Soviet Union (USSR)

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR; In Russian: Соưз Советских Социалистических Республик, transliterated as Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik) or simply soviet union (Russian: Советский Соưз, transliterated as Sovetskiy Soyuz), was a socialist state located in northern Eurasia that extended from the Baltic and Black Seas to the Pacific Ocean, and which existed between 1917/22 and 1991. A union of several subnational Soviet republics, the USSR was governed by a one-party regime led by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and had as its capital the city of Moscow.

The Soviet Union had its roots in the Russian Revolution of 1917, which deposed imperial autocracy. After the uprising, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the provisional government that had been established. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was then created and the Russian Civil War began. The Red Army entered several territories of the former Russian Empire and helped the local Communists take power. In 1922, the Bolsheviks were victorious, forming the Soviet Union, with the unification of the Soviet republics of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Transcaucasia. After Lenin’s death on January 21, 1924, the collective leadership of the Troika took power.

Between late August and early September, a political conflict known as the August Uprising would occur and soon after, that same year, Josef Stalin would come to power. Stalin associated state ideology with Marxism-Leninism and initiated a planned economic regime. As a result, the country went through a period of rapid industrialization and collectivization, which laid the foundations of support for the subsequent war effort and Soviet rule after World War II. However, Stalin repressed both Communist party members and elements of the population through his authoritarian regime.

At the beginning of World War II, the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, initially to avoid a confrontation, but the treaty was disregarded in 1941 when the Nazis invaded the territory of the USSR and began the largest and bloodiest theater of war in history. Soviet losses during the war were proportionally the largest of the conflict, due to the cost to gain an advantage over the forces of the Axis Powers in intense battles, such as Stalingrad, which led the Soviets through Eastern Europe until the capture of Berlin in 1945, inflicting the vast majority of German losses during the war.

The territories that the USSR conquered from Axis forces in Central and Eastern Europe later became the satellite states of the Eastern Bloc. Ideological and political differences with their Western Bloc counterparts, which was led by the United States, led to the formation of several economic and military pacts that culminated in the long period of the Cold War.

A process of destalinization followed after Stalin’s death, beginning an era of liberation and re-democratization. Then the USSR began to initiate several of the most significant technological advances of the twentieth century, including the launch of the first artificial satellite and the first spaceflight of a human being in history, factors that created the space race. Cuba’s missile crisis in 1962 marked a period of extreme tension between the two superpowers, which was considered the closest to a mutual nuclear confrontation. In the 1970s, there was a relaxation of international relations, but political tensions were resumed with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The occupation drained economic resources and dragged on without achieving significant political results.

In the 1980s the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform the Union with the introduction of glasnost and perestroika policies in an attempt to end the period of economic stagnation and democratize the government. However, Gorbachev’s reforms led to the emergence of strong nationalist and separatist movements in the country.

The central authorities then started a referendum, which was boycotted by the Baltic republics and Georgia and resulted in a majority of citizens who voted in favor of preserving the Union as a renewed federation. In August 1991, an attempted coup d’état against Gorbachev was made by hard-line government members, with the intention of reversing reforms. The coup failed and Russian President Boris Yeltsin played a prominent role in his defeat, which resulted in the Communist Party’s ban. On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the remaining twelve republics emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as independent post-Soviet countries. The Russian Federation, the successor state of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, assumed the rights and obligations of the former Soviet Union and became recognized as the continuation of its legal personality.

Names

The Soviet Union was also known as СССР, an acronym for Union of Soviet Socialist Republics according to its Russian name Соưз Советских Социалистических Республик (Soyuz Soviétskikh Sotsialistítchiekh ski Respúblik). Although originally written in the Cyrillic alphabet, the Western world eventually adopted it as CCCP, “Latinizing” the letters.

The acronym became well known in the Western world, due to the use of the acronym in uniforms in sports competitions and other objects, in cultural and technological events that occurred in the USSR, such as ships, automobiles or hats and helmets of cosmonauts. This is also due to the detachment of the Soviet Union at such events, which made it better known around the world. Due to the great symbolism and fame that this acronym brought; after the abolition of its use, along with the end of the USSR, Russia, during the administration of Vladimir Putin, resumed the use of the name of the country, but this time described as “Россия” (Rossiya), accompanying the restoration of the Soviet anthem, the bicéfala eagle of Tsarist Russia and the reuse of the flag with the site and hammer as a symbol of the Russian army.

History of the Soviet Union

Background

The late 19th century saw the emergence of various socialist movements in Tsarist Russia.Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 by revolutionary terrorists and the reign of his son, Alexander III (1881–1894), was less liberal, but quieter. The last Russian emperor, Nicholas II (1894-1917), was unable to avoid the events of the Russian Revolution of 1905, triggered by the unsuccessful Russo-Japanese War and the incident known as Bloody Sunday.

The uprising was controlled, but the government was forced to admit major reforms, including the granting of freedoms of expression and assembly, the legalization of political parties, as well as the creation of an elected legislative body, the Duma of the Russian Empire. These measures had little effect, as the parties were systematically monitored and the Duma was controlled by the aristocracy and the Tsar, who could dissolve it at any time.

Until 1905, the political system of Tsarist Russia had no political parties, with all power concentrated in the hands of the emperor. It should be highlighted that these changes, although significant from a political point of view, did not alter the social framework of the majority of the Russian population. Migration to Siberia increased rapidly in the early 20th century, particularly during the Stolypin agrarian reform. Between 1906 and 1914, more than four million settlers arrived in that region.

In 1914, the Russian Empire entered World War I in response to the Declaration of War of the Austro-Hungarian Empire against Serbia, which was allied with the Russians, and fought on several fronts at the same time, isolated from its allies of the Triple Entente. In 1916, the Russian Army’s Brusilov Offensive nearly completely destroyed the Austrian-Hungarian military forces. However, the already existing distrust of the population with the imperial regime was deepened by the rising costs of war, many casualties and rumors of corruption and betrayal. All this formed the climate for the Russian Revolution of 1917, carried out in two main acts.

Revolution and foundation

Although Russia at the time was one of the most powerful countries in the world in military terms, only a fine part of the population, the nobles, had good living conditions. The peasants were terribly poor and worked from sun to sun their land without being able to possess them. Successive defeats in various wars and battles during World War I and the general discontent of the population caused the internal economy to begin to deteriorate. On this occasion, the Soviets and the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party emerged forcefully, founded in 1898, and later divided between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, two terms analogous to the minority (меньше) and majority (больше), in Russian.

This social and political framework has been profoundly altered by the outbreak of World War I. The February 1917 Revolution characterized the first phase of the Russian Revolution. The immediate consequence was the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II. It led to the transfer of power from the Tsar to a republican regime, arising from the alliance between liberals and socialists who intended to conduct political reforms.

The changes proposed by the Mensheviks, who had led the February Revolution, did not change the social framework, as the country continued to suffer great losses due to participation in the War. Social dissatisfaction, coupled with the actions of the Bolsheviks, broke out in the October Revolution. The landmark of this revolution was the invasion of the Winter Palace by the revolutionaries. The October Revolution was led by Vladimir Lenin, becoming the first socialist revolution of the 20th century.

Russia’s departure from World War I, the desire for the return of power by the then Russian elite and the fear that the communist ideal could spread throughout Europe and eventually the world, broke out in the Russian Civil War, which had the participation of several nations. The then French Prime Minister, George Clemenceau, created the term Sanitary Cord, with the aim of isolating Bolshevik Russia from the rest of the world. The Bolshevik idealism propagated to the poorest population was the decisive factor for the victory of Lenin’s supporters.

After the October Revolution, a civil war broke out between the white army, which was anti-communist, and the new Soviet regime with its Red Army. Bolshevik Russia lost its Ukrainian, Polish, Baltic and Finnish territories by signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ended hostilities with the Central Powers of World War I. Allied powers launched an unsuccessful military intervention in support of anti-communist forces. However, both the Bolsheviks and the white movement carried out campaigns of deportations and executions against the others, an episode that became known, respectively, as Red Terror and White Terror. By the end of the Russian civil war, the country’s economy and infrastructure were deeply damaged. Millions of members of the white movement emigrated, while the Russian famine of 1921 killed about 5 million people.

The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, together with the Soviet Socialist Republics of Ukraine, Belarus and Transcaucasia, formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or simply the Soviet Union, on December 30, 1922. The Russian Socialist Republic was the largest and most populous of the 15 republics that made up the USSR, and dominated the union throughout its existence of 69 years.

After Lenin’s death in 1924, a troika was assigned to rule the Soviet Union. However, Josef Stalin, the then secretary general of the Communist Party, managed to suppress all opposition groups within the party and consolidate power in his hands. Leon Trotsky, the main supporter of the world revolution, was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929 and Stalin’s idea of “socialism in one country” became the main line. The continuing internal struggle in the Bolshevik Party culminated in the Great Purge, a period of mass repression between 1937 and 1938, during which hundreds of thousands of people were executed, including the party’s original military members and leaders, who were accused of a coup.

