Soviet Union

At a glance

When and how was the Soviet Union founded?

The Soviet Union grew out of the revolutions of 1917. After the fall of the tsar, the short-lived Russian Republic of the Provisional Government was overthrown by the Bolsheviks in October 1917, and in the civil war that followed Soviet republics were set up in many borderlands of the old Russian Empire. For five years these Soviet republics were formally separate states bound to Soviet Russia by military and economic treaties; their history, and the drafting of the union treaty, are covered in that entry.

On 30 December 1922 the First Congress of Soviets of the USSR, meeting in Moscow, approved the Treaty on the Formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Its four members were the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (RSFSR), the Ukrainian and Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republics, and the Transcaucasian federation of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia. The first constitution of the USSR, adopted by the Second Congress of Soviets on 31 January 1924, declared that these republics united "into one union state", able to secure "both external security and internal economic prosperity, and freedom of national development of the peoples". Moscow was named the capital.

The border data behind this map draws the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1991. The same treaty of 1922 returned at the end: in December 1991 the leaders of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, describing themselves as "founder states of the USSR, signatories of the Union Treaty of 1922", declared that the Union was ceasing to exist.

How was the Soviet Union governed, and who led it?

On paper the Soviet Union was a federation of sovereign republics governed by elected councils, or soviets. The 1924 constitution made the Congress of Soviets the supreme organ, with a Central Executive Committee between congresses. The 1936 constitution, adopted on 5 December 1936, created the Supreme Soviet, listed eleven union republics and guaranteed in Article 17 that "each union republic retains the right freely to secede from the USSR". It also promised freedom of speech and that no one could be arrested "except by court decision or with the sanction of a procurator", promises the terror of the following years made hollow.

Real power lay with the Communist Party. The 1936 constitution called it "the leading core of all organisations of the working people, both public and state"; the 1977 constitution, in its Article 6, went further: "The leading and guiding force of the Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system, of all state organisations and public organisations, is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union." The party's leader was the most powerful person in the country, whatever his state office; the formal head of state, for decades Mikhail Kalinin, had little power of his own.

The republics changed over time. By 1936 the constitution listed eleven: Russia, Ukraine and Belarus; Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia, now separate republics instead of a Transcaucasian federation; and the Turkmen, Uzbek, Tajik, Kazakh and Kirghiz SSRs in Central Asia. In 1940 the Karelo-Finnish, Moldavian, Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian SSRs were added; the Karelo-Finnish republic was downgraded to an autonomous republic within the RSFSR by a law of 16 July 1956. The 1977 constitution lists fifteen union republics.

How did Stalin take power and remake the economy?

When Lenin died in January 1924, the struggle to succeed him lasted several years. Lenin had warned against Stalin. In a note dated 4 January 1923, he wrote that "Stalin is too rude and this defect … becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General", and proposed moving him. The warning was not acted on. Stalin outmanoeuvred his rivals one by