Soviet Union

La Soviet Union (in Russian, Советский Союз, Sovietski), officially Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSRin Russian, Союз Советских Социалиских Республик, pronunciation, Soyuz Soviétskij Sotsialistícheskij; abbreviated as СССР, SSSR), was a federal state of socialist republics that existed from December 30, 1922 to December 25, 1991 in Eurasia.

The February Revolution of 1917, which caused the fall of the Russian Empire, was succeeded by the Russian Provisional Government, which was overthrown by the October Revolution, establishing the Bolshevik government called Sovnarkom. This was followed by the Russian civil war which was won by the new Soviet regime. On December 30, 1922, the Soviet Union was created with the merger of Russia, Transcaucasia, Ukraine and Belarus.

After the death of the first Soviet leader, Vladimir Lenin, in 1924, Joseph Stalin eventually won the power struggle and led the country through large-scale industrialization, a centralized economy, and extreme political repression. In June 1941, during World War II, Nazi Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union, a country with which it had signed a non-aggression pact later called the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. After four years of brutal warfare, the Soviet Union emerged victorious as one of the world's two superpowers, alongside the United States.

The Soviet Union and its allied Eastern European states, called the Eastern Bloc, were involved in the Cold War, which was a protracted global ideological and political struggle against the United States and its Western Bloc allies; eventually the Soviet Union gave in to economic problems and internal and external political unrest. During this period, the Soviet Union became the reference model for future socialist states. From 1945 to 1991, the Soviet Union and the United States dominated the global agenda of economic policy, foreign affairs, military operations, cultural exchange, scientific progress including the initiation of space exploration, and sports (including the Olympic Games). In the late 1980s, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, tried to reform the state with his policies of perestroika and glasnost, but the Soviet Union collapsed. and was formally dissolved on December 25, 1991 after the failed coup attempt in August. After this, the Russian Federation assumed its rights and obligations.

The geographic boundaries of the Soviet Union varied over time, but after its latest territorial annexations, including the occupation of the Baltic republics (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia) and the occupation of eastern Poland, Bessarabia, and some other territories during the World War II, from 1945 until dissolution, the boundaries roughly corresponded to those of the defunct Imperial Russia, with the notable exclusions of Poland, most of Finland, and Alaska; thus covering something more than the seventh part of the emerged surface of the Earth.

History

The Soviet Union is traditionally thought of as the successor to the Russian Empire; however, five years passed between the last government of the tsars and the establishment of the Soviet Union. The last Tsar, Nicholas II, ruled the Russian Empire until his abdication in March 1917 in the February Revolution, partly due to the pressure of fighting in World War I, then a brief Russian Provisional Government took power, to being overthrown in the October Revolution of that same year by revolutionaries led by Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin.

The Soviet Union was established in December 1922, through the signing of the Treaty Creating the USSR as the union of the Soviet Socialist Republics of Russia (known as Bolshevik Russia), Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Transcaucasia governed by Bolshevik parties. Despite the founding of the Soviet state as a federative entity of many constituent republics, each with its own political and administrative entities, the term "Soviet Russia"—strictly applicable only to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic—was often misapplied. (RSFSR)—to the whole country by non-Soviet politicians and writers.

Revolution and foundation of the Soviet state

Vladimir Lenin together with several commanders in the Red Square of Moscow during an inspection of the troops on 25 May 1919

Modern revolutionary activity in the Russian Empire began with the Decembrist Revolt of 1825, and although serfdom was abolished in 1861, it was done on terms unfavorable to the peasants and served to encourage revolutionaries. A parliament, the Imperial Duma of Russia, was established in 1906, after the 1905 Revolution. Despite the tsar's resistance to attempts to move from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy, the Russian Constitution of 1906 was finally enacted, the country's first constitution. However, social unrest continued and worsened during World War I due to military failure and food shortages in major cities.

A spontaneous popular uprising in Petrograd, in response to declining wartime economics and morale, culminated in the overthrow of the imperial government in March 1917 (see February Revolution). The Tsarist autocracy was replaced by the Russian Provisional Government, whose leaders thought to establish a liberal democracy in Russia and continue to participate on the side of the Triple Entente in World War I. At the same time, to ensure the rights of the working class, workers' assemblies, known as soviets, are born throughout the country. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, lobbied for a socialist revolution both at the assemblies and in the streets, overthrowing the Provisional Government on November 7 (October 25 according to the Julian calendar) 1917 (see Revolution of October), and power was handed over to the soviets of workers, soldiers and peasants. A few weeks later, democratic elections were called, which after Lenin's defeat caused the new Bolshevik government to dissolve the Russian Constituent Assembly a few months later. In December 1917, the Bolsheviks signed an armistice with the Central Powers, although by February 1918, fighting had resumed. In March, the Soviets abandoned the war for good and signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

Beginning in 1917, a long and bloody Russian civil war between the Reds and the Whites ensued, ending in 1923 with the victory of the Reds and included foreign intervention, the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, and the famine of 1921, which killed about five million people. After the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1921 and the Ukrainian war of independence of 1917-1921, the "Peace of Riga" was signed at the beginning of the year 1921 divided the disputed territories of Byelorussia and the Ukrainian People's Republic between the Second Polish Republic and the Russian SFSR. The Soviet Union had to resolve similar conflicts with the newly created Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

Unification of the Soviet Republics

On December 29, 1922, at a conference of plenipotentiary delegations from Russia, Transcaucasia, Ukraine, and Byelorussia, the Treaty on the Creation of the Soviet Union and the Declaration of the Creation of the Soviet Union were approved, forming the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics. These two documents were confirmed by the First Congress of Soviets of the Soviet Union and signed by the heads of the delegations Mikhail Kalinin, Mikhail Tskhakaya, Mikhail Frunze, Grigory Petrovsky and Aleksandr Cherviakov respectively on 30 December 1922.

On February 1, 1924, the Soviet Union was recognized by the British Empire, with Labor Ramsay MacDonald being Prime Minister, and in that same year a Soviet Constitution was approved, legitimizing the union of December 1922.

Intensive restructuring of the country's economy, industry, and politics began from the earliest days of Soviet power in 1917. Much of it was done according to the Bolshevik Initial Decrees, Soviet government documents signed by Vladimir Lenin. One of the most prominent advances was the GOELRÓ plan, which advocated a deep restructuring of the Soviet economy based on the total electrification of the country. The plan began in 1920, developing over a period of ten to fifteen years. It included the construction of a network of 30 regional power stations, including ten large hydroelectric stations, and the electrification of numerous industrial enterprises. The Plan became the prototype for the subsequent Five-Year Plan and was virtually completed by 1931.

Stalin (1927-1953)

Lavrenti Beria with Svetlana Aliluyeva and Iosif Stalin behind

Since the beginning of the Soviet Union, its government was based on a one-party system administered by the Bolshevik party. After the economic policy of war communism carried out during the Civil War, the Soviet government allowed some private companies to coexist with industry nationalized during the 1920s. Similarly, the total requisition of surplus food in the countryside was replaced by taxes on food (see New Economic Policy).

Soviet leaders argued that a one-party government was necessary to ensure that "capitalist exploitation" did not return to the Soviet Union and that the principles of democratic centralism represented the will of the people. The debate over the future of the economy formed the backdrop for the power struggle that broke out among Soviet leaders after Lenin's death in 1924. Originally, Lenin was to be replaced by a collective leadership consisting of Grigori Zinoviev from the Ukraine, Lev Kamenev from Russia and Stalin from Georgia.

On April 3, 1922, Joseph Stalin was appointed General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Lenin had appointed him chief inspector of workers and peasants. By gradually consolidating his influence and isolating or limiting his rivals within the party, Stalin became the main Soviet leader. In October 1927 Grigori Zinoviev and Leon Trotsky were expelled from the Central Committee and forced into exile.

In 1928, Stalin introduced the First Five Year Plan aimed at building a socialist economy. This, unlike the proletarian internationalism expressed by Lenin and Trotsky throughout the course of the Revolution, aimed at socialism in one country. In industry, the state took control of all existing enterprises and undertook an intensive program of industrialization, and in agriculture collective farms (kolkhoz) were established all over the country.

Gulag Prisoners working on the construction of the Kolymá Autopista.

Following dekulakization, surviving kuláks were persecuted and many sent to the Gulag for forced labor. Social upheavals continued into the mid-1930s. Stalin's Great Purge resulted in the execution of many "Old Bolsheviks", who had participated in the October Revolution. The death toll is uncertain, with a wide range of estimates. According to declassified Soviet archives, between 1937 and 1938 the NKVD arrested 1,500,000 people, of whom 681,692 were shot. Excess deaths during the 1930s as a whole were in the range of 10 to 11 million. people. Despite the turmoil of the mid to late 1930s, the Soviet Union developed a powerful industrial economy in the years preceding World War II, making it an international industrial power.

