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History of the Soviet Union (1927–1953)

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The first five-year plan ( Russian : I пятилетний план , первая пятилетка ) of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was a list of economic goals, implemented by Communist Party General Secretary Joseph Stalin , based on his policy of socialism in one country . Leon Trotsky had delivered a joint report to the April Plenum of the Central Committee in 1926 which proposed a program for national industrialisation and the replacement of annual plans with five-year plans. His proposals were rejected by the Central Committee majority which was controlled by the troika and derided by Stalin at the time. Stalin's version of the five-year plan was implemented in 1928 and took effect until 1932.

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193-644: The history of the Soviet Union between 1927 and 1953 , commonly referred to as the Stalin Era or Stalinist Era , covers the period in Soviet history from the establishment of Stalinism through victory in the Second World War and down to the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. Stalin sought to destroy his enemies while transforming Soviet society with central planning , in particular through

386-568: 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

579-719: A bulwark of traditionalism that stood in the way of the Soviet state's goals. Given the goals of the first Five Year Plan, the state sought increased political control of agriculture in order to feed the rapidly growing urban population and to obtain a source of foreign currency through increased cereal exports. Given its late start, the USSR needed to import a substantial number of the expensive technologies necessary for heavy industrialization. By 1936, about 90% of Soviet agriculture had been collectivized. In many cases, peasants bitterly opposed this process and often slaughtered their animals rather than give them to collective farms, even though

772-580: A capitalist world. In 1936, the country adopted its first formal constitution , which only on paper granted freedom of speech, religion, and assembly. 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 March 1939, the 18th congress of the Communist Party was held in Moscow. Most of

965-527: A cause of the large-scale famine in the Soviet Union between 1932 and 1933 in which 3.3 to 7.5 million died. These famines were among the worst in history and created scars which would mark the Soviet Union for many years to come and incense a deep hatred of Russians by Ukrainians, Tatars, and many other ethnic groups. This famine led many Russians to relocate to find food, jobs, and shelter outside of their small villages which caused many towns to become overpopulated. Their diet consisted of bread but there

1158-454: 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

1351-628: A continuing Soviet interest in patching up relations with Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union supplied military aid to the Republican faction of the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War , including munitions and soldiers, and helped far-left activists come to Spain as volunteers. The Spanish government let the USSR have the government treasury. Soviet units systematically liquidated anarchist supporters of

1544-543: A cultural change in the decline of the Kulak population within the Soviet Union. Members of Agitprop brigands attempted to use the push towards industrialization to isolate peasants from religion and away from the formerly influential Kulak population with performances in which they would deem that issues faced by peasant populations were the faults of the Kulaks. From 1929 through 1931, 3.5 million Kulaks were dispossessed by

1737-481: 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

1930-413: A land decree in 1917 that eliminated private ownership of land. Vladimir Lenin tried to establish removal of grain from wealthier peasants after the initial failure of state farms, but this was also unsuccessful. Peasants were mainly concerned for their own wellbeing and felt that the state had nothing of necessity to offer for the grain. This stockpiling of grain by the peasantry left millions of people in

2123-437: A limited scale. First five-year plan (Soviet Union) The Soviet Union entered a series of five-year plans which began in 1928 under the rule of Joseph Stalin . Stalin launched what would later be referred to as a "revolution from above" to improve the Soviet Union's domestic policy. The policies were centered around rapid industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture . Stalin desired to remove and replace

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2316-550: 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 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

2509-481: 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,

2702-741: 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

2895-453: A million Soviets were executed, and more than a million others were sentenced to lengthy terms in harsh labour camps. Stalin's Great Terror ravaged the ranks of factory directors and engineers, and removed most of the senior officers in the Army. The pretext was the 1934 assassination of Sergei Kirov (which many suspect Stalin of having planned, although there is no evidence for this). Nearly all

3088-539: 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;

3281-424: 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 a number of assassination attempts on Bolshevik senior leaders and organized insurrections against the Soviet government. The federalization of Russia

3474-473: A result, especially in the Central Asian republics . The Soviet people also benefited from a type of social liberalization. Women were to be given the same education as men and, at least legally speaking, obtained the same rights as men in the workplace. Although in practice these goals were not reached, the efforts to achieve them and the statement of theoretical equality led to a general improvement in

3667-458: 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

3860-692: 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

4053-790: 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

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4246-526: 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

4439-513: 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

4632-527: The British unions never forgave. By 1930, the Stalinists started suggesting the value of alliance with other parties, and by 1934 the idea to form a Popular Front had emerged. Comintern agent Willi Münzenberg was especially effective in organizing intellectuals, antiwar and pacifist elements to join the anti-Nazi coalition. Communists would form coalitions with any party to fight fascism. For Stalinists,

4825-676: The Cold War had started between the Western Bloc and the Eastern (Soviet) Bloc , with the Warsaw Pact (created 1955) pitched against NATO (created 1949) in Europe. After 1945, Stalin did not directly engage in any wars, continuing his totalitarian rule until his death in 1953. The mobilization of resources by state planning expanded the country's industrial base. From 1928 to 1932, pig iron output, necessary for further development of

5018-653: 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

5211-573: 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 the Eastern Bloc, further strained the Soviet economy. In the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev 's policies of Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (restructuring) aimed to revitalize

5404-738: 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 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

5597-559: The Kirgiziya area also knew guerrilla opposition. Prior to launching the first Soviet five-year plan, the Soviet Union had been facing threats from external sources as well as experiencing an economic and industrial downturn since the introduction of Bolshevik rule. The first war threat emerged from the East in 1924. A war scare arose in 1927 when multiple Western states, like Great Britain , began cutting off diplomatic relations with

