43°00′N 131°51′E / 43.00°N 131.85°E / 43.00; 131.85
152-925: Russky Island ( Russian : Ру́сский о́стров , lit. 'Russian Island') is an island in Peter the Great Gulf in the Sea of Japan , in Primorsky Krai , Russia . It is the largest island in the Eugénie Archipelago , separated from the Muravyov-Amursky Peninsula immediately to the north by the Eastern Bosphorus , and is one of the four islands in Primorsky Krai that are permanently inhabited, with
304-674: A constitutional referendum on whether to adopt Russian as a second official language. According to the Central Election Commission, 74.8% voted against, 24.9% voted for and the voter turnout was 71.1%. Starting in 2019, instruction in Russian will be gradually discontinued in private colleges and universities in Latvia, and in general instruction in Latvian public high schools. On 29 September 2022, Saeima passed in
456-629: 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
608-519: A new education law which requires all schools to teach at least partially in Ukrainian, with provisions while allow indigenous languages and languages of national minorities to be used alongside the national language. The law faced criticism from officials in Russia and Hungary. The 2019 Law of Ukraine "On protecting the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the state language" gives priority to
760-527: A political scandal when four soldiers of the Russian Navy serving at an isolated garrison on the island starved to death and dozens of others were hospitalized suffering from the effects of starvation. Their commanders had failed to send them rations for months, and the matter became a national scandal regarding the state of the armed forces. In 2002, the St. Seraphim Monastery, a monastery belonging to
912-454: 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
1064-481: 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
1216-615: A formula with V standing for the nucleus (vowel) and C for each consonant, the maximal structure can be described as follows: (C)(C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C) Soviet era 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 the Russian Civil War ,
1368-558: A hard or soft counterpart, and the distinction is a prominent feature of the language, which is usually shown in writing not by a change of the consonant but rather by changing the following vowel. Another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels . Stress , which is often unpredictable, is not normally indicated orthographically , though an optional acute accent may be used to mark stress – such as to distinguish between homographic words (e.g. замо́к [ zamók , 'lock'] and за́мок [ zámok , 'castle']), or to indicate
1520-484: A language that "belongs to the European cultural space". The financing of Russian-language content by the state will cease, which the concept says create a "unified information space". However, one inevitable consequence would be the closure of public media broadcasts in Russian on LTV and Latvian Radio, as well as the closure of LSM's Russian-language service. In Lithuania , Russian has no official or legal status, but
1672-539: A lesser extent in the Baltic states and Israel . Russian has over 258 million total speakers worldwide. It is the most spoken native language in Europe , the most spoken Slavic language , as well as the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia . It is the world's seventh-most spoken language by number of native speakers , and the world's ninth-most spoken language by total number of speakers . Russian
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#17327723423171824-588: A lesser extent the languages to the south and the east: Uralic , Turkic , Persian , Arabic , and Hebrew . According to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California , Russian is classified as a level III language in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers, requiring approximately 1,100 hours of immersion instruction to achieve intermediate fluency. Feudal divisions and conflicts created obstacles between
1976-550: 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
2128-481: 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,
2280-681: 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
2432-622: A minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities . 30% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 2% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. In Azerbaijan , Russian has no official status, but is a lingua franca of the country. 26% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 5% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. In Georgia , Russian has no official status, but it
2584-539: 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;
2736-424: 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
2888-565: A population of 5,360 (2010). Russky Island is home to Far Eastern Federal University and the southern span of the Russky Bridge , the world's longest cable-stayed bridge , connecting the island across the Eastern Bosphorus to the mainland portion of Vladivostok . Russky Island is located about 9,334 kilometres (5,800 mi) east of Moscow , the capital of Russia. It is the largest island in Primorsky Krai , with about
