Khrushchev And De-StalinizationĪfter Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev rose to power. The Cold War power struggle-waged on political, economic and propaganda fronts between the Eastern and Western blocs-would persist in various forms until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. In response to NATO, the Soviet Union in 1955 consolidated power among Eastern bloc countries under a rival alliance called the Warsaw Pact, setting off the Cold War. The alliance between countries of the Western bloc was a political show of force against the USSR and its allies. In 1949, the U.S., Canada and its European allies formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ( NATO). The Americans and British feared the spread of communism into Western Europe and worldwide. The Soviet Union by 1948 had installed communist-leaning governments in Eastern European countries that the USSR had liberated from Nazi control during the war. The Cold Warįollowing the surrender of Nazi Germany at the end of World War II, the uncomfortable wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States and Great Britain began to crumble. Millions more were deported, or imprisoned in forced labor camps known as Gulags. Stalin eliminated all likely opposition to his leadership by terrorizing Communist Party officials and the public through his secret police.ĭuring the height of Stalin’s terror campaign, a period between 19 known as the Great Purge, an estimated 600,000 Soviet citizens were executed. The Ukrainian famine-known as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and “to inflict death”-by one estimate claimed the lives of 3.9 million people, about 13 percent of the population. For many years the USSR denied the Great Famine, keeping secret the results of a 1937 census that would have revealed the extent of loss. Millions died during the Great Famine of 1932-1933. The opposite was true.Īmid confusion and resistance to collectivization in the countryside, agricultural productivity dropped. The Communists believed that consolidating individually owned farms into a series of large state-run collective farms would increase agricultural productivity. Hundreds of thousands of higher-income farmers, called kulaks, were rounded up and executed, their property confiscated. Those that owned land or livestock were stripped of their holdings. Rural peasants were forced to join collective farms. Subsequent Five-Year Plans focused on the production of armaments and military build-up.īetween 19, Stalin enforced the collectivization of the agricultural sector. The first Five-Year Plan focused on collectivizing agriculture and rapid industrialization. Stalin implemented a series of Five-Year Plans to spur economic growth and transformation in the Soviet Union. During his reign-which lasted until his death in 1953-Stalin transformed the Soviet Union from an agrarian society to an industrial and military superpower. The dictator ruled by terror with a series of brutal policies, which left millions of his own citizens dead. Georgian-born revolutionary Joseph Stalin rose to power upon Lenin’s death in 1924. At its peak, the USSR would grow to contain 15 Soviet Socialist Republics. The newly established Communist Party, led by Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, took control of the government. In a period known as the Red Terror, Bolshevik secret police-known as Cheka-carried out a campaign of mass executions against supporters of the czarist regime and against Russia’s upper classes.Ī 1922 treaty between Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Transcaucasia (modern Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The Red Army, backed by the Bolshevik government, defeated the White Army, which represented a large group of loosely allied forces including monarchists, capitalists and supporters of other forms of socialism. The Bolsheviks established a socialist state in the territory that was once the Russian Empire.Ī long and bloody civil war followed. Radical leftist revolutionaries overthrew Russia’s Czar Nicholas II, ending centuries of Romanov rule. The Soviet Union had its origins in the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Russian Revolution and the Birth of the Soviet Union
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