The Stalin-Trotsky opposition went beyond a personal conflict over power, reflected in two different conceptions of the development of socialism, which was resolved in favor of Stalin, with the support of Zinoviev and Kamenev. Marginalized Trotsky (January 1925) the construction of “socialism in one country”, led by Stalin required the elimination of opponents of the left and right, and the existence in the Komintern of an international strategy that would be compatible with the interests of the communist movement in the Soviet Union. After being defeated in his position, Trotsky was forced into exile in Mexico, to be killed in 1940 by Ramón Mercader, a Hispanic-Soviet agent.

It was Stalin

The Soviet Union between 1927 and 1953 was dominated by Josef Stalin (the so-called Stalin era). Often the USSR was described as a totalitarian state, modeled by a leader who had all the powers, and who sought to reform Soviet society, with aggressive economic planning, in particular, with a sweep of the collectivization of agriculture and the development of industrial power. He also built a huge bureaucracy, which was undoubtedly responsible for millions of deaths as a result of various purges and collectivization efforts.

During his time as leader of the USSR, Stalin made frequent use of his secret police, gulags and almost unlimited power to reshape Soviet society, this demonstrates the total unknown, on the part of many, about the USSR and its leader, since the 1936 constitution was the most democratic in the history of the country and the gulags had paid work. The rise to definitive power of Joseph Stalin, as secretary general of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union or Gensek between 1927 and 1929, marked the beginning of a radical transformation of Soviet society. In a few years, the face of the Soviet Union has changed radically by the collectivization of land and the rapid industrialization carried out by the many ambitious five-year plans.

Under Stalin’s leadership, the government launched a planned economy, the industrialization of the country, which was largely still basically rural, and the collectivization of agriculture. During this period of rapid economic and social change, millions of people were sent to forced labor camps, including many political prisoners who opposed Stalin’s government, as well as millions who were deported and exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union. The country’s disorganized agricultural transition, combined with harsh state policies and a drought, led to Soviet famine from 1932 to 1933. The Soviet Union, although at a very high price, was transformed from an agrarian economy to a major industrial powerhouse in a small space of time.

Even with the collectivization process already nearly complete in Ukraine, Stalin announced that the battle against the kulaks was not yet won—the kulaks had been “defeated, but not yet exterminated.” Given that by this time anyone who by any reasonable definition could be classified as a kulak had already been expelled, killed or sent to prison, this new stage of the Soviet campaign in Ukraine would have the aim of terrorizing ordinary peasants.

Stalin began by setting targets for producing and delivering cereals, which were overly high. Failure to comply with the requirements was considered an act of deliberate sabotage. After some time, and with production and delivery inevitably below the target, Stalin determined that his activists confiscated from the peasants all the volume of cereals needed to achieve the stipulated goals. People were sentenced to ten years in prison and forced labor simply for harvesting potatoes, or even for harvesting ears of corn from the pieces of private land they could manage. It is usually said that the number of Ukrainians killed in the 1932-33 famine was five million. According to Robert Conquest, if we add other disasters that occurred with peasants between 1930 and 1937, including a huge number of deportations of alleged kulaks, the large total is raised to 14.5 million deaths.

In 1936, Josef Stalin’s regime expelled or executed a considerable number of party members, among them many of its opponents, in acts that became known as the “Great Purges” (see: political repression in the Soviet Union). After all, they believed that this would be the way to communism, but the course of this social form was already plotted in a totally different way from what Karl Marx and Lenin thought, no longer being a form aimed at the dissolution of the state itself and the social classes, but now, the regime under the command of Josef Stalin, it was already a social form focused on crystallization (the idea of socialism within one country).

Among the things that were done to this effect are the nationalizations and the physical annihilation of the bourgeois class that Nep had recreated, using the gulags (labor camps in Siberia). Some theorists criticize this form that Stalin used to liquidate private property, for not agreeing with it, and for thinking that it only tarnishes the image of communism before the world because the same effect could have been achieved without the physical annihilation of that class. The disaster and the authoritarian truculence of Stalinist policies contributed greatly to the misrepresenting of Marx’s concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. After the nationalizations, the economy was planned, so that it could take advantage of its nationalization. Five-to-five years, five-year plans were made, in which it was decided which funds would be invested and in which areas.

World War II

The policy of appeasement promoted by the United Kingdom and France on the annexation of Austria and the invasion of Czechoslovakia expanded the power of Nazi Germany and posed a threat of war between Adolf Hitler’s regime and the Soviet Union. Around the same time, the Third Reich allied itself with the Empire of Japan, a Soviet rival in the Far East and a declared enemy of the USSR in the Soviet-Japanese border wars between 1938 and 1939.

In August 1939, after another failure in attempts to establish an anti-Nazi alliance with the British and French, the Soviet government decided to improve its relations with the Nazis by celebrating the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, promising not aggression between the two countries and dividing their spheres of influence in Eastern Europe.

While Hitler invaded Poland and France and other countries operated on a single front at the beginning of World War II, the USSR was able to build its army and reclaim some of the former territories of the Russian Empire as a result of the Soviet invasion of Poland, the Winter War and the occupation of the Baltic countries. On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany broke the treaty of non-aggression and invaded the Soviet Union, with the largest and most powerful invasion force in human history and the opening of the largest theater of World War II.

Although the German army had considerable success at the beginning of the invasion, the attack was stopped at the Battle of Moscow. Subsequently, the Germans suffered great defeats at the Battle of Stalingrad in the winter between 1942 and 1943, and then at the Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943. Another German failure was the Siege of Leningrad, in which the city was completely blocked by land between 1941 and 1944 by German and Finnish forces, and suffered a hunger crisis that killed more than a million people but never surrendered.

Under Stalin’s administration and the leadership of commanders such as Gueorgui Jukov and Konstantin Rokossovsky, Soviet forces arrived in Eastern Europe between 1944 and 1945 and took Berlin in May 1945. In August 1945, the Soviet army defeated the Japanese in Manchukuo, China, and North Korea, contributing to the Allied victory over Imperial Japan.

The Period of World War II (1941-1945) is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War. During this conflict, which included many of the deadest combat operations in human history, the deaths of Soviet civilians and military personnel were 10.6 million and 15.9 million, respectively, representing about a third of all victims of the entire conflict.

The total demographic loss of the Soviet people was even greater. The Soviet economy and infrastructure suffered massive devastation, but the USSR emerged as a recognized military superpower after the end of the war.

The Red Army occupied Eastern Europe after the war, including East Germany. Soviet-dependent socialist governments were installed in puppet states in the so-called Eastern Bloc. By becoming the second nuclear power in the world, the Soviet Union created the Warsaw Pact alliance and entered a fight for global domination with the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a period known as the Cold War.

The Soviet Union supported revolutionary movements around the world, including the newly formed People’s Republic of China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and later the Republic of Cuba. Significant amounts of Soviet resources were allocated in aid to the other socialist states.

Cold war

With the end of World War II, European countries were half-destroyed and without the resources to rebuild themselves, with this the superpowers decided to help each of their allies, with the aim of not losing areas of influence.

The United States proposes to create a broad economic plan, the Marshall Plan, which was about granting a series of low-interest loans and public investments to ease the end of the crisis in Western Europe and repel the threat of socialism among the disgruntled population.

The Soviet Union set out to help its allied countries with the creation of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON). COMECON had been proposed as a way to prevent the satellite countries of the Soviet Union from showing interest in the Marshall Plan, and not abandoning Moscow’s sphere of influence.

In 1949 the United States and Canada, along with most of Western Europe, created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance with the goal of international protection in the event of an alleged attack by Eastern European countries.

In response to NATO, the USSR signed the Warsaw Pact (1955) between it and its allies to join Eastern European military forces. Soon the military alliances were in full operation, and any conflict between two member countries could cause a war never seen before. During this period, most local conflicts, civil wars, or inter-state wars were intensified by polarization between the United States and the USSR (see: proxy war) and the Soviet socialist system was expanded around the world.

Era Khrushchov

Stalin died on March 5, 1953, leaving a power vacuum that led to an internal dispute in the PCUS (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) for leadership, between Malenkov, Beria, Molotov and Khrushchov – the latter winner. As Stalin’s successor, Khrushchev undertook a policy of denouncing his predecessor’s abuses. During the 1956 Congress of the PCUS, Khrushchov released a series of Stalin’s crimes (see: Secret Speech), denying the legacy of Stalinism, thus establishing a new stance and creating a new liberal paradigm for international communism. Capitalist propaganda used much of Khrushchev’s arguments to counter the USSR.

In this era, there was the release of all political prisoners from the gulags, an unprecedented effort was made for the production of consumer goods, and also carried out numerous reforms, often cited as hasty or contradictory, also present the secret Speech of Nikita Khrushchov, criticizing the Stalinist regime, and revealing Stalin’s crimes, and his cults of personality.

There is no consensus on the count of victims of Stalinism (see: Crimes against Humanity under Communist regimes). Certain statistics state that between 20 and 35 million Soviets died of starvation, cold or executed in concentration camps or forced labor during Stalin’s time.