3040-526: A qualitatively new entity can be said to emerge—the general language of the working class... capitalism has the tendency of creating the general urban language of a given society. In 2010, there were 259.8 million speakers of Russian in the world: in Russia – 137.5 million, in the CIS and Baltic countries – 93.7 million, in Eastern Europe – 12.9 million, Western Europe – 7.3 million, Asia – 2.7 million, in
3192-496: A quarter of its area being the Saperny Peninsula, which forms much of the north and east of the island, and the closest part to the mainland. Novik Bay is a long and thin bay located between the Saperny Peninsula and the remainder of the island. Russky Island is the largest and northernmost island in the Eugénie Archipelago , a cluster of small islands and islets south of the Muravyov-Amursky Peninsula that extend to
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#17327723423173344-458: 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
3496-490: 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
3648-692: 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
3800-790: 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
3952-577: 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
4104-539: Is Belarusian, among ethnic Belarusians this share is 28.5%; the highest share of those who speak Belarusian at home is among ethnic Poles — 46.0%. In Estonia , Russian is spoken by 29.6% of the population, according to a 2011 estimate from the World Factbook, and is officially considered a foreign language. School education in the Russian language is a very contentious point in Estonian politics, and in 2022,
4256-481: Is a co-official language per article 5 of the Constitution of Kyrgyzstan . The 2009 census states that 482,200 people speak Russian as a native language, or 8.99% of the population. Additionally, 1,854,700 residents of Kyrgyzstan aged 15 and above fluently speak Russian as a second language, or 49.6% of the population in the age group. In Tajikistan , Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication under
4408-401: Is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian , and a moderate degree of it in all modern Slavic languages, at least at the conversational level. Russian is written using a Cyrillic alphabet. The Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters. The following table gives their forms, along with IPA values for each letter's typical sound: Older letters of
4560-610: Is a post-posed definite article -to , -ta , -te similar to that existing in Bulgarian and Macedonian. In the Southern Russian dialects , instances of unstressed /e/ and /a/ following palatalized consonants and preceding a stressed syllable are not reduced to [ɪ] (as occurs in the Moscow dialect), being instead pronounced [a] in such positions (e.g. несл и is pronounced [nʲaˈslʲi] , not [nʲɪsˈlʲi] ) – this
4712-488: Is being used less frequently by Russian-speaking typists in favor of the extension of Unicode character encoding , which fully incorporates the Russian alphabet. Free programs are available offering this Unicode extension, which allow users to type Russian characters, even on Western 'QWERTY' keyboards. The Russian language was first introduced to computing after the M-1 , and MESM models were produced in 1951. According to
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4864-624: Is called yakanye ( яканье ). Consonants include a fricative /ɣ/ , a semivowel /w⁓u̯/ and /x⁓xv⁓xw/ , whereas the Standard and Northern dialects have the consonants /ɡ/ , /v/ , and final /l/ and /f/ , respectively. The morphology features a palatalized final /tʲ/ in 3rd person forms of verbs (this is unpalatalized in the Standard and Northern dialects). During the Proto-Slavic (Common Slavic) times all Slavs spoke one mutually intelligible language or group of dialects. There
5016-573: Is more spoken than English. Sizable Russian-speaking communities also exist in North America, especially in large urban centers of the US and Canada, such as New York City , Philadelphia , Boston , Los Angeles , Nashville , San Francisco , Seattle , Spokane , Toronto , Calgary , Baltimore , Miami , Portland , Chicago , Denver , and Cleveland . In a number of locations they issue their own newspapers, and live in ethnic enclaves (especially
5168-564: Is odd") – чу́дно ( chúdno – "this is marvellous"), молоде́ц ( molodéts – "well done!") – мо́лодец ( mólodets – "fine young man"), узна́ю ( uznáyu – "I shall learn it") – узнаю́ ( uznayú – "I recognize it"), отреза́ть ( otrezát – "to be cutting") – отре́зать ( otrézat – "to have cut"); to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words, especially personal and family names, like афе́ра ( aféra , "scandal, affair"), гу́ру ( gúru , "guru"), Гарси́я ( García ), Оле́ша ( Olésha ), Фе́рми ( Fermi ), and to show which
5320-657: Is one of the four extant East Slavic languages, and is the native language of the Russians . It was the de facto and de jure official language of the former Soviet Union . Russian has remained an official language of the Russian Federation , Belarus , Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan , and Tajikistan , and is still commonly used as a lingua franca in Ukraine , Moldova , the Caucasus , Central Asia , and to
5472-762: Is one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station , one of the six official languages of the United Nations , as well as the fourth most widely used language on the Internet . Russian is written using the Russian alphabet of the Cyrillic script ; it distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without—the so-called "soft" and "hard" sounds. Almost every consonant has
