| Native name | Союз Советских Социалистических РеспубликSoyuz Sovietskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik |
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| Conventional long name | Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Other names |
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| Common name | Soviet Union |
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| Continent | Eurasia |
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| Status | Federation |
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| Government type | Union socialist republic, single-party communist state |
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| Year start | 1922 |
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| Year end | 1991 |
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| Date start | 30 December |
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| Date end | 26 December |
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| P1 | Russian SFSR |
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| Flag p1 | Flag RSFSR 1918.svg |
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| P2 | Transcaucasian SFSR |
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| Flag p2 | Flag of Transcaucasian SFSR.svg |
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| P3 | Ukrainian SSR |
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| Flag p3 | Flag of the Ukrainian SSR (1927-1937).svg |
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| P4 | Byelorussian SSR |
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| Flag p4 | Flag of the Byelorussian SSR (1919).svg |
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| S1 | Russia |
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| Flag s1 | Flag of Russia 1991-1993.svg |
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| S2 | Georgia (country)Georgia |
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| Flag s2 | Flag of Georgia (1990-2004).svg |
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| S3 | Ukraine |
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| Flag s3 | Flag of Ukraine.svg |
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| S4 | Moldova |
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| Flag s4 | Flag of Moldova.svg |
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| S5 | Belarus |
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| Flag s5 | Flag of Belarus (1991-1995).svg |
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| S6 | Armenia |
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| Flag s6 | Flag of Armenia.svg |
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| S7 | Azerbaijan |
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| Flag s7 | Flag of Azerbaijan.svg |
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| S8 | Kazakhstan |
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| Flag s8 | Flag of Kazakh SSR.svg |
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| S9 | Uzbekistan |
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| Flag s9 | Flag of Uzbekistan.svg |
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| S10 | Turkmenistan |
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| Flag s10 | Flag of Turkmen SSR.svg |
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| S11 | Kyrgyzstan |
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| Flag s11 | Flag of Kyrgyz SSR.svg |
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| S12 | Tajikistan |
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| Flag s12 | Flag of Tajik SSR.svg |
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| S13 | EstoniaEstonia3 |
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| Flag s13 | Flag of Estonia.svg |
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| S14 | LatviaLatvia3 |
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| Flag s14 | Flag of Latvia.svg |
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| S15 | LithuaniaLithuania3 |
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| Flag s15 | Flag of Lithuania 1989-2004.svg |
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| |image flag | Flag of the Soviet Union.svg |
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| Flag | Flag of the Soviet Union |
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| Image coat | Coat_of_arms_of_the_Soviet_Union.svg |
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| Symbol | Coat of arms of the Soviet Union |
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| Symbol type | State Emblem |
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| Image map size | 220px |
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| Image map caption | The Soviet Union after World War II |
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| Capital | Moscow |
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| Largest city | Moscow |
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| National motto | Пролетарии всех стран, соединяйтесь!(Translit.: Proletarii vsekh stran, soyedinyaytes'!)English: Workers of the world, unite! |
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| National anthem | The Internationale (1922–1944)Hymn of the Soviet Union (1944–1991) |
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| Common languages | Russian, many others |
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| Demonym | Soviet |
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| Religion | None |
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| Currency | Soviet ruble (руб) (SUR) |
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| Currency code | SUR |
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| Leader1 | Vladimir Lenin |
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| Leader2 | Mikhail Gorbachev |
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| Year leader1 | 1922–1924 (first) |
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| Year leader2 | 1985–1991 (last) |
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| Title leader | Leader |
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| Stat year1 | 1991 |
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| Stat area1 | 22402200 |
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| Stat pop1 | 293047571 |
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| Utc offset | +2 to +13 |
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| Cctld | .su2 |
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| Calling code | 7 |
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The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, , abbreviated СССР, SSSR), informally known as the Soviet Union () or Soviet Russia, was a constitutionally socialist state that existed on the territory of most of the former Russian Empire in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991.William Roseberry (1997) Marx and Anthropology Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 26: pp. 25–46 (October 1997) (doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.26.1.25) Although the USSR was nominally a union of Soviet republics (of which there were 15 after 1956) with the capital in Moscow, it was in actuality a highly centralized state with a planned economy. Much of Soviet society was overseen by national security agencies such as the KGB (which was active from 1954). ordinarily held twice a year, and appointed the Supreme Court, All Soviet party leaders before Gorbachev died in office, except Georgy Malenkov (died 1988) The Treaty on the Creation of the USSR was signed in December 1922 by four founding republics, the RSFSR, Transcaucasian SFSR, Ukrainian SSR and Belorussian SSR. In 1924, during the national delimitation in Central Asia, the Uzbek and Turkmen SSRs were formed from parts of the RSFSR's Turkestan ASSR and two Soviet dependencies, the Khorezm and Bukharan SSR. In 1929 the Tajik SSR was split off from the Uzbek SSR. With the constitution of 1936 the constituents of the Transcaucasian SFSR, namely the Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijan SSRs, were elevated to union republics, whereas the Kazakh and Kirghiz SSRs were split off from the RSFSR. the union authorities at first refused to recognize it. After the August coup attempt most of the other republics followed suit. The Soviet Union ultimately recognized the secession of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania on 6 September 1991. The remaining republics were recognized as independent with the union's final dissolution in December 1991. Preparation for war was one of the main driving forces behind industrialization, mostly due to distrust of the outside capitalistic world. During the arms race of the Cold War the Soviet economy was burdened by military expenditures, heavily lobbied by the powerful bureaucracy dependent on the arms industry. At the same time the Soviet Union became the largest arms exporter to the Third World. Significant amounts of the Soviet resources during the Cold War were allocated in aid to the other socialist states.