Externally, he used the so-called, Peaceful Coexistence, which stated that the communist bloc could peacefully coexist with capitalist states. This theory was contrary to the principle that communism and capitalism were antagonistic and could never exist in peace. The Soviet Union applied it to relations between the Western world and, in particular, with the United States, NATO countries and warsaw pact nations.

This had a large impact on the socialist countries of Eastern Europe (in 1956 the Hungarian Revolution was aimed at ending the repressive act of the Stalinist regime, but which was soon crushed with the intervention of the USSR), and in China with the Sino-Soviet rupture in the 1950s and 1960s. During the 1960s and early 1970s, the People’s Republic of China, under the leadership of its founder, Mao Tse-tung, claimed that the belligerent attitude should be maintained for capitalist countries and therefore initially rejected peaceful coexistence considering it as revisionism of Marxist theory.

As a result of the Cold War, the Soviet Union found itself involved in a race to conquer space with the United States. The Soviet space program began with a great advantage over that of the United States. Due to technical problems to manufacture lighter nuclear warheads, the USSR intercontinental launch missiles were immense and powerful compared to their American similarities.

Soon, the rockets for their space program were already ready as a result of the Soviet military effort resulting from the Cold War. Thus, at the time Sputnik was launched, the launch capacity of the USSR was 500 kg, while that of the United States was 5 kg. The Soviet Union was the nation that took the lead in space exploration by sending the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, and the first man to space, Yuri Gagarin. Much of the Soviet Union’s space achievements are due to the talent of rocket engineer Sergei Korolev, the chief engineer of the Soviet space program, who convinced leader Nikita Kruschov of the importance of conquering space.

In the economic sphere, an unprecedented effort was made for the production of consumer goods, and also carried out numerous reforms in Soviet agriculture. Even if you don’t get the expected result. By such hasty and contradictory measures, Khrushchov is deposed by the Politburo.

Era Brejnev

Leonid Brejnev takes the Soviet Union into a difficult situation after Khrushchov’s contradictory management, with the countries closest amid instability, a tense situation with the People’s Republic of China, fickle, sometimes apocalyptic relations, sometimes friendly with the United States, Yugoslavia’s resistance to the Warsaw Pact and a political division within the party.

Khrushchov’s deposition and Leonid Brejnev’s tenure represented the return of more conservative power in the party’s power, including the bureaucracy that controlled the Soviet Union at the time of Josef Stalin, but which was split by Khrushchov, amid his revisionist measures.

Brejnev developed the policy of The Theory of Limited Sovereignty, which intended to keep the Soviet Union as a socialist axis in the world, with the other nations aligned with Moscow. This policy was characterized Stalinist for maintaining socialist hegemony, promoting the cult of personality and maintaining a bureaucracy in politics, whose removal, according to Brejnev, was an example of utopian and Trotskyist thinking.

Brejnev would try to rehabilitate Stalin’s name, which had not been pronounced by Soviet leaders for nearly ten years, but failed, as the authorities and the people were divided by what Khrushchov had said about Stalin. On the other hand, communist symbolism in Stalin’s time, including political propaganda, military parades, the expulsion of critics of the regime and the personality cult itself, to a lesser extent, were one of the main characteristics of the Brejnev regime.

Over time, the country’s political situation stabilized and the party agreed to follow a neutral line regarding the liberalization initiated by Khrushchov.It was during Brejnev’s administration that the Soviet anthem recovered its lyrics and pro-party advertisements were released in the press.

During this time, the USSR managed to reach its political, military and economic peak, having great influence around the world, from the economy to sports, and its people had a great improvement in quality of life compared to previous decades. Industry was growing rapidly and Soviet science was developing new technologies.

In 1982, after two decades of rule, Brejnev died unexpectedly from the ingestion of pentobarbitals, being succeeded by former secret agent Iuri Andropov, who would initiate a political reform in the country, interrupted by a serious illness that led to his death in 1984. Konstantin Chernenko, brejnev’s trusted man, gave up retirement and assumed the presidency of the USSR, even-aged and sick. After a year in office, Chernenko is hastily hospitalized and died in early 1985, representing the end of a generation of Soviet politicians, characterized by maintaining a conservative. He would succeed the young Mikhail Gorbatchov, with a younger, liberal and more flexible Politburo.

Era Gorbachev

From the late 1970s on, the limitations of the Soviet model of planned economy began to become clear. The oil crisis of the 1970s elevated the Soviet economy, and the people, in the middle of the socialist regime, could consume more. Many families were able to buy new technologies. Automobiles, microwave ovens and electronic devices were not new to many, but more than one automobile and various electronic devices were a dream that depended on a lot of savings, and which now became a reality for many people, giving a much greater material comfort, without hurting socialist principles. The welfare was so much that the Soviet authorities even said that capitalist countries were in crisis.

For this profound economic, political and military development, the Soviet economy ended up stagnating in the late 1970s. It was not anticipated that later this small stagnation would evolve into a deep crisis, capable of restructuring the country’s economy. As the stagnation of the 1970s turned into the crisis of the 1980s, it is the subject of discussion so far. The comparison with China, which has made a more successful transition to capitalism, has helped to better assess the weight of structural and conjuncture factors in the production of this crisis.

In structural terms, the planned economy may have been the main responsible for the crisis, as it required that everything produced in all sectors of the economy be foreseen in the five-year plans. In practice, this created distortions, such as excess of certain products (basic industries and capital goods) and scarcity of others (consumer goods). When the production of a given product was insufficient to meet consumption, prices could not rise to the point of inhibiting demand (as is often the case in a market economy), but the products simply ran out of stores and supermarket shelves.

By the late 1970s, the military costs of the Cold War were already unsustainable for the USSR. The country maintained armed forces of nearly two million men, one million of whom were mobilized in Eastern Europe. When China approached the United States in the 1970s and began threatening the USSR, the situation worsened. China stationed nearly a million men on the borders with the Soviet Union, and to counterbalance, it had to park another million men on the border with China. The costs of this permanent mobilization were beginning to prove unsustainable in the early 1980s, mainly because of Soviet involvement in the Afghanistan conflict.

According to Angelo Segrillo, the military factor was not the main factor in the fall of the USSR, as Soviet spending in this area did not increase significantly when compared to previous data. The fall, according to the author, was mainly due to the change of the global paradigm of industrial production, begun in the early 1970s, moving from the Fordist model, in which production was centralized and with little flexibility – and which had been successfully adopted by the USSR – to the Toyotista model, decentralized and flexible, incompatible with the characteristics of the Soviet economy.

Mikhail Gorbatchov was the last Soviet leader. He assumed the post of secretary general of the PCUS (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) in March 1985, replacing Konstantin Tchernenko, who had died that year. Good relationships with party members and political skill were factors that accredited Gorbatchov to take the most important position in the Soviet administrative hierarchy. An advocate of modernizing ideas, he instituted two innovative projects: perestroika (economic reconstruction) and glasnost (political transparency). The attempt to accelerate the modernization of perestroika and glasnost would come as Gorbatchov’s “saving” proposal, but it could no longer reverse the crisis.

On March 26, 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear accident occurred at the No. 4 nuclear reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near the town of Pripiat in northern Soviet Ukraine, near the border with Soviet Belarus. The fire caused by the explosion was contained only on May 4, 1986. As plumes of fission products thrown into the atmosphere by the fire precipitated over parts of the Soviet Union and Western Europe. The estimated radioactive inventory that was released during the hottest phase of the fire was roughly equal in magnitude to the airborne fission products released in the initial explosion.

The year 1989 saw the first free elections in the socialist world, with several candidates and with the free media to discuss. Although many communist parties had tried to prevent the changes, Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost had a great positive effect on society. Thus, communist regimes, country after country, began to fall. Poland and Hungary negotiated free elections (no dwelling on the victory of the Solidarity party in Poland), and Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and East Germany had mass uprisings calling for an end to the socialist regime (see: Revolutions of 1989).

And on the night of November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall began to be torn down after 28 years of existence. Before his fall, there were large demonstrations in which, among other things, the freedom to travel was asked. In addition, there was a huge influx of refugees to the West, through the RFA embassies, mainly in Prague and Warsaw, and through the newly opened border between Hungary and Austria, near Lake Neusiedl.

In 1990, with German reunification, the Soviet Union falls to the rank of fourth largest GDP in the world. This situation worsens rapidly with the new crisis of the transition to capitalism in the 1990s, when Russia becomes the 15th world GDP. Between 1987 and 1988 the USSR gave up continuing the arms race with the United States, signing a new series of strategic and conventional arms limitation agreements.

The USSR begins its withdrawal from Afghanistan and begins to reduce its military presence in Eastern Europe. The Soviet government is pressuring allies to negotiate peace in conflicts such as the Angolan Civil War, where the terms for ending the conflict are established in agreement with the United States, Angola, Cuba and South Africa. This new stance also meant reducing all forms of support (political, financial and commercial) that this power gave to allied regimes around the world.

Internally, Gorbatchov faced great resistance from the oligarchy and partisan bureaucrats (the Apparatchiks). The hard-line of the party saw Gorbatchov’s stance on the international level as cowardly and accused him of betraying the USSR and socialism. These groups were against the withdrawal from Afghanistan and argued that the USSR should intervene in eastern European countries that were going through democratization processes and abandoned socialism, such as Poland. In 1991, more warring sectors of the Soviet government argued that the USSR should have supported Iraq in the Gulf War against the Coalition of Countries led by the United States and began to criticize the Gorbatchov government as weak.

