Soviet Union

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 26th of December 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev officially recognized the dissolution of the Soviet Union, ending nearly seven decades of Soviet rule. The country he led had spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until that day. It was the world's largest country by area, the third-most populous, and it bordered twelve countries. Its capital and largest city was Moscow. At its height it was one of the world's two superpowers, with the largest standing military and the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons on Earth. How did a state born from a revolution in 1917 grow into a federal union of fifteen national republics? How did it become both a founding member of the United Nations and the country that suffered the most deaths of any nation in World War II, around 27 million? And what pulled it apart? The answers run through its leaders, its economy, its science, and the millions of lives it shaped and ended.

• 2. The Council Becomes A Country

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  The word soviet comes from the Russian sovet, meaning council, assembly, or advice, ultimately tracing to a proto-Slavic stem meaning to inform. Workers' councils first appeared during the 1905 Russian Revolution, but the Imperial army quickly suppressed them. After the February Revolution of 1917, workers' and soldiers' soviets emerged across the country and shared power with the Russian Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, demanded that all power be transferred to the soviets. After the October Revolution, Lenin proclaimed the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic, the world's first constitutionally communist state. During the Georgian Affair of 1922, Lenin called for the Russian SFSR and other national soviet republics to form a greater union. He first named it the Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia. Joseph Stalin initially resisted the proposal but accepted it, and with Lenin's agreement the name became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Cyrillic abbreviation СССР was used so often that audiences worldwide came to recognize it. Since the start of the Great Patriotic War, abbreviating the name as СС became taboo, because those letters were associated with the Schutzstaffel of Nazi Germany.

• 3. The Forge Of Stalin

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  By 1928 to 1929, having gained control of the country, Stalin abandoned Lenin's New Economic Policy and pushed for full central planning. He started the forced collectivization of agriculture and enacted draconian labour legislation. The forced labour camp system, known as the Gulag, was expanded. Rapid industrialization significantly expanded Soviet capacity in heavy industry, but the upheaval contributed to a devastating famine in the 1930s that killed millions. During the late 1930s, Stalin's government conducted the Great Purge to eliminate perceived enemies, producing deportations, executions, and the Moscow trials. The Soviet Union was a totalitarian state from 1927 until 1953. Freedom of speech was suppressed and dissent was punished, while the state security police, the predecessor of the KGB, carried out the Red Terror and the Great Purge. Stalin's reach extended even into science. His government persecuted geneticists in favour of Lysenkoism, a pseudoscience rejected by scientists at home and abroad but supported by his inner circles. Implemented in the USSR and China, it reduced crop yields and is widely believed to have contributed to the Great Chinese Famine.

• 4. Two Superpowers, One Cold War

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  In 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union in the largest land invasion in history, opening the Eastern Front of World War II. The Soviets played a decisive role in defeating the Axis as part of the Allies, liberating much of Central and Eastern Europe. In the war's aftermath, the Soviet Union turned territories occupied by the Red Army into satellite states. Geopolitical tensions with the United States produced the Cold War, in which there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two superpowers. Instead each supported regional proxy wars and competed through espionage, propaganda, and sport. The US-led Western Bloc formed the NATO military alliance in 1949, and in reaction to West Germany's integration into NATO the Eastern Bloc formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955. Although nominally defensive, the Pact's only direct military actions were invasions of its own member states to stop them breaking away. The Soviet Ground Forces suppressed the uprising in East Germany in 1953, the Hungarian revolution of 1956, and invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968. The Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved in a way that narrowly averted a global conflict. The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, or Comecon, ran from 1949 to 1991, binding the Eastern Bloc economically and answering the Marshall Plan that Moscow feared.