5790-491: 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

5983-618: 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 the late 1920s ushered in an era of intense centralization and totalitarianism. Stalin's rule was characterized by

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6176-791: The Russian Orthodox Church began as soon as the Bolsheviks took power in 1917. In the 1930s, Stalin intensified his war on organized religion. Nearly all churches and monasteries were closed and tens of thousands of clergymen were imprisoned or executed. Historian Dimitry Pospielovski has estimated that between 5,000 and 10,000 Orthodox clergy died by execution or in prison 1918–1929, plus an additional 45,000 in 1930–1939. Monks, nuns, and related personnel added an additional 40,000 dead. The state propaganda machine vigorously promoted atheism and denounced religion as being an artifact of capitalist society. In 1937, Pope Pius XI decried

6369-576: 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

6562-515: The Soviet Union . This created fear among the Soviets that the West was preparing to attack the Soviet Union again; during the Russian Civil War , foreign powers had occupied portions of Russian territory . The fear of invasion from the West left the Soviets feeling a need for rapid industrialization to increase Soviet war-making potential, and to compete with the Western powers. At the same time as

6755-464: 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

6948-489: The United States , began to boycott goods produced by this form of labor. Although many of the goals set by the plan were not fully met, there were several economic sectors that still saw large increases in their output. Areas like capital goods increased 158%, consumer goods increased by 87%, and total industrial output increased by 118%. In addition, despite the difficulties that agriculture underwent throughout

7141-533: 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 the Khrushchev Thaw . However, the subsequent era under Leonid Brezhnev , referred to as

7334-579: The famine in Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan as well as areas of the Northern Caucasus . Public machine and tractor stations were set up throughout the USSR, and peasants were allowed to rent these public tractors to farm the land, with the intention to increase the food output per peasant. Peasants were allowed to sell any surplus food from the land. However, the government planners failed to take notice of local situations. In 1932, grain production

7527-453: The forced collectivization of agriculture and rapid development of heavy industry . Stalin consolidated his power within the party and the state and fostered an extensive cult of personality . Soviet secret-police and the mass-mobilization of the Communist Party served as Stalin's major tools in molding Soviet society. Stalin's methods in achieving his goals, which included party purges , ethnic cleansings , political repression of

7720-631: The mixed-economy policies of the New Economic Policy . Some scholars have argued that the programme of mass industrialisation advocated by Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition was co-opted after Trotsky's exile to serve as the basis of Stalin's first five-year plan. According to historian Sheila Fitzpatrick , the scholarly consensus was that Stalin appropriated the position of the Left Opposition on such matters as industrialisation and collectivisation . The plan, overall,

7913-524: The police state operated at high intensity, seeking out anyone accused of sabotaging the system. The estimated numbers vary greatly. Perhaps, 3.7 million people were sentenced for alleged counter-revolutionary crimes, including 600,000 sentenced to death, 2.4 million sentenced to labor camps, and 700,000 sentenced to expatriation . Stalinist repression reached its peak during the Great Purge of 1937–1938, which removed many skilled managers and experts and considerably slowed industrial production in 1937. Under

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8106-644: 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 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

8299-520: The "loss of the right to use an apartment″ and even blacklisted for new employment which altogether meant a threat of starving. Those measures, however, were not fully enforced, as managers were hard-pressed to replace these workers. In contrast, the 1938 legislation, which introduced labor books, followed by major revisions of the labor law, was enforced. For example, being absent or even 20 minutes late were grounds for becoming fired; managers who failed to enforce these laws faced criminal prosecution. Later,

8492-522: 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

8685-458: 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

8878-480: The 1950s. In 1937, as a part of the Great Purge , repressive “national operations” were conducted. Representatives of “Western” minorities were targeted because of their possible connections to countries hostile to the USSR and fear of disloyalty in case of an invasion. As this process unfolded, Stalin consolidated near-absolute power by destroying the potential opposition. In 1936–1938, about three quarters of

9071-577: 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

9264-643: 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

9457-552: The Central Committee were purged, along with foreign communists who were living in the Soviet Union, and numerous intellectuals, bureaucrats, and factory managers. The total of people imprisoned or executed during the Yezhovschina numbered about two million. By 1938, the mass purges were starting to disrupt the country's infrastructure, and Stalin began winding them down. Yezhov was gradually relieved of power. Yezhov

9650-644: 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

9843-574: 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

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10036-527: 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,

10229-608: 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

10422-843: The Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, 26 June 1940 "On the Transfer to the Eight-Hour Working Day, the Seven-day Work Week, and on the Prohibition of Unauthorized Departure by Laborers and Office Workers from Factories and Offices" replaced the 1938 revisions with obligatory criminal penalties for quitting a job (2–4 months imprisonment), for being late 20 minutes (6 months of probation and pay confiscation of 25 per cent), etc. Based on these figures,

10615-419: The FYP, mass collectivization was communal farms being assigned an amount of agricultural output with government coercion. Villages had to agree to collectivization: some collectivization planners would hold endless meetings that would not end until villages joined; another tactic was through intimidation and coercion. Mass agricultural collectivization was largely supported by the middle and poor peasantry As

10808-513: The First Five-Year Plan period in an effort to increase productivity through human effort in the absence of more developed machinery. Agricultural collectivisation , within Russia, had its origins under Lenin during the New Economic Policy. One reason for the collectivization of Soviet agriculture was to increase the number of industrial workers for the new factories. Soviet officials also believed that collectivization would increase crop yields and help fund other programs. The Soviets enacted

11001-417: The Five-Year Plan found that much of the military production capacities in the Soviet Union lay in the country's war threatened Western provinces and notably the city of Leningrad. In 1931 evacuation plans for military production facilities into deeper Soviet territories were drafted beginning a policy that would accelerate and relocate deeper within the Soviet Union during World War II. Between 1929 and 1936

