Soviet Union

Background

The Soviet Union—officially, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or USSR—was a global superpower from 1922 until its collapse in 1991. At its height, it was the largest country in the world, taking up one-sixth of the planet's land mass and holding nearly 300 million people from more than 100 nationalities.

As a major real-world test of Karl Marx’s socio-political theory, the Soviet Union was a central part of the 20th century’s dominant ideological debate: Could Communism be an effective alternative to capitalism?

What Came Before: The Romanovs

For 300 years, the Russian Empire was ruled by the tsars of the Romanov Dynasty. By 1917, tensions were brewing between the ruling class, the peasantry, and the highly educated intelligentsia over basic economic issues like the role of private property in society.

Workers' demonstrations against food shortages and an increasingly autocratic rule led Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate during the so-called February Revolution.

The Russian Revolution

After plotting in secret from abroad, Vladimir Lenin’s highly organized, orthodox Marxist Bolshevik revolutionaries—or “those of the majority”—led a coup against the post-tsarist provisional government in November 1917.

The radical faction called for the country to be ruled directly by worker-led councils called "soviets"—the embodiment of the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat.

For two years, Lenin’s Red Army battled the antirevolutionary Whites (a coalition of monarchists, democratic socialists, and capitalists) in a civil war. The victorious Reds then established the Communist Party’s collective control of factories and agricultural lands, and by 1922, much of the international community began recognizing the new Soviet Union.

Failures and Achievements

The Soviet Union operated as a centrally planned, or command, economy, with economic priorities outlined by the state in the form of a Five-Year Plan.

After Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin took over the Party, and his brutal reign was marked by purges of the intelligentsia and anyone who might pose a threat to his regime.

Over three years, he arrested half the members of his Party—more than 1.2 million people, about half of whom died in gulags. Stalin’s forced collectivization of the country’s farms shrank Russia’s food supply by 25%, and millions died of starvation.

After Stalin, the USSR notched a number of scientific and technical wins in the Space Race with the US, including launching the world’s first satellite and sending the first man into space. Its nuclear program also rivaled that of the US, establishing the USSR as the world’s only other true superpower.

Collapse

By the mid-1980s, food shortages and a faltering economy led new leader Mikhail Gorbachev to enact political and economic reforms known as "glasnost" (openness) and "perestroika" (restructuring).

Aimed at liberalizing the USSR, the policies diminished the Communist Party’s grip on power and allowed for more private enterprise, greater democracy, and friendlier relations with the West.

But the reforms proved too little too late: Antigovernment protests spread, and Communism’s influence around the world began to wane—most visibly with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Over the next two years, several of the USSR’s constituent republics declared independence, and the Soviet Union’s existence officially ended on Christmas Day 1991, when Gorbachev handed the reins to prodemocracy opposition leader Boris Yeltsin.