We explain what the USSR was and what "Soviet" means. History of the USSR. The cold war, and dissolution of the USSR.
What is USSR?
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, known as the USSR by its acronym, was a federal nation and a Marxist-Leninist system (communist) that existed between 1922 and 1991, and that it was one of the two most powerful countries in the world during the so-called Cold War (1947-1991), in which it faced the United States and its allies in the Europe western.
It was located in the current territory of Russia and that of fifteen neighboring nations that were united in a federation socialist, pursuing the ideals of the October Revolution of 1917, in which the tsarist regime of Russia was overthrown and the communist party assumed political power. It was made up of the current nations of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Uzbekistan.
Many others nations, close and not so close, received the influence of the USSR and were countries protected by it, especially those that assumed communism as an economic and social system. government, as is the case of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Poland, East Germany and Cuba, among others.
What does "Soviet" mean?
The model of country imposed by the Communist Revolution in 1917 reorganized the Russian territory into small workers and peasants committees called soviets (from the Russian "councils"). These units of organization of soldiers and workers they were the basis of the society inversely hierarchical (political power had to flow from the bottom up and not the other way around) that was planned in the Constitution of 1918, until reaching the highest authority of the Condition, the Supreme Soviet.
This development model was summarized in the formula "Communism = Soviets + electricity", since the idea was to socialize and industrialize the country to the maximum. However, since 1922, when the USSR was institutionalized and the workers' state was bureaucratized, the Soviets were gradually losing can and giving way to a centralist state, which adopted a legislative political model.
History of the USSR
The USSR formally began in December 1922, when the integration treaties of the Soviet socialist republics of Russia, Ukraine and Transcaucasia (at that time Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia) were signed, once the “war communism”That reigned until 1920 had its end.
The death of the revolutionary Vladimir Lenin left Joseph Stalin at the head of the new one-party state, appointed Secretary General of the Party, who put an end to all forms of left-wing opposition and dissent, which included the persecution of Leon Trotsky, a revolutionary from long-standing whose interpretation of communist doctrine was different from his.
The USSR participated in both the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in the WWII, being the country that suffered the highest casualties during the conflict: around 25 million deaths among civilians (almost 18 million) and the military (almost 9 million).
The Cold War
The end of the Second World War left the USSR and the United States as the great world powers, after the collapse of a devastated Europe. Then began a struggle for ideological domination of the world between these two powers, each defending its model: the western capitalism vs. Soviet communism.
East conflict It was very long and very particular, since neither of the two countries directly attacked each other, but they fought their battles through third countries, financing dictatorships, insurgencies, civil wars and Revolutions throughout the Third World, especially in Asia Y Latin America.
In addition, the USSR and the USA competed in technological, cultural and arms matters, developing much of the technology key to the contemporary world of the 21st century, such as space travel (the USSR was the first to carry a animal I live to space: the bitch Layka, and in putting an astronaut in orbit: Yuri Gagarin), computational development or the creation and hoarding of nuclear weapons.
Dissolution of the USSR
The USSR began a period of economic crisis and political instability towards the end of the 20th century, which an attempt was made to alleviate with a series of reforms called the Perestroika and the Glasnost, none very successful. The USSR was unable to maintain its economy walking at the same pace as his investment in technology and the financing of allied governments such as Cuba.
These internal changes were followed by a governance crisis and the loss of portions of its territory, which led headlong to the dissolution of the Union in 1991. The fall of the USSR and the end of the Cold War marked the beginning of a new era in the contemporary history of humanity, which in the 1970s and 1980s believed it was on the brink of a devastating atomic war.