11194-412: 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

11387-480: 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 , 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

11580-409: 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

11773-407: The NEP (New Economic Policy), Lenin had to tolerate the continued existence of privately owned agriculture. He decided to wait at least 20 years before attempting to place it under state control and in the meantime concentrate on industrial development. However, after Stalin's rise to power , the timetable for collectivization was shortened to just five years. Demand for food intensified, especially in

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11966-414: The New Soviet Woman was also a working woman. Furthermore, department store staff had a low status in the Soviet Union and many men did not want to work as sales staff, leading to the jobs as sales staff going to poorly educated working-class women and from women newly arrived in the cities from the countryside. However, many rights were rolled back by the authorities during this era, such as abortion, which

12159-457: 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

12352-401: The Popular Front was simply an expedient, but to rightists, it represented the desirable form of transition to socialism. Franco-Soviet relations were initially hostile because the USSR officially opposed the World War I peace settlement of 1919 that France emphatically championed. While the Soviet Union was interested in conquering territories in Eastern Europe, France was determined to protect

12545-419: The Red Army because he seriously misperceived a serious security threat”; thus “Stalin seems to have genuinely believed that foreign‐backed enemies had infiltrated the ranks and managed to organize a conspiracy at the very heart of the Red Army.” The purge hit deeply from June 1937 and November 1938, removing 35,000; many were executed. Experience in carrying out the purge facilitated purging other key elements in

12738-503: 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 the threat of martial law against profiteering. The ruble collapsed, with barter increasingly replacing money as

12931-409: The Red Army, which was ill-equipped for the winter weather and lacking competent commanders since the purge of the Soviet high command . The Finns resisted fiercely, and received some support and considerable sympathy from the Allies. On 29 January 1940, the Soviets put an end to their puppet Terijoki Government that they had intended on inserting into Helsinki, and informed the Finnish government that

13124-481: 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 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

13317-443: The Russians. In his work, Revolution Betrayed , Trotsky argued that the excessive authoritarianism under Stalin had undermined the implementation of the First five-year plan. He noted that several engineers and economists who had created the plan were themselves later put on trial as " conscious wreckers who had acted on the instructions of a foreign power". A number of streets and squares in major Russian cities are named after

13510-426: 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

13703-496: The Soviet Union and left with no choice but relocation to cities. As a result of the First Five Year Plan, state investment volume increased from 15% in 1928 to 44% in 1932 due to the rise in industry. The First Five Year Plan resulted in the easy access of staple foods bread, potatoes and cabbage across the Soviet Union. Severe drops in agriculture did however result in famine and inflation as agricultural output and livestock numbers in general dropped. Soviet reports from before

13896-427: The Soviet Union began being sentenced to forced labor, even when they committed small offenses, or committed no crime at all. Many of the prisoners used for labor were peasants who had resisted indoctrination. This was an attempt by the Soviet Union to acquire free labor for the rapid industrialization; however, it led to the incarceration of many innocent people in the Soviet Union. Eventually Western nations, such as

14089-409: The Soviet Union could address external and internal threats if needed. The central aspect of the first Soviet five-year plan was the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union from October 1928 to December 1932, which was thought to be the most crucial time for Russian industrialization. Lenin himself before the time of his death, knew the importance of building a transitional state to communism and

14282-539: The Soviet Union in 1933. The first five-year plan also began to prepare the Soviet Union to win in the Second World War. Without the initial five-year plan, and the ones that followed, the Soviet Union would not have been prepared for the German invasion in 1941. Due to the rapid industrialization of the plan, as well as the strategic construction of arms manufacturers in areas less vulnerable to future warfare,

14475-471: 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 the Russian Empire began with the 1825 Decembrist revolt . Although serfdom was abolished in 1861, it

14668-479: 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

14861-417: The Soviet Union often called on to attack traditional enemies. The Komsomol played an important role as a mechanism for teaching Party values to the younger generation. The Komsomol also served as a mobile pool of labor and political activism, with the ability to relocate to areas of high-priority at short notice. In the 1920s the Kremlin assigned Komsomol major responsibilities for promoting industrialization at

15054-474: The Soviet Union was partially able to build the weapons it needed to defeat the Germans in 1945. The first plan saw unrealistic quotas set for industrialization that, in reality, would not be met for decades to come. The great push for industrialization caused quotas to consistently be looked at and adjusted. Quotas expecting to reach 235.9 percent output and labor to increase by 110 percent were unrealistic in

15247-490: The Soviet Union was willing to negotiate peace. The Moscow Peace Treaty was signed on 12 March 1940, with the war ending the following day. By the terms of the treaty, Finland relinquished the Karelian Isthmus and some smaller territories. London, Washington—and especially Berlin—calculated that the poor showing of the Soviet army indicated it was incompetent to defend the USSR against a German invasion. In 1940,

15440-487: The Soviet Union, were used as a method of gaining international influence and encouraging fellow travelers and pacifists to build popular fronts. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September; the USSR followed on 17 September. The Soviets quelled opposition by executing and arresting thousands. They relocated suspect ethnic groups to Siberia in four waves, 1939–1941. Estimates varying from the figure over 1.5 million. After Poland

15633-695: The Soviet government declared that the Five Year Industrial Production Plan had been fulfilled by 93.7% in only four years, while parts devoted to the heavy industry parts were fulfilled by 108%. Stalin in December 1932 declared the plan success to the Central Committee since increases in the output of coal and iron would fuel future development. During the Second Five-Year Plan (1933–1937), on

