20160-414: Was nearly annihilated: 85% of the 35,000 members of the clergy were arrested. Particularly vulnerable to repression were also the so-called "special settlers" ( spetzpereselentsy ) who were under permanent police surveillance and constituted a huge pool of potential "enemies" to draw on. At least 100,000 of them were arrested in the course of the Great Terror. Common criminals such as thieves, "violators of

20304-588: Was not mentioned in it until 1977. The USSR was a federative entity of many constituent republics, each with its own political and administrative entities. However, the term 'Soviet Russia' – formally applicable only to the Russian Federative Socialist Republic ;– was often applied to the entire country by non-Soviet writers due to its domination by the Russian SFSR. On 3 April 1922, Stalin

20448-440: Was officially demarcated. On 1 November, the Soviet Union annexed Western Ukraine , followed by Western Belarus on the 2nd. In late November, unable to coerce the Republic of Finland by diplomatic means into moving its border 25 kilometres (16 mi) back from Leningrad , Stalin ordered the invasion of Finland . On 14 December 1939, the Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations for invading Finland. Germany broke

20592-524: Was the same. But we are close friends, and intellectual friendship is stronger than other friendships. I knew that Bukharin was in the same state of upheaval as myself. That is why I did not want to deliver him bound hand and foot to the People's Commissariat of Home Affairs. Just as in relation to our other cadres, I wanted Bukharin himself to lay down his arms. The third and final trial, in March 1938, known as

20736-407: Was used to offset multiple economic weaknesses. Former Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin once remarked that "things are bad with bread. Give me 3 million tons [of oil] over the plan." The revenue from oil exports helped to mitigate a growing food supply crisis, fund the import of equipment and consumer goods, and sustain the arms race with the US. It also underpinned risky foreign policy actions, such as

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