THE WORLD ATLAS

Empire · 1922–1991 · Europe

Soviet Union (USSR)

Also known as USSR, White Russia, Far Eastern SSR

The Soviet Union grew out of the October Revolution of 1917, when Lenin's Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd and then won a brutal civil war. In 1922 Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the Transcaucasian republics formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a one-party state run by the Communist Party from Moscow.

Under Stalin it forced peasants into collective farms, industrialised at terrible human cost and sent millions to Gulag labour camps. Invaded by Nazi Germany in 1941, it lost around 27 million people but drove on to Berlin, then dominated Eastern Europe through allied communist regimes. It rivalled the United States in the Cold War, launching the first satellite and the first human into space. Economic stagnation, Gorbachev's reforms and nationalist movements led to its breakup into fifteen independent states in December 1991.

Follow its story on the map

The main building of Moscow State University, one of the Stalinist 'Seven Sisters' skyscrapers, built 1949–53
The main building of Moscow State University, one of the Stalinist 'Seven Sisters' skyscrapers, built 1949–53 Dmitry A. Mottl (cropped by King of Hearts) · CC BY-SA 3.0
Years
1922–1991
Capital
Moscow
Greatest extent
1946, about 22.40 million km²
Region
Europe

About one-sixth of the world's land surface; official area 22.4M km²; Taagepera (1997) gives c. 22.3M km² for 1945

Legacy

The Cold War rivalry it led divided the world for four decades, and Russian remains a common language across its fifteen successor states.

Timeline of Soviet Union (USSR)

  1. Treaty on the Creation of the USSR approved on 30 December

    After the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917 and won the Russian Civil War, several Soviet republics existed side by side, all ruled by the Communist Party. To bind them together, delegations from the Russian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR, the Byelorussian SSR and the Transcaucasian SFSR approved the Declaration and Treaty on the Creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on 30 December 1922. The treaty set up a federal state with its government in Moscow. The Soviet Union inherited most of the former Russian Empire's territory and became the world's first communist state, lasting until 1991.

  2. Death of Lenin; Stalin wins the power struggle

    Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, was disabled by three strokes in 1922–23 and died on 21 January 1924, aged 53. A struggle for power followed among the party's leaders, including Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Nikolai Bukharin. Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party since 1922, used his control of the party apparatus to outmanoeuvre his rivals one by one, and by the late 1920s he ruled the Soviet Union. Under his 'Socialism in One Country' and five-year plans, the country was forcibly industrialised and its farms collectivised, at the cost of millions of lives.

  3. Pact with Nazi Germany; Soviet invasion of eastern Poland

    In August 1939 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact, dated 23 August, whose secret protocol divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence, including a partition of Poland. A week later Germany invaded Poland, starting the Second World War. On 17 September 1939 the Red Army invaded Poland from the east without a declaration of war, and the two powers divided the country. The Soviet Union annexed eastern Poland, today's western Belarus and western Ukraine, pushing its border far to the west.

  4. Annexation of the Baltic states and parts of Finland and Romania

    Using the secret protocol, the Soviet Union expanded further. It invaded Finland on 30 November 1939; the Finns resisted fiercely in the Winter War, but by the Moscow Peace Treaty of March 1940 they ceded the Karelian Isthmus, Ladoga Karelia and other areas. In June 1940 Soviet troops occupied Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which were annexed as Soviet republics in August; most Western countries never recognised this. Between 28 June and 3 July 1940, after an ultimatum, the Soviets also occupied Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina from Romania. The USSR now reached the Baltic coast and the Danube delta.

  5. Germany invades the Soviet Union on 22 June

    On 22 June 1941 Germany broke the pact and launched Operation Barbarossa, invading the Soviet Union with more than 3.8 million Axis troops along a front of about 2,900 kilometres. Soviet forces were caught largely unprepared, and in the first months the Germans encircled and captured whole armies and overran the Baltic states, Belarus and much of Ukraine, before they were stopped in the Battle of Moscow in late 1941. The Axis deliberately killed 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war and millions of civilians. The war on the Eastern Front, the largest theatre of the Second World War, killed over 26 million Soviet people.