5624-402: Is recognized as a minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities . Russian is the language of 9% of the population according to the World Factbook. Ethnologue cites Russian as the country's de facto working language. In China , Russian has no official status, but it is spoken by the small Russian communities in the northeastern Heilongjiang and
5776-569: Is sometimes considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. Also, Russian has notable lexical similarities with Bulgarian due to a common Church Slavonic influence on both languages, but because of later interaction in the 19th and 20th centuries, Bulgarian grammar differs markedly from Russian. Over the course of centuries, the vocabulary and literary style of Russian have also been influenced by Western and Central European languages such as Greek, Latin , Polish , Dutch , German, French, Italian, and English, and to
5928-585: Is spoken by 14.2% of the population according to an undated estimate from the World Factbook. In 2005, Russian was the most widely taught foreign language in Mongolia, and was compulsory in Year 7 onward as a second foreign language in 2006. Around 1.5 million Israelis spoke Russian as of 2017. The Israeli press and websites regularly publish material in Russian and there are Russian newspapers, television stations, schools, and social media outlets based in
6080-546: Is the only island in the archipelago connected to Russky Island by land, as a thin isthmus forms a land bridge during low tide. Russky Mountain, 291 metres (955 ft) above sea level , is the highest point of Russky Island and the Eugénie Archipelago, and one of the highest peaks of Vladivostok. It is located in the northern part of the island, near the south-western shore of the Novik Bay. The source of
6232-518: Is the stressed word in a sentence, for example Ты́ съел печенье? ( Tý syel pechenye? – "Was it you who ate the cookie?") – Ты съе́л печенье? ( Ty syél pechenye? – "Did you eat the cookie?) – Ты съел пече́нье? ( Ty syel pechénye? "Was it the cookie you ate?"). Stress marks are mandatory in lexical dictionaries and books for children or Russian learners. The Russian syllable structure can be quite complex, with both initial and final consonant clusters of up to four consecutive sounds. Using
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6384-470: The 2011 Lithuanian census , Russian was the native language for 7.2% of the population. In Moldova , Russian was considered to be the language of interethnic communication under a Soviet-era law. On 21 January 2021, the Constitutional Court of Moldova declared the law unconstitutional and deprived Russian of the status of the language of interethnic communication. 50% of the population
6536-513: 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
6688-1000: The Apollo–Soyuz mission, which first flew in 1975. In March 2013, Russian was found to be the second-most used language on websites after English. Russian was the language of 5.9% of all websites, slightly ahead of German and far behind English (54.7%). Russian was used not only on 89.8% of .ru sites, but also on 88.7% of sites with the former Soviet Union domain .su . Websites in former Soviet Union member states also used high levels of Russian: 79.0% in Ukraine, 86.9% in Belarus, 84.0% in Kazakhstan, 79.6% in Uzbekistan, 75.9% in Kyrgyzstan and 81.8% in Tajikistan. However, Russian
6840-413: The Constitution of Tajikistan and is permitted in official documentation. 28% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 7% used it as the main language with family, friends or at work. The World Factbook notes that Russian is widely used in government and business. In Turkmenistan , Russian lost its status as the official lingua franca in 1996. Among 12% of the population who grew up in
6992-653: 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
7144-683: 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
7296-755: 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 the Western Bloc during the Cold War . This period saw
7448-426: 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
7600-431: The Russian President in the Russian Far East in Boyarin Bay were approved by the APEC summit. The Russky Bridge between Russky Island and Vladivostok was completed in July 2012, and has the longest cable-stayed bridge span in the world at 1,104 metres (3,622 ft). Russian language Russian is an East Slavic language belonging to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family . It
7752-403: 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
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#17327723423177904-405: 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
8056-476: The Ukrainian language in more than 30 spheres of public life: in particular in public administration , media, education, science, culture, advertising, services . The law does not regulate private communication. A poll conducted in March 2022 by RATING in the territory controlled by Ukraine found that 83% of the respondents believe that Ukrainian should be the only state language of Ukraine. This opinion dominates in all macro-regions, age and language groups. On
8208-507: The United States Census , in 2007 Russian was the primary language spoken in the homes of over 850,000 individuals living in the United States. Russian is one of the official languages (or has similar status and interpretation must be provided into Russian) of the following: The Russian language is also one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station – NASA astronauts who serve alongside Russian cosmonauts usually take Russian language courses. This practice goes back to
