Soviet Union history

The formation of the Soviet Union was a milestone in human history, one of the largest empires in history and the first openly atheist government. The profound changes promoted in Russia during the 20th century are still alive and present today.

How did the Soviet Union form 

The Soviet Union was formed in 1922 after the triumph of the Russian Revolution. The official name of the Soviet Union was the Union of Russian Socialist Republics. The country grouped 15 nations into a single country, led by the central power of Moscow.

Historical context

Circumstances in nineteenth-century Russia were changing. People were already attending schools and the flow of information was facilitated by the innovative activity of trains. Through the locomotives, passengers from different national and foreign places could circulate information.

At that time Russia was an empire, ruled by absolutist kings. Their kings were called czars, after the Roman emperors, the caesars.

Russia's intellectual class was being influenced by European Enlightenment ideals during the 19th century. The people were assimilating these ideas due to the misery they were living.

The desire for a people's government was growing. A desire for democracy, according to Rousseau's ideas.

During this period, Europe was going through the Napoleonic wars. Napoleon was attacking and dominating the countries headed by the relatives of the Russian Tsars.

Sending soldiers and generals abroad provided contact with different societies, in which kings were limited by constitutions and did not have full power to determine the fate of their subjects.

Reforms to limit royal power were ignored by the Russian monarchy, whose legal system was summarized in the following law:

His majesty is the absolute monarch, not answerable for his actions to anyone in the world, and has the power and authority to govern his States and lands as a Christian sovereign, according to his desire and good will." 

In other words, the Emperor was unquestionable. This fact raised questions in the people, people wondered why they had nothing to eat while the King had several palaces, why fight the war of his relatives.

A climate of political instability was established, clashes began to happen in the streets.

This was the context when Alexander II ascended the throne in 1855. He recognized the need for renewal. Therefore, he decided to significantly reduce state censorship and determined the expansion of public schools, including for the poor, adopting a less oligarchic government. 

To facilitate the dissemination of schools, Alexandre II elected a secretary who, during two and a half decades of public service, inaugurated more than three hundred educational institutions.

The population was happy. Although there was a radical minority, inspired by the ideas of Karl Marx, the moderate portion of the communists was hopeful and believed that the problems would be solved.

There were no plans for anything resembling the formation of the Soviet Union in the minds of many moderate communists.

The reforms were held back when an upheaval struck Russia: the main revolutionary movement, People's Will, assassinated Alexander II. 

Gathered in a family assembly to discuss the future of Russia, the Romanovs concluded that the changes being implemented had had negative effects. 

This impression was shared by Alexander III, a man who blamed the assassination of the monarch on the laxity of the government. It was precisely he who took power. Alexander III began his reign by expounding that: 

It is not fundamental to encourage the masses and the Cossacks so that they can go to school and expect to be more than they already are". 

The premise of his governance was to push back the reforms of his father, Alexander II. With that, censorship was restored, schools were closed, newspapers were closed, including the main communist newspaper at the time. University activities were extinguished. 

Early formation of the USSR, life of the founder

Lenin's father was one of Alexander II's top officials, he was responsible for creating 300 schools across Russia.

After many decorations under Tsar Alexander II, Lenin's father faced the reverse process under Alexander III. Lenin witnessed his father being increasingly discredited in his childhood days.

Schools and universities were closed. The Russian government was increasingly becoming an oligarchic and tyrannical regime, as per Aristotle's political nomenclature.

Due to his father's culture, Lenin and his brother were always encouraged to study hard since childhood. The family had good economic conditions.

Lenin excelled at school but underperformed in logic.

As a young adult, a family twist would change his life forever.

Her brother was a researcher in biology, he seemed to have a quiet life and everyone in the family was proud of Sasha. One day, to the surprise of the whole family, he was arrested and sentenced to death.

Sasha had been the financier of an assassination attempt on the Emperor. He had melted down a gold medal he had won for school merit and gave it to a revolutionary group.

Her family interceded for her life and succeeded, all Sasha needed to do was send a letter to the Emperor apologizing. Again surprising everyone, Sasha denied it.

He chose death to defend the communist revolution, having read a revolutionary text before his conviction.

Upon witnessing all this, Lenin was impressed and began to study the same books as his brother, starting with the Manifesto of the Communist Party and Capital.