The 1930s saw the closest cooperation between Western countries and the Soviet Union. In 1933 diplomatic relations were established between the United States and the Soviet Union. Four years later, the Soviet Union supported the Spanish Republic in the Spanish civil war against the coup d'état by the rebels, supported by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. However, after the United Kingdom and France concluded the Munich Agreements with Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union made deals with the latter country concluding the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact (Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact) and the German-Molotov Treaty. Council of Friendship, Cooperation and Demarcation. This favored the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 and the occupation of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in 1940. In late November 1939, finding himself unable to force Finland to move its border 25 kilometers from Leningrad by diplomatic means, Stalin ordered the intervention of the Red Army in that country, causing the so-called Winter War.

In the east, the Red Army won several decisive battles during border clashes with the Empire of Japan in 1938 and 1939. However, in April 1941, the Soviet Union signed the Neutrality Pact with the Japanese, acknowledging the territorial integrity of Manchukuo, a Japanese puppet state.

Participation in World War II

Germany, once deemed strong enough, broke the non-aggression pact it had signed with the Soviet Union, in Moscow on August 23, 1939, and invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, beginning what was known in the Soviet Union (and in present-day Russia and the rest of the countries that formerly made up the Soviet Union) as the "Great Patriotic War." The Red Army stopped the seemingly invincible German army in the Battle of Moscow. The Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted from late 1942 to early 1943, dealt the Germans and their allies a heavy blow from which they never fully recovered and made it a turning point of the war. After Stalingrad, Soviet forces advanced through Eastern Europe to Berlin forcing Germany's surrender in May 1945. The German army suffered 80% of its military casualties on the Eastern Front.

Soviet leader Iosif Stalin, American President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (from left to right) gathered in Tehran in 1943.

That same year, the Soviet Union, in keeping with its agreement with the Allies at the Yalta Conference, denounced the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact in April 1945 and invaded Manchukuo and other Japanese-controlled territories on April 9. August 1945. This conflict ended in a decisive Soviet victory, which contributed to the unconditional surrender of Japan and the end of World War II.

The Soviet Union was the country with the most fatalities during the Second World War

The Soviet Union suffered greatly during the war, losing an estimated 27 million people. Despite this, it emerged from the conflict as a military superpower. Having denied diplomatic recognition to the Western world, the Soviet Union had official relations with virtually all nations in the 1940s. As a member of the United Nations at its founding in 1945, it became one of five permanent members of the United Nations. UN Security Council, which gave it the right to veto any of its resolutions (see Soviet Union and the United Nations).

The Soviet Union maintained its status as one of the world's two superpowers for four decades through its hegemony in Eastern Europe stemming from its military strength, economic strength, aid to developing countries, and research science, especially in space technology and weapons.

Start of the Cold War

Soviet R-12 nuclear ballistic missiles in a military parade in the Red Square in the late 1950s.

During the immediate postwar period, the Soviet Union rebuilt and expanded its economy while maintaining tightly centralized control. The Soviet Union helped rebuild the Eastern Bloc countries in the postwar period, while turning them into satellite states with the founding of the Warsaw Pact military alliance in 1955 and with the formation of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance or COMECON of 1949 to 1991, the latter an equivalent to the European Economic Community. Later, COMECON provided aid to the eventual victory of the Communist Party of China and saw its influence grow in other parts of the world. Fearing its ambitions, the United Kingdom and the United States, allies of the Soviet Union during World War II, became its enemies and, in the ensuing Cold War, the two blocs fought indirectly using most of their forces.

Khrushchev (1953-1964)

Nikita Jrushchov.

Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953. In the absence of a commonly accepted successor, the top Communist Party officials chose to rule the Soviet Union in committee. Nikita Khrushchev, who had prevailed in that struggle for power at the beginning of the 1950s, denounced in his secret speech at the XX Congress of the CPSU in 1956 the political repression in the Soviet Union and ordered the release of Gulag political prisoners. In addition to this denunciation, he proceeded to relax the repressive controls that the Party had exercised over society until then. All of this is known as the de-Stalinization process.

Moscow viewed Eastern Europe as a buffer zone for the preemptive defense of its western borders and secured its control of the region by transforming Eastern European countries into satellite states. At the same time, Soviet military force was used to suppress anti-communist uprisings in Hungary and Poland in 1956 (see 1956 Poznań protests, Polish October, and 1956 Hungarian Revolution).

Nikita Jrushchov and John F. Kennedy in Vienna, 1961

In the late 1950s, a confrontation with China over the Soviet Union's rapprochement with the West took place that Mao Zedong perceived as an act of revisionism, which led to the Sino-Soviet split. This led to a schism throughout the world communist movement, with communist governments in Albania, Cambodia and Somalia choosing to ally with China over the Soviet Union.

Fidel Castro and Yuri Gagarin in 1961.

During this period, the Soviet Union continued to advance scientifically and technologically, allowing it to launch the first artificial satellite Sputnik 1 and achieve the feat of taking a living being into outer space for the first time: the dog Laika. On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to travel into outer space aboard Vostok 1. Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman to go into space aboard Vostok 6 on June 16, 1963. Alexei Leonov became the first person to walk in space on March 18, 1965, and the first lunar rovers, Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2.

Khrushchev initiated "the thaw" known as the Khrushchev Thaw, a complex change in the political, cultural, and economic life of the Soviet Union. This included openness and contact with other nations and new social and economic policies with greater emphasis on basic products and housing construction, allowing living standards to rise dramatically and maintaining high levels of economic growth. Censorship was also eased, although the publication of novels that did not conform to the precepts of socialist realism continued, such as the novel Doctor Zhivago whose author, Boris Pasternak, was forced to publish. reject the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. However, that same year Soviet physicists Pavel Cherenkov, Ilya Frank and Igor Tamm were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Khrushchev's reforms in agriculture and administration, however, were generally unproductive. In 1962, a crisis was triggered with the United States over the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. The Soviet Union backed down after the United States initiated a naval blockade, causing Khrushchev's prestige to decline, forcing him to resign in 1964.

Brezhnev (1964-1982)

Members of collective leadership between 1965 and 1977

Leonid Brézhnev:
General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Alekséi Kosyguin:
President of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union

Nikolái Podgorni:
President of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet Union

After Khrushchev's departure, there was another period of collective leadership, made up of Leonid Brezhnev as General Secretary, Alexei Kosygin as President of the Council of Ministers and Nikolai Podgorny as President of the Presidium, which lasted until the 1970s where Brezhnev established himself as the most important Soviet leader. In 1968 the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia to stop the Prague Spring reforms.

Brezhnev presided over a period of Détente or détente with the West (see SALT I, SALT II and Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty ) while continuing to increase military force soviet; the concentration of arms contributed to the disappearance of Détente at the end of the 1970s. Another factor that contributed to the end of détente was the war in Afghanistan in December 1979, in order to support a Local communist government that was in serious difficulties.

In October 1977, the third Soviet constitution was unanimously approved, but the prevailing mood in the Soviet leadership at the time of Brezhnev's death in 1982 was aversion to change. The long period of government in charge of Brezhnev had begun to be called one of immobility (застой), with an aging and stagnant political leadership.

In sports, the Soviet Union organized the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games, based in Moscow. There was an attempt to boycott the event by the United States: within the framework of the Cold War and in protest against the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, the Americans decided not to attend the Olympic Games, while trying to persuade their allies to they didn't attend either. In total, 65 countries abstained from participating, mainly due to the US initiative.

Gorbachev's reforms and the dissolution of the Soviet Union

Gorbachev holding discussions with U.S. President Ronald Reagan at the first summit in Geneva (1985).

Two phenomena characterized the following decade: the increasingly evident collapse of the economic and political structures of the Soviet Union, and an incoherent set of reforms aimed at reversing that process. Kenneth S. Deffeyes argued in Beyond Oil that the Reagan administration had encouraged Saudi Arabia to lower the price of oil to the point where the Soviets couldn't make a profit selling their oil, so they ran out of oil. the foreign exchange reserves of the Soviet Union.

Brezhnev's next two successors would be transitional figures with deep roots in the Brezhnevite tradition, which did not last long. When they took power, Yuri Andropov was 68 years old and Konstantin Chernenko 72; both died in less than two years. In an attempt to avoid a short-lived third leader, in 1985 the Soviets turned to the next generation and selected Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev began to implement significant changes in the economy and party leadership with perestroika. His glásnost policy allowed public access to information after decades of heavy government censorship.

Gorbachev also moved to end the Cold War. In 1988, the Soviet Union abandoned its nine-year war in Afghanistan and began withdrawing its troops. In the 1980s, he withdrew military support from the Soviet Union's former satellite states, resulting in the fall of several communist governments. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and East and West Germany pursuing unification, the Iron Curtain came down.

