Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

• Also Known As: The Soviet Union (USSR)
• Capital: Moscow
• Present-Day nations:
  1. Russia
  2. Belarus
  3. Latvia
  4. Lithuania
  5. Estonia
  6. Ukraine
  7. Moldova
  8. Armenia
  9. Azerbaijan
  10. Georgia
  11. Kazakhstan
  12. Kyrgyzstan
  13. Uzbekistan
  14. Turkmenistan
  15. Tajikistan
• Government: Communist dictatorship
• 1917: Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks seize power
  • The rise of the communist Bolsheviks was not widely supported in the new nation
    • Civil War ensued from 1918-1922
  • This was the first time any nation had based their government off of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto
• 1918: Lenin withdraws the Soviet Union from World War One with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
• 1927: Joseph Stalin becomes leader of the Communist Party over Leon Trotsky
• 1927-1953: Stalin leads the USSR with a tight-fist
  • 5 Year Plans: planned the Soviet economy by increasing industry and agriculture
  • Collectivization: forced peasant labor to carry out the 5 Year Plans and to destroy any ability of the peasantry to oppose the Party
    • leads to the death of many of the peasants
• 1936: Fight Francisco Franco and the fascists in Spain
• 1939: Stalin signs a non-aggression treaty with Hitler's Germany
• 1939-1945: World War Two
  • 1942-43: Battle of Stalingrad prevents both Nazi advance and Nazi seizure of oil fields
  • 1944: Tehran Conference where Churchill and Roosevelt agree to establish a second front (occurs in 1945 on D-Day)
  • 1945: Yalta and Potsdam Conferences
    • Division of Germany into 4 sectors where the Soviets receive the eastern portion
    • Stalin placed in charge of "free elections" in Eastern Europe
      • "Free elections" turn out to be a vote-for-any-communist election, thus establishing the Soviet Bloc or Iron Curtain, as Winston Churchill would say (later the Warsaw Pact nations)
• 1945-1991: Cold War
  • 1948: Stalin blockades capitalist controlled areas of Berlin leading to the Berlin airlift
  • 1953-1964: Nikita Khrushchev rules following Stalin's death
    • "De-Stalinizes" by ending forced labor
    • 1956: Harshly puts down an uprising in Hungary
    • 1957: Launches Sputnik
    • 1961: Begins building the Berlin Wall
    • 1962-63: Cuban Missile Crisis with the United States ends with return of Soviet ships armed with nuclear weapons
  • 1964-1982: Leonid Brezhnev rules following Khrushchev's ousting
    • Undoes Khrushchev's De-stalinization
    • 1968: Puts down the Prague Spring revolt in Czechoslovakia
      • Issues the Brezhnev Doctrine saying that the USSR is the strongest socialist nation and can intervene in any socialist nation
    • 1979: Invades Afghanistan
  • 1985-1991: Mikhail Gorbachev leads the USSR
    • 1989: Berlin Wall falls
    • 1990: Soviet Bloc nations remove communists from power
    • 1991: The Soviet Union disintegrates, Boris Yeltsin leads the new nation of Russia
• United States President Ronald Reagan once referred to the USSR as the "evil empire"