Soviet Union

The Soviet Union flag

Yuri Gagarin, hero of the USSR

The Soviet Union or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) is a country that doesn't exist anymore. It was created in 1922 as a result of the October Revolution and it ceased to exist in 1991 with the end of the Cold War. It was a dictatorship. Its legal successor is Russia.

In 1991 there were 293,047,571 people living in the Soviet Union for a land area of 22,402,200 km². The Soviet Union was a socialist country with the goal of eventually developing a communist society.

History

The Soviet Union was founded by Vladimir Lenin after the Russian Civil War (1917-1921). Lenin founded a dictatorship, with gulags (concentration camps for political opposants) and the Cheka (a political police force, which later became the KGB).

From 1929 to 1953, it was lead by general-secretary Joseph Stalin, who extended the totalitarianism established by Vladimir Lenin. Like Lenin, he used massive propaganda. His regime caused more than twenty millions deaths.

After the death of Stalin in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev took power.

In 1961 the Soviets sent the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin.

From 1985 to 1991, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev reformed the Soviet Union with democratc laws, believed by some to have lead to the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union.^[1] The Soviet Union was dissolved on 25 December 1991.

List of Soviet leaders

1. Vladimir Lenin ;
2. Joseph Stalin ;
3. Nikita Khrushchev ;
4. Leonid Brezhnev ;
5. Yuri Andropov ;
6. Konstantin Chernenko ;
7. Mikhail Gorbachev.

References

History Portal — All articles about history.