At the end of the 1980s, the republics that made up the Soviet Union legally incorporated movements towards the declaration of sovereignty over their territories, citing Article 72 of the Constitution of the Soviet Union, which indicated that any member republic of the Union The Soviet Union was free to secede. On April 7, 1990, a law was passed under which a republic could leave the union if more than two-thirds of its residents voted in favor of it in a referendum. Many republics held their first free elections in the Soviet era in order to create their own national legislatures around 1990. Many of these legislatures proceeded to make legislation that contradicted Union law in what became known as "The War of Laws." ».

Boris Yeltsin in 1989.

In 1989, the Russian SFSR, then the largest republic (with about half the population) called a new election to elect the Russian Congress of People's Deputies. Boris Yeltsin was elected president of the Congress. On March 11, 1990 Lithuania proclaimed the restoration of independence and the end of occupation by the Soviet Union. On June 12, 1990, the Congress of People's Deputies declared Russia's sovereignty over its territory and took the lead in drafting laws that tried to replace some of the laws of the Soviet Union. The period of legal uncertainty continued. throughout 1991 as well as the constituent republics were slowly becoming independent de facto.

On March 17, 1991, a referendum seeking to preserve the Soviet Union was held, in which the majority of the population voted for its preservation in nine of the fifteen Soviet republics. This referendum gave Gorbachev a break and a New Union Treaty was drawn up in the summer of 1991, in an attempt to reach agreements that would make the Soviet Union a much looser federation and lessen political centralism.

In the New Treaty of the Union, mention was no longer made of the Soviet Union and the word socialist was no longer used. This New Treaty was made in secret and when Prime Minister Pavlov found a draft of it, the conservative leaders of the party and the KGB interpreted it as the basis for the dissolution of the Soviet Union and for that reason they chose to leak it to the press.. According to the content of said treaty, the Soviet Union was about to divide into several sovereign states. For this reason they decided to confront Gorbachev and reaffirm the control of the central government over the republics of the Soviet Union.

Tanks in the Red Square during the August 1991 coup attempt.

The treaty was to be signed on August 20, but the signing was interrupted by the August 1991 coup attempt against Gorbachev, by conservatives in an attempt to preserve the Soviet system. The conservatives had created the State Committee for the State of Emergency, mobilizing Soviet troops to protect state institutions, but gave up when three young men were accidentally killed by falling under tanks.

After the failed coup attempt, Yeltsin, after remaining hidden in his residence, appeared in public and discredited the State of Emergency Committee chaired by Yanayev by declaring it unconstitutional; meanwhile, Gorbachev's power diminished vertiginously, a fact that Yeltsin took advantage of to consolidate his power and delegitimize once and for all the control of the Communist Party over the Government. The political balance tilted appreciably towards the secessionist republics. In fact, immediately and as late as August 1991, Latvia and Estonia declared the restoration of full independence (following the example set by Lithuania in 1990), while the other 12 Soviet republics continued to discuss possible models for an increasingly Union. weak.

The heads of State of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Treaty of Belavezha and officially declared the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

On December 8, 1991, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus signed the Belavezha Treaty, which officially declared the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place. doubts remained about the authority of the Belavezha Treaty to dissolve the Union, on December 21, 1991, representatives of all Soviet republics except Georgia and the Baltic republics, including the three republics that had signed the Belavezha Treaty, signed the Protocol of Almá-Atá, which confirmed the consequent dismantling of the Soviet Union and raised again the establishment of the CIS. The Alma-Ata summit also agreed to several other practical measures as a consequence of the extinction of the Soviet Union. On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned as President of the Soviet Union declaring the position extinct and transferred powers that had been created in the presidency to Boris Yeltsin, the President of Russia.

The next day, the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, the highest governmental body in the Soviet Union, dissolved itself. This event is generally recognized as the final dissolution of the Soviet Union as a state. Many organizations such as the Soviet Army and the police forces continued to occupy their respective positions until the beginning of 1992, but they were progressively withdrawn and absorbed by the newly constituted states.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991, Russia was internationally recognized as its legal successor on the international scene. To this end, Russia voluntarily accepted all Soviet foreign debts and claimed Soviet overseas properties as its own. Since then, the Russian Federation has assumed the rights and obligations of the Soviet Union.

Key moments in the dissolution of the Soviet Union

• 9 April 1989violent dissolution with the intervention of the army of a demonstration for the independence of Georgia in Tiflis.

• May-June 1989, first meetings of the People's Congress of the Soviet Union elected outside the soviets system.

• July 1989, generalization of the strikes of miners that began in March for labor reasons that turned into politicians demanding the repeal of Article 6 of the Constitution that gave the PCUS a leading character.

• 11 March 1990Lithuania is planning its independence and the departure of the Soviet Union.

• 14 March 1990the Congress of the People's Deputies of the Soviet Union repeals Article 6 of the Constitution, the CPUS ceases to be considered "leading party".

• 12 June 1990the Soviet Socialist Federal Republic of Russia proclaims its sovereignty and puts its laws above the laws of the Union.

• 19 November 1990the leaders of Russia and Ukraine recognize each other as sovereign objects and express the intention of establishing direct economic cooperation outside the Soviet organization.

• January 1991the security forces of the Soviet Union take several government buildings in the capitals of Lithuania and Latvia in response to the independence tensions of their governing bodies.

• 17 March 1991a referendum for the preservation of the Soviet Union. A referendum is held on the conservation of the "renewed" Soviet Union, which is supported by 76.4 percent of voters. In the Republics of Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Armenia, Georgia and Moldova are boycotted by their governments. In Russia, another referendum is held in parallel to create the post of "president of the Republic of Russia" that goes in favor with 71.3 % of the votes cast.

• 9 April 1991, Georgia declared its independence.

• 12 June 1991Borís Yeltsin is elected president of Russia.

• 19 August 1991, attempted coup d'etat in Moscow, which destitutes Gorbachev.

• 24 August 1991Ukraine proclaims its independence, which would be followed by Belarus, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

• 18 October 1991the Commonwealth of Independent States agrees with the signature of the President of the Soviet Union and those of Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tunisia and Tajikistan.

• 1 December 1991, referendum on the independence of Ukraine with support for it of 90% of the votes cast.

• 8 December 1991, creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States for an agreement, the Treaty of Belavezha, signed by the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus in the forest of Belavezha in Belarus.

• 25 December 1991Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as president of the Soviet Union, surrenders the powers of the State to the president of Russia and the Soviet flag of the Kremlin is raised, and the Russian Federation is erected instead.

Government and politics

The Soviet Union was created in 1922. At first a few agencies were created; however, the new State was not institutionalized until the approval in 1924 of a new constitution. The Constitution of 1924 established some fundamental bases of the State. The highest legislative body was the Supreme Soviet, elected by universal suffrage and made up of two chambers: the Soviet of the Union and the Soviet of Nationalities. The first of the chambers performed the tasks of a parliament. The Soviet of Nationalities was made up of representatives of the various federated and autonomous republics, in a number determined by law. Another source of parliamentary power was the Congress of Soviets, which met annually and was made up of representatives from various soviets in the Soviet Union. The Head of State was embodied in a collective body - the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. The Government was exercised by the Council of People's Commissars. Both bodies were elected by the Supreme Soviet. Until his death in 1924, the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars was Lenin. The 1924 Constitution of the Soviet Union included for the first time the federal structure of the Soviet Union and the right of the federated republics to secede from the Soviet Union and establish themselves as independent states. The party was not given a relevant function in the State, as it would be done later in the other constitutions.

The Soviet Union was a federal republic made up of fifteen united republics. In turn, a series of territorial units formed the republics. The republics also had jurisdiction designed to protect the interests of national minorities. The republics had their own constitutions, which, together with the Union Constitution, provided the theoretical division of power in the Soviet Union. All the republics except the Russian SFSR had their own communist parties. In 1989, however, the CPSU and the central government seized all significant authority, establishing the policies to be carried out by the governments of the republics, oblasts, and districts.

The Communist Party

The annual military parade of Moscow in 1983, commemorating the 66th anniversary of the October Revolution. The flag at the top says: "Glory to the PCUS!"

At the top of the Communist Party was the Central Committee, elected at Party congresses and conferences. The Central Committee, for its part, chose the Politburo (called the Presidium between 1952 and 1966), the Secretariat and the General Secretary (called the First Secretary between 1953 and 1966), which was literally the highest position in the Soviet Union. degree of consolidation of power, could be both the Politburo as a collective body or the general secretary, who was always occupied by one of the members of the Politburo, who led the country and the party (except for the Stalin period, marked by a highly personalized authoritarianism, exercised directly through their position in the Council of Ministers, rather than the Politburo from 1941). They were not subject to the control of all Party members, as the fundamental principle of Party organization it was democratic centralism, demanding a strict subordination to the superior bodies, in addition the elections were without opposition, since the candidates were proposed by the levels superiors.