8360-464: 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
8512-469: 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
8664-406: 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
8816-448: 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
8968-405: The 20th century, Russian was a mandatory language taught in the schools of the members of the old Warsaw Pact and in other countries that used to be satellites of the USSR. According to the Eurobarometer 2005 survey, fluency in Russian remains fairly high (20–40%) in some countries, in particular former Warsaw Pact countries. In Armenia , Russian has no official status, but it is recognized as
9120-412: The Belarusian society the Russian language prevails, so according to the 2019 census 6,718,557 people (71.4% of the total population) stated that they speak Russian at home, for ethnic Belarusians this share is 61.4%, for Russians — 97.2%, for Ukrainians — 89.0%, for Poles — 52.4%, and for Jews — 96.6%; 2,447,764 people (26.0% of the total population) stated that the language they usually speak at home
9272-531: 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
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#17327723423179424-406: 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
9576-455: 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
9728-410: 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,
9880-433: 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
10032-412: 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
10184-480: 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
10336-510: The Governor-General of Eastern Siberia . The island was charted in its entirety by an expedition led by the cartographer Lieutenant Colonel Vasily Babkin in 1862, as part of the survey of Peter the Great gulf after its acquisition. A map featuring the whole island was published in 1865 with the name Kazakevich Island, in honour of Petr Kazakevich, the military governor of Primorskaya Oblast . The names Russky Island and Kazakevich Island were used interchangeably until after World War II , when it
10488-409: The Great and developed from the Moscow ( Middle or Central Russian ) dialect substratum under the influence of some of the previous century's Russian chancery language. Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution , the spoken form of the Russian language was that of the nobility and the urban bourgeoisie. Russian peasants, the great majority of the population, continued to speak in their own dialects. However,
10640-468: The Institute of Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences, an optional acute accent ( знак ударения ) may, and sometimes should, be used to mark stress . For example, it is used to distinguish between otherwise identical words, especially when context does not make it obvious: замо́к ( zamók – "lock") – за́мок ( zámok – "castle"), сто́ящий ( stóyashchy – "worthwhile") – стоя́щий ( stoyáshchy – "standing"), чудно́ ( chudnó – "this
10792-411: The Middle East and North Africa – 1.3 million, Sub-Saharan Africa – 0.1 million, Latin America – 0.2 million, U.S., Canada , Australia, and New Zealand – 4.1 million speakers. Therefore, the Russian language is the seventh-largest in the world by the number of speakers , after English, Mandarin, Hindi -Urdu, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Portuguese. Russian is one of the six official languages of
10944-597: 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
11096-636: 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
11248-625: 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
11400-829: 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
11552-807: The Russian alphabet include ⟨ ѣ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ е ⟩ ( /je/ or /ʲe/ ); ⟨ і ⟩ and ⟨ ѵ ⟩ , which both merged to ⟨ и ⟩ ( /i/ ); ⟨ ѳ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ ф ⟩ ( /f/ ); ⟨ ѫ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ у ⟩ ( /u/ ); ⟨ ѭ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ ю ⟩ ( /ju/ or /ʲu/ ); and ⟨ ѧ ⟩ and ⟨ ѩ ⟩ , which later were graphically reshaped into ⟨ я ⟩ and merged phonetically to /ja/ or /ʲa/ . While these older letters have been abandoned at one time or another, they may be used in this and related articles. The yers ⟨ ъ ⟩ and ⟨ ь ⟩ originally indicated
11704-458: The Russian principalities before and especially during Mongol rule. This strengthened dialectal differences, and for a while, prevented the emergence of a standardized national language. The formation of the unified and centralized Russian state in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the gradual re-emergence of a common political, economic, and cultural space created the need for a common standard language. The initial impulse for standardization came from
11856-629: The Russky River is on the southern slope of the mountain. The first map to feature Russky Island was published in Russia in 1859, although only the western and northern shores of the island were shown. It became a part of the Russian Empire the following year in 1860 after the Convention of Peking , when Outer Manchuria was ceded by Qing China. The island was named Russky Island, meaning "Russian Island", by Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky ,