In the middle of 1990 and early 1991, the political and economic situation in the Soviet Union worsened and to try to reverse this crisis President Mikhail Gorbatchov, thought of first solving the Soviet political and ethnic problem and then reforming the economy. The new Treaty of the Union of Sovereign States was a draft treaty that would have replaced the 1922 Treaty (Treaty of the Creation of the USSR) and therefore would have replaced the Soviet Union with a new entity called the Union of Sovereign States, an attempt by Mikhail Gorbachev to recover and reform the Soviet state.

Collapse

On August 19, 1991, the day before Gorbachev and a group of leaders of the Republics signed the new Treaty on Union, a group called the State Committee for the State of Emergency (Государственный Комитет по Чрезвычайному Положениё, ГКЧП, pronounced GeKaTchePe) tried to seem to take power in Moscow. It was announced that Gorbachev was ill and had been removed from his post as president. Gorbachev was then on vacation to Crimea, where the takeover was unleashed and remained there throughout its course.

Soviet Vice President Gennady Yanayev was appointed interim president. The eight-member committee, including KGB chief Vladimir Krioutchkov and Foreign Minister Boris Pogo, Defense Minister Dmitri Iazov, all of which agreed to work under Gorbachev. On August 21, 1991, the vast majority of troops who were sent to Moscow openly stand alongside the protesters or are deserters. The coup failed and Gorbachev, who had attributed to his Dacha residence in Crimea, returned to Moscow.

After his return to power, Gorbachev promised to punish the conservatives of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (PCUS). He resigned from his duties as Secretary-General, but remains president of the Soviet Union. The failure of the coup d’état presented a series of collapses of the institutions of the union. Boris Yeltsin took control of the central television company and the ministries and economic bodies.

The defeat of the coup and the political and economic chaos that followed aggravated regional separatism and eventually led to the fragmentation of the country. In September the Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) declared independence from Moscow.

On December 1, Ukraine proclaimed its independence through a plebiscite with the support of 90% of the population. And between October and December 11 (with the 3 Baltic republics and Ukraine) of the 15 Soviet republics declare independence.

On December 21, leaders of the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Belarus signed a document that declared the Soviet Union extinct. And in its place was created the Community of Independent States (CIS).

On Christmas Day 1991, in a ceremony transmitted by satellite to the whole world, Gorbatchov who was 6 years in power officially declares the end of the USSR and resignation sits the presidency of the country and after that, the flag with the scythe and hammer is removed from the Kremlin and the Russian flag is placed in its place. The Soviet Union officially dissolved on December 31, 1991, after 69 years of existence. The Russian Federation became known as its successor, as it took more than half of the former Soviet territory, in addition to most of its industrial and military park.

Geography

The Soviet Union was located in the middle and northern latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. Almost two and a half times larger than the territory of the United States, it was a country of continental size, only slightly smaller than the whole of North America. The Soviet territory had a total area of 22,402,200 square kilometers, representing one-sixth of the earth’s surface. Three quarters of the country was north of the 50th parallel; the USSR was, in general, much closer to the North Pole than to the equator.

Extending for over 62 710 km, the Soviet border was not only the largest of the world, but also the widest. Along the land border almost 20,000 km, the Soviet Union bordered twelve countries, six on each continent. In Asia, its neighbors were North Korea, China, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey. In Europe, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, and Finland were limited. With the exception of the icy miles of the Bering Strait, it would have a thirteenth neighbor: the United States. The rest of the 60,000 km border was with the Arctic Ocean.

To the north, the Arctic coastline is the domain of the tundra. To the south of the tundra extends the domain of the boreal forest (Taiga). Further south still, the forest is enriched by trees with many leaves, which mainly cover the eastern part of the European plain as well as the south of extreme-eastern Russia. To the south, the forest degrades and becomes a steppe with few areas with mountains. There are still deserts in the south of the country. And in the European part develops on very fertile black lands several temperate plants.

Environmental problems

The official Soviet environmental policy has always attached great importance to actions in which human beings actively improve nature. Lenin’s quote “Communism is Soviet power and the electrification of the country!” in many ways summarizes the focus on modernization and industrial development. During the first five-year plan in 1928, Stalin continued industrializing the country at all costs. Values such as environmental protection and nature were completely ignored in the struggle to create a modern industrial society. After Stalin’s death, the Soviet government focused more on environmental issues, but the basic perception of the value of environmental protection remained the same.

Formerly the fourth largest lake in the world with an area of 68,000 square kilometers, the Aral Sea in present-day Kazakhstan began shrinking in the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by irrigation projects of the Soviet Union. In 1997, the lake was only 10% of its original size, dividing into four smaller lakes: the North Aral Sea, the east and west basins of the once much larger South Aral Sea, and the smaller intermediate lake, the Barsakelmes.

In 1949, the Soviet atomic bomb program selected a site on the steppes 150 km west of the city of Semei as the site for its weapons tests. For decades, Kurchatov (the secret city in the center of the testing area named after Igor Kurchatov, father of the Soviet atomic bomb) was home to many of the brightest stars in Soviet weapons science. The Soviet Union operated the Semipalatinsk Testing Area (STS) from the first explosion in 1949 to 1989; 456 nuclear tests, including 340 underground and 116 atmospheric tests, took place there.

The city of Semei suffered serious environmental and health effects because of the atomic tests carried out in the region. The nuclear ash from atmospheric tests and the uncontrolled exposure of workers, most of whom lived in the city, resulted in high rates of cancer, childhood leukemia, erectile dysfunction and birth defects among residents of Semei and surrounding villages.

The Chernobyl disaster in 1986 was the first major accident at a civilian nuclear power plant. Unparalleled in the world, it resulted in the release of a large number of radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere. Radioactive doses spread relatively far. About 4,000 new cases of thyroid cancer were reported after the incident. However, the long-term effects of the accident are unknown. Another major accident is the Kyshtym disaster.

The Soviet Union demography

The first fifty years of the 20th century of Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union were marked by a succession of disasters, each accompanied by large population losses. Excess deaths during World War I and the Russian Civil War (including post-war famine) amounted to a combined total of 18 million, about 10 million in 1930 and more than 26 million between 1941 and 1945. The post-Soviet population was 45 and 50 million smaller than it would have been if pre-war population growth had continued.

The USSR’s gross birth rate decreased from 44.0 per 1,000 inhabitants in 1926 to 18.0 in 1974, largely due to increasing urbanization and increasing the average age of marriages. The crude mortality rate also showed a gradual decrease – from 23.7 per thousand in 1926 to 8.7 in 1974.

In general, the birth rates of the southern Transcaucasia and Central Asian republics were considerably higher than those in the north of the Soviet Union and, in some cases, even increased in the post-War II period, a phenomenon attributed in part to the slow rates of urbanization and marriages, which traditionally took place earlier in the southern republics. Soviet Europe moved to population replacement sub-fertility, while Soviet Central Asia continued to show population growth well above the replacement fertility level.

In the late 1960s and 1970s there was a reversal of the declining trajectory of the mortality rate in the USSR and was especially notable among men of working age, but it was also prevalent in Russia and other predominantly Slavic areas of the country. An analysis of official data from the late 1980s showed that after a worsening in the late 1970s and early 1980s, adult mortality began to improve again. The infant mortality rate increased from 24.7 in 1970 to 27.9 in 1974.

Some researchers have considered the increase as a consequence of the worsening in health conditions and services. The increases in infant and adult mortality rates were not explained or advocated by Soviet officials and the USSR government simply stopped publishing all mortality statistics for ten years. Soviet medical students and health experts remained silent about the increase in mortality until the late 1980s, when the publication of mortality data resumed and researchers were able to deepen the real causes of the phenomenon.

Most populous cities

Position	Locality	Republic	Pop.
1	Moscow/Moscow	RSFS of Russia	9 million
2	Leningrad	RSFS of Russia	5 million
3	Kiev	RSS of Ukraine	2.6 million
4	Tasquente	RSS of Uzbekistan	2.1 million
5	Baku	RSS of Azerbaijan	1.8 million
6	Kharkov	RSS of Ukraine	1.6 million
7	Minsque	RSS of Belarus	1.6 million
8	Gorki	RSFS of Russia	1.4 million
9	Novosibirsk	RSFS of Russia	1.4 million
10	Sverdlovsk	RSFS of Russia	1.4 million

Ethnic groups

The extensive multinational state that the Communists inherited after their Revolution, which was created by tsarist expansion for nearly four centuries. Some groups of nations voluntarily joined the state, but most were fortituded. The national antagonisms developed over the years were not only directed against the Russians, but sometimes arose among other nations of the Soviet Union.