The Communist Party maintained its dominance over the state mainly through its control of the appointment system. All senior government officials and most of the deputies of the Supreme Soviet were members of the CPSU. Of the leaders of the Party, Stalin between 1941 and 1953 and Khrushchev between 1958 and 1964, were presidents of the Council of Ministers. After Khrushchev's forced retirement, the party leader forbade this type of dual membership, but the last General Secretaries, at least for part of their tenure, also held the position of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, nominally the head of state.. Institutions at the lower levels were supervised and sometimes superseded by the primary Party organizations.

In practice, the degree of Party control could extend throughout the state bureaucracy, particularly after Stalin's death, it was far from total, with the bureaucracy pursuing different interests that sometimes led to conflicts with the Party. The Party, however, was also not monolithic from top to bottom, although factions were occasionally banned.

Government of the Soviet Union

The Great Palace of the Kremlin, headquarters of the Supreme Soviet Soviet Soviet Soviet, in 1982.

The Supreme Soviet (successor to the Congress of Soviets and the Central Executive Committee), was nominally the highest organ of state for most of Soviet history, while at first simply acting as an institution to seal, approve and implement all decisions made by the Party, however, the powers and functions of the Supreme Soviet were expanded in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, including the creation of new state commissions and committees. It also acquired additional powers after the approval of the Five-Year Plans and by the Soviet state budget. The Supreme Soviet elected a Presidium to exercise its power between plenary sessions, ordinarily held twice a year, and appointed the Supreme Court, the attorney general and the Council of Ministers (known before 1946 as the Council of People's Commissars), chaired by the President (Prime Minister) and headed the huge bureaucracy responsible for the administration of the economy and society. The state and party republics of the constituent republics largely emulated the structure of the central institutions, although the Russian SFSR, unlike the other republics, did not have a republican branch of the CPSU for most of its history, being governed directly by the All-Union Party until 1990. Local authorities were organized through local party committees, sov local iets and executive committees. While the state system was nominally federal, the CPSU was unitary.

The state security police (the KGB and its predecessor agencies) played a very important role in Soviet politics. They were instrumental in Stalinist terror, but after Stalin's death the state security police came under strict Party control. Under Yuri Andropov, KGB Chairman from 1967 to 1982 and Party General Secretary from 1982 to 1983, the KGB, in addition to devoting itself to the suppression of political dissent and maintaining an extensive network of informers, reasserted itself as a political actor, being to some extent independent within the party structure, culminating in the anti-corruption campaign targeting high-ranking Party officials in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Rulers of the Soviet Union

Nikita Jrushchov, Nikolái Podgorni and Walter Ulbricht

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a federal socialist state made up of fifteen republics, created on December 30, 1922 and dissolved on December 25, 1991. Although the heads of State and Government were differentiated positions, a large part Political power rested with the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and other members of its Central Committee.

In fact, it was common for the general secretary of the Party to be president of the Presidium, head of state or president of the Council of Ministers (Head of Government). Until Nikita Khrushchev it was customary for the party leader to be directly in charge of the executive branch, but after him his successor Leonid Brezhnev occupied the head of state. The Western press generally ignored these distinctions and called the political leader the President of the Soviet Union or the Premier of the Soviet Union, although these positions did not officially exist until the last months of Mikhail Gorbachev's rule.

The position of General Secretary of the Party was not created until April 1922 and became the highest post after the death of Lenin, ideologue of the October Revolution and main Bolshevik leader. Between March 1953 and April 8, 1966 the position was called First Secretary. As of that date and until March 14, 1990, the position was renamed General Secretary of the CPSU.

Soviet Armed Forces

Gueorgui Zhúkov, Vassili Sokolovski, Konstantin Rokossovski and Bernard Montgomery in Berlin, 12 July 1945

Soviet Armed Forces, also called Armed Forces of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or Armed Forces of the Soviet Union refers to the armed forces of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (1917-1922), and the Soviet Union (1922-1991) from its inception in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War to its dissolution in December 1991.

According to the All-Union Military Service Law, enacted in September 1925, the Soviet Armed Forces consisted of five components: The Soviet Army, the Soviet Air Force, the Navy, the Political Directorate of the Red Army (ru:Политическое управление Красной армии), and the Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (ru:Внутренние войска МВД СССР). After World War II the following armed bodies were added: the Strategic Missile Troops (1959), the Air Defense Forces (1948) and the Civil Protection Troops (1970).

Separation of power and reform

The Soviet constitutions, which were enacted 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 branches of government. The system was governed more by informal agreements than by statute, and there was no established mechanism for leadership succession. There were bitter and sometimes deadly power struggles in the Politburo after the deaths of Lenin and Joseph Stalin, as well as after the removal of Khrushchev, due to a coup in the Politburo and the Central Committee. All the Soviet party leaders before Gorbachev were killed in office, except for Georgi Malenkov and Khrushchev, both sacked from the party leadership amid internal infighting within the party.

1988 postal seal promoting the Perestroika.

In the period from 1988 to 1990, in the face of considerable opposition, Mikhail Gorbachev enacted reforms that changed the power of the higher party bodies and made the Supreme Soviet less dependent on them. The Congress of People's Deputies was established, most members of which were elected in competitive elections held in March 1989. The Congress now elected the Supreme Soviet, which had become a much stronger full-time Parliament. than before. For the first time since the 1920s, he refused to authorize proposals from the party and the Council of Ministers. In 1990, Gorbachev ushered in and took office as President of the Soviet Union, concentrating power in his executive office, independent of the party and subordinate to the Government, now renamed itself the Cabinet of Ministers of the Soviet Union.

Tensions grew between the all-union authorities under Gorbachev, the reformists in Russia led by Boris Yeltsin, controlled the newly elected Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR, and Communist Party hardliners. From August 19-21, 1991, a hardline group staged a failed coup. After the failed coup, the State Council of the Soviet Union became the highest body of state power "in the transition period". Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary, remaining only as President for the last months of the Soviet Union's existence. Soviet Union.

Judicial system

The Soviet judiciary was not independent of the other branches of government. The Supreme Court supervised the lower courts (People's Courts) and applied the law as established by the Constitution or as interpreted by the Supreme Soviet. The Constitutional Oversight Committee reviewed the constitutionality of laws and decrees. The Soviet Union used the inquisitive principle of Roman law, where the judge, the prosecutor, and the defense attorney collaborated to establish the truth.

International relations

Map of States members of the Warsaw Pact.

Map of COMECON member States in November 1986.Members Members who have not participated Partners Observers

Signed by Leonid Brézhnev and Jimmy Carter of the SALT II agreements on 18 June 1979 in Vienna.

President Richard Nixon and President of the Council of Ministers Alekséi Kosyguin sign the cooperation agreement that allowed the Apolo-Soyuz test project mission. Moscow, May 1972.

The historic handshake between Stafford and Leonov in 1975.

Gorbachev and Reagan signed the INF Treaty in Washington, D.C., in 1987.

After the initial denial of diplomatic recognition by the capitalist world, the Soviet Union came to have official relations with most of the world's nations in the late 1980s, increasing its importance in the international sphere and moving from being outside international organizations and negotiations, to be one of the arbiters of the fate of Europe after the Second World War. As a member of the United Nations since its founding in 1945, the country became one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council which gave it the right to veto its resolutions ( see Union Soviet and the United Nations).

In 1949 nine Eastern European countries founded the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), as a reply to the Marshall Plan and the OEEC. The objective of the body was to integrate the economy of these countries into that of the Soviet Union, through rigorous planning, which the member countries had to follow, and close coordination. The military counterpart to COMECON was the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet economy was also of great importance to Eastern Europe due to imports of vital natural resources from the Soviet Union, such as natural gas.

Moscow considered Eastern Europe an excellent area to defend its western borders and secured its control in the region by transforming Eastern European countries into satellite states, much like the US with Western Europe. Soviet troops intervened in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and together with the Warsaw Pact expelled the Czechoslovak leadership in 1968, since the Government of that country had dictated economic measures that were outside the planning framework, as well as other political measures. This event is known as the "Prague Spring".

In the late 1950s, a confrontation with China stemming from the Soviet Union's rapprochement with the West that Mao rejected, coupled with a series of reforms implemented by Khrushchev, led to the Sino-Soviet split. This resulted in a break through the global communist movement and communist governments in Albania and Cambodia who chose to ally with China instead of the Soviet Union. For a time, war between the former allies seemed to be a possibility; while relations would cool off during the 1970s, they would not return to normal until the Mikhail Gorbachev era.