  6. German 6th Army surrenders at Stalingrad

    In the summer of 1942 the German army advanced towards the Volga River and the Caucasus oil fields, and in July it began its assault on Stalingrad, the city bearing Stalin's name. After months of brutal street fighting, a Soviet counter-offensive, Operation Uranus, launched on 19 November 1942, encircled the German 6th Army under Friedrich Paulus. Relief attempts and airlifts failed, and on 2 February 1943 the starving 6th Army capitulated. Stalingrad is generally regarded as the turning point of the war in Europe: the Soviets took the strategic initiative and began to drive the Germans back west.

  7. Victory over Germany and Japan; southern Sakhalin and Kurils annexed

    After years of fighting, Soviet forces drove the Germans out of the Soviet Union and advanced through Eastern Europe, taking Berlin in May 1945; Germany surrendered on 8–9 May. As agreed with the Allies at Yalta, the Soviet Union then declared war on Japan on 8 August 1945 and invaded Manchuria, northern Korea, southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. The USSR annexed southern Sakhalin and the Kurils, as well as eastern Poland, the Baltic states and other lands, and Soviet-backed communist governments were soon installed across Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union emerged as one of two global superpowers.

  8. Death of Stalin

    Joseph Stalin, who had ruled the Soviet Union for about a quarter of a century, died on 5 March 1953 at his dacha at Kuntsevo after a stroke, aged 74. Millions had died in his purges, labour camps and famines, but he was mourned at a huge state funeral on 9 March. His inner circle, including Georgy Malenkov, Lavrentiy Beria and Nikita Khrushchev, competed to succeed him, and Khrushchev emerged as leader. Khrushchev went on to denounce his predecessor and launched a campaign of de-Stalinisation, freeing many political prisoners in what became known as the 'Khrushchev thaw'.

  9. Soviet intervention in Afghanistan (withdrawal 1989)

    A communist government had seized power in Afghanistan in the Saur Revolution of 1978, but it faced a widespread rebellion; on 25 December 1979 Soviet troops entered the country, and its leader, Hafizullah Amin, was replaced by Babrak Karmal. The Soviet army spent nearly ten years fighting the mujahideen, guerrilla fighters backed mainly by Pakistan and the United States, along with Britain, China, Iran and Arab states. Between about 14,500 and 26,000 Soviet soldiers died, and far more Afghans. Gorbachev announced a withdrawal, and the last Soviet troops left on 15 February 1989. The costly war weakened the Soviet Union and damaged its standing in the world.

  10. Gorbachev comes to power: glasnost and perestroika

    On 11 March 1985, after the death of the elderly Konstantin Chernenko, the Communist Party chose 54-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev as its General Secretary. Facing a stagnant economy and an expensive arms race, he launched glasnost ('openness'), allowing more freedom of speech and of the press, and perestroika ('restructuring'), which tried to decentralise economic decision-making. He also held summits with US President Ronald Reagan to limit nuclear weapons and began withdrawing from Afghanistan. His reforms unleashed forces he could not control, including nationalist movements in the Soviet republics.

  11. Soviet-backed regimes fall across Eastern Europe

    Gorbachev made clear that the Soviet Union would no longer intervene to prop up communist governments in its Eastern European satellites, a policy jokingly called the 'Sinatra Doctrine'. In Poland the Solidarity movement won a landslide in elections on 4 June 1989, and a non-communist government took office. Over the following months communist regimes fell in Hungary, East Germany, where the Berlin Wall was opened in November, Czechoslovakia in the Velvet Revolution, Bulgaria and, violently, Romania. By the end of 1989 the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe had collapsed, ending the Soviet Union's empire beyond its borders.

  12. Failed August coup; the USSR is dissolved on 26 December

    On 19 August 1991 hardline communists, including the defence minister and the KGB chief, tried to seize power, placing Gorbachev under house arrest in Crimea. Crowds led by Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian republic, defended the parliament building in Moscow, and the coup collapsed within days. The republics rushed to declare independence. On 8 December the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Belovezha Accords declaring that the Soviet Union no longer existed, and on 25 December Gorbachev resigned. On 26 December 1991 the USSR was formally dissolved into 15 independent states, with Russia as its successor.

Periods and reigns

Rulers

Realms on the map

Wars

Chapters

Sources