When was soviet russia

The Soviet Union had its origins in the Russian Revolution of 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 by the Bolshevik government, defeated the White Army, which represented a large group of loosely allied forces including monarchists, capitalists and supporters of other forms of socialism.

The newly established Communist Party, led by Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin , took control of the government. The dictator ruled by terror with a series of brutal policies, which left millions of his own citizens dead. During his reign—which lasted until his death in —Stalin transformed the Soviet Union from an agrarian society to an industrial and military superpower.

Stalin implemented a series of Five-Year Plans to spur economic growth and transformation in the Soviet Union. The first Five-Year Plan focused on collectivizing agriculture and rapid industrialization. Subsequent Five-Year Plans focused on the production of armaments and military build-up.

Between and , Stalin enforced the collectivization of the agricultural sector. Rural peasants were forced to join collective farms. Those that owned land or livestock were stripped of their holdings. Hundreds of thousands of higher-income farmers, called kulaks, were rounded up and executed, their property confiscated. The Communists believed that consolidating individually owned farms into a series of large state-run collective farms would increase agricultural productivity.

The opposite was true. Amid confusion and resistance to collectivization in the countryside, agricultural productivity dropped. This led to devastating food shortages. Millions died during the Great Famine of For many years the USSR denied the Great Famine, keeping secret the results of a census that would have revealed the extent of loss.

Stalin eliminated all likely opposition to his leadership by terrorizing Communist Party officials and the public through his secret police.

Millions more were deported, or imprisoned in forced labor camps known as Gulags. The Americans and British feared the spread of communism into Western Europe and worldwide. In , the U. The alliance between countries of the Western bloc was a political show of force against the USSR and its allies.

The Cold War power struggle—waged on political, economic and propaganda fronts between the Eastern and Western blocs—would persist in various forms until the fall of the Soviet Union in He became Communist Party secretary in and premier in At home, however, Khrushchev initiated a series of political reforms that made Soviet society less repressive. During this period, later known as de-Stalinization, Khrushchev criticized Stalin for arresting and deporting opponents, took steps to raise living conditions, freed many political prisoners, loosened artistic censorship, and closed the Gulag labor camps.

With the dissolution of Soviet Union, the main goal of the Bush administration was economic and political stability and security for Russia, the Baltics, and the states of the former Soviet Union. Bush recognized all 12 independent republics and established diplomatic relations with Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. In February , Baker visited the remaining republics and diplomatic relations were established with Uzbekistan, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan.

Civil war in Georgia prevented its recognition and the establishment of diplomatic relations with the United States until May Leaders from Kazakhstan and Ukraine visited Washington in May During his visits to Washington, politics, economic reforms, and security issues dominated the conversations between Yeltsin and Bush.

Of paramount concern was securing the nuclear arsenal of the former Soviet Union and making certain nuclear weapons did not fall into the wrong hands.

Baker made it clear that funding was available from the United States to secure nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in the former Soviet Union. Bush and Baker also worked with Yeltsin and international organizations like the World Bank and IMF to provide financial assistance and hopefully prevent a humanitarian crisis in Russia.

Menu Menu. Milestones: — For more information, please see the full notice. Boris Yeltsin makes a speech from atop a tank in front of the Russian parliament building in Moscow, U. AP Photo. Behind the lines, special German units murdered millions of Jews, Soviet commissars, and members of other targeted groups.

Eventually, though, the German advance stalled. Despite tremendous losses, the Soviets were able to regroup, moving industrial production safely out of the Germans' reach. Like Napoleon's invasion forces before them, the Germans were not equipped for the harshness of the Russian winter. With the aid of supplies delivered by the Western Allies, the Soviets pushed back against the Germans, gaining the upper hand by The Soviets occupied and communized most of Eastern Europe after the war.

The physical and cultural divide between the democratic, capitalist West and the Communist East became known as the Iron Curtain, and was symbolized most poignantly by the Berlin Wall, which divided Germany's former capital in two. This state of affairs lasted for nearly the remainder of the Soviet Union's existence. Stalin died in , to be succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev. However, in this year, the Soviets also crushed a pro-democracy movement in Hungary.

A similar crackdown occurred in Czechoslovakia in Tensions with the United States rose and fell during the s, s, and s, but never erupted into armed conflict. A period of relatively open relations between the superpowers ended with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in and the election of US President Ronald Reagan the following year, who by increasing US defense spending forced the Soviet Union to do the same.

Both of these developments had a negative effect on the Soviet economy. From to , the Soviet Union experienced a succession of elderly party leaders who died in office: Leonid Brezhnev, Yury Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko. After this, however, a younger, more reform-minded man came to power: Mikhail Gorbachev. His policies are usually known by the terms glasnost openness or transparency and perestroika restructuring.