15826-753: The Soviet government. The United States was the last major polity to recognise the USSR in 1933. In 1934, the French government proposed an alliance and led 30 governments to invite the USSR to join the League of Nations. The USSR had achieved legitimacy but was expelled in December 1939 for aggression against Finland. In 1928, Stalin pushed a leftist policy based on his belief in an imminent great crisis for capitalism. Various European communist parties were ordered not to form coalitions and instead to denounce moderate socialists as social fascists . Activists were sent into labour unions to take control away from socialists–a move

16019-490: The Soviet leaders sought to decrease the number of prisoners in the Soviet Union so that those resources could be rerouted to the five-year plan. This legislation led to many dangerous prisoners being released from prison into labor camps. Early in the plan, however, the Communist leaders realized the necessity and the benefit of prisoner labor to complete the five-year plan. At this time the Soviet leaders attempted to orchestrate an increase in prison population. The people of

16212-498: The Soviet policy of collectivization shifted their production from cotton to food products; Russian settlers were given the best land, and Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads were forced to settle down on soil without agricultural potential. Such a change caused unrest within a community that had already existed prior to this external adjustment, and between 1928 and 1932, Turkmen nomads and peasants made it clear through methods like passive resistance that they did not agree with such policies,

16405-405: 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 the collapse of the Soviet Union, which formally dissolved on December 26, 1991, ending nearly seven decades of Soviet rule. The legacy of

16598-606: 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 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

16791-647: The Spanish government. Moscow's support of the government gave the Republicans a Communist taint in the eyes of anti-Bolsheviks in Britain and France, weakening the calls for Anglo-French intervention in the war. Nazi Germany promulgated an Anti-Comintern Pact with Imperialist Japan and Fascist Italy, along with various Central and Eastern European states (such as Hungary ), ostensibly to suppress Communist activity but more realistically to forge an alliance against

16984-561: The USSR occupied and illegally annexed Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. On 14 June 1941, the USSR performed first mass deportations from Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. History of the Soviet Union The history of the Soviet Union (USSR) (1922–91) began with the ideals of the Bolshevik Revolution and ended in dissolution amidst economic collapse and political disintegration. Established in 1922 following

17177-646: The USSR concluded pacts of mutual assistance with France and Czechoslovakia. Stalin-ordered the Comintern to form a popular front with leftist and centrist parties against the forces of Fascism . The pact was undermined, however, by strong ideological hostility to the Soviet Union and the Comintern's new front in France, Poland's refusal to permit the Red Army on its soil, France's defensive military strategy, and

17370-451: 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,

17563-535: 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

17756-564: The USSR's primary grain producing regions, with new, forced approaches implemented . Upon joining kolkhozes (collective farms), peasants had to give up their private plots of land and property. Every harvest, Kolkhoz production was sold to the state for a low price set by the state itself. However, the natural progress of collectivization was slow, and the November 1929 Plenum of the Central Committee decided to accelerate collectivization through force. In any case, Russian peasant culture formed

17949-508: The USSR. Stalin arranged the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact , a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany on 23 August along with the German-Soviet Commercial Agreement to open economic relations. A secret appendix to the pact gave Eastern Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Bessarabia and Finland to the USSR, and Western Poland and Lithuania to Nazi Germany. This reflected the Soviet desire of territorial gains. Following

18142-477: 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 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

18335-490: 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

18528-508: 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

18721-559: 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 ',

18914-599: The War Scare of 1927, dissatisfaction grew among the peasantry of the Soviet Union. This dissatisfaction arose from the famine of the early 1920s , as well as from increasing mistreatment of the peasants . Also during this time the secret police (the OGPU ) had begun rounding up political dissenters in the Soviet Union. All these tensions had the potential to destroy the young Soviet Union and forced Joseph Stalin to introduce rapid industrialization of heavy industry so that

19107-529: 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

19300-471: The allocation of resources for the industry along with decreasing productivity since collectivization, a famine occurred. In the construction of the industrial complexes, inmates of Gulag camps were used as expendable resources. But conditions improved rapidly during the second plan. Throughout the 1930s, industrialization was combined with a rapid expansion of technical and engineering education as well as increasing emphasis on munitions. From 1921 until 1954,

19493-599: The attacks on religion in the Soviet Union. By 1940, only a small number of churches remained open. The early anti-religious campaigns under Lenin were mostly directed at the Russian Orthodox Church, as it was a symbol of the czarist government. In the 1930s however, all faiths were targeted: minority Christian denominations, Islam , Judaism , and Buddhism . During World War II state authorities eased pressures on Religion in Russia and stopped prosecuting

19686-459: The available food. From this rapid industrialization a new working class emerged in the Soviet Union. This new society was to be an industrial working class, which could be considered much of the population with the purpose of becoming a technologically advanced industry. During this time the industrial workforce rose from 3.12 million in 1928 to 6.01 million at the end of the plan in 1932. The Soviet Union promoted shock work during

19879-668: The basis of the huge investment during the first plan, the industry expanded extremely rapidly and nearly reached the plan's targets. By 1937, coal output was 127 million tons, pig iron 14.5 million tons, and there had been very rapid development of the armaments industry. While making a massive leap in industrial capacity, the First Five Year Plan was extremely harsh on industrial workers; quotas were difficult to fulfill, requiring that miners put in 16- to 18-hour workdays. Failure to fulfill quotas could result in treason charges. Working conditions were poor, even hazardous. Due to

20072-589: 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

20265-480: The church. The Orthodox Church was, therefore, able to help the Soviet Army to defend Russia. Religions in former USSR republics revived and once again flourished after the fall of communism in the 1990s. As Paul Froese explains: According to 2012 official statistics, nearly 15% of ethnic Russians identify as atheist, and nearly 27% identify as unaffiliated. The Soviet Union authorities systematically promoted