12008-478: 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
12160-408: 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
12312-479: 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
12464-603: 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 the forced collectivization of agriculture , rapid industrialization , and
12616-405: The Soviet era can speak Russian, other generations of citizens that do not have any knowledge of Russian. Primary and secondary education by Russian is almost non-existent. In Uzbekistan , Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication. It has some official roles, being permitted in official documentation and is the lingua franca of the country and the language of the elite. Russian
12768-510: 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
12920-606: 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
13072-451: 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,
13224-558: 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 the Era of Stagnation , was marked by economic decline, political corruption, and
13376-535: 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
13528-477: 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
13680-490: 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
13832-403: The United Nations. Education in Russian is still a popular choice for both Russian as a second language (RSL) and native speakers in Russia, and in many former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics. In Belarus , Russian is a second state language alongside Belarusian per the Constitution of Belarus . 77% of
13984-452: 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
14136-559: 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 ',
14288-613: The Vladivostok diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church , was built on the island. In April 2019, the island hosted a summit between President Vladimir Putin and North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un . Development of Russky Island is linked to Russia's response to growing Chinese economic power in the region and the opportunity of the Chinese market. The 2012 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit
14440-580: 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
14592-403: The broader sense of expanding the use of Russian alongside or in favour of other languages. The current standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language ( современный русский литературный язык – "sovremenny russky literaturny yazyk"). It arose at the beginning of the 18th century with the modernization reforms of the Russian state under the rule of Peter
14744-541: 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
14896-407: 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
15048-707: 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
15200-572: The country. There is an Israeli TV channel mainly broadcasting in Russian with Israel Plus . See also Russian language in Israel . Russian is also spoken as a second language by a small number of people in Afghanistan . In Vietnam , Russian has been added in the elementary curriculum along with Chinese and Japanese and were named as "first foreign languages" for Vietnamese students to learn, on equal footing with English. The Russian language
15352-537: 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
15504-573: 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
15656-413: The factory and the industrial plant their local peasant dialects with their phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary, and the very process of recruiting workers from peasants and the mobility of the worker population generate another process: the liquidation of peasant inheritance by way of leveling the particulars of local dialects. On the ruins of peasant multilingual, in the context of developing heavy industry,
15808-523: 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
15960-456: The final reading amendments that state that all schools and kindergartens in the country are to transition to education in Latvian . From 2025, all children will be taught in Latvian only. On 28 September 2023, Latvian deputies approved The National Security Concept, according to which from 1 January 2026, all content created by Latvian public media (including LSM ) should be only in Latvian or
16112-631: The generation of immigrants who started arriving in the early 1960s). Only about 25% of them are ethnic Russians, however. Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union , the overwhelming majority of Russophones in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in New York City were Russian-speaking Jews. Afterward, the influx from the countries of the former Soviet Union changed the statistics somewhat, with ethnic Russians and Ukrainians immigrating along with some more Russian Jews and Central Asians. According to
16264-480: The government bureaucracy for the lack of a reliable tool of communication in administrative, legal, and judicial affairs became an obvious practical problem. The earliest attempts at standardizing Russian were made based on the so-called Moscow official or chancery language, during the 15th to 17th centuries. Since then, the trend of language policy in Russia has been standardization in both the restricted sense of reducing dialectical barriers between ethnic Russians, and
16416-407: 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
