The Soviet Union lasted less than seventy years, from its formal creation in 1922 to its dissolution in 1991, yet no state of the twentieth century left a deeper mark on the world. It began as a revolutionary experiment in a vast, largely agricultural empire, and it ended as a nuclear superpower that could not feed its own people or hold its republics together. In between it survived civil war, famine, terror, invasion and cold war, industrialised at extraordinary speed and cost, defeated the largest invasion in history, and sent the first satellite and the first human into space. This chapter follows that full arc, from revolution to collapse, because the Soviet story is the central story of this book, and its lessons are still argued over in the countries that emerged from it.
Revolution and civil war
The Soviet Union was born from the collapse of the Russian Empire in the First World War. In February 1917, food shortages, military defeats and political deadlock brought about the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the formation of a Provisional Government. That government kept Russia in the war and could not solve the questions of land, bread and peace. In October 1917 the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, seized power in Petrograd, promising peace, land and workers’ control of factories. Civil war followed from 1918 to 1921, between the Bolshevik Red Army, commanded in large part by Leon Trotsky, and White armies, national movements and foreign intervening forces. When the Bolsheviks won, they ruled a devastated country, and in December 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formally created.
Lenin and the New Economic Policy
Lenin understood that survival required a retreat. Under War Communism, grain requisition and central control had contracted the economy and provoked peasant resistance. In 1921 he introduced the New Economic Policy, known as the NEP. It replaced requisition with a tax in kind, allowed peasants to sell surpluses and permitted small private trade, while the state kept large industry, banking, transport and foreign trade. Food supplies improved, markets revived and the economy began to recover. The NEP also left an unresolved argument: how long could a socialist state tolerate private farming and trade? Lenin did not live to answer it. He suffered strokes and died in January 1924, leaving a struggle for leadership, and the question of what Lenin would have done became a central argument in Soviet politics for decades.
Stalin: collectivization and terror
That struggle was won in the late 1920s by Joseph Stalin, who had become General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1922 and built power through control of appointments and the party machine. Stalin abandoned the NEP and launched a drive to transform the country in a decade. Collectivization of agriculture, begun in earnest in 1929, forced peasants into collective farms and brought grain under state control. Wealthier peasants, labelled kulaks, were targeted, and resistance was met with deportation and repression. Collectivization was followed by famine, most severely in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and parts of southern Russia in the early 1930s, worsened by state grain requisitions. At the same time the first Five-Year Plans drove rapid industrialisation, drawing millions from villages into cities, while in the mid-1930s the Great Terror arrested party officials, officers, intellectuals and ordinary citizens, and sent millions to labour camps in the Gulag.
The Great Patriotic War
The test of that system came in June 1941, when Germany invaded in Operation Barbarossa, breaking the Nazi-Soviet Pact signed in August 1939. In its first months the Red Army suffered enormous losses as German forces advanced toward Leningrad, Moscow and the Caucasus. Leningrad was besieged for almost nine hundred days, and Moscow was saved only in the winter of 1941. Yet the Soviet Union did not collapse. Factories were moved east of the Urals, new armies were raised, and the population endured hardships few societies have faced. The turning point came at Stalingrad, where German forces were encircled and defeated in the winter of 1942 and 1943, followed by the tank battle at Kursk in 1943. The Red Army then advanced westward and reached Berlin in the spring of 1945. Victory came at an immense cost in lives, with much of the western Soviet Union in ruins, but it made the country a great power and gave the regime a legitimacy its pre-war record could not have supplied.
Superpower and stagnation
After the war the Soviet Union rebuilt its industry, established control over much of Eastern Europe, and entered the Cold War with the United States. It became one of two nuclear superpowers, launched the first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, and put the first human, Yuri Gagarin, into orbit in 1961. Inside the country, Stalin’s death in 1953 was followed by a thaw, and in 1956 Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes in a secret speech to the party. Political terror was scaled back and living standards improved, but in 1962 the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world close to nuclear war over Soviet missiles in Cuba. After Khrushchev was removed in 1964, Leonid Brezhnev led a long period later called stagnation. The economy grew ever more slowly, consumer goods remained scarce, and the gap with the West widened. The invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 became a long and costly war, and by the early 1980s the Soviet Union was a superpower abroad and a society of queues and shortages at home.
Gorbachev and the collapse of 1991
Mikhail Gorbachev, who became General Secretary in 1985, was chosen to reform the system. His policies of glasnost, or openness, and perestroika, or restructuring, allowed public discussion of the country’s problems, gave more scope to private initiative and sought to reduce the arms race. Agreements with the United States reduced nuclear weapons, Soviet troops left Afghanistan, and in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and the communist governments of Eastern Europe collapsed without Soviet intervention. Gorbachev was praised abroad for ending the Cold War, but his reforms released forces he could not control. National movements demanded independence, the economy deteriorated, and conservatives attempted a coup in August 1991. The coup failed, but it destroyed what remained of Gorbachev’s authority. Power passed to republic leaders, above all Boris Yeltsin in Russia, and by December 1991 the Soviet Union was formally dissolved into fifteen independent states.
What the film adds, and the lesson
The documentary that accompanies this chapter traces that arc in the order in which it happened, and its value lies in seeing how each period grew out of the one before. The civil war made the NEP necessary, the NEP made the argument about collectivization inevitable, the terror weakened the army that had to fight in 1941, and the victory in 1945 made the empire that Gorbachev inherited. Watching those stages in sequence makes clear that the Soviet Union was not a single regime repeated for seventy years, but a series of regimes under one name. The lesson is not a simple moral. The Soviet story matters because it was the largest attempt in history to build a society on Marx’s ideas, and because its failures and its achievements both need to be understood if the chapters that follow are to be read with the seriousness they deserve.
From revolution to global power, this series chronicles the evolution of the Soviet Union. 00:00 1922-1941Discover the birth of a new superpower, the turmoil that followed Lenin’s death, and Stalin’s rise to absolute power. Witness the ruthless transformation of the USSR through purges and industrialization and uncover the story behind the fateful Nazi-Soviet Pact and the fragile alliance that set the stage for war.45:00 1941-1964From the devastation of Operation Barbarossa to the height of the Cold War, trace the Soviet Union’s defining moments from the middle of the 20th century. Witness the Red Army’s costly triumph in WW2, the chaos that followed Stalin’s death, and the tense standoff between the world’s two nuclear superpowers during the Cuban Missile Crisis. 01:28:51 1964-1991From Khrushchev’s dramatic ousting in 1964 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, trace the final decades of the USSR. Explore Brezhnev’s era of stagnation, Gorbachev’s attempts at reform, and the fall of the Berlin Wall as a global superpower came to an end.War Stories is your one-stop shop for all things military history. From Waterloo to Verdun, we’ll be bringing you only the best documentaries and stories from history’s most engaging and dramatic conflicts.