Five things to know about the Soviet Union
Born out on the ashes of the Russian Empire in 1922, and officially pronounced dead nearly seven decades later, the Soviet Union profoundly marked the history of the 20th century.
Five things to know:
- Bloody birth -
The Soviet Union, or USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), came into being on December 30, 1922 after the communist "Reds" won a long and bloody civil war against the "Whites", who were supported by Western powers.
The five years of fighting came after the fall of Tsar Nicholas II and the 1917 October Revolution which brought the Bolsheviks to power led by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, alias Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin.
Upon Lenin's death on January 21, 1924, a power struggle set in. His rivals sidelined -- sometimes executed after summary Moscow trials -- Stalin became in the early 1930s the single master of the Soviet Union.
Trotsky was thrown out of the country in 1929, and was assassinated by a Soviet agent in Mexico in 1940.
- A totalitarian system -
Stalin presided over a totalitarian system which combined massive purges, summary justice, executions and organised famines until his death on March 5, 1953.
In the winter of 1929-1930, he launched the forced collectivisation of agriculture, which led to millions of deaths.
In 1943-1944, after having successfully repelled the German army during World War II, he set about deporting whole sections of the population.
Whole peoples including the Chechens, Ingushes and Crimean Tatars were sent to the inhospitable steppes of Central Asia and Siberia.
Those considered "Enemies of the People" were sent to gulags, work camps whose concentration-camp-style conditions were revealed to the world by Russian dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his works "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and "The Gulag Archipelago".
Historians estimate that around a million people perished during the 1930 purges alone, and that there were some 20 million victims during the three decades that Stalin was in power.
Three years after the death of a man portrayed in the Soviet propaganda as a father figure, Stalin's successor Nikita Khrushchev launched a process of "destalinisation" at the 20th congress of the Communist Party in 1956, denouncing his personality cult.
- World's biggest country -
With a surface area of more than 22 million square kilometres, the Soviet Union was the biggest country in the world, straggling Europe and Asia.
Three times bigger than the United States, and twice as big as China, the immense territory with borders with 12 countries stretched from the Baltic to the Pacific Ocean and from the Arctic to Asia, where it shared nearly 5,000 kilometres of border with China.
The world's biggest oil producer, the USSR also had some of the world's biggest coal and natural gas reserves.
- An ethnic mosaic -
The USSR was a federal state comprised of 15 republics: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.
By far the biggest republic, covering three quarters of the Soviet Union, and also the richest, was the Russian Federation. With its nearly 147 million inhabitants, it was also the most populous and home to Soviet capital Moscow.
Apart from Russian, spoken by the majority, the Soviet Union embraced more than a hundred nationalities and languages.
Officially atheist, the Christian Orthodox faith was the religion of some 50 million citizens. Almost as many identified as Muslims.
In the 1980s both religions saw a certain revival, particularly as the population in the Muslim republics of Central Asia continued to grow.
- From single to multi-party -
The first communist state in the world, the Soviet Union was based on a socialist economy and led by a single party, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), which was headed by a Central Committee.
The Central Committee elected the Politburo, with as its head the party's General Secretary.
The Supreme Soviet, or parliament, made up of two chambers, was the USSR's permanent legislative body.
CPSU General Secretary since 1985, reformist Mikhail Gorbachev was elected Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, effectively head of state, on October 1, 1988 and from then on combined the two jobs.
Two months later the Supreme Soviet adopted a new constitution, introducing the post of president, a position to which Gorbachev was elected for five years by the Congress of People's Deputies.
Just over a year later deputies changed the constitution and created a multi-party system.
The reform of March 13, 1990 abandoned the reference to the leading role of the Communist Party.
After surviving an attempted coup in August 1991, Gorbachev resigned on December 25, days after the leaders of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine said the Soviet Union no longer existed and instead set up the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).