For nearly seventy years, Soviet leaders had maintained that friction between the many nationalities of the Soviet Union had been eradicated and that the Soviet Union was a family of nations living harmoniously. However, the national leaven that shook every corner of the Soviet Union in the 1980s proved that seventy years of communist rule had failed to eradicate ethnic and national differences and that traditional cultures and religions would reemerge at the slightest opportunity. This reality faced by Gorbachev and his colleagues meant that, given the low confidence in the traditional use of force, he had to find alternative solutions to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The concessions awarded national cultures and the limited autonomy tolerated in the Republics of the Union during the year 1920 led to the development of national elites and a sense of national identity. Subsequent repression and russification provoked resentment against Moscow’s domination and promoted a greater growth of national consciousness. National sentiments were exacerbated in the multinational Soviet state of increased competition for resources, services and works.

Women and fertility

Under Lenin, the state made explicit commitments to promote equality between men and women. Many of the first Russian feminists and ordinary Russian working women actively participated in the Revolution, and many more were affected by the events of that period and the new policies. From October 1918, Lenin’s government released divorce and abortion laws, decriminalized homosexuality (recriminalized, however, in the 1930s), allowed cohabitation and initiated a series of reforms.

However, without birth control, the new system produced many broken marriages as well as countless children out of wedlock. The epidemic of divorces and extramarital affairs created social difficulties when Soviet leaders wanted people to focus their efforts on economic growth. Giving women control over their fertility has also led to a precipitous fall in the birth rate, seen as a threat to their country’s military power. In 1936, Stalin reversed most liberal laws, ushering in a pro-Natalera that lasted for decades.

In 1917, Russia became the first major power to grant women the right to vote. After heavy casualties in World War I and World War II, women outnumbered men in Russia by a ratio of 4:3.

Religion

The USSR since 1922 has become an atheist state. In 1934, 28% of Christian Orthodox churches, 42% of Muslim mosques and 52% of Jewish synagogues were closed in the USSR.

Atheism in the USSR was based on Marxist-Leninist ideology. Like the founder of the Soviet state, Lenin spoke the following about the USSR and religions:

Religion is the opium of the people: this saying of Marx is the cornerstone of the whole ideology of Marxism on religion. All modern religions and churches, all kinds of religious organizations are always regarded by Marxism as organs of bourgeois reaction, used for the protection of exploitation and the astonishment of the working class.

Within about a year of the state revolution nationalized all church estates and in the period from 1922 to 1926, 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and more than 1,200 priests were killed and a much larger number were the subject of persecution.

The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour of Moscow, the seat of the Russian Orthodox Church and its holiest temple, was destroyed in two rounds of explosions by Stalin’s direct orders in 1931, thousands of priests protested against the decision and were arrested and sent to gulags, in its place the Communists intended to build the “Palace of the Soviets”, the Stalinist government’s office. The Russian Orthodox Church had 54,000 parishes during World War I, which was reduced to 500 in 1940. Most of the seminars were closed, the publication of religious writing was prohibited. Although historically the vast majority of Russia was Christian, only 17% to 22% of the population is currently Christian.

The communist regime confiscated church property, ridiculed religion, persecuted believers, and propagated atheism in schools. Actions towards specific religions, however, were determined by the interests of the State and most organized religions were never entirely prohibited. Some actions against Orthodox priests and believers included torture, being sent to prison camps, labor camps, or psychiatric hospitals. Some were also executed. Many Orthodox (along with people of other religions) were also subjected to psychological punishment or torture and experimentation of mind control in an attempt to force them to give up their religious convictions (see Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union).

Politics

There were three hierarchies of power in the Soviet Union: the Legislative Power, represented by the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union; the government, represented by the Council of Ministers and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (PCUS), the only legal party in the country.

According to communist ideologues, the Soviet political system was a true democracy, where the working councils (“Soviets”) represented the will of the working class. In particular, the Soviet Constitution of 1936 guaranteed universal suffrage and secret voting. The practice, however, departed from the principles of the law. For example, all candidates were selected by Communist Party organizations before democratization and the March 1989 elections.

Historian Robert Conquest described the Soviet electoral system as “a set of institutions run by peasants and workers for peasants and workers: a model constitution adopted in a period of terror guaranteeing human rights; elections in which there was only one candidate who received 99% of the vote; a parliament in which no hand was raised in opposition or abstention.”

Communist Party

At the top of the Communist Party was the Central Committee, elected in Party Conferences and Congresses. The Central Committee, in turn, voted for the Politburo (the so-called Presidium between 1952 and 1966), the Secretariat and the Secretary-General (First Secretary from 1953 to 1966), the highest office in the USSR. Depending on the degree of consolidation of power, it was either the Politburo as a collective body or the Secretary-General, who was always one of the members of the Politburo, who effectively commanded the party and the country (except in the period of Joseph Stalin’s highly personalized authority, exercised directly through his position in the Council of Ministers).

They were not controlled by the general members of the party, since the fundamental principle of the organization of the party was democratic centralism, which required strict subordination to the higher bodies and the elections were uncontestable, endorsing the candidates proposed from above.

The Communist Party maintained its dominance over the state largely through its control over the nominations system. All senior government officials and most members of the Supreme Soviet were members of the PCUS. Institutions at lower levels were supervised and sometimes supplanted by primary party organizations.

In practice, however, the degree of control that the party was able to exert over state bureaucracy, particularly after Stalin’s death, was far from total, and bureaucracy pursued different interests that sometimes conflicted with the party. Nor was it a monolithic top-down party, although factions were officially banned.

Government

The Supreme Soviet (successor to the Congress of the Soviets and the Central Executive Committee) was nominally the highest state body for most of Soviet history, first acting as a puppet institution, to approve and implement all decisions made by the party. However, the powers and functions of the Supreme Soviet were extended in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, including the creation of new state commissions and committees.

It gained additional powers with the approval of the five-year plans and the Soviet state budget. The Supreme Soviet elected a Presidium to exercise its power between plenary sessions, ordinarily twice a year, and appointed the Supreme Court, the Attorney General and the Council of Ministers (known before 1946 as the Council of the People’s Commissariat), led by the President (Prime Minister) and managing the enormous bureaucracy responsible for the administration of the economy and society.

Government and party structures in the constituent republics largely repeated the structure of central institutions, although the Soviet Federative Socialist Republic of Russia, unlike the other republics, for most of its history did not have a republican branch of the PCUS, being governed directly by the union-wide party until 1990. Local authorities were likewise organized into party committees, local Soviets and executive committees. While the state system was nominally federal, the party was unitary.

The state security police (the KGB and its predecessor agencies) played an important role in Soviet politics. It was instrumental in Stalinist terror, but after the death of Josef Stalin, the state security police were brought into strict control of the party. According to Yuri Andropov, KGB president between 1967 and 1982 and Secretary General between 1982 and 1983, the KGB involved the repression of political dissent and maintained an extensive network of informants, reaffirming itself as a political actor, to some extent independent of the party structure, which culminated in the anti-corruption campaign targeting senior party officials in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

• Leaders of the Soviet Union

Vladimir Lenin1922 – 1924

Josef Stalin1924 – 1953

Georgia Malenkov1953 – 1955

Nikita Khruschov 1955 – 1964

Leonid Brejnev 1964 – 1982

Iuri Andropov1982 – 1984

Konstantin Chernenko1984 – 1985

Mikhail Gorbatchov1985 – 1991

Judicial system

The judiciary was not independent of the other branches of government. The Supreme Court oversaw the lower courts (People’s Court) and applied the law as established by the Constitution or as interpreted by the Supreme Soviet. The Constitutional Oversight Committee examined the constitutionality of the laws. The Soviet Union used the inquisitorial system of Roman law, where the judge, prosecutor, defense lawyer must collaborate to establish the truth.

The Soviet legal system regarded the law as an arm of politics and the courts as government agencies. Extensive extrajudicial powers were given to Soviet secret police agencies. The regime abolished the Western rule of law, civil liberties, the protection of the law and the guarantees of property, regarded as examples of “bourgeois morality” by Soviet theorists such as Andrey Vyshinsky. According to Vladimir Lenin, the goal of socialist courts was not to “eliminate terror… but to substantive it and legitimize it in principle.”

The crimes were determined not as a violation of the law, but as any action that could threaten the Soviet state and society. For example, the desire to make a profit could be interpreted as a counterrevolutionary activity punishable by death.

The deportation of millions of peasants in 1928–31 was carried out under the Soviet Civil Code. Some Soviet jurists even claimed that “criminal repression can be applied in the absence of guilt”.Martin Latsis, head of the Ukrainian Cheka, explained “Do not look in the incriminating evidence file to see whether or not the accused stood up against the Soviets with weapons or words. Instead, ask what class he belongs to, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of Red Terror.”

The purpose of the public trials “was not to demonstrate the existence or absence of a crime – which was predetermined by the appropriate authorities of the party – but to provide yet another forum of political unrest and propaganda for the instruction of citizens (see the Moscow Processes, for example). The defense attorneys, who had to be party members, were forced to accept the guilt of their clients… “.

Separation of powers and reform

Soviet constitutions, which were promulgated in 1918, 1924, 1936 and 1977, did not limit state power. There was no formal separation of powers between the party, the Supreme Soviet and the Council of Ministers, which represented the executive and legislative powers of the government.