During the same period, there was a tense confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States over the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The KGB (Committee for State Security) served in a way as the Soviet counterpart to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States, operating with a massive network of informants throughout the Soviet Union and being used to monitor violations of the law. The foreign branch of the KGB was used to collect information in countries around the globe. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union it was replaced in Russia by the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service) and the FSB (Federal Security Service).

The KGB was not out of control. The GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate), which was not made public by the Soviet Union until the end of the Soviet era during perestroika, was created by Lenin in 1918 and served as the centralized organ of military intelligence and institutional controller for intelligence. power with relatively less restriction than the KGB. Effectively, it served to spy on spies, and, interestingly, the KGB served a similar function with the GRU. Like the KGB, the GRU operated in other nations around the world, particularly in the Soviet bloc states and satellite countries. The GRU continues to function even in Russia, with resources exceeding those of the SVR by some estimates.

In the 1970s, the Soviet Union reached approximate nuclear parity with the United States. He perceived his own involvement as essential to the solution of any major international problem. Meanwhile, the Cold War gave way to detente and a more complicated pattern of international relations in which the world was not clearly divided into two opposing blocs. Minor countries were more able to assert their independence, and the two superpowers recognized their common interest in trying to control the spread and proliferation of nuclear weapons (see SALT I, SALT II, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty).

In 1972 the United States and the Soviet Union shocked the world when they announced that they were working on creating a unique space station. The delegations of both superpowers signed a treaty in Moscow that same year on this innovative project. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, which seemed to herald the end of the Cold War at the time, became a symbol of peace and goodwill that would end the tensions caused by the space race and allow each party to learn more about the other's space program. On July 17, 1975, the objectives of the agreement became a reality when the American astronaut Thomas Stafford, commander of the crew of the Apollo spacecraft, and the Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, commander of the Soyuz spacecraft crew, shook hands. in the first international space salute in history. The extraordinary joint work and coexistence of this first international space crew moved the world; by demonstrating that both superpowers could put aside their differences and pool their efforts and resources to achieve something similar. The result of the joint mission was a resounding success and an unimaginable achievement both from a technological point of view; how from the point of view of international relations between the two. In 1977, shortly before the talks in Geneva on the SALT II agreements, the American and Soviet delegations signed a new space agreement that extended the joint work that made possible the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975.

During this time, the Soviet Union signed friendship and cooperation treaties with a good number of non-socialist countries, especially from the third world or belonging to the non-allied movement such as India and Egypt. Despite some ideological differences, Moscow was interested in gaining important strategic positions through economic and military aid to revolutionary movements in the Third World. For all these reasons, Soviet foreign policy was of great importance to the rest of the world's countries that were not part of the socialist camp and helped determine the direction of foreign policy internationally.

Although countless bureaucracies were implicated in the formation and execution of Soviet foreign policy; the main guidelines of the policy were determined by the Politburo of the communist party. The first objectives of Soviet foreign policy had been the maintenance and enhancement of national security and the maintenance of hegemony in Eastern Europe. Relations with the United States and Western Europe were also a major concern of the Soviet rulers, and relations with Third World states were at least partially determined by each state's proximity to the Soviet border and Soviet estimates of its strategic significance.

After Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded Konstantin Chernenko as CPSU General Secretary in 1985, he introduced many changes to Soviet foreign policy and the economy of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev pursued conciliatory policies towards the West instead of maintaining the status quo of the Cold War. The Soviet Union ended its intervention in Afghanistan, signed strategic arms reduction treaties with the United States, and allowed its allies in Eastern Europe to determine their own affairs. The fall of the Berlin Wall, which began in November 1989, dramatically signaled the end of the Soviet Union's external influence in Central and Eastern Europe, culminating two years later with the dismantling of the Soviet system.

Republics

The evolution of Soviet territory, and the corresponding republics of each year.

Administrative divisions, 1989.

Constitutionally, the Soviet Union was a union of Soviet Socialist Republics (SSR) together with the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), although the highly centralized government of the Communist Party made the union merely nominal. The Creation of the Soviet Union was signed in December 1922 by four founding republics, the RSFSR, the Transcaucasian SSR, the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR. In 1924, during the national delimitation in Central Asia, the Uzbek and Turkmen SSRs were made up of parts of the RSFSR, which were the Turkestan SSR and two Soviet dependencies, the Khorasmian SSR and the Bukhara SSR. In 1929, the Tajik SSR seceded from the Uzbek SSR. With the 1936 Constitution, the constituents of the Transcaucasian SFSR, namely the Georgian, Armenian, and Azerbaijan SSRs, were elevated to union republics, while the Kazakhstani and Kyrgyz SSRs were separated from the RSFSR. 1940, the Soviet Union formed the Moldovan SSR from parts of the Ukrainian SSR and Bessarabia annexed from Romania. It also annexed the Baltic States such as the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian SSRs. The Karelo-Finnish RSS broke away from the RSFSR in March 1940 and merged in 1956. In October 1944 the Soviet Union annexed the Republic of Tannu Tuva, an independent Central Asian state, which became an autonomous Oblast within the RSFSR. Between July 1956 and September 1991, there were 15 union republics (see map below).

On November 16, 1988, the Supreme Soviet of the Estonian SSR approved the Declaration of Estonian Sovereignty which reaffirmed Estonian sovereignty and declared the supremacy of Estonian laws over those of the Soviet Union. In 1990, the newly elected Supreme Soviet of the Lithuanian SSR declared its independence, which was followed by the Georgian Supreme Soviet in April 1991. Although the symbolic right of the republics to secede was nominally guaranteed by the Constitution and the Treaty of Union, the Soviet authorities refused to recognize it at first. After the August coup attempt, most other republics followed suit. Finally, the Soviet Union recognized the secession of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania on September 6, 1991. The remaining republics were recognized as independent with the final dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.

Soviet republics SSR of Armenia Azerbaijan SSR Belarus RSS Estonian RSS RSS of Georgia SSR of Kazakhstan SSR of Kyrgyzstan RSS of Latvia RSS of Lithuania RSS of Moldova Russian RSFS Tajikistan RSS feeds of Turkmenistan RSS Feeds of Ukraine RSS feeds Uzbekistan Current countries Armenia Azerbaijan Belarus Estonia Georgia Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Latvia Lithuania Moldova Russia Tajikistan Turkmenistan Ukraine Uzbekistan Abkhazia (partially recognized) Artsaj (Unrecognized State) South Ossetia (partially recognized) Transnistria (Unrecognized State)

Symbols

Flag of the Soviet Union waving in a video of 1952.

The flag of the Soviet Union corresponds to the emblem used by that State from its establishment in 1922 until its dissolution in 1991.

Throughout its history, the emblem had several modifications, but in general it maintained the same structure since its adoption on November 12, 1923. The flag, in a 1:2 ratio, was completely red (the traditional color of the communism) and in its canton it had the symbol of the hammer and sickle in gold and on it a red star with a gold border.

The flag was of great importance for the various political movements of a Marxist nature and served as inspiration for various emblems, especially of socialist countries during the Cold War era. In turn, the various flags of the republics that made up the USSR. they were modifications of the national flag.

First shield of the Soviet Union.

The coat of arms of the Soviet Union shows the traditional Soviet symbols of the hammer and sickle on a globe, which is embraced by two bundles of wheat surrounded by a red ribbon with the motto of the Soviet Union written in the different languages of the Soviet Socialist Republics, in reverse order to that in which they are cited in the Constitution of the Soviet Union. Within the beams and under the globe appears a radiant sun, representative of the future, and above the whole a red five-pointed star.

The shield was adopted in 1924 and was used until the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. It is an emblem and not a coat of arms, as it does not respect heraldic rules. However, in Russian it has always been called герб, the word used for traditional coats of arms.

The version used in 1991 had the motto of the Soviet Union in 15 languages, after the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic was integrated into the Russian SFSR in 1956 as Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.

Each Soviet Socialist Republic and each Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic had their own coat of arms, clearly modeled on that of the Soviet Union. The coat of arms of the Soviet Union also served as the basis for many other coats of arms of socialist states, such as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the German Democratic Republic.

Economy

The Dniéper Hydroelectric Station, one of the many powerful hydroelectric stations at the time of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union became the first country to adopt a command economy, whereby the production and distribution of goods were centralized and directed by the government. The first Bolshevik experience with a command economy was with the policy of war communism, which involved the nationalization of industry, centralized distribution of production, coercive requisitioning of agricultural produce, and attempts to eliminate the circulation of money, as well as such as private business and free trade. As in 1921 this had aggravated a severe economic collapse caused by the war, Lenin replaced war communism with the New Economic Policy (NEP), legalizing free trade and private ownership of smaller businesses. With this the economy quickly recovered.