20458-555: The city hungry, leading Lenin to establish his New Economic Policy to keep the economy from crashing. NEP was based more on capitalism and not socialism, which is the direction the government wanted to head toward. By 1928, with the rapid industrialisation , and mass urbanization that followed, consumption was to increase rapidly as well. Need for urban dwellers to be fed, the FYP increased collectivization, leading to its recognition be largely associated with Stalin . Beginning in 1929 under

20651-459: 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 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

20844-650: 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 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

21037-597: The country, this was the era of exaggeration. Collectivization was under-planned; a lack of instructions, and unrealistic quotas were the reality. Lacking a foundation, collectivization led to the Kazakh famine of 1931–1933 , in a region that had been a major grain producer. Farmers of Kazakhstan rejected collectivization, and protested, while Stalin raised quotas, meaning peasants would not be able to eat and would psychologically break them. Those who did not give up their grain were considered breaking Soviet law, which caused

21230-472: The delegates present at the 17th congress in 1934 were gone, and Stalin was heavily praised by Litvinov and the western democracies criticized for failing to adopt the principles of "collective security" against Nazi Germany. Two major lines of interpretation have emerged among historians. One argues that the purges reflected Stalin's ambitions, his paranoia, and his inner drive to increase his power and eliminate potential rivals. Revisionist historians explain

21423-537: 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 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

21616-572: The end of 1937. The ghastly price paid by the peasantry has yet to be established with precision, but probably up to 5 million people died of persecution or starvation in these years. Ukrainians and Kazakhs suffered worse than most nations. In Ukraine alone, the number of people who died in the famines is now estimated to be 3.5 million. The USSR took over Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1940, which were lost to Germany in 1941, and then recovered in 1944. The collectivization of their farms began in 1948. Using terror, mass killings and deportations, most of

21809-573: 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

22002-500: The expectations, collectivization led to a catastrophic drop in farm productivity, which did not return to the levels achieved under the NEP until 1940. The upheaval associated with collectivization was particularly severe in Ukraine and the heavily Ukrainian Volga region . Peasants slaughtered their livestock en masse rather than give them up. In 1930 alone, 25% of the nation's cattle, sheep, and goats, and one-third of all pigs were killed. It

22195-498: The expedited transformation of Soviet social relations, nature, and economy. The plan's greatest supporters viewed it as the means to change the Soviet Union economically and socially. This change was visibly seen in the role of women in the industrial workplace where rudimentary figures show they comprised 30 percent of the workforce. The prevalence of women within the industrial workplace saw International Women's Day rise in significance in Soviet culture. The Five-Year Plans also saw

22388-414: The facilities had to be constructed quickly to facilitate material production before goods could be produced. During this period 1928–1932, massive industrial centers emerged in areas that were highly isolated before. These factories were not only for war production, but to produce tractors to meet the needs of mechanized agriculture. The Stalingrad Tractor Plant was built with the help of western allies and

22581-572: The factory level. In 1929 7,000 Komsomol cadets were building the tractor factory in Stalingrad, 56,000 others built factories in the Urals, and 36,000 were assigned work underground in the coal mines. The goal was to provide an energetic hard-core of Bolshevik activists to influence their coworkers the factories and mines that were at the center of communist ideology. Komsomol adopted meritocratic, supposedly class-blind membership policies in 1935, but

22774-438: The famine. Death rates are estimated between 6–7 million. Stalin's second wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva, committed suicide due to the atrocities of collectivization, particularly the famine. By the end of the FYP, agricultural collectivization showed minimal growth in production as well as profits. To meet the goals of the first five-year plan the Soviet Union began using the labor of its growing prisoner population. Initially

22967-456: The fear of impending war from the West. If war were to break out between the Soviet Union and the West, the Soviets would be fighting against some of the most industrialized nations in the world. The rapid industrialization would inhibit fears of being left unprotected if War between the Soviets and the West were to occur. To meet the needs of a possible war, the Soviet leaders set unrealistic quotas for production. To meet those unrealistic needs,

23160-523: 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

23353-468: The first generation free from the fear of typhus and cholera . The occurrences of these diseases dropped to record-low numbers and infant mortality rates were substantially reduced, resulting in the life expectancy for both men and women to increase by over 20 years by the mid-to-late 1950s. The Komsomol or Youth Communist League, was an entirely new youth organization designed by Lenin became an enthusiastic strike force that organized communism across

23546-651: The fledgling states there. However, Adolf Hitler 's foreign policy centered on a massive seizure of Central European, Eastern European, and Russian lands for Germany's own ends, and when Hitler pulled out of the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva in 1933, the threat hit home. Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov reversed Soviet policy regarding the Paris Peace Settlement, leading to a Franco-Soviet rapprochement. In May 1935,

23739-600: 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 the conflict. The Soviet Union emerged as one of the world's two superpowers, leading the Eastern Bloc in opposition to

23932-618: The general population , and forced collectivization , led to millions of deaths : in Gulag labor camps and during famine . World War II, known as "the Great Patriotic War " by Soviet historians, devastated much of the USSR , with about one out of every three World War II deaths representing a citizen of the Soviet Union . In the course of World War II, the Soviet Union's armies occupied Eastern Europe , where they established or supported Communist puppet governments . By 1949,

24125-407: The government in the Soviet Union was based on the one-party rule of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) . The stated purpose was to prevent 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

24318-560: The government only wanted the grain. Kulaks , prosperous peasants, were forcibly resettled to Kazakhstan , Siberia and the Russian Far North (a large portion of the kulaks served at forced labor camps). However, just about anyone opposing collectivization was deemed a "kulak". The policy of liquidation of kulaks as a class—formulated by Stalin at the end of 1929—meant some executions, and even more deportation to special settlements and, sometimes, to forced labor camps. Despite