The system was governed less by statute than by formal conventions and no mechanism would establish a succession of leadership. Infighting occurred in the Politburo after the death of Lenin and Joseph Stalin, as well as after Khrushchev’s resignation, due to a decision by both the Politburo and the Central Committee. All Communist party leaders before Gorbachev died in office, except GeorgiaMalenkov and Khrushchev, fired from the party’s leadership amid internal fighting.

Between 1988 and 1990, facing considerable opposition, Mikhail Gorbachev enacted power-shiftreforms away from the highest instances of the party and made the Supreme Soviet less dependent on them. The Congress of People’s Deputies was established, the majority of which were directly elected in competitive elections, held in March 1989. Congress now elected the Supreme Soviet, which became a full-time parliament, much stronger than before. For the first time since the 1920s, he turned down proposals from the party and the Council of Ministers. In 1990, Gorbachev introduced and assumed the post of president of the Soviet Union, concentrated power in his executive office, independent of the party and subordinate to the government, now renamed the Council of Ministers of the USSR.

Tensions grew among the authorities across the union during Gorbachev’s rule. Reformists led in Russia by Boris Yeltsin controlled the newly elected Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Federative Socialist Republic of Russia. Between 19 and 21 August 1991, a group of extremists made a failed coup attempt. After the failure of the coup, the State Council of the Soviet Union became the highest body of state power. Gorbachev resigned as Secretary-General in the final months of the USSR’s existence.

International relations

Since its inception in 1922, the Soviet Union has always maintained an aggressive policy with other countries in the world (see: Soviet occupations). After its creation in 1922, she spent about 20 years isolated from the world by Western capitalist countries.

After World War II the USSR emerges as a world superpower and controls a powerful socialist bloc (see: Soviet Empire). During the Cold War relations between the United States and the Soviet Union deteriorated and it was only from 1985 that effective peace initiatives between the two superpowers began.

Relations between the USSR and its satellite countries most often were peaceful, but there were socialist countries that eventually left Moscow’s area of influence such as China and Yugoslavia (see: Tito-Stalin rupture).

The Soviet Union was a permanent member of the UN Security Council, the leading country of the Warsaw Pact (the military alliance of the socialist bloc) and a member of COMECON. In addition to playing a decisive role in international relations in the times of the Cold War.

Armed forces

The USSR has always been a military power, its Army was responsible for the suicide of Adolf Hitler and for much of the extermination of the Nazis in World War II. After World War II, the Red Army was the axis of the Warsaw Pact, the military mutual defense organization integrated by the Socialist Bloc countries in Eastern Europe.

Soviet nuclear weapons increased proportionally to that of the Americans. After overthrowing the Soviet regime in 1991, the Red Army was dismantled and disappeared as such. However, the current Army of the Russian Federation still uses many of the symbols of the Organization of the Red Army of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union has produced military equipment that is used and revered to the present day. Among them are the AK-47 rifle and the MiG-29 fighter. He also left a large quantity of atomic bombs to the Russian Federation, which is speculated to keep in stock 37 warheads only inherited from the Soviet regime. Russia’s military physical structure is mostly also inherited from the former regime. It has also left a lot of scrap which raises debates in ecologists on how chemical and biological weapons are dispensed in the environment.

Human rights in the Soviet Union

The regime remained in power through the secret police, propaganda disseminated by the state-controlled mass media, personality worship, restriction of free discussions and criticism, use of mass surveillance, political purges and persecution of specific groups of people. The Soviet conception of human rights was very different from the prevailing conceptions in the West. According to Soviet legal theory, “it is the government that is the beneficiary of human rights that must be claimed against the individual”, while Western law claims otherwise. The Soviet state was regarded as the “source” of human rights.

In the 1930s and 1940s, political repression was practiced by the Soviet secret police, OGPU and NKVD. An extensive network of civilian informants – volunteers or recruits – was used to gather information for the government and report cases of suspected dissent.

Personal belongings were allowed, with certain limitations. The real estate sector belonged mainly to the state. Health, housing, education and nutrition were guaranteed by providing employment structures and economic well-being implemented in the workplace. Economic protection was also extended to the elderly and disabled by paying pensions and benefits. However, these guarantees were not always fulfilled in practice. For example, more than five million people lacked adequate nutrition and starved to death during the Soviet famine from 1932 to 1933, one of several food crises that plagued the country. The famine of 1932–33 was mainly caused by forced collectivization.

The right to come and go was restricted in the country. Emigration, or any trip abroad, was not allowed without explicit government permission. People who were not allowed to leave the country and campaigned for the right to leave in the 1970s were known as “refuseniks”. According to the Soviet Penal Code, a refusal to return from abroad was treason, punishable by imprisonment for a period of 10 to 15 years or death with confiscation of property.

The passport system in the Soviet Union restricted the migration of citizens within the country through the “propiska” (system of permissions/residential records) and the use of internal passports. For a long period of Soviet history, peasants did not have internal passports and could not move to urban areas without government permission. Many former prisoners received “wolf tickets” and were only allowed to live at least 101 km from the city’s borders. Travel to closed cities and regions near international borders was heavily restricted. An attempt to illegally escape abroad was punishable by imprisonment for 1 to 3 years.

Subdivisions

Republics

Constitutionally, the Soviet Union was a federation of Soviet socialist republics (RSSs) and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), although the rule of the highly centralized Soviet Communist Party made federalism merely nominal.

The treaty on the creation of the USSR was signed in December 1922 by four founding republics:

• The Soviet Federative Socialist Republic of Russia,
• The Soviet Socialist Republic of Belarus,
• The Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine, and
• Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.

In 1924, during the national delimitation in Central Asia, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan formed Soviet republics from parts of Turkmatter and two Soviet dependencies, the Khorezm and Bukharan.

In 1929, Tajikistan was divided from the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. With the constitution of 1936, the constituents of the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, i.e. Georgia, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia and the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan, were elevated to Republics of the Union, while the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic were separated from the Soviet Socialist Republic of Russia.

In August 1940, the Soviet Union formed the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova from parts of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine and parts of Bessarabia annexed from Romania. In the same year, the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) annexed. The Carelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic was formed from March 1940 and incorporated in 1956.

Between July 1956 and September 1991, there were 15 republics in the Soviet Union (see map below).

	Republic	Capital
1	RSS of Armenia	Erevan
2	RSS of Azerbaijan	Baku
3	RSS of Belarus	Minsque
4	Estonian RSS	Tallinn
5	Georgia RSS	Tiblíssi
6	RSS of Kazakhstan	Alma-Ata
7	RSS of Kyrgyzstan	Frunze
8	Latvian RSS	Riga
9	RSS of Lithuania	Vilnius
10	Moldova NRS	Snow
11	RSFS of Russia	Moscow
12	RSS of Tajikistan	Duxambé
13	Turkmenistan RSS	Asgabade
14	RSS of Ukraine	Kiev
15	RSS of Uzbekistan	Tasquente

Economy

The Soviet Union became the first country to adopt a planned economy, in which the production and distribution of goods were centralized and directed by the government. The first Bolshevik experience in charge of an economy was the politics of war communism, which involved the nationalization of industry, the centralized distribution of production, the coercive requisition of agricultural production and the attempt to eliminate the movement of money, private enterprises and free trade. After the severe economic collapse caused by the war in 1921, Lenin replaced war communism with the New Economic Policy (NEP), with the legalization of free trade and private property for small businesses. The economy recovered rapidly.

After a long debate among the members of the Politburo on the field of economic development between 1928 and 1929, after gaining control of the country, Josef Stalin abandoned the NEP and led the Soviet economy to complete central planning, beginning with the forced collectivization of agriculture and the enactment of draconian labor legislation. Resources were mobilized for rapid industrialization, which greatly expanded Soviet capacity in industry and heavy capital goods during the 1930s.

War preparation was one of the main forces behind industrialization, mainly due to distrust of the capitalist world. As a result, the USSR was transformed from an agrarian economy into a major industrial power, paving the way for its emergence as a superpower after World War II. During the war, the Soviet economy and infrastructure suffered massive devastation and extensive reconstruction was necessary.

Until the early 1940s, the Soviet economy became relatively self-sufficient; for most of the period until the creation of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), only a very small portion of the national products was sold internationally. After the creation of the Eastern Bloc, foreign trade grew rapidly. Still, the influence of the world economy on the USSR was limited by fixed domestic prices and a state monopoly on foreign trade. Grains and manufactures of sophisticated goods became major manufacturers of import goods throughout the 1960s.

During the Cold War arms race, the Soviet economy was burdened by military spending, heavily pressured by a powerful bureaucracy dependent on the arms industry. At the same time, the Soviet Union became the largest exporter of weapons to the Third World. Significant amounts of Soviet resources during the Cold War were allocated in aid to the other socialist states.

From the 1930s to its collapse in the late 1980s, the way the Soviet economy operated remained essentially unchanged. The economy was formally driven by central planning, carried out by Gosplan and organized into five-year plans. In practice, however, the plans were highly aggregated and provisional, subject to ad hoc intervention by the superiors.

