From the foundation of the USSR in 1922 and the death of Lenin through Stalin's five-year plans, collectivization, the Great Terror, and the triumph and trauma of the Great Patriotic War, the Cold War and the space race, the thaw and the long stagnation, to Gorbachev's perestroika, Chernobyl, the fall of the Eastern Bloc, and the dissolution of the union in 1991. Slide across the decades to read the major events of the world's first socialist superpower.
On 30 December 1922, the Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Transcaucasian republics unite to form the USSR, the world's first socialist federal state.
From the foundation of the USSR in 1922 and the death of Lenin through Stalin's five-year plans, collectivization, the Great Terror, and the triumph and trauma of the Great Patriotic War, the Cold War and the space race, the thaw and the long stagnation, to Gorbachev's perestroika, Chernobyl, the fall of the Eastern Bloc, and the dissolution of the union in 1991. Slide across the decades to read the major events of the world's first socialist superpower.
On 30 December 1922, the Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Transcaucasian republics unite to form the USSR, the world's first socialist federal state.
Vladimir Lenin dies after a series of strokes; his body is embalmed and a power struggle begins between Stalin and Trotsky.
Stalin launches the First Five-Year Plan, forcing breakneck industrialization and the collectivization of peasant agriculture.
Forced grain requisitions amid collectivization cause a famine that kills millions, with Ukraine — the Holodomor — and Kazakhstan worst affected.
Stalin unleashes a campaign of terror, with show trials of Old Bolsheviks and mass arrests and executions carried out by the NKVD.
The USSR and Nazi Germany sign a non-aggression pact whose secret protocol divides Eastern Europe; days later the Second World War begins.
Germany launches the largest invasion in history; the Wehrmacht drives deep into Soviet territory and reaches the outskirts of Moscow before being halted.
The encirclement and destruction of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad marks the great turning point of the war on the eastern front.
Soviet forces capture Berlin; at Yalta and Potsdam the USSR secures dominance over Eastern Europe and emerges as a superpower.
The USSR tests its first atomic bomb, breaking the American nuclear monopoly and ushering in the nuclear arms race of the Cold War.
Joseph Stalin dies after nearly thirty years in power; a collective leadership emerges and the secret police chief Beria is arrested and shot.
Khrushchev denounces Stalin's crimes in a secret speech to the Party Congress, then crushes the Hungarian uprising with tanks the same year.
Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbits the Earth aboard Vostok 1, a triumph of Soviet science following the launch of Sputnik in 1957.
The deployment of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba triggers a confrontation with the United States that brings the world to the edge of nuclear war.
Leonid Brezhnev leads a Politburo coup that removes Khrushchev, beginning two decades of conservative, stable rule.
Warsaw Pact tanks crush the Prague Spring reform movement, and the Brezhnev Doctrine asserts Moscow's right to intervene in socialist states.
Soviet troops intervene to prop up a communist government in Afghanistan, beginning a nine-year war against US-backed mujahideen insurgents.
Mikhail Gorbachev becomes leader and introduces perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) to revive the stagnant Soviet system.
A reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine explodes, causing history's worst nuclear accident and a vast radioactive contamination.
As Gorbachev refuses to intervene, communist regimes fall across Eastern Europe and the Berlin Wall is opened in November.
A failed hardliner coup against Gorbachev accelerates the collapse; on 26 December the Soviet Union is formally dissolved into fifteen independent states.