The Soviet Union was formally founded on December 30, 1922, when the Treaty on the Creation of the Soviet Union (signed by the Russian SSR, the Transcaucasian SSR, the Ukrainian SSR, and the Byelorussian SSR) was ratified by the First All-Soviet Congress.
1.Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in 1922. The former was the founder and first leader of the Soviet Union, driving the 1917 revolution. It was in this year that Stalin was elected General Secretary of the Bolshevik Committee, a position that meant that he would become the future head of state.
2.In 1922, many organizations were founded in the Soviet Union, and now it's time to celebrate their 100th anniversary. The All-Union Young Pioneers Organisation named after Lenin was one of them.
3.The Bolsheviks had many progressive and important ideas and movements – one of which was the eradication of illiteracy. In record time, they made education free and compulsory, enabling at least half of the country's population to read and write. And this number is increasing year by year.
4.At the same time, the Bolsheviks were responsible for the counter-religious movement, the confiscation of church jewelry, and the mass arrest and trial of priests.
5.After Lenin's death, Joseph Stalin became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1925. He was known for being very tough on politics, putting the interests of the country above the interests (and lives) of the people. However, he still had supporters who praised him for forcing the industrialization of the country, making the Soviet Union a powerful empire.
6.Stalin initiated the construction of many factories, giant hydroelectric power stations and giant factories, as well as the extraction and production of large quantities of goods from various fields. He also commissioned the construction of roads and launched the entire transport system - for example, the metro in Moscow (in general, turned Moscow into a metropolis). One of his most ambitious projects was the "Seven Sisters" or "Stalin Skyscrapers", which, however, were not completed until after his death.
7.The darkest side of Stalin's reign was the gulag camp system, which used prisoners to carry out the most complex construction works in the harshest conditions, whether it was wood preparation in the Far North, Siberia or uranium mining in the Far East.
8.Millions of people forced to pass through these prisons died there. Getting rid of any political rivals and the so-called "fifth column", Stalin's NKVD (the future KGB intelligence service) could arrest anyone for a rash joke or denunciation.
9.To find out what happened to their relatives, people sometimes spent hours queuing up to the NKVD office, raining, hailing or sunny.
10.After Stalin's purge, World War II began to become one of the most difficult experiences in the history of the Soviet Union. The four years of the Soviet Union's war against the Nazis were immortalized in the history of the country under the name of the "Great Patriotic War". Not only men and professional soldiers, but also women, children, and retirees helped the country win. Some are fighting on the front lines, while others are busy making bullets or sewing**.
11.In the nightmare of World War II, which claimed the lives of millions of Soviet people, the city of Leningrad suffered the harshest 900 days under the Nazi siege without food, heating or electricity. When the enemy retreated, they wreaked havoc on the once luxurious palace and took away many treasures.
12.After winning the war, the Soviet state recovered year after year after suffering huge losses. Peaceful production was restored to the industry, and the era of Soviet culture and cinema began.
13.After Stalin's death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev became the head of the Soviet Union. He closed the Gulag, pardoned many prisoners, and debunked the cult of Stalin personally. The years of his reign are recorded in history books under the name "Khrushchev's thaw".
14.One of the most striking things about Khrushchev was the handling of the housing problem. During the industrialization of the Soviet Union, millions of people moved from the countryside to the cities, but they did not have enough shelter, so they had to live in communal apartments or dormitories. Khrushchev began to build inexpensive standard apartment houses, which are now called "Khrushchevka".
15.Finally, Khrushchev's era marked one of the most epic events in human history. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to fly into space. Look at how Moscow welcomed the hero after his epic flight.
16.For almost two decades, starting in 1964, the Soviet state was ruled by Leonid Brezhnev. Beginning in the 1970s, it was called the "era of stagnation", but the Communist elite called it "advanced socialism".
17.It was a period of stability. The previously rapid economic growth stopped, the country no longer had any serious political problems, and at the same time, began to receive some decent income from the sale of oil. In addition, the standard of living is much better than it was in the post-war period and even in the 60s of the last century. And all this happened at a time when Cold War relations between the Soviet Union and the United States became more conciliatory (below, Brezhnev gave the United States ** Jimmy Carter a trademark kiss).
18.In the 1980s, two Soviet leaders died after only one year in power. There is also the economic crisis, everything is in short supply, the shelves are empty, and there are long queues in stores. Finally, in 1986, the biggest disaster struck – the Chernobyl nuclear power plant**. All these events point to the need for large-scale reforms in the country. This is how Gorbachev's perestroika began.
19.Thanks to the late 1980s, the world became familiar not only with Russian words like "perestroika", but also with "open". If not real freedom of speech, but at least there is an opportunity to inform people about what is happening in the country, and not just as Soviet television advertised. At the same time, censorship failed, and many great Russian and Soviet books were published, from Boris Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago" to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago". People can really feel the fresh air. At the same time, after a decade of war, the USSR withdrew its troops from Afghanistan.
20.As part of the perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev gave the Soviet republics more autonomy and even held a referendum on saving the USSR (which the majority voted for). Gorbachev planned to sign a new alliance treaty. However, in December 1991, the reactionary Soviet coup d'état was supposed to take place in Moscow, but failed. Boris Yeltsin led the anti-coup conference against the restoration of the USSR and the celebration of democracy. As a result, on December 25, 1991, after almost 70 years of existence, the Soviet era came to an end.
A vast empire collapsed in this way.