24511-616: 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

24704-456: 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

24897-641: The industrial infrastructure rose from 3.3 million to 6.2 million tons per year. Coal production , a basic fuel of modern economies and Stalinist industrialization , rose from 35.4 million to 64 million tons, and the output of iron ore rose from 5.7 million to 19 million tons. A number of industrial complexes such as Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk , the Moscow and Gorky automobile plants, the Ural Mountains and Kramatorsk heavy machinery plants, and Kharkiv, Stalingrad and Chelyabinsk tractor plants had been built or were under construction. In real terms,

25090-413: 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

25283-891: 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

25476-415: 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

25669-575: 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

25862-419: The mid-1930s. Despite the turmoil of 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,

26055-500: The most enthusiastic and skilled membership. Under Stalin, the death penalty was also extended to adolescents as young as 12 years old in 1935. Urban women under Stalin, paralleling the modernization of western countries, were also the first generation of women able to give birth in a hospital with access to prenatal care. Education was another area in which there was improvement after economic development, also paralleling other western countries. The generation born during Stalin's rule

26248-406: The national consciousness of indigenous peoples and established institutional forms characteristic of a modern nation for them. In Central Asia the liberation of women was approached in the same revolutionary way as the assault on the religion. In 1927 the campaign against paranja (veil) started, called " hujum " (assault). However, it produced a massive backlash and paranja did not disappear until

26441-414: The national newspapers Pravda and Izvestia , there were numerous regional publications as well as newspapers and magazines and all the important languages. Ironclad uniformity of opinion was the norm during the Soviet era. Typewriters and printing presses were closely controlled until the late 1980s to prevent unauthorized publications. Samizdat illegal circulation of subversive fiction and nonfiction

26634-417: The needs of heavy industry. 80% of the total investment of the first five-year plan, was focused heavily on the industrial sector. Programs not necessary to heavy industry were cut from the Soviet budget; and because of the redistribution of industrial funding, basic goods, such as food, became scarce. The Soviet Union then decided that the workers necessary for further industrialization should be given most of

26827-594: The newly elected President of 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

27020-775: 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, 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

27213-408: The old pre-1918 Bolsheviks were purged. Trotsky was expelled from the party in 1927, exiled to Kazakhstan in 1928, expelled from the USSR in 1929, and assassinated in 1940. Stalin used the purges to politically and physically destroy his other formal rivals (and former allies) accusing Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev of being behind Kirov's assassination and planning to overthrow Stalin. Ultimately,

27406-579: The pact with Hitler, Stalin in 1939–1940 annexed half of Poland, the three Baltic States, and Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia in Romania. They no longer were buffers separating the USSR from German areas, argues Louis Fischer. Rather they facilitated Hitler's rapid advance to the gates of Moscow. Propaganda was also considered an important foreign relations tool. International exhibitions, the distribution of media such as films, e.g.: Alexander Nevski , as well as inviting prominent foreign individuals to tour

27599-399: 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 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

27792-433: The peasant class itself was divided into three groups: kulaks, wealthy; serednyak, middle; bednyak, poor. The middle and lower class supported collectivization, because it took private land from individual kulaks, and distributed it among the serednyak and bednyak's villages. With the serednyak and bednyak joining collectivization they were also joining a kolkhoz. The kulaks did not support mass collectivization, as their land

27985-503: The peasantry was collectivized by 1952. Agricultural production fell dramatically in all the other Soviet Republics. In the period of rapid industrialization and mass collectivization preceding World War II, Soviet employment figures experienced exponential growth. 3.9 million jobs per annum were expected by 1923, but the number actually climbed to an astounding 6.4 million. By 1937, the number rose yet again, to about 7.9 million. Finally, in 1940 it reached 8.3 million. Between 1926 and 1930,

28178-663: The peasants did everything they could in the way of sabotage. They cultivated far smaller portions of their land and worked much less. The scale of the Ukrainian famine has led many Ukrainian scholars to argue that there was a deliberate policy of genocide against the Ukrainian people. Other scholars argue that the massive death totals were an inevitable result of a very poorly planned operation against all peasants, who had given little support to Lenin or Stalin. Almost 99% of all cultivated land had been pulled into collective farms by

28371-592: The people arrested were tortured and forced to confess to being spies and saboteurs, and quickly convicted and executed. Several show trials were held in Moscow, to serve as examples for the trials that local courts were expected to carry out elsewhere in the country. There were four key trials from 1936 to 1938, The Trial of the Sixteen was the first (December 1936); then the Trial of the Seventeen (January 1937); then

28564-566: The plan to include the creation of kolkhoz collective farming systems that stretched over thousands of acres of land and had hundreds of thousands of peasants working on them. The creation of collective farms essentially destroyed the kulaks as a class ( dekulakization ). Another consequence of this is that peasants resisted by killing their farm animals rather than turning them over to the State when their farms were collectivized. The resistance to Stalin's collectivization policies contributed to

28757-513: The plan was fulfilled in four years and three months instead of five years. The plan was also lauded by some members of the Western media, and although much of his reporting was later disputed, New York Times reporter Walter Duranty received the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence for his coverage of the first five-year plan. Duranty's coverage of the five-year plan's many successes led directly to Franklin Roosevelt officially recognizing

28950-734: The plan, including the First Five-Year Plan Street in Chelyabinsk and Volgograd , and First Five-Year Plan Square in Yekaterinburg . The First Five-Year Plan saw Soviet cities sharply rise in population. At least 23 million Soviet peasants moved into cities, with Moscow's population rising by nearly 60 percent. A large portion of the Soviet Union's urbanization was due to the deportation of peasants from villages. From 1929 through 1931, 1.4 million peasants were deported into cities. The Five-Year Plan saw