The Russian revolution

Taking advantage of the popular feeling against the Empire and using the communist articulation already present in the country, Lenin started the Russian Revolution in 1917.

He had already spent years studying politics, communism and articulating the revolutionary movement.

Lenin managed to co-opt artists and intellectuals to his side, they wrote popular texts that circumvented government censorship.

With the support of the people and important names in the country, the communist movement grew. The government's bad policies only favored the revolutionaries. In an episode known as Bloody Sunday, the emperor's representative, absent at the time, ordered the murder of all demonstrators.

They were led by a priest who had non-communist requests, his manifesto provided for the maintenance of the current czar in power, Nicholas II.

Nicholas II still ordered wars in Manchuria and China, aiming to keep Russian territories in those places.

Dissatisfied with such distant and unnecessary wars, many soldiers defected and became members of the Communist Party.

Hunger in Russia only grew, the government was in a vertiginous fall.

In 1917, the population explodes. People took to the streets even without a leader calling them on, they couldn't take the situation anymore. Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin hurried from exile in Europe to Russia.

They arrived in time to commandeer the crowd and storm the Winter Palace, where they met no military resistance. 

The revolutionaries shot the imperial family at close range, ending the Russian Empire. 

A bourgeois provisional government takes power but does not sustain itself, the changes they planned were too slow for the needs of the people.

The moment comes when Lenin takes power.

After the white army gave up on returning to the monarchy in Russia, the representative army of the European royal families, the communists took power for good.

The communist government was failing to improve the situation in the country, hunger and poverty were getting worse. At that time, a new plan comes to light: to unite all neighboring countries.

The Creator of the Soviet Union

Thus was born the Union of Russian Socialist Republics, created under the leadership of Vladimir "Lenin". The USSR was a republican system, with the other 15 nations acting as federations of the Union, central power located in Moscow.

Lenin believed that assistance from each Slavic country would allow the regime to survive. He sought to form a sovereign nation, which would be communist and manage to defeat capitalist and conservative nations. 

Due to the relativist morals of communism, one of the first achievements of the USSR was the legalization of abortion in the country. The government encouraged the practice.

The intention was to form a country contrary to conservative, capitalist and Christian customs.

The countries that formed the Soviet Union

The 15 countries that made up the Soviet Union were:

Russia; 

Ukraine;

Latvia;

Lithuania;

Estonia;

Georgia;

Armenia;

Azerbaijan;

Belarus;

Kazakhstan;

Moldova;

Kyrgyzstan;

Tajikistan;

Turkmenistan; 

Uzbekistan.

What happened for the Soviet Union to End

When talking about the main events towards the end of the Soviet Union, it is important to remember that the country was never without crises. The USSR went through the deaths of millions in Lenin's Revolution, Holodomor and gulags under Stalin, and then economic and political stagnation under Brezhnev.

Shortly after the white army gave up on ending communism, because of the absence of Russian successors to the throne, Lenin needed to recreate capitalism in the USSR. The country was without basic inputs for survival, forcing Lenin to create the New Economic Policy (NEP).

After Lenin's death, Stalin took power and created a reign of terror, having been denounced by his own Communist Party successor, Nikita Khrushchev. 

The key moment in the de-Stalinization of the USSR was Khrushchev's speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, where he repatriated many of Stalin's political exiles and revealed the dictator's worst deeds.

Stalin had further developed the gulags created by Lenin, the communist concentration camps that inspired the Nazis. He even murdered several political opponents and caused genocide against 14 million people in Ukraine

End of soviet union 

After World War II and the end of Stalin's terror, the USSR was still experiencing economic crises. The main reasons were the lack of basic products and the formation of an oligopoly by party members.

President Brezhnev created a policy of keeping civil servants in their posts for years. From then on, the oligopoly worsened, as Party members enjoyed almost complete stability. 

The lack of a market economy in the USSR made poverty more and more accentuated from 1917 until 1991.

With the communist system harming the population, the member countries of the USSR began to leave the Socialist Republic. Poland, Hungary and East Germany managed to break free from the USSR after years of fighting.

There being no other way out, President Gorbachev announced the end of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Countries became independent and open to the free market, although Russia continued to be run by the same people.

The Soviet Union influenced the world by investing in communist activities across the globe, especially due to the Cold War.