After a long debate among the members of the Politburo in the course of economic development, already in 1928 and 1929, upon gaining control of the country, Joseph Stalin abandoned the NEP and promoted complete central planning, beginning the collectivization of agriculture. Resources were mobilized for rapid industrialization, which greatly expanded Soviet capacity in heavy industry and capital goods during the 1930s. Preparation for war was one of the main driving forces behind industrialization, mainly due to to distrust in the outside capitalist world. As a result, the Soviet Union grew from a largely agrarian economy to a major industrial power, paving the way for its emergence as a superpower after World War II. During the war, the Soviet infrastructure and economy suffered massive devastation and required extensive rebuilding.

Cotton collectors from the Armenian SSR.

By the early 1940s, the Soviet economy had become relatively self-sufficient; for most of the period up to the creation of Comecon, only a very small proportion of domestic products were traded internationally. After the creation of the Eastern bloc, foreign trade increased rapidly. The influence of the world economy in the Soviet Union was still limited by fixed internal prices and a state monopoly on foreign trade. Grain consumption and sophisticated manufactures became the main import items around the 1960s. During the Cold War arms race, the Soviet economy was burdened by military spending and heavily pressured by a powerful bureaucracy dependent on the arms industry. At the same time, the Soviet Union became the largest exporter of arms to the third world. Significant amounts of Soviet resources during the Cold War were allocated to aid the other socialist states.

From the 1930s until its collapse in the late 1980s, the way the Soviet economy worked remained essentially unchanged. The economy was formally directed by central planning, carried out by the Gosplan and organized in five-year plans. However, in practice, the plans were highly global and provisional, subject to special interventions by superiors. All the key economic decisions were made by the political leadership. The allocation of resources and the goals of the plans were normally denominated in rubles, instead of doing so in physical goods. Credit was discouraged, but generally speaking. The final 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 informal horizontal linkages were widespread.

A series of basic services were financed by the State, such as education and health. In the manufacturing sector, defense and heavy industry was given a higher priority than the production of consumer goods. Consumer goods, especially outside large cities, were often in short supply, of poor quality, and of choice. limited. Under the planned economy, consumers had almost no influence over production, so the changing demands of a higher-income population could not be met by supplies at rigidly fixed prices. A second major unplanned economy grew alongside the planned current at low levels, providing some of the goods and services that the planners could not offer. With the 1965 reform, an attempt was made to legalize some elements of the decentralized economy.

Soviet ticket of 10 rubles (1991).

Although its economic growth is difficult to estimate precisely, according to most sources, the economy continued to grow until the mid-1980s. Until the 1950s, the Soviet economy experienced relatively high growth and was catching up with West. However, since the late 1950s, growth, while still positive, declined steadily, much faster and more consistently than in other countries, despite a rapid increase in capital stock (the rate of increase of capital was second only to Japan).

Overall, between 1960 and 1989, the rate of growth of per capita income in the Soviet Union was slightly above the world average (based on 102 countries). However, given the very high level of investment in physical capital, the high percentage of people with a secondary education, and the low population growth, the economy should have grown much faster. According to Stanley Fischer and William Easterly, the Soviet growth record was among "the worst in the world." By his calculations, the per capita income of the Soviet Union in 1989 should have been twice as high as it was, if investment, education, and population had had their typical effect on growth. The authors attribute this poor performance to the low productivity of capital in the Soviet Union.

In 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform and revitalize the economy with his program of perestroika. His policies relaxed state control over companies, but still did not allow their replacement by market incentives, ultimately resulting in a sharp decline in production. The economy, already suffering from low oil export revenues, began to collapse. Prices were still set, and much of the property was still state owned until 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. The largest in the world by GDP (PPP), although in per capita terms Soviet GDP lags behind first world countries.

Energy

A Soviet stamp representing the 30th anniversary of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The need for fuel in the Soviet Union decreased from the 1970s to the 1980s, both in rubles per ton of gross social products and in rubles per industrial products. At first this decline increased very rapidly, but gradually slowed down between 1970 and 1975.

From 1975 to 1980, the Soviet Union had slow growth, only 2.6 percent. Historian David Wilson believed that the gas industry accounted for 40 percent of Soviet fuel production at the end of the 1980s. century, but his theory fell through due to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Theoretically, the Soviet Union would have continued to have a 2 to 2.5 percent economic growth rate through the 1990s due to Soviet energy fields However, the energy sector faced many difficulties, including the country's high military spending and hostile relations with the West (pre-Gorbachev era).

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, petroleum products, natural gas, metals, Timber, agricultural products, and a wide variety of manufactured goods, mainly machinery, weapons, and military equipment, were exported. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet Union relied heavily on fossil fuel exports for foreign exchange. At its peak in 1988, it was the largest producer and second largest exporter of crude oil, surpassed only by Saudi Arabia.

Science and technology

The MIR station was the most advanced space station built by humanity until the consolidation of the International Space Station.

The Soviet Union placed a great deal of emphasis on science and technology within its economy, however, the most notable Soviet successes in technology, such as producing the first space satellite, were generally carried out by the military. Lenin believed that the Soviet Union would never surpass the developed world if it remained technologically backward as it was. The Soviet authorities demonstrated their commitment to Lenin's belief by developing massive networks of research and development organizations. In 1989, Soviet scientists were among the best trained specialists in the world in various areas, such as physical energy, certain areas of medicine, mathematics, welding, and military technologies. Yet the Soviets remained technologically behind in chemistry, biology, and computers, compared to the rest of the West.

Project Socrates, under the Reagan administration, determined that the Soviet Union had approached the acquisition of science and technology in a radically different way than the United States was using at the time. In the case of the United States, economic prioritization was being used for indigenous research and development legacy; and saw it as the means to acquire science and technology in both the private and public sectors. In contrast, the Soviet Union was offensive and defensive in maneuvering the acquisition and use of technology around the world, thereby increasing the competitive advantage it had gained from the technology, while preventing the United States from gaining an advantage. competitive. In addition, the Soviet Union's technology-based planning was executed in a centralized, government-focused manner that greatly hampered its flexibility. This significant lack of flexibility was taken advantage of by the United States to undermine the strength of the Soviet Union and thus promote its reform.

Transportation

Flag of the Aeroflot in the Soviet era.

Transportation was a key component of the country's economy. Economic centralization during the 1920s and 1930s led to large-scale infrastructure development, particularly the establishment of Aeroflot, the largest Soviet aviation company. The country had a wide variety of modes of transportation by land, water, and air. However, due to poor maintenance, most civilian road, water and air transport was outdated and technologically backward compared to the rest of the West.

Soviet rail transport was the largest and most heavily used in the world, and was also more developed than most of its Western counterparts. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Soviet economists called for the construction of more roads to relieve some of the burden on the railways and improve the Soviet public budget. The road network and the automobile industry remained underdeveloped, and dirt roads were common on the outskirts of major cities. Soviet maintenance projects proved unable to take over even the few routes in the country. During the first half of the 1980s, the Soviet authorities tried to solve the problem of roads by ordering the construction of new ones. Meanwhile, the automobile industry was growing at a faster rate than road construction. Undeveloped highways led to a growing demand for public transportation.

The Soviet merchant marine fleet was one of the largest in the world.

Property Forms

In the Soviet Union there were two basic forms of property, individual property and collective property (joint property, which in practice was cooperative or state). This was very different both in its content and in its legal status. According to communist theories, capital (the means of production) could not be privately owned, apart from a few minor exceptions. After the end of the short-term easing of Lenin's New Economic Policy, any industrial and land property became the common property of the inhabitants, that is, state property, respectively. Individual property could only be made up of personal assets, that is, those of capital (the means of production) were automatically owned by the state or cooperative.

Geography

The Soviet Union occupied the eastern portion of the European continent and the northern portion of the Asian continent. Most of the country lay north of 50° north latitude and covered a total area of approximately 22,402,200 km². Due to the large size of the State, the climate varied greatly, from subtropical and continental to subarctic and polar. 11% of the land was arable, 16% was grassland and pasture, 41% forest, and 32% was declared as "other". » (including tundra).

The Soviet Union stretched about 10,000 kilometers from Kaliningrad in the west to the island of Ratmanova (Diomede Islands) in the Bering Strait, roughly the equivalent of the distance from Edinburgh, Scotland, east of Nome, Alaska. From the tip of the Taimyr Peninsula in the Arctic Ocean to the Central Asian town of Kushka near the Afghan border is nearly 5,000 kilometers of terrain, much of it rugged and inhospitable. The full width of the continental United States would lie between the extreme northern and southern borders of the Soviet Union.

Demographics

Demographic developments in the Soviet Union (red) and Post-Soviet States (blue) from 1961 to 2009.