29143-431: The plan, the Soviets recruited more than 70,000 volunteers from the cities to help collectivize and work on farms in the rural areas. The largest success of the first five-year plan, however, was the Soviet Union beginning its journey to become an economic and industrial superpower. Stalin declared the plan a success at the beginning of 1933, noting the creation of several heavy industries where none had existed, and that

29336-418: 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

29529-527: 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 , the Reds were defeated, while

29722-481: The prosecutors were tried and executed. The secret police were renamed the NKVD and control given to Nikolai Yezhov , known as the "Bloody Dwarf". The "Great Purge" swept the Soviet Union in 1937. It was widely known as the "Yezhovschina", the "Reign of Yezhov". The rate of arrests was staggering. In the armed forces alone, 34,000 officers were purged, including many at the higher ranks. The entire Politburo and most of

29915-422: 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 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,

30108-527: The public—despite few Soviet citizens being able to afford a car—and the expansion of steel production and other industrial materials made the manufacture of a greater number of cars possible. Car and truck production, for example, reached 200,000 in 1931. A minimum wage of 110–115 rubles was established in 1937; private gardens were allowed for one million workers to farm in their private plots. Even so, most Soviet workers lived in crowded communal housings and dormitories and suffered from extreme poverty. Most of

30301-446: The purges by theorizing that rival factions exploited Stalin's paranoia and used terror to enhance their own position. Peter Whitewood examines the first purge, directed at the Army, and comes up with a third interpretation that: Stalin and other top leaders, assuming that they were always surrounded by enemies, always worried about the vulnerability and loyalty of the Red Army. It was not a ploy – Stalin truly believed it. “Stalin attacked

30494-574: 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

30687-409: The rest were resettled to non-arable land in the same region. In the years following the agricultural collectivization, the reforms would disrupt the Soviet food supply. In turn, this disruption would eventually lead to famines for the many years following the first five-year plan, with 6–7 million dying from starvation in 1933. Although Stalin reported in 1930 that collectivization was aiding

30880-406: The result was a decline in working class youth members, and a dominance by the better educated youth. A new social hierarchy emerged as young professionals and students joined the Soviet elite, displacing proletarians. Komsomol's membership policies in the 1930s reflected the broader nature of Stalinism, combining Leninist rhetoric about class-free progress with Stalinist pragmatism focused on getting

31073-593: 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 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

31266-424: The secret police of opposing Stalin's regime became commonplace. By the NKVD's own count, 681,692 people were shot during 1937–1938 alone, and hundreds of thousands of political prisoners were transported to Gulag work camps. The mass terror and purges were little known to the outside world, and some western intellectuals and fellow travellers continued to believe that the Soviets had created a successful alternative to

31459-432: The sharp decrease in unemployment, which dropped in real terms by 50% from 1928 to 1940. With wages artificially depressed, the state could afford to employ far more workers than would be financially viable in a market economy. Several ambitious extraction projects were begun that endeavored to supply raw materials for both military hardware and consumer goods. The Moscow and Gorky automobile plants produced automobiles for

31652-424: The socio-economic status of women. Women were notably recruited as clerks for the expanding department stores , resulting in a "feminization" of department stores as the number of female sales staff rose from 45 percent of the total sales staff in 1935 to 62 percent of the total sales staff in 1938. This was in part due to a propaganda campaign launched in 1931 which linked femininity with "culture" and asserted that

31845-444: The time frame they allotted for. The goals for the plans were not set and those that were, were constantly changed. Each time one quota was met, it was revised and made larger. Unions were being shut down which meant workers were no longer allowed to strike and were not protected from being fired or dismissed from work for reasons such as being late or just missing a day. Secondly, many western historians point to collectivization as

32038-441: The top communist leaders in the 1920s and 1930s had been propagandists or editors before 1917, and were keenly aware of the importance of propaganda. As soon as they gained power in 1917 they seized the monopoly of all communication media, and greatly expanded their propaganda apparatus in terms of newspapers, magazines and pamphlets. Radio became a powerful tool in the 1930s. Stalin, for example, has been an editor of Pravda . Besides

32231-434: 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

32424-432: The trial of Red Army generals, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky (June 1937); and finally the Trial of the Twenty One (including Bukharin ) in March 1938. During these, the defendants typically confessed to sabotage, spying, counter-revolution, and conspiring with Germany and Japan to invade and partition the Soviet Union. The initial trials in 1935–1936 were carried out by the OGPU under Genrikh Yagoda . In turn

32617-457: The urban population increased by 30 million. Unemployment had been a problem in late Imperial Russia and even under the NEP, but it ceased being a major factor after the implementation of Stalin's massive industrialization program. The sharp mobilization of resources used in order to industrialize the heretofore agrarian society created a massive need for labor; unemployment virtually dropped to zero. Wage setting by Soviet planners also contributed to

32810-408: 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

33003-421: The wider Soviet polity. Historians often cite the disruption as factors in its disastrous military performance during the German invasion. The Soviet government had forfeited foreign-owned private companies during the creation of the RSFSR and the USSR. Foreign investors did not receive any monetary or material compensation. The USSR also refused to pay tsarist-era debts to foreign debtors. The young Soviet polity

33196-401: The workers' standards of living tended to drop, rather than rise during industrialization. Stalin's laws to "tighten work discipline" made the situation worse: e.g., a 1932 change to the RSFSR labor law code enabled firing workers who had been absent without a reason from the workplace for just one day. Being fired accordingly meant losing "the right to use ration and commodity cards" as well as

33389-425: 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 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

33582-414: Was 32% below average; to add to this problem, procurement of food increased by 44%. Agricultural production was so disrupted that famine broke out in several districts. Because of the plan's reliance on rapid industrialization, major cultural changes had to occur in tandem. As this new social structure arose, conflicts occurred among some of the majority of the populations. In Turkmenistan , for example,

