How long ussr lasted

The dictator ruled by terror with a series of brutal policies, which left millions of his own citizens dead. During his reign—which lasted until his death in —Stalin transformed the Soviet Union from an agrarian society to an industrial and military superpower.

Stalin implemented a series of Five-Year Plans to spur economic growth and transformation in the Soviet Union. The first Five-Year Plan focused on collectivizing agriculture and rapid industrialization. Subsequent Five-Year Plans focused on the production of armaments and military build-up. Between and , Stalin enforced the collectivization of the agricultural sector.

Rural peasants were forced to join collective farms. Those that owned land or livestock were stripped of their holdings. Hundreds of thousands of higher-income farmers, called kulaks, were rounded up and executed, their property confiscated. The Communists believed that consolidating individually owned farms into a series of large state-run collective farms would increase agricultural productivity. The opposite was true. Amid confusion and resistance to collectivization in the countryside, agricultural productivity dropped.

This led to devastating food shortages. Millions died during the Great Famine of For many years the USSR denied the Great Famine, keeping secret the results of a census that would have revealed the extent of loss. Stalin eliminated all likely opposition to his leadership by terrorizing Communist Party officials and the public through his secret police. Millions more were deported, or imprisoned in forced labor camps known as Gulags. The Americans and British feared the spread of communism into Western Europe and worldwide.

In , the U. The alliance between countries of the Western bloc was a political show of force against the USSR and its allies. 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 He became Communist Party secretary in and premier in At home, however, Khrushchev initiated a series of political reforms that made Soviet society less repressive.

During this period, later known as de-Stalinization, Khrushchev criticized Stalin for arresting and deporting opponents, took steps to raise living conditions, freed many political prisoners, loosened artistic censorship, and closed the Gulag labor camps. Members of his own political party removed Khrushchev from office in Many early projects were tied to the Soviet military and kept secret, but by the s, space would become another dramatic arena for competition between dueling world superpowers.

The success of Sputnik made Americans fear that the U. President John F. The U. Some say another could be starting as tensions with Russia rise. Between and the United States, the Soviet Union, and their allies were locked in a long, tense conflict known as the Cold War.

Though the parties were technically at peace, the period was characterized by an aggressive arms race, proxy wars, and ideological bids for world dominance. The term cold war had existed since the s, when it was used to describe increasingly fraught relationships between European countries.

In , shortly after the United States used the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, writer George Orwell used the term in an essay that explored what the atom bomb meant for international relations. The Truman Doctrine , as it was called, was the first salvo in a decades-long containment policy in which the U. By , both countries had missile defenses pointed at one another. That year, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought both countries closer to actual conflict than any other event in the Cold War.

Multiple proxy wars stood in for actual conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Korean War , Vietnam War , and a number of other armed conflicts, during which both sides either funded one side of the war or fought directly against a communist or capitalist force, are all considered Cold War proxies.

Both sides also funded revolutions, insurgencies, and political assassinations in Central America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Though the Cold War ended with the dissolution of the Soviet bloc in the s and the fall of the Soviet Union in , it still affects modern geopolitics. As the last remaining superpower, the U. NATO, an alliance between the U. Today, increased tensions between Russia and the West have been referred to as a second Cold War. All rights reserved.

Culture Explainer. What was the Cold War? They are not going to agree quickly on why the Soviet Union collapsed when it did.

Some think it could have lasted for many years, others that the collapse was unforeseeable. Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet dissident scientist, foresaw it decades before it happened.

Victory in war took the Soviet armies to the centre of Europe, where they stayed. In Eastern Europe, inside the Soviet Union itself, the subject peoples were increasingly restless for freedom. It worked for a while. The Soviet leaders were not stupid. They knew something had to be done.

In , after three decrepit leaders died in succession, they picked Mikhail Gorbachev to run the country: young, experienced, competent and — they wrongly thought — orthodox. But Gorbachev believed that change was inescapable.

He curbed the KGB, freed the press and introduced a kind of democracy. He was defeated by a conservative establishment, an intractable economy and an unsustainable imperial burden.

It was the fatal moment, identified by the 19th-century French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, when a decaying regime tries to reform — and disintegrates. Russians call Gorbachev a traitor for failing to prevent the collapse by force. Foreigners dismiss him as an inadequate bungler. No one has suggested a convincing alternative scenario. Tauris, and former BBC Moscow correspondent. Few foresaw then that it would collapse early in the following decade.

Yet the system was failing.