Since the 1930s and until its collapse in the late 1980s, the way the Soviet economy operated had remained essentially unchanged. The economy was formally directed by central planning, carried out by Gosplan and organized into five-year plans. In practice, however, the plans were highly aggregated and provisional, subject to ad hoc intervention by superiors. All key economic decisions were taken by the political leadership. Allocated resources and plan targets were normally denominated in rubles rather than in physical goods. Credits were discouraged, but widespread. Final allocation of output was achieved through relatively decentralized, unplanned contracting. Although in theory prices were legally set from above, in practice the actual prices were often negotiated, and informal horizontal links were widespread.
{| class="wikitable" style="border:1px black; float:right; margin-left:1em;"
|-
! style="background:#d3d3d3;" colspan="3"| Comparison between USSR and US economies (1989)according to 1990 CIA World Factbook Consumer goods, in particular outside large cities, were often in short supply, of poor quality and limited choice, as under command economy consumers' preferences wielded almost no influence over production, changing demands of the population with growing money incomes couldn't be matched by supplies at rigidly fixed prices.
Although statistics of the Soviet economy are notoriously unreliable and its economic growth is difficult to estimate precisely,
Overall, between 1960 and 1989, the growth rate of per capita income in the Soviet Union was slightly above world average (based on 102 countries). However, given the very high level of investment in physical capital, high percentage of people with a secondary education, and the nation's 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 their calculation per capita income of Soviet Union in 1989 should have been twice as high as it was, if investment, education and population had their typical effect on growth. The authors attribute this poor performance to low productivity of capital in the Soviet Union. For the most of the period after World War II and up to its collapse, the Soviet economy was the second largest in the world by GDP (PPP),Petroleum and petroleum products, natural gas, metals, wood, agricultural products, and a variety of manufactured goods, primarily machinery, arms and military equipment, were exported from the country. At the peak level in 1988, it was the largest producer and second largest exporter of crude oil, surpassed only by Saudi Arabia.
Transportation
Transport was a key component of the nation's
economy. The
economic centralisation of the late 1920s and 1930s led to the development of infrastructure in a massive scale, most notably the establishment of
Aeroflot, an aviation
enterprise. However, due to bad maintenance, much of the road, water and Soviet civil aviation transport were outdated and technologically backward, when compared to the
First World. Soviet rail transport was the largest and the most intensively used in the world; Another obstacle was that the automobile industry was growing at a faster rate than road construction. and more than 26 million in 1941–5. Since a high proportion of those killed during World War II were young men, the postwar Soviet population was 45 to 50 million smaller than post–1939 projections would have led one to expect. In a measurement poll by the Soviet authorities in 1982, 20 percent of the Soviet population confessed to be "active religious believers".
Culture
over the northern entrance to the All-Soviet Exhibition Centre in
Moscow (today the
All-Russia Exhibition Centre)]]
The
culture of the Soviet Union passed through several stages during the USSR's 70-year existence. During the first eleven years following the Revolution (1918–1929), there was relative freedom and artists experimented with several different styles in an effort to find a distinctive Soviet style of art. 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 work banned, for example
Nikolai Gumilev (shot) and
Yevgeny Zamyatin (banned).
The government encouraged a variety of trends. In art and literature, numerous schools, some traditional and others radically experimental, proliferated. Communist writers Maksim Gorky and Vladimir Mayakovsky were active during this time. Film, as a means of influencing a largely illiterate society, received encouragement from the state; much of director Sergei Eisenstein's best work dates from this period.
