UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS
Coat of arms of the Soviet Union 1
The flag of the Soviet Union The
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (
USSR ), commonly known as the
Soviet Union , was a
transcontinental country that spanned much of
Eurasia from 1922 until it
dissolved in 1991. During its existence, it was the
largest country by area , extending across
eleven time zones and sharing
borders with twelve countries , and the
third-most populous country . An overall successor to the
Russian Empire , it was nominally organized as a
federal union of
national republics , the largest and most populous of which was the
Russian SFSR . In practice,
its government and
economy were
highly centralized . As a
one-party state governed by the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), it was the flagship
communist state . Its capital and largest city was
Moscow .
The Soviet Union's roots lay in the October Revolution of 1917. The new government, led by Vladimir Lenin , established the Russian SFSR, the world's first constitutionally communist state . The revolution was not accepted by all within the Russian Republic , resulting in the Russian Civil War . The Russian SFSR and its subordinate republics were merged into the Soviet Union in 1922. Following Lenin's death in 1924, Joseph Stalin came to power, inaugurating rapid industrialization and forced collectivization that led to significant economic growth but contributed to a famine between 1930 and 1933 that killed millions. The Soviet forced labour camp system of the Gulag was expanded. During the late 1930s, Stalin's government conducted the Great Purge to remove opponents, resulting in large scale deportations, arrests, and show trials accompanied by public fear. Having failed to build an anti-Nazi coalition in Europe, the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany in 1939. Despite this, 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 powers while liberating much of Central and Eastern Europe . However they would suffer an estimated 27 million casualties , which accounted for most losses among the victorious Allies . In the aftermath of the war , the Soviet Union consolidated the territory occupied by the Red Army , forming satellite states , and undertook rapid economic development which cemented its status as a superpower .
Geopolitical tensions with the United States led to the Cold War . The American-led Western Bloc coalesced into NATO in 1949, prompting the Soviet Union to form its own military alliance, the Warsaw Pact , in 1955. Neither side engaged in direct military confrontation, and instead fought on an ideological basis and through proxy wars . In 1953, following Stalin's death , the Soviet Union undertook a campaign of de-Stalinization under Nikita Khrushchev , which saw reversals and rejections of Stalinist policies. This campaign caused ideological tensions with the PRC led by Mao Zedong , culminating in the acrimonious Sino-Soviet split . During the 1950s, the Soviet Union expanded its efforts in space exploration and took a lead in the Space Race with the first artificial satellite , the first human spaceflight , the first space station , and the first probe to land on another planet . In 1985, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev , sought to reform the country through his policies of glasnost perestroika overthrew their Soviet-backed regimes , leading to the fall of the Eastern Bloc. A major wave of nationalist and separatist movements erupted across the Soviet Union, primarily in Azerbaijan , Georgia and the Baltic states . In 1991, amid efforts to preserve the country as a renewed federation , an attempted coup against Gorbachev by hardline communists prompted the largest republics—Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus—to secede. On 26 December, Gorbachev officially recognized the dissolution of the Soviet Union . Boris Yeltsin , the leader of the Russian SFSR , oversaw its reconstitution into the Russian Federation , which became the Soviet Union's successor state; all other republics emerged as fully independent post-Soviet states . The Commonwealth of Independent States was formed in the aftermath of the disastrous Soviet collapse, although the Baltics would never join.
During its existence, the Soviet Union produced
many significant social and technological achievements and innovations . The USSR was one of the most advanced industrial states during its existence. It
had the world's second-largest economy and largest standing military. As a
nuclear state , it wielded the
largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world . As an Allied nation, it was a
founding member of the
United Nations as well as one of the
five permanent members of the
United Nations Security Council . Before its dissolution, the Soviet Union was one of the world's two superpowers through its hegemony in Eastern Europe and Asia, global diplomacy, ideological influence (particularly in the
Global South ), military might, economic strengths, and
scientific accomplishments. (
Full article... )
Entries here consist of Good and Featured articles, which meet a core set of high editorial standards. Mir Russian : Мир , IPA: [ˈmʲir] lit. ' peace ' or ' world ' ) was a space station operated in low Earth orbit from 1986 to 2001, first by the Soviet Union and later by the Russian Federation . Mir was the first modular space station and was assembled in orbit from 1986 to 1996. It had a greater mass than any previous spacecraft . At the time it was the largest artificial satellite in orbit, succeeded by the International Space Station (ISS) after Mir 's deorbiting . The station served as a microgravity research laboratory in which crews conducted experiments in biology , human biology , physics , astronomy , meteorology , and spacecraft systems with a goal of developing technologies required for permanent occupation of space .