All fundamental economic decisions were made by political leadership. The resources allocated and the goals of the plans were usually denominated in rubles and not in physical goods. The credit was withdrawn, but widespread. The definitive allocation of production was achieved through relatively decentralized, unplanned contracting. Although in theory prices were legally set from above, in practice, actual prices were often negotiated, and horizontal indirect bonds (between factory producers, etc) were widespread.

A number of basic services were funded by the state, such as education and health. In the industrial sector, heavy and defense industries received higher priority than the production of consumer goods. Consumer goods, especially outside large cities, were often scarce, of poor quality and of limited choice. Under heavily controlled economy, consumers had almost no influence on production, so the new demands of a population with rising incomes could not be met by supplies at tightly fixed prices. A massive, massive secondary economy and huge unplanned economy grew alongside low-level planning, providing some of the products and services planners could not provide. The legalization of some elements of the decentralized economy was attempted with the reform of 1965.

Although statistics of the Soviet economy were unreliable and its economic growth difficult to accurately estimate, by most accounts, the economy continued to expand until the mid-1980s. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet economy experienced comparatively high economic growth and approached the West. However, after the 1970s, growth, although still positive, declined constantly, much faster and consistently than in other countries, despite a rapid increase in social capital (the rate of capital increase was only surpassed by Japan).

Overall, between 1960 and 1989, the growth rate of per capita income in the Soviet Union was slightly above the world average (based on a comparison with 102 countries). According to Stanley Fischer and William Easterly, growth could have been faster. By its calculation, the per capita income of the Soviet Union in 1989 should have been twice as high as it was when considering the value of investment, education and the population. The authors attribute this poor performance to the low productivity of capital in the country. Steven Rosefielde claims that the standard of living actually declined as a result of Stalin’s despotism and, although there was a brief improvement after his death, it fell into stagnation.

In 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform and revitalize the economy with his perestroika program. Its policies relaxed state control over companies, but still did not allow it to be replaced by market incentives, resulting in a sharp decline in production. The economy, which was already suffering from reduced oil export revenues, began to collapse. Prices were still fixed and the property was still largely state-owned after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. For most of the period after World War II until its collapse, the Soviet economy was the second largest in the world by GDP (PPC) and was the third largest in the world in the mid-1980s and 1989, although in terms of GDP per capita, the Soviets were still behind first world countries.

The Soviet Union infrastructure

Energy

The need for fuel decreased in the Soviet Union between the 1970s and the 1980s. At first, this decline grew very rapidly, but gradually declined between 1970 and 1975. From 1975 to 1980, it grew even slower, only 2.6 percent. David Wilson, a historian, believes the gas industry would account for 40 percent of Soviet fuel production by the end of the century. His theory did not come to fruition because of the collapse of the USSR. The Soviet Union, in theory, would have continued to have an economic growth rate of between 2 and 2.5 percent during the 1990s because of the Soviet energy area. However, the energy sector faced many difficulties, including the country’s high military spending and hostile relations with First World countries (it was pre-Gorbachev).

In 1991, the Soviet Union had a pipeline network of 82,000 kilometers for crude oil and another 206,500 kilometers for natural gas. Oil and its derivatives, natural gas, metals, wood, agricultural products and a variety of manufactured products, mainly machinery, weapons and military equipment, were exports of the USSR. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet Union relied heavily on fossil fuel exports to gain foreign exchange. At its peak in 1988, the country was the largest producer and the second-largest exporter of crude oil, being surpassed only by Saudi Arabia.

Science and technology

The Soviet Union placed great emphasis on science and technology in its economy; Lenin believed that the USSR would never dominate the developed world if it remained as a technologically backward country, as it was when the USSR was founded. The Soviet authorities showed their commitment to Lenin’s belief, developing huge organizations and research and development networks. However, the most notable Soviet successes in technology, such as the production of Sputnik 1, the world’s first space satellite, were usually the responsibility of the military.

However, during the Stalin Era and after, research on certain scientific theories was suppressed. Soviet scientists suffered persecution and branches of the exact sciences, social and human sciences were labeled as “bourgeois pseudoscience.”Areas such as cybernetics, astronomy, linguistics, physics (specifically quantum mechanics and relativity), statistics and history were opposed and/or manipulated. Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin was exiled in 1922, sociology was Stalinized and, between the 1930s and 1950s, this discipline practically disappeared, being replaced in the communist bloc by Marxist sociology. Sociology was only rehabilitated after the 23rd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (March-April 1966).

The regime also supported pseudoscientific theories, such as those of the agronomist Trofim Lysenko (“Lysenkoism”), which rejected modern genetics by classifying it as a “bourgeois pseudoscience”.The fact that this camp was founded by a Christian, the monk Gregor Mendel, angered Stalin and was shocked by the principles of Marxist-Leninist atheism defended by the Soviet atheist state. Mendelian genetics was banned and the influence of Lysenko’s ideas, which lasted until the mid-1960s, slowed the development of biological sciences in the USSR.

The great Purge victimized scientists whose ideas were not ideologically aligned with the regime, and one of the many victims, the world-renowned geneticist, botanist and food expert Nikolai Vavilov, was imprisoned in Siberia in 1940, where he starved to death three years later. In the early 1960s, the Soviet sc. 40% of PhDs in chemistry were women, compared to only 5% of those who received such a degree in the United States.

In 1989, Soviet scientists were among the best-trained specialists in the world in various fields, such as high-energy physics, various fields of medicine, mathematics, welding and military technologies. Due to strict state planning and bureaucracy, the Soviets remained far behind technologically in chemistry, biology and computers when compared to the First World.

The country’s scientists have won important awards in different fields of knowledge. They were at the forefront of science in various fields, such as mathematics, and in various branches of physics (such as nuclear physics), chemistry and astronomy. Physicist and physicist Nikolay Semyonov was the first Soviet citizen to win a Nobel Prize in 1956, among several other Soviet honorees. Mathematician Sergei Novikov was the first Soviet citizen to win a Fields Medal in 1970, followed by Grigory Margulis in 1978 and Vladimir Drinfeld in 1990.

The Socrates Project, under the administration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, determined that the Soviet Union was targeting the acquisition of science and technology in a way that was radically different from what the United States did. In the case of the United States, economic prioritization was being used for research and development as a means of acquiring science and technology in the public and private sectors.

In contrast, the Soviet Union was offensively and defensively acquiring and using technology around the world to increase the competitive advantage they acquired from technology, thereby preventing the United States from gaining a competitive advantage. However, in addition, the Soviet Union’s technology-based planning was carried out in a centralized government-centered manner that made it very difficult to flexibility. It was this significant lack of flexibility that was used by the United States to undermine the strength of the USSR and thereby promote its reform.

Transport

Transportation was a key component of the country’s economy. The economic centralization of the late 1920s and 1930s led to the development of large-scale infrastructure, mainly with the creation of Aeroflot, an aviation company. The country had a wide variety of means of transport by land, water and air. However, due to poor maintenance, much of Soviet transport by roads, water and civil aviation was outdated and technologically delayed from the First World.

Soviet rail was the largest and most intensively used in the world; it was also better developed than in most of its Western colleagues. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Soviet economists called for more roads to ease railroad stake slightly and improve the Soviet state’s budget. The road network and the auto industry remained underdeveloped and dirt roads were common outside major cities. The projects to maintain Soviet transport networks proved unable to take care of the few roads the country had. In the 1980s, soviet authorities tried to solve the problem of roads by ordering the construction of new highways. Meanwhile, the auto industry was growing at a faster rate than road construction. The underdeveloped of the road network has led to a growing demand for public transport.

Despite the improvements, several aspects of the transport sector were still full of problems due to outdated infrastructure, lack of investment, corruption and poor management. Soviet authorities were unable to meet the growing demand for infrastructure and transportation services. The Soviet merchant fleet, however, was one of the largest in the world.

Education

Before 1917, education was not free and was only available to the nobility. Estimates from 1917 were that 75-85% of the Russian population was illiterate. Anatoly Lunacharsky became the first Narkompros (People’s Commissariat for the Education of Soviet Russia).

The Soviet authorities placed great emphasis on eliminating illiteracy and people with some education were automatically hired as teachers. For a short time, quality was sacrificed by quantity. In getting rid of illiteracy, the Soviet authorities were successful, and by 1940, Josef Stalin could announce that illiteracy had been eliminated.

In the aftermath of the Great Patriotic War, the country’s educational system expanded dramatically. This expansion had a tremendous effect in the 1960s almost all Soviet children had access to education, the only exception being children living in remote areas. Nikita Khrushchev tried to improve education by making it more accessible and making it clear to children that education was closely linked to the needs of society. Education also became an important feature in the creation of the New Soviet man (see also: Homo Sovieticus and New Man).

Education was free for everyone in the Soviet Union. Accessibility for Soviet citizens for primary, secondary and technical education was roughly the same as in the United States.

Health

In 1917, before the revolution, health conditions were significantly worse than that of developed countries. As Lenin later remarked, “Either the louse will defeat socialism, or socialism will defeat lice.”The Soviet principle of medical care was conceived by the People’s Commissariat for Health in 1918. The health system was controlled by the state and was provided to its citizens free of charge as a revolutionary concept. Article 42 of the Soviet Constitution of 1977 gave all citizens the right to medical care and free access to all health institutions in the USSR. Before Leonid Brezhnev became head of state, the Soviet Union’s health system was considered of quality by many foreign experts.

