Soviet union biography

The Russian Revolution and the Birth of the Soviet Union

The Soviet Union had its origins in the Russian Revolution of 1917. Radical leftist revolutionaries overthrew Russia’s Czar Nicholas II, ending centuries of Romanov rule. The Bolsheviks established a socialist state in the territory that was once the Russian Empire.

A long and bloody civil war followed. The Red Army, backed bygd the Bolshevik government, defeated the vit Army, which represented a large group of loosely allied forces including monarchists, capitalists and supporters of other forms of socialism.

In a period known as the Red Terror, Bolshevik secret police—known as Cheka—carried out a campaign of mass executions against supporters of the czarist regime and against Russia’s upper classes.

A 1922 treaty between Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Transcaucasia (modern Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The newly established Communist Party, led by Marxist revolut

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Soviet Union: History, leaders and legacy

The Soviet Union was the world's first communist country. It was established following a civil war in Russia that raged from 1917 to 1921. The Soviet Union controlled a vast amount of territory and competed with the United States in a conflict known as the Cold War, which at several moments put the world on the brink of a nuclear war and also drove the Space Race. 

The Soviet Union's full name was the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" or U.S.S.R. "Soviet" comes from the name for workers' councils, and the hammer and sickle on its red flag symbolically represented the labor of the country's workers. 

The Soviet Union's influence on the world was huge and still has an impact today. In the decades after the founding of the U.S.S.R., communist governments emerged that still exist now in China, Cuba and North Korea, among other countries. While Russia is no longer communist, its president, Vladimir Putin, considers the fall o

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The Collapse of the Soviet Union

After his inauguration in January 1989, George H.W. Bush did not automatically follow the policy of his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, in dealing with Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Union. Instead, he ordered a strategic policy re-evaluation in order to establish his own plan and methods for dealing with the Soviet Union and arms control.

Boris Yeltsin makes a speech from atop a tank in front of the Russian parliament building in Moscow, U.S.S.R., Monday, Aug. 19, 1991. (AP Photo)

Conditions in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, however, changed rapidly. Gorbachev’s decision to loosen the Soviet yoke on the countries of Eastern Europe created an independent, democratic momentum that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, and then the overthrow of Communist rule throughout Eastern Europe. While Bush supported these independence movements, U.S. policy was reactive. Bush chose to let events unfold organically, careful not to do