• 5. The Command Economy

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  The Soviet Union adopted a command economy, in which production and distribution were centralized and directed by the government. For most of its existence it did not use GDP or GNP, relying instead on the Material Product System. Central planning was carried out by Gosplan and organized into five-year plans, though in practice the plans were highly aggregated and provisional. Heavy industry and defence were prioritized over consumer goods, which outside large cities were often scarce, of poor quality, and limited in variety. A massive unplanned second economy grew up alongside the planned one, supplying goods the planners could not. The military budget in the 1970s was enormous, forming 40 to 60% of the entire federal budget and 15% of GDP, falling to 13% in the 1980s. Professor of Economic History Bob Allen argues that between 1928 and 1989 Soviet GDP per capita growth outpaced nearly all other economies, trailing only Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Soviet per capita growth expanded by a factor of 5.2, exceeding Western Europe at 4.0. Yet after 1970 growth steadily declined faster than in other countries. Christopher Davidson argued that in the 1980s the Reagan administration weaponized the global energy market, with Saudi Arabia flooding it with oil and dropping the price from $28 to $10 per barrel, draining Soviet foreign currency reserves.

• 6. Reaching For Space

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  At the end of the 1950s the USSR built the first satellite, Sputnik 1, beginning the Space Race. Sputnik 5 followed, sending test dogs into space. On the 12th of April 1961, the USSR launched Vostok 1 carrying Yuri Gagarin, making him the first human launched into space. The Luna program reached the Moon only with automated spacecraft, never crewed ones. The N1, a super heavy-lift rocket meant to match the American Saturn V for a crewed Moon landing, failed all four of its test launches, and the Moon part of the Space Race was won by the Americans. The Soviet public's reaction to the American landing was mixed, partly because the government limited the release of information about it. Shortcomings in the electronics industry, including rapid overheating, delayed a Soviet space shuttle until the late 1980s. The first shuttle, the Buran, flew in 1988 without a human crew. A second, Ptichka, was canceled in 1991. In the late 1980s the Soviet Union built the Mir orbital station, the only orbital station in operation from 1986 to 1998. Mir deteriorated rapidly after a fire on board and was deorbited in 2001, burning up in the atmosphere.

• 7. Arsenals And Aftermath

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  By the end of the Cold War, the Soviet Armed Forces held the world's largest arsenals of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The nuclear stockpile peaked at over 40,000 warheads in 1986. The country was the second to develop nuclear weapons, conducting its first test, RDS-1, in 1949, four years after the US Trinity test. Its biological weapons program was the world's largest and most sophisticated, weaponizing the agents of anthrax, plague, smallpox, and others through a civilian cover organization named Biopreparat. The Sverdlovsk anthrax leak, which led to at least 68 deaths, began to reveal the program's extent. These hidden hazards sat alongside open ones. The Chernobyl disaster in the Ukrainian SSR in 1986 was the first major accident at a civilian nuclear power plant, releasing radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere and contributing to the crises that led to the country's collapse. When dissolution seemed imminent, the United States launched the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program to dismantle this infrastructure and secure its personnel and materials.

• 8. The Unraveling

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  In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev sought reform through glasnost, meaning openness, and perestroika, meaning restructuring. The policies aimed to revitalize the system but instead accelerated its unraveling, relaxing state control over enterprises without replacing it with market incentives and producing a sharp decline in output. In March 1989 the Congress of People's Deputies held the first competitive elections in Soviet history. The new Supreme Soviet, for the first time since the 1920s, refused to rubber stamp proposals from the party. In 1989 most Warsaw Pact countries overthrew their Soviet-backed regimes, effectively ending the Eastern Bloc. Nationalist movements across the republics declared sovereignty. On the 19th to the 21st of August 1991, hardline communists staged a coup attempt against Gorbachev, and it failed. The failure prompted Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus to secede. All fifteen republics became independent states, and all except the Baltic states joined the Commonwealth of Independent States. Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian SFSR, oversaw the country's reconstitution into the Russian Federation, the Soviet Union's successor state. The post-Soviet states then experienced a humanitarian disaster, the human cost of a country whose excess deaths Catherine Merridale estimated at somewhere around 60 million.