Later, during Joseph Stalin's rule, Soviet culture was characterised by the rise and domination of the government-imposed style of Socialist realism, with all other trends being severely repressed, with rare exceptions (e.g. Mikhail Bulgakov's works). Many writers were imprisoned and killed. Those who were not murdered were often banned, for example Anna Akhmatova and Alexander Solzhenytsin. Also, religious people were persecuted and either sent to Gulags or were murdered by the thousands. The ban on the Orthodox Church was temporarily lifted in the 1940s, in order to rally support for the Soviet war against the invading forces of Germany. Under Stalin, prominent symbols that were not in line with communist ideology were destroyed, such as Orthodox Churches and Tsarist buildings.
Following the Khrushchev Thaw of the late 1950s and early 1960s, censorship was diminished. Greater experimentation in art forms became permissible once again, with the result that more sophisticated and subtly critical work began to be produced. The regime loosened its emphasis on socialist realism; thus, for instance, many protagonists of the novels of author Yury Trifonov concerned themselves with problems of daily life rather than with building socialism. An underground dissident literature, known as samizdat, developed during this late period. In architecture the Khrushchev era mostly focused on functional design as opposed to the highly decorated style of Stalin's epoch.
In the second half of the 1980s, Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and glasnost significantly expanded freedom of expression in the media and press.
See also
Index of Soviet Union-related articles
References
;Notes
;Bibliography
Further reading
;Surveys
A Country Study: Soviet Union (Former). Library of Congress Country Studies, 1991.
Brown, Archie, et al., eds.: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia and the Soviet Union (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
Gilbert, Martin: The Routledge Atlas of Russian History (London: Routledge, 2002).
Goldman, Minton: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (Connecticut: Global Studies, Dushkin Publishing Group, Inc., 1986).
Grant, Ted: Russia, from Revolution to Counter-Revolution, London, Well Red Publications,1997
Howe, G. Melvyn: The Soviet Union: A Geographical Survey 2nd. edn. (Estover, UK: MacDonald and Evans, 1983).
Pipes, Richard. Communism: A History (2003), by a leading conservative scholar
;Lenin and Leninism
Clark, Ronald W. Lenin (1988). 570 pp.
Debo, Richard K. Survival and Consolidation: The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1918-1921 (1992).
Marples, David R. Lenin's Revolution: Russia, 1917-1921 (2000) 156pp. short survey
Pipes, Richard. A Concise History of the Russian Revolution (1996) excerpt and text search, by a leading conservative
Pipes, Richard. Russia under the Bolshevik Regime. (1994). 608 pp.
Service, Robert. Lenin: A Biography (2002), 561pp; standard scholarly biography; a short version of his 3 vol detailed biography
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Lenin: Life and Legacy (1994). 600 pp.
;Stalin and Stalinism
Daniels, R. V., ed. The Stalin Revolution (1965)
Davies, Sarah, and James Harris, eds. Stalin: A New History, (2006), 310pp, 14 specialized essays by scholars excerpt and text search
De Jonge, Alex. Stalin and the Shaping of the Soviet Union (1986)
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, ed. Stalinism: New Directions, (1999), 396pp excerpts from many scholars on the impact of Stalinism on the people (little on Stalin himself) online edition
Hoffmann, David L. ed. Stalinism: The Essential Readings, (2002) essays by 12 scholars
Laqueur, Walter. Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations (1990)
Kershaw, Ian, and Moshe Lewin. Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (2004) excerpt and text search
Lee, Stephen J. Stalin and the Soviet Union (1999) online edition
Lewis, Jonathan. Stalin: A Time for Judgement (1990)
McNeal, Robert H. Stalin: Man and Ruler (1988)
Martens , Ludo. Another view of Stalin (1994), a highly favorable view from a Maoist historian
Service, Robert. Stalin: A Biography (2004), along with Tucker the standard biography
Trotsky, Leon. Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, (1967), an interpretation by Stalin's worst enemy
Tucker, Robert C. Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879-1929 (1973); Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1929-1941. (1990) online edition with Service, a standard biography; online at ACLS e-books
;World War II
Bellamy, Chris. Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War (2008), 880pp excerpt and text search
Broekmeyer, Marius. Stalin, the Russians, and Their War, 1941-1945. 2004. 315 pp.
Overy, Richard. Russia's War: A History of the Soviet Effort: 1941-1945 (1998) excerpt and text search
Roberts, Geoffrey. Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953 (2006).
