No more than a fifth of respondents to opinion polls in the 1990s thought that Russia would benefit from ‘democracy’ in its Western forms, and observation of post-Soviet political practice generated widespread negative reactions to the word itself, along with ‘freedom’ and ‘elections’. In response to a 1999 poll asking Russians which of thirteen variables were most important to them, ‘democracy’ came in second last, less popular than any of the options except ‘freedom of entrepreneurship’. Top choices were ‘stability’ and ‘social welfare’.” The Shortest History of the Soviet Union is the story of an empire made an empire undone by one of the world’s leading authorities on Soviet Russia.

Meanwhile, Gorbachev’s reforms were slow to bear fruit and did more to hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union than to help it. A loosening of controls over the Soviet people emboldened independence movements in the Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe. On February 24, Russia invaded Ukraine. Two days before, Vladimir Putin gave his version of history during a speech in which he declared Ukraine "an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space." He blamed Lenin for the establishment of modern Ukraine, with further gifts of land by Stalin and Khrushchev. But rather than believe an unhinged thug, why not read an account of history not fabricated by someone trying to justify a disgusting and doomed war? As we have a particular interest in visiting the countries and territories that once formed the USSR, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, we thought it would be beneficial to create a short history of how this vast empire came into being and what eventually led to its downfall. Of course, the topic is far more in-depth and complex than the 1,500-odd word narrative we have generated below to describe it but our aim was to keep this post short and provide just a general overview. One wonders what Marx and Engels would have made of the growth and decline of the USSR. There is no doubt that both were sincere in their belief that communism was the only way forward but it would appear that they failed to take account of the more pragmatic aspects of the effects of rule and power. It’s a pity they were unable to take note of Lord Acton’s famous remark in a letter to Bishop Creighton, ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.’ The letter was written in April 1887, thirty-nine years after Marx and Engels produced The Communist Manifesto. 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.Here is an irresistible entree to a sweeping history. From revolution and Lenin to Stalin's Great Terror, from World War II to Gorbachev's perestroika policies, this is a lively, authoritative distillation of seventy-five years of communist rule and the collapse of an empire. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Communist Party elite rapidly gained wealth and power while millions of average Soviet citizens faced starvation. The Soviet Union’s push to industrialize at any cost resulted in frequent shortages of food and consumer goods. Bread lines were common throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Soviet citizens often did not have access to basic needs, such as clothing or shoes. Stalin eliminated all likely opposition to his leadership by terrorizing Communist Party officials and the public through his secret police. In 1917, Bolshevik revolutionaries came to power in the war-torn Russian Empire in a way that defied all predictions, including their own. Scarcely a lifespan later, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed as accidentally as it arose. The decades between witnessed drama on an epic scale--the chaos and hope of revolution, famines and purges, hard-won victory in history's most destructive war, and worldwide geopolitical conflict, all entwined around the dream of building a better society.

Although a committed socialist, Gorbachev felt that without the freedom of expression afforded by glasnost and the free-market reforms built into perestroika, the USSR would not survive against the capitalist systems of the West. His objective was to build a better implementation of communism and, in that, he failed. Six years later, in 1991, the USSR was disbanded and all the member states returned to an autonomous status.When Lenin died in 1924 and after a brief power struggle, his position as head of government was taken by the Georgian, Joseph Stalin. And thus began the darkest period in the history of the Soviet Union. Stalin’s interpretation of Leninist-Marxism led to the 1932-33 famine, the rapid expansion of the forced labour camps known as gulags, multiple political purges (particularly the Great Purge of 1936-38), and by 1937 he had become a dictator in charge of a totalitarian state and totally obsessed with self-glorification; a personality cult. He implemented a huge growth in patriotic statues in public places; constant praise in the state-owned press who positioned him as a benevolent and caring father figure; the subject of artistic creations in literature, paintings, film and music; extensive renaming of streets, places and geographic features; and a form of ornate pompous architecture based on Gothic and Baroque forms that became known as Stalinist architecture. The height of the Soviet Union and the Cold War The same happened in the other Soviet states (Transcaucasian republics, Ukraine, and Belarus) and, particularly, in the three Baltic states assigned to Russia after WW2. The whole USSR was seething with separatist movements and, ironically, it was a non-USSR state, East Germany, that sealed the fate of the USSR. East Germany came under communist control at the end of WW2 but was never formally admitted into the USSR, similar to other east European communist states such as Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Albania and Yugoslavia. In November 1989, the world watched at East Germans tore down the hated Berlin Wall and poured into West Berlin thus starting the process of Germany’s reunification. This very emotional moment in history gave strength of purpose to all other USSR and satellite states and on the 26 December, 1991, the dissolution of the USSR was complete. Mikhail Gorbachev resigned the day before saying his General Secretary office no longer existed and handed over his President of Russia position to Boris Yeltsin. When Yeltsin died in 2007, Vladimir Putin became the President and remains so to this day. The aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union Millions died during the Great Famine of 1932-1933. 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. Her explanation of how Soviet identity changed over the years of the Union's existence makes for excellent reading, though I am sure many would disagree with parts of her account. However, this is not a book to be read as political analysis nor as an evaluation of what socialism meant in the Union.

Following 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.

Why not also add these?

Soviet Russia arrived in the world accidentally and departed unexpectedly. More than a hundred years after the Russian Revolution, the tumultuous history of the Soviet Union continues to fascinate us and influence global politics. 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. Khrushchev And De-Stalinization