16568-616: 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
16720-513: 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
16872-413: 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
17024-827: 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
17176-415: 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
17328-520: 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
17480-619: 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,
17632-719: 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
17784-524: The northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region . Russian was also the main foreign language taught in school in China between 1949 and 1964. In Kazakhstan , Russian is not a state language, but according to article 7 of the Constitution of Kazakhstan its usage enjoys equal status to that of the Kazakh language in state and local administration. The 2009 census reported that 10,309,500 people, or 84.8% of
17936-835: 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
18088-515: The other hand, before the war, almost a quarter of Ukrainians were in favour of granting Russian the status of the state language, while after the beginning of Russia's invasion the support for the idea dropped to just 7%. In peacetime, the idea of raising the status of Russian was traditionally supported by residents of the south and east . But even in these regions, only a third of the respondents were in favour, and after Russia's full-scale invasion , their number dropped by almost half. According to
18240-461: The other three languages in the East Slavic branch. In many places in eastern and southern Ukraine and throughout Belarus, these languages are spoken interchangeably, and in certain areas traditional bilingualism resulted in language mixtures such as Surzhyk in eastern Ukraine and Trasianka in Belarus. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect , although it vanished during the 15th or 16th century,
18392-446: The parliament approved a bill to close up all Russian language schools and kindergartens by the school year. The transition to only Estonian language schools and kindergartens will start in the 2024-2025 school year. In Latvia , Russian is officially considered a foreign language. 55% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 26% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. On 18 February 2012, Latvia held
18544-466: 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
18696-453: The peasants' speech was never systematically studied, as it was generally regarded by philologists as simply a source of folklore and an object of curiosity. This was acknowledged by the noted Russian dialectologist Nikolai Karinsky , who toward the end of his life wrote: "Scholars of Russian dialects mostly studied phonetics and morphology. Some scholars and collectors compiled local dictionaries. We have almost no studies of lexical material or
18848-459: The population aged 15 and above, could read and write well in Russian, and understand the spoken language. In October 2023, Kazakhstan drafted a media law aimed at increasing the use of the Kazakh language over Russian, the law stipulates that the share of the state language on television and radio should increase from 50% to 70%, at a rate of 5% per year, starting in 2025. In Kyrgyzstan , Russian
19000-418: The population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 67% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. According to the 2019 Belarusian census , out of 9,413,446 inhabitants of the country, 5,094,928 (54.1% of the total population) named Belarusian as their native language, with 61.2% of ethnic Belarusians and 54.5% of ethnic Poles declaring Belarusian as their native language. In everyday life in
19152-418: 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
19304-527: 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
19456-479: The pronunciation of ultra-short or reduced /ŭ/ , /ĭ/ . Because of many technical restrictions in computing and also because of the unavailability of Cyrillic keyboards abroad, Russian is often transliterated using the Latin alphabet. For example, мороз ('frost') is transliterated moroz , and мышь ('mouse'), mysh or myš' . Once commonly used by the majority of those living outside Russia, transliteration
19608-472: The proper pronunciation of uncommon words or names. Russian is an East Slavic language of the wider Indo-European family . It is a descendant of Old East Slavic , a language used in Kievan Rus' , which was a loose conglomerate of East Slavic tribes from the late 9th to the mid-13th centuries. From the point of view of spoken language , its closest relatives are Ukrainian , Belarusian , and Rusyn ,
19760-490: 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,
19912-625: 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
20064-491: The respondents), while according to the 2002 census – 142.6 million people (99.2% of the respondents). In Ukraine , Russian is a significant minority language. According to estimates from Demoskop Weekly, in 2004 there were 14,400,000 native speakers of Russian in the country, and 29 million active speakers. 65% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 38% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. On 5 September 2017, Ukraine's Parliament passed
20216-653: 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