The first fifty years of the 20th century in Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union were marked by a succession of disasters, each accompanied by losses of large numbers of population. Excess deaths in the course of World War I and the Russian Civil War (including the postwar famine) totaled 18 million, about 10 million in the 1930s, and more than 26 million between 1941 and 1945. The postwar Soviet population was 45 to 50 million less than it would have been if prewar population growth had continued.

The crude birth rate in the Soviet Union fell from 44.0 per thousand in 1926 to 18.0 in 1974, largely due to increasing urbanization and the rising average age of marriage. The crude death rate thus demonstrated a gradual decline – from 23.7 per thousand in 1926 to 8.7 in 1974. In general, the birth rates of the southern republics in Transcaucasia and Central Asia were considerably higher than those of the northern part of the Soviet Union, and in some cases even increased in the post-World War II period, a phenomenon attributed in part to lower rates of urbanization and traditionally earlier marriages in the southern republics. Soviet Europe became shifted towards sub-replacement fertility, while Soviet Central Asia continued to show population growth well above replacement fertility.

Map of the distribution of the population of the Soviet Union in 1974.

The 1960s and 1970s saw a reversal in the downward trajectory of the death rate in the Soviet Union and this was noted mostly among working-age men, but was also common in Russia and the United States. other predominantly Slavic areas of the country. An analysis of official data from the 1980s showed that after worsening in the late 1970s and early 1980s, adult mortality began to improve again. The mortality rate Infant mortality increased from 24.7 in 1970 to 27.9 in 1974. Some researchers consider that the rise was mostly real, as a result of worsening health conditions and services. The increase in adult and infant mortality was not it was explained or defended by Soviet officials, and the Soviet Government simply stopped publishing all mortality statistics for ten years. Soviet demographers and health specialists remained silent regarding the increase in mortality until the late 1980s, when the publication of mortality data resumed and researchers were able to investigate the true causes.

Ethnic groups

Ethnographic map of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union was a very ethnically diverse country, with more than 100 different ethnic groups. The total population was estimated at 293 million in 1991 and according to a 1990 estimate, the majority were Russians (50.78%), followed by Ukrainians (15.45%) and Uzbeks (5.84%).

All citizens of the Soviet Union had their own ethnic affiliation listed on their identity document. A person's ethnicity was chosen at the age of 16 by the child's parents; if they disagreed, the child was automatically assigned the mother's ethnic origin. Due in part to Soviet policies, some of the smaller ethnic groups were considered to be part of the larger ones, such as the Mingrels of the Georgian SSR, who were classified with the linguistically related Georgians.

Nationalities

The sprawling multinational state that the Bolsheviks inherited after their revolution was created by tsarist expansion over nearly four centuries. Some groups of nations joined the state voluntarily, but most joined by force. Generally, the Russians and the majority of the non-Russian population of the empire shared little in the way of culture, religion, and language. Very often, two or more diverse nationalities were placed on the same territory. Thus, national antagonisms developed over the years not only against the Russians, but often between some of the subject nations as well.

For nearly seventy years, Soviet leaders had maintained that frictions between the many nationalities of the Soviet Union had been eradicated and that the Soviet Union consisted of a family of nations living harmoniously together. However, the national ferment that shook the Soviet Union in the 1980s proved that this statement did not have much of a basis in reality, since traditional religions and cultures would re-emerge at the slightest opportunity. This reality faced by Gorbachev and his colleagues meant that, faced with little confidence in the traditional use of force, they had to find alternative solutions in order to avoid the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The concessions made to national cultures and the limited autonomy tolerated in the Union republics during the 1920s led to the development of national elites and a heightened sense of national identity. The subsequent repression and Russification provoked resentment against Moscow's domination and promoted the further growth of national consciousness. National sentiments were exacerbated in the Soviet multinational state by increased competition for resources, services, and jobs.

Social welfare

Education

Soviet students during a visit to Milovice, Czechoslovakia in 1985.

Before 1917, in the Russian Empire, education was inaccessible or difficult to access for most of the population, especially urban citizens and peasant families. There was no free public education. Estimates from 1917 recorded that as many as 56% of the Russian population was illiterate. After the revolution Anatoly Lunacharsky became the People's Commissar for Education in Soviet Russia. From the beginning, the Soviet authorities placed great emphasis on the literacy of the population. People who were literate were automatically hired as teachers. For a brief period, quality was sacrificed for quantity. By 1940, Joseph Stalin was able to announce that illiteracy had been eliminated from the country. After the Great Patriotic War, the country's educational system was greatly expanded. In the 1960s, almost all Soviet children had access to primary and secondary education, except for those living in remote areas. Nikita Khrushchev tried to make education even more accessible, making it clear to children that education was closely linked to the needs of society. Ideologically, education was considered fundamental to the creation of the new Soviet man.

Access to higher education was limited: only 20% of all applicants were accepted. The rest entered the job market or learned a trade at a Vocational Technical School or a Technicum, another higher technical school. In addition, students from families of dubious political credibility were often excluded from higher education. In this regard, the Brezhnev administration introduced a rule requiring all university applicants to present a reference from the local Komsomol party secretary. According to the For 1986 statistics, the number of students per 10,000 population was 181 for the Soviet Union, compared to 517 for the United States.

Medical assistance

In 1917, before the Bolshevik revolution, health conditions were far behind those of developed countries. As Lenin later noted, "Either the louse defeats socialism or socialism defeats the lice." The Soviet principle of medical care was conceived by the People's Commissariat for Public Health in 1918. Medical care was to be controlled by the state and would be provided to its citizens free of charge. Article 42 of the 1977 Soviet Constitution gave all citizens the right to health protection and free access to any health institution in the Soviet Union. However, the Soviet Union's healthcare system was unable to meet all the needs of its people. Before Leonid Brezhnev came to power, Soviet socialized medicine was held in high esteem by many foreign specialists. However this changed; beginning with Brezhnev's ascension and Mikhail Gorbachev's tenure as leader, the Soviet health system was heavily criticized for many basic errors, such as the quality of service and irregularity in its provision. During the 19th Communist Party Congress of the Soviet Union, the Minister of Health Yevgeny Cházov, in addition to highlighting the Soviet success in having the majority of doctors and hospitals in the world, recognized the deficiencies of the system and considered that billions of Soviet rubles had been wasted.

After the communist takeover, life expectancy rose for all ages. This statistic was used by the authorities to demonstrate that the socialist system was superior to the capitalist system. It was fairly stable for several years, although in the 1970s, it dipped slightly, probably due to alcohol abuse. Most Western sources blamed increasing alcohol abuse and poor medical care; this theory was also implicitly accepted by the Soviet authorities. At the same time, infant mortality began to increase and for this reason, after 1974, the Government stopped publishing statistics on this subject. Finally, in the 1980s the Soviet Union had a life expectancy much lower than Western countries and comparable to Asian countries.

This trend can be explained in part by the drastic increase in the number of pregnancies in the Asian part of the country where infant mortality was highest, while it declined markedly in the more developed European part of the Soviet Union.

Religious Groups

A. L. Eliseev wrote that at a meeting of the anti-religious commission of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) chaired by E. Laroslavskii and which took place on May 23, 1929, believers in the country were estimated at the 80% It cannot be ruled out that this percentage was somewhat underestimated, to demonstrate the success of the fight against religion.

Christianity and Islam had the greatest number of adherents among the religious citizens of the Soviet state. Eastern Christianity predominated among Christians, with the traditional Russian Orthodox Church being the largest Christian denomination in the Soviet Union. Approximately 90 percent of Muslims in the Soviet Union were Sunni, with Shi'ites concentrated in the Azerbaijan SSR. Smaller groups included Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, and a variety of Protestant denominations.

Religious influence had been strong in the Russian Empire and the Russian Orthodox Church enjoyed a privileged status as the Church of the monarchy participating in the performance of official state functions. The period immediately after the establishment of the Soviet state included a fight against the Orthodox Church, which the revolutionaries considered an ally of the former ruling class.

In Soviet law, the "freedom to hold religious services" was constitutionally guaranteed, although the Communist Party regarded religion as incompatible with the Marxist spirit of scientific materialism. In practice, the Soviet system subscribed to a restrictive interpretation of this right and actually used a variety of official measures to discourage religion and curb the activities of religious groups.

The Cathedral of St Basil located in the red square in Moscow was the maximum icon of religion in the Soviet Union.

The 1918 decree of the Council of People's Commissars establishing the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic as a secular state also decreed that "the teaching of religion in all [places] where subjects of general learning are taught, It is forbidden. Citizens may teach and may learn religion in private." Among other restrictions, those passed in 1929, with half a decade of Stalin's rule, included express prohibitions on a variety of church activities, including organized meetings for Bible study. Thousands of both Christian and non-Christian establishments were closed in the 1920s and 1930s, and by 1940 no less than 90 percent of the churches, synagogues, and mosques that had been operating in 1917 were closed.