Seaton, Albert. Stalin as Military Commander, (1998) online edition
;Cold war
Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1989)
Edmonds, Robin. Soviet Foreign Policy: The Brezhnev Years (1983)
Goncharov, Sergei, John Lewis and Litai Xue, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao and the Korean War (1993) excerpt and text search
Gorlizki, Yoram, and Oleg Khlevniuk. Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945-1953 (2004) online edition
Holloway, David. Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (1996) excerpt and text search
Mastny, Vojtech. Russia's Road to the Cold War: Diplomacy, Warfare, and the Politics of Communism, 1941–1945 (1979)
Mastny, Vojtech. The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (1998) excerpt and text search; online complete edition
Nation, R. Craig. Black Earth, Red Star: A History of Soviet Security Policy, 1917-1991 (1992)
Sivachev, Nikolai and Nikolai Yakolev, Russia and the United States (1979), by Soviet historians
Taubman, William. Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (2004), Pulitzer Prize; excerpt and text search
Ulam, Adam B. Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–1973, 2nd ed. (1974)
Zubok, Vladislav M. Inside the Kremlin's Cold War (1996) 20% excerpt and online search
Zubok, Vladislav M. A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (2007)
;Collapse
Beschloss, Michael, and Strobe Talbott. At the Highest Levels:The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (1993)
Bialer, Seweryn and Michael Mandelbaum, eds. Gorbachev's Russia and American Foreign Policy (1988).
Garthoff, Raymond. The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (1994), detailed narrative
Grachev, A.S. Gorbachev's Gamble: Soviet Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (2008) excerpt and text search
Hogan, Michael ed. The End of the Cold War. Its Meaning and Implications (1992) articles from Diplomatic History
Kotkin, Stephen. Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (2008) excerpt and text search
Matlock, Jack. Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador's Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union (1995)
Pons, S., Romero, F., Reinterpreting the End of the Cold War: Issues, Interpretations, Periodizations, (2005) ISBN 0-7146-5695-X
Remnick, David. Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, (1994), ISBN 0-679-75125-4
;Specialty studies
Armstrong, John A. The Politics of Totalitarianism: The Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1934 to the Present. New York: Random House, 1961.
Katz, Zev, ed.: Handbook of Major Soviet Nationalities (New York: Free Press, 1975).
Moore, Jr., Barrington. Soviet politics: the dilemma of power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950.
Dmitry Orlov, Reinventing Collapse, New Society Books, 2008, ISBN 978-0-86571-606-3
Rizzi, Bruno: "The bureaucratization of the world : the first English ed. of the underground Marxist classic that analyzed class exploitation in the USSR" , New York, NY : Free Press, 1985.
Schapiro, Leonard B. The Origin of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet State, First Phase 1917–1922. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955, 1966.
External links
Impressions of Soviet Russia, by John Dewey.
Documents and other forms of media from the Soviet Union: 1917–1991.
A Country Study: Soviet Union (Former)
Soviet Union Exhibit at Global Museum on Communism with essay by Richard Pipes
The Soviet Union
Category:History of the Soviet Union and Soviet Russia
Category:Communist states
Category:Early Soviet republics
Category:States and territories established in 1922
Category:Former Slavic countries
Category:Single-party states
Category:History of Russia
Category:Former polities of the Cold War
Category:Superpowers
![Algirdas Mykolas Brazauskas (About this sound pronunciation (help·info), 22 September 1932 – 26 June 2010[1]) was the first President of a newly independent post-Soviet Union Lithuania from 1993 to 1998 and Prime Minister from 2001 to 2006.](http://web.archive.org./web/20110409172835im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/dc/bd/5e338ccf6b10bdcbd4d1b9f5c9f4_grande.jpg "Algirdas Mykolas Brazauskas (About this sound pronunciation (help·info), 22 September 1932 – 26 June 2010[1]) was the first President of a newly independent post-Soviet Union Lithuania from 1993 to 1998 and Prime Minister from 2001 to 2006.")
![Algirdas Mykolas Brazauskas (About this sound pronunciation (help·info), 22 September 1932 – 26 June 2010[1]) was the first President of a newly independent post-Soviet Union Lithuania from 1993 to 1998 and Prime Minister from 2001 to 2006.](http://web.archive.org./web/20110409172835im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/dc/bd/5e338ccf6b10bdcbd4d1b9f5c9f4_thumb.jpg "Algirdas Mykolas Brazauskas (About this sound pronunciation (help·info), 22 September 1932 – 26 June 2010[1]) was the first President of a newly independent post-Soviet Union Lithuania from 1993 to 1998 and Prime Minister from 2001 to 2006.")