20368-461: The southwest for about 40 km (25 mi). Major neighboring islands in the archipelago include Shkot Island to the south, Popov Island (7 km (4.3 mi) long, 4.3 km (2.7 mi) wide), Reyneke Island (3.4 km (2.1 mi) across), and Rikord Island (4.1 km (2.5 mi) long and less than 2 km (1.2 mi) wide) to the south-west. There are many small islets and sea stacks scattered between them. Shkot Island
20520-626: The survey carried out by RATING in August 2023 in the territory controlled by Ukraine and among the refugees, almost 60% of the polled usually speak Ukrainian at home, about 30% – Ukrainian and Russian, only 9% – Russian. Since March 2022, the use of Russian in everyday life has been noticeably decreasing. For 82% of respondents, Ukrainian is their mother tongue, and for 16%, Russian is their mother tongue. IDPs and refugees living abroad are more likely to use both languages for communication or speak Russian. Nevertheless, more than 70% of IDPs and refugees consider Ukrainian to be their native language. In
20672-459: The syntax of Russian dialects." After 1917, Marxist linguists had no interest in the multiplicity of peasant dialects and regarded their language as a relic of the rapidly disappearing past that was not worthy of scholarly attention. Nakhimovsky quotes the Soviet academicians A.M Ivanov and L.P Yakubinsky, writing in 1930: The language of peasants has a motley diversity inherited from feudalism. On its way to becoming proletariat peasantry brings to
20824-542: 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
20976-786: The two. Others divide the language into three groupings, Northern , Central (or Middle), and Southern , with Moscow lying in the Central region. The Northern Russian dialects and those spoken along the Volga River typically pronounce unstressed /o/ clearly, a phenomenon called okanye ( оканье ). Besides the absence of vowel reduction, some dialects have high or diphthongal /e⁓i̯ɛ/ in place of Proto-Slavic * ě and /o⁓u̯ɔ/ in stressed closed syllables (as in Ukrainian) instead of Standard Russian /e/ and /o/ , respectively. Another Northern dialectal morphological feature
21128-454: The use of the language has some presence in certain areas. A large part of the population, especially the older generations, can speak Russian as a foreign language. However, English has replaced Russian as lingua franca in Lithuania and around 80% of young people speak English as their first foreign language. In contrast to the other two Baltic states, Lithuania has a relatively small Russian-speaking minority (5.0% as of 2008). According to
21280-654: 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
21432-481: 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
21584-460: Was built in an irregular trapezoid shape, with numerous artillery batteries which were meant to be able to fire into almost all the bays of Russky island in case of invasion. During the Soviet era , the island was a closed territory and was home to several military installations, and became one of the largest training areas for the Soviet Navy . In 1992, Russky Island became the scene of
21736-515: 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
21888-405: Was first introduced in North America when Russian explorers voyaged into Alaska and claimed it for Russia during the 18th century. Although most Russian colonists left after the United States bought the land in 1867, a handful stayed and preserved the Russian language in this region to this day, although only a few elderly speakers of this unique dialect are left. In Nikolaevsk, Alaska , Russian
22040-421: Was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 19% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. According to the 2014 Moldovan census , Russians accounted for 4.1% of Moldova's population, 9.4% of the population declared Russian as their native language, and 14.5% said they usually spoke Russian. According to the 2010 census in Russia , Russian language skills were indicated by 138 million people (99.4% of
22192-416: 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
22344-422: Was held on Russky Island, and about US$ 6 billion was set aside for the development of the island and Vladivostok in preparation for the summit and construction of the site for the 2012 APEC conference that was also planned and built as a new campus for the Far Eastern Federal University . Plans include the potential to develop the island as a large scale tourist resort and to construct the official residence of
22496-440: 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
22648-406: Was permanently changed to only Russky Island. By 1889, Fort Pospelov had been built on the island as part of the Vladivostok Fortress complex, as developed by Colonel K. I. Velichko. Over several years, the initial temporary wooden structures were gradually replaced with stone structures. Fort Russky was built on Russky Mountain, near the highest point on the island, between 1898 and 1903. The fort
22800-399: 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
22952-402: Was the sixth-most used language on the top 1,000 sites, behind English, Chinese, French, German, and Japanese. Despite leveling after 1900, especially in matters of vocabulary and phonetics, a number of dialects still exist in Russia. Some linguists divide the dialects of Russian into two primary regional groupings, "Northern" and "Southern", with Moscow lying on the zone of transition between
23104-407: 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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