33775-503: Was a major decrease in the amount of meat and dairy they were receiving if any at all. Aside from the three to four million people dying because of starvation or even freezing to death because of waiting in line for rations, people were not wanting or unable to have children which assisted in the decrease of the population. Hitler claimed the supposed disregard of human life by Russians toward non-Russians as one of his reasons to conduct Operation Barbarossa and gain initial victories over

33968-466: Was a pariah because of its openly stated goal of supporting the overthrow of capitalistic governments. It sponsored workers' revolts to overthrow numerous capitalistic European states, but they all failed. Lenin reversed radical experiments and restored a sort of capitalism with the NEC. The Comintern was ordered to stop organizing revolts. Starting in 1921 Lenin sought trade, loans and recognition. One by one, foreign states reopened trade lines and recognized

34161-645: Was being taken from them as well as their animals. At the end of 1929 the Soviets asserted themselves to forming collectivized peasant agriculture, but the "kulaks" had to be "liquidated as a class," because of their resistance to fixed agricultural prices. Resulting from this, the party behavior became uncontrolled and manic when the party began to requisition food from the countryside. Kulaks were executed, exiled or deported, based on their level of resistance to collectivization. The kulaks who were considered "counter-revolutionary" were executed or exiled, those who opposed collectivization were deported to remote regions and

34354-496: Was brutally suppressed. The rare exceptions to 100% uniformity in the official media were indicators of high-level battles. The Soviet draft constitution of 1936 was an instance. Pravda and Trud (the paper for manual workers) praised the draft constitution. However Izvestiia was controlled by Nikolai Bukharin and it published negative letters and reports. Bukharin won out and the party line changed and started to attack "Trotskyite" oppositionists and traitors. Bukharin's success

34547-402: Was divided up with Germany, Stalin made territorial demands to Finland, claiming security needs regarding the protection of Leningrad. After the Finns refused the demands, the Soviets invaded Finland on 30 November 1939, launching the Winter War , with the goal of annexing Finland into the Soviet Union. Despite outnumbering Finnish troops by over 2.5:1, the war proved embarrassingly difficult for

34740-515: 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 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

34933-416: 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

35126-424: Was legalized before Stalin came to power, was banned in 1936 after controversial debate among citizens. Women's issues were also largely ignored by the government. Stalinist development also contributed to advances in health care, which marked a massive improvement over the Imperial era. Stalin's policies granted the Soviet people access to free health care and education . Widespread immunization programs created

35319-433: Was meant to play a major factor in the rapid industrialization of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. These isolated areas included Magnitogorsk , Dnieper , and Nizhny Novgorod . Magnitogorsk, the largest of the rapid industrialized areas of Russia, was founded in 1743, but became more prevalent in the early 1930s by Stalin. His plan was to make it a one-industry town. The city would become the largest steel producer in Russia and

35512-429: Was meant to rival production that was being seen in the U.S. at the same time. During this era of Soviet history, heavy industry was supposed to experience a 350% increase in output. The Soviet Union's achievements were tremendous during the first five-year plan, which yielded a fifty-percent increase in industrial output. To achieve this massive economic growth, the Soviet Union had to reroute essential resources to meet

35705-426: Was not until the 1980s that the Soviet livestock numbers would return to their 1928 level. Government bureaucrats, who had been given a rudimentary education on farming techniques, were dispatched to the countryside to "teach" peasants the new ways of socialist agriculture, relying largely on theoretical ideas that had little basis in reality. Even after the state inevitably won and succeeded in imposing collectivization,

35898-440: 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

36091-399: 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, the Soviets ended their involvement in the war and signed a separate peace treaty, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk . After the defeat of

36284-418: Was quoted saying "Modern industry is the key to this transformation, the time has come to construct our fatherland anew with the hands of machines". Rapid growth was facilitated starting in 1928 and continued to accelerate because of the building of heavy industry, which in turn raised living standards for peasants escaping the countryside. The Bolsheviks ' need for rapid industrialization was once again out of

36477-419: Was relieved of all powers in 1939, then tried and executed in 1940. His successor as head of the NKVD (from 1938 to 1945) was Lavrentiy Beria , a Georgian friend of Stalin's. Arrests and executions continued into 1952, although nothing on the scale of the Yezhovschina ever happened again. During this period, the practice of mass arrest, torture, and imprisonment or execution without trial, of anyone suspected by

36670-563: Was short-lived; he was arrested in 1937, given a show trial and executed. Industrial workers needed to be educated in order to be competitive and so embarked on a program contemporaneous with industrialization to greatly increase the number of schools and the general quality of education. In 1927, 7.9 million students attended 118,558 schools. By 1933, the number rose to 9.7 million students in 166,275 schools. In addition, 900 specialist departments and 566 institutions were built and fully operational by 1933. Literacy rates increased substantially as

36863-591: Was the first near-universally literate generation. Some engineers were sent abroad to learn industrial technology, and hundreds of foreign engineers were brought to Russia on contract. Transport links were also improved, as many new railways were built, although with forced labour, costing thousands of lives. Workers who exceeded their quotas, Stakhanovites , received many incentives for their work, although many such workers were in fact "arranged" to succeed by receiving extreme help in their work, and then their achievements were used for propaganda. The systematic attacks on

37056-409: Was to transition the Soviet Union from a weak, poorly organized agricultural economy, into an industrial powerhouse. Its grand and idealistic vision, enforced through Stalin's various ministries , saw planners and builders often disregarding practical constraints as they worked to meet demanding schedules, with the possibility of facing severe consequences for failure to do so. In 1929, Stalin edited

37249-407: 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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