Mir was the first continuously inhabited long-term research station in orbit and held the record for the longest continuous human presence in space at 3,644 days, until it was surpassed by the ISS on 23 October 2010. It holds the record for the longest single human spaceflight, with Valeri Polyakov spending 437 days and 18 hours on the station between 1994 and 1995. Mir was occupied for a total of twelve and a half years out of its fifteen-year lifespan, having the capacity to support a resident crew of three, or larger crews for short visits. (Full article...
... that the proposals for a new Crimean flag collapse of the Soviet Union included a white flag with seven rainbow colors at the top and a blue-white-red tricolor design, which was officially adopted in 1999?
“
Complete equality of rights for all nations; the right of nations to self-determination; the unity of the workers of all nations—such is the national program that Marxism, the experience of the whole world, and the experience of Russia, teach the workers.
”
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until his death in 1924, and of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death. As the founder of the Bolsheviks , Lenin led the October Revolution , which established the world's first communist state . His government won the Russian Civil War and created a one-party state under the Communist Party . Ideologically a Marxist , his developments to the ideology are called Leninism .
revolutionary socialist politics after his brother was executed in 1887 for plotting to assassinate the Russian tsar . He was expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in student protests, and earned a law degree before moving to Saint Petersburg in 1893 and becoming a prominent Marxist activist. In 1897, Lenin was exiled to Siberia for three years, after which he moved to Western Europe and became a leading figure in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party . In 1903, the party split between Lenin's Bolshevik faction and the Mensheviks , with Lenin advocating for a vanguard party to lead the proletariat in establishing socialism . Lenin briefly returned to Russia during the Revolution of 1905 . During the First World War he campaigned for its transformation into a Europe-wide proletarian revolution . After the February Revolution of 1917 ousted Tsar Nicholas II , Lenin returned to Russia and played a leading role in the October Revolution. (Full article...
The following are images from various Soviet Union-related articles on Wikipedia.
Image 1 Soldiers marching in
Petrograd , March 1917 (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 2 Russian troops in trenches awaiting a German attack (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 5 Russian Civil War in the European part of Russia (from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 6 The
Battle of Stalingrad , considered by many historians as a decisive turning point of World War II (from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 7 Revolutionaries protesting in February 1917 (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 8 Lenin ,
Trotsky and
Kamenev celebrating the second anniversary of the October Revolution (from
October Revolution )
Image 9 Provisional Government 's volunteer soldiers secure Petrograd's
Palace Square with the
Austin Armoured Car , summer 1917. (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 10 Changes in national boundaries after the end of the Cold War (from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 11 A map of the Ukrainian SSR from 1922, with the Kholodny Yar Republic marked in the center as a white spot—a territory not under the control of the USSR at the time of its formation. (from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 12 Stalin and
Lavrentiy Beria with Stalin's daughter,
Svetlana , on his lap. As head of the NKVD, Beria was responsible for many
political repressions in the Soviet Union . (from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 13 Forward gun of
Aurora that fired the signal shot (from
October Revolution )
Image 15 The
Pan-European Picnic took place in August 1989 on the Hungarian-Austrian border. (from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 16 Revolutionaries attacking the tsarist police in the early days of the February Revolution (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 17 Bolshevik (1920) by
Boris Kustodiev (from
October Revolution )
Image 18 View of the monastery in Kholodny Yar, which was the main base of the rebels. (from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 19 The
Russian famine of 1921–22 killed an estimated 5 million people.