Convinced that religious anti-Sovietism had become a thing of the past, Stalin's government began to move toward a more moderate policy regarding religion in the 1930s. Soviet religious establishments rallied overwhelmingly to support the war effort during the war with Nazi Germany. Amid other adaptations to religious faith, churches were reopened, Moscow Radio began broadcasting a religious schedule, and in 1943 a historic meeting was held between Stalin and Patriarch Sergius I of Moscow, the leader of the Orthodox Church at that time. then. The general trend of this period was an increase in religious activity among believers of all religions.

The Soviet system clashed again with the churches under the leadership of General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, which had the characteristic of being a period where atheism was emphasized in the educational curriculum and where numerous state publications promoted atheist views. Between 1959 and 1965, the number of churches fell from 20,000 to 10,000, and the number of synagogues dropped from 500 to 97. The number of active mosques also declined, falling from 1,500 to 500 in a decade.

Religious institutions continued to be supervised by the Soviet government, but all churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques were given more freedom of action during the time of Leonid Brezhnev. Official relations between the Orthodox Church and the Soviet government became heated. again to the point where the Brezhnev mandate twice honored Orthodox Patriarch Alexios I with the Order of the Red Banner of Labor. A survey by Soviet authorities in 1982 recorded 20% of the Soviet population as "believers". active religious".

Crime

Crime statistics in the Soviet Union were often partially published by the government, because crime was seen as an ideological embarrassment to the Soviet Union. According to Western experts, robberies, homicides, and other violent crimes were less frequent in the Soviet Union than in the United States because the Soviet Union had a larger police force, strict gun controls, and a low incidence of drug abuse.. Corruption in the form of bribery was common, mainly due to the scarcity of goods and services on the open market.

Although the Soviet press and radio gave extensive coverage of crime in the West, the persistence of crime in the Soviet Union was an ideological embarrassment that received relatively little attention. Detailed statistics on crime in the Soviet Union were never published, and a Soviet journalist, L. Vladimirov, who defected to Britain in 1966, confirmed that it was forbidden to mention the number of crimes in the country as a whole or by districts, provinces, regions or cities.

Ideology

A basic premise of Marxism is that crime is a socioeconomic phenomenon:

"The elimination of private ownership in the means of production, the eradication of the exploitation of one person by another and the resolution of social antagonisms led to the disappearance of basic social roots of crime."

B. A. Víktorov, Deputy Minister for Internal Affairs

Marxist theorists argued that the most immediate reasons for crime in the Soviet Union were capitalist influence, mental retardation, and poor education.

Punishment

In 1989 the Soviet Union had few prisons. About 99% of the convicted criminals served their sentences in the Gulag labor camps, supervised by the General Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps which was under the MVD. The camps had four regimes of ascending severity. In the strict regime camps, inmates worked at the most difficult tasks, usually in the open air and receiving meager rations. The jobs were less demanding and with better rations in the camps of the lightest regimes. The corrective labor system was considered successful by the Soviet authorities because the recidivism rate was very low. However, prisons and labor camps, from the perspective of former prisoners and Western observers, were notorious for their harsh conditions, the arbitrary and sadistic treatment of prisoners, and flagrant violations of human rights. New legislation, emphasizing rehabilitation rather than punishment, was being drafted in 1989 to humanize the special system. However, in 1989 conditions for many prisoners changed little.

Death penalty

The death penalty, carried out by firing squad, was applied in the Soviet Union only in cases of treason, espionage, terrorism, sabotage, certain types of murder, and large-scale theft of state property by officials. Otherwise, the maximum sentence for a first-time offender was fifteen years. Parole was allowed in some cases after the completion of half the sentence, and periodic amnesties sometimes also led to early release.

During the collapse of the Soviet Union

Near and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, crime statistics moved sharply and steadily upward. Between 1991 and 1992, the number of officially reported crimes and the overall crime rate showed an increase of 27 percent; the crime rate nearly doubled between 1985 and 1992. In the early 1990s, theft, robbery, and other acts against property accounted for approximately two-thirds of all crimes in Russia. However, the rapidly growing violent crimes were those of particular interest to citizens, including violent homicides.

Culture

Vladimir Vysotski

Soviet culture went through several stages during the 70 years of its existence. During the first eleven years of the Revolution (1918–1929), there was relative freedom, and artists experimented with several different styles in an effort to find a distinctive Soviet art style. Lenin wanted art to be accessible to the Russian people. On the other hand, hundreds of intellectuals, writers and artists were exiled or executed, and their works banned, for example Nikolai Gumilev (executed for conspiring against the Bolshevik government) and Yevgeny Zamyatin (banned).

The government encouraged a variety of trends. In art and literature, numerous schools, some traditional and others radically experimental, proliferated. The communist writers Maxim Gorky and Vladimir Mayakovsky were active during this period. The cinema received the support of the State; many of the best works of cinematographer Sergei Eisenstein date from this period.

Later, during Stalin's rule, Soviet culture was characterized by the rise and dominance of the government-imposed style of socialist realism, with all other trends being severely repressed, with rare exceptions, for example the works by Mikhail Bulgakov. Many writers were imprisoned and killed.

"Both or more than silencing awkward voices, the goal of the systematic liquidation of intellectuals in the early decades of the Soviet Union was to reduce the ground of reflection, doubts, plurality, ambiguity, subjectivism, withdrawal to spheres of private thought and spirituality, ecclesiasticalism, contradictions, in short, also of inner life and "soul": unnecessary complications in a non-expensive economy. »

After the Khrushchev thaw of the 1950s and 1960s, censorship waned. Greater experimentation in art forms was again allowed, so more sophisticated and subtly critical works began to be produced. The government loosened its emphasis on socialist realism; Thus, for example, many protagonists of the novels by the author Yuri Trifonov were concerned with themselves and the problems of everyday life, instead of doing so with the construction of socialism. An underground dissident literature, known as samizdat, developed during this latter period. In the Khrushchev era, architecture focused primarily on functional design as opposed to the ornate style of Stalin's time.

In the second half of the 1980s, Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and glasnost greatly expanded freedom of expression in the media and press.

Parties

Post-Soviet nostalgia

100 years of the USSR

Flag and outline of the former Soviet Union.

Nostalgia for the Soviet Union is a common phenomenon in Russia and the CIS of the post-Soviet period, as well as among Russian citizens abroad born in the Soviet Union. This nostalgia is expressed in the political system, society, social security, culture, or aesthetics, as well as in childhood and youth memories. This is a controversial phenomenon, spanning a wide range of opinions.

According to surveys conducted in 2011, one in five Russians would like to live in the Soviet Union again. The number of Russians wanting to live in the Soviet Union again increased from 16% in 2010 to 20%. The total number of Russians wanting a union with Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan is 37%.

The number of Russian citizens longed for by the Soviet Union was already over 50%, but it is increasing more and more: they are 66% in 2018.

Positive opinion about the phenomenon

May 9th Day of the Victory of the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War, Donetsk, 2018.

There is a deep-rooted feeling of nostalgia for the Soviet Union, probably due to the fact that the Soviet Union is tied to many people's youthful memories, including all manifestations of the Soviet era. It may also be due to the attitudes and ethics of Soviet society: the Soviet Union promoted the ideals of goodness, justice and humanism, and in a significant part of society the spirit of collectivism has prevailed and rejects many of the values of modern Russia. They see a devaluation of moral values as taking place, and are often frustrated and resentful of attempts, in their opinion, to distort the past, belittling the ideals and values on which they grew up. In some cases, it is a consequence of social disorder or dissatisfaction with life in modern Russia, in which a considerable part of the population is accustomed to the Soviet way of life.

Social aspects also play an important role. The standard of living for most of the population fell drastically in the first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic reforms that followed. In addition, the Soviet state owned the living space and granted citizens a home, in addition to being responsible for providing health care, education and other social services, so citizens can see the change as a loss of living conditions. Anti-capitalists are also nostalgic for the Soviet Union.

The negative opinion regarding the phenomenon

According to some critics, nostalgia for the Soviet Union and the Soviet system is expressed in the denial or underestimation of the real deficiencies that existed in the Soviet Union (high institutional corruption, the privileges of the Nomenklatura, the complete dependence on the citizens of the bureaucracy and its excess, the police regime and the severe state control over social life, the plunder, the shortages, the queues, the persecution of dissidents, the censorship, the great difficulty to enter and leave the country, etc.) and the exaggeration of the virtues of the Soviet system (social justice, stability, security, low prices, accessibility of housing, education, public medicine, etc.).