This changed, however, from Brezhnev’s uptake and Mikhail Gorbachev’s tenure as leader, the Soviet health system was then heavily criticized for many basic failures, such as quality of service and inequality in its delivery. Health Minister Yevgeniy Chazov, during the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, despite highlighting Soviet successes because the country has the largest number of doctors and hospitals in the world, acknowledged that some areas of the system needed improvement and said billions of Soviet rubles were wasted.

After the socialist revolution, life expectancy for all age groups of the country’s inhabitants rose. This statistic itself was seen by some as a sign that the socialist system was superior to the capitalist system. These improvements continued until the 1960s, when life expectancy in the Soviet Union exceeded that of the United States. It has remained stable for most years, although in the 1970s it fell a bit, possibly because of alcohol abuse. At the same time, infant mortality began to rise.

After 1974, the government stopped publishing statistics on the subject. This trend can be partially explained by the drastic increase in the number of pregnant women in the Asian part of the country where infant mortality was highest, despite the marked decline in the more developed European part of the Soviet Union.

Culture of the Soviet Union

The culture of the Soviet Union went through several phases during its 70-year existence. During the first eleven years after the Revolution (1918-1929), there was relative freedom and artists experimented with several different styles in an effort to find a distinct Soviet style of art. Lenin wanted art to be accessible to the Russian people.

The government encouraged a number of trends. In art and literature, numerous schools, some traditional and some radically experimental, proliferated. Communist writers such as Max Gorki and Vladimir Mayakovsky were active during this time. Films, as a means of influencing an unjustifiable society, received the encouragement of the State; much of director Serguei Eisenstein’s best working dates of this period.

Later, during the rule of Josef Stalin, Soviet culture was characterized by the rise and domination of the government that imposed the style of socialist realism, with all other tendencies to be harshly repressed, with rare exceptions (e.g., works by Mikhail Bulgákov). Many perpetrators were arrested and killed. In addition, the religious were persecuted and sent to gulags or were murdered by the thousands. The Ban on the Orthodox Church was temporarily lifted in 1940 in order to obtain support for the Soviet war against Germany’s invading forces. Under Stalin, prominent symbols that did not conform to communist ideology were destroyed, such as Orthodox churches and Tsarist buildings.

Following the Kruschev Thaw in the late 1950s and early 1960s, censorship was diminished. Greater experimentation of art forms became permissible once, with the result that more sophisticated and subtle critical work began to be produced. The regime looses its emphasis on socialist realism, so, for example, many protagonists of the novels of author Yury Trifonov are concerned about the problems of everyday life rather than building socialism. A dissident underground literature, known as samizdat, developed during this period of delay. In Kruchev era architecture mainly focused on functionalist design as opposed to Stalin’s highly decorated period style.

In the second half of the 1980s, Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost significantly expanded freedom of expression in the media and press, resulting in the complete elimination of censorship, total freedom of expression and freedom to criticize the government.

Sports

Founded on July 20, 1924, in Moscow, Sovetsky Sport was the first sports newspaper of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Olympic Committee was formed on April 21, 1951, and the IOC recognized the new body in its 45th session. In the same year, when Soviet representative Konstantin Andrianov became a member of the IOC, the USSR officially joined the Olympic Movement. The 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki became the first Olympic Games for Soviet athletes. The Soviet Union’s national ice hockey team won almost every world championship and Olympic tournament between 1954 and 1991 and never failed to win a medal in tournaments of the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) in which it competed.

Doping

The advent of the “full-time amateur athlete” of the Eastern Bloc countries further eroded the ideology of the pure amateur, as it put at a disadvantage the self-funded amateurs of Western countries. The Soviet Union joined teams of athletes who were all nominally students, soldiers or who worked in a profession – in reality, the state paid many of these competitors to train full-time. However, the IOC maintained the traditional rules on amateurism.

A 1989 report by an Australian Senate committee claimed that “there is hardly a medal winner at the Moscow Games, certainly not a gold medal winner… who is not using one type of drug or another: usually of various types. The games may well have been called the Chemical Games.”

A member of the IOC Medical Commission, Manfred Donike, conducted additional tests with a new technique to identify abnormal testosterone levels by measuring the proportion of epitestosterone in the urine. Twenty percent of the specimens he tested, including those of sixteen gold medalists, would have resulted in disciplinary procedures if the tests were official. Donike’s unofficial test results later convinced the IOC to add its new technique to its test protocols. The first documented case of “blood doping” occurred at the 1980 Summer Olympics, when a runner was transfused with two liters of blood before winning medals in the 5,000 m and 10,000 m.

A paper obtained in 2016 revealed the Soviet Union’s plans for a state-run doping system in athletics in preparation for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Dating back to the decision to boycott the 1984 Games, the document detailed the steroid operations in the program, as well as suggestions for further improvements. Dr. Sergei Portugalov, from the Institute of Physical Culture, prepared the communication, addressed to the head of athletics of the Soviet Union. Portugalov later became one of the main figures involved in the implementation of Russian doping before the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

Holidays

Date	Local name	Observations
January 1	Новый Год	Beginning of the new calendar year
February 23	День Советской Армии и Военно-Морского Флота	February Revolution (1917) and Formation of the Red Army (1918)It is currently called День Заưитника Отечества
March 8	Международный Женский День
April 12	День космонавтики	The day Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space in 1961
May 1	Первое Мая – День Солидарности Трудящихся
May 9	День Победы	End of World War II, marked by the Soviet conquest of Nazi Germany in 1945
October 7	День Конституции СССР	Day the 1977 constitution was adopted
November 7	Седьмое Ноября	October Revolution (1917). It was called День Примирения и Согласия

Legacy

Nostalgia

In Armenia, 12% of respondents said the collapse of the USSR did well, while 66% said it did wrong. In Kyrgyzstan, 16% of respondents said the collapse of the USSR did well, while 61% said it did wrong. Since the collapse of the USSR, the Levada Center’s annual survey showed that more than 50% of Russia’s population has lamented its collapse, with the only exception being in 2012. A 2018 Levada Center survey showed that 66% of Russians lamented the fall of the Soviet Union.

According to a 2014 survey, 57% of Russian citizens lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union, while 30% said they did not regret it. The elderly tend to be more nostalgic than young Russians. About 50% of respondents in Ukraine in a similar survey conducted in February 2005 said they regretted Soviet disintegration. However, a similar survey conducted in 2016 showed only 35% of Ukrainians lamenting the collapse of the Soviet Union and 50% not regretting it.

The break in economic ties that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a severe economic crisis and the catastrophic drop in living standards in the post-Soviet states and the former Eastern Bloc, which was even worse than the Great Depression. Poverty and economic inequality increased between 1988-1989 and 1993-1995, with the Gini index increasing by an average of 9 points for all in former European socialist countries. Even before the financial crisis in Russia in 1998, Russian GDP was half of what it had been in the early 1990s.

In the decades that followed the end of the Cold War, only five or six of the post-communist states are on the way to joining the wealthy capitalist West, while most are lagging behind, some to the point that it will take more than 50 years to reach where they were before the end of communism.In a 2001 study, economist Steven Rosefielde calculated that there were 3.4 million premature deaths in Russia from 1990 to 1998, which he attributes in part to the “shock therapy” that came with the Washington Consensus.

In the 1959 Kitchen Debate, Nikita Khrushchev stated that the grandchildren of then-U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon would live under communism, and Nixon stated that Khrushchev’s grandchildren would live in freedom. In a 1992 interview, Nixon commented that at the time of the debate, he was sure Khrushchev’s statement was wrong, but Nixon was not sure that his own statement was correct. Nixon said the events proved him really right because Khrushchev’s grandchildren now lived in freedom, referring to the then recent collapse of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev’s son, Sergei Khrushchev, was a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Former Soviet republics

After September 1991, the 15 republics in the Soviet Union became independent countries (see map below).

	Republic	Capital
1	Armenia	Erevan
2	Azerbaijan	Baku
3	Belarus	Minsque
4	Estonia	Tallinn
5	Georgia	Tiblíssi
6	Kazakhstan	Astana
7	Kyrgyzstan	Bisqueque
8	Latvia	Riga
9	Lithuania	Vilnius
10	Moldova	Quixinau
11	Russia	Moscow
12	Tajikistan	Duxambé
13	Turkmenistan	Asgabade
14	Ukraine	Kiev
15	Uzbekistan	Tasquente

References (sources)

Philip Micklin; Nikolay V. Aladin (2008). «Reclaiming the Aral Sea». Scientific American;  Josef Stalin – “Marxism and Problems of Linguistics.“; União Soviética, Wikipedia; Gao, George. «Why the Former USSR Has Far Fewer Men than Women». Pew Research Center. Pew Research Center; Ruiz, Rebecca R. (2016). «The Soviet Doping Plan: Document Reveals Illicit Approach to ’84 Olympics». nytimes.com.