(from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 20 The elections to the
Constituent Assembly took place in November 1917. The Bolsheviks won 24% of the vote. (from
October Revolution )
Image 21 Mikhail Gorbachev in one-to-one discussions with US President
Ronald Reagan (
left ), 1985 (from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 22 "Pogrom in the Winter Palace" by
Ivan Vladimirov (from
October Revolution )
Image 24 Soviet leader
Nikita Khrushchev (left) with US President
John F. Kennedy in Vienna, 3 June 1961 (from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 25 A revolutionary meeting of Russian soldiers in March 1917 in Dalkarby of
Jomala ,
Åland (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 26 American, British, and Japanese Troops parade through Vladivostok in armed support to the White Army. (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 27 Soviet general secretary
Leonid Brezhnev and US President
Jimmy Carter sign the
SALT II arms limitation treaty in Vienna on 18 June 1979. (from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 28 From left to right, the Soviet General Secretary
Joseph Stalin , US President
Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill confer in Tehran, 1943 (from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 30 The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly on 6 January 1918. The
Tauride Palace is locked and guarded by
Trotsky ,
Sverdlov ,
Zinoviev , and
Lashevich . (from
October Revolution )
Image 32 The dissolution of the
Constituent Assembly on 6 January 1918. The
Tauride Palace is locked and guarded by
Trotsky ,
Sverdlov ,
Zinoviev and
Lashevich . (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 33 Petrograd
Milrevcom proclamation about the deposing of the
Russian Provisional Government (from
October Revolution )
Image 34 European theatre of the
Russian Civil War in 1918 (from
October Revolution )
Image 35 Russian troops meeting German troops in No Man's Land (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 36 Map showing the greatest territorial extent of the Soviet Union and the sovereign states that it dominated politically, economically and militarily in 1960, after the
Cuban Revolution of 1959 but before the official
Sino-Soviet split of 1961 (total area: c. 35,000,000 km
2 ) (from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 37 A scene from the July Days. The army has just opened fire on street protesters. (from
October Revolution )
Image 38 Meeting before the Russian wire entanglements (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 39 Residents of Leningrad leave their homes destroyed by German bombing. About 1 million civilians died during the 871-day
Siege of Leningrad , mostly from starvation. (from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 40 Anniversary of October Revolution in
Riga , Soviet Union in 1988 (from
October Revolution )
Image 41 Murder of the Romanov family,
Le Petit Journal (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 42 On 21 December 1991, the leaders of 11 former Soviet republics, including Russia and Ukraine, agreed to the
Alma-Ata Protocols , formally establishing the
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). (from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 43 Red Guard unit of the Vulkan factory in Petrograd, October 1917 (from
October Revolution )
Image 44 The New York Times headline from 9 November 1917 (from
October Revolution )
Image 45 The 2nd Moscow Women Death Battalion protecting the Winter Palace as the last guards of the stronghold (from
Russian Revolution )
Image 46 Internally displaced Azerbaijanis from
Nagorno-Karabakh , 1993 (from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 47 Cruiser
Aurora (from
October Revolution )
Image 48 Country emblems of the Soviet Republics before and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union (the
Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (fifth in the second row) no longer exists as a political entity of any kind and the emblem is unofficial.) (from
History of the Soviet Union )
Image 49 Lenin ,
Trotsky , and
Kamenev celebrating the second anniversary of the
October Revolution (from
History of the Soviet Union )
This is a list of recognized content, updated weekly by JL-Bot (talk · contribs ) (typically on Saturdays). There is no need to edit the list yourself. If an article is missing from the list, make sure it is tagged (e.g. {{ WikiProject Soviet Union }} ) or categorized correctly and wait for the next update. See WP:RECOG for configuration options.
2020-09-16 165855 Soviet submarine B-515
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Mamoru Shigemitsu signs the Instrument of Surrender, officially ending the Second World War
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Yalta Conference (Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin) (B&W)
Yuri Gagarin (1961) - Restoration
Yury Pen - Portrait of Marc Chagall
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Maxim Gorky LOC Restored edit1 (2013-03-28)
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Mamoru Shigemitsu signs the Instrument of Surrender, officially ending the Second World War (2022-09-02)
2020-09-16 165855 Soviet submarine B-515 (2023-04-18)
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Raising a flag over the Reichstag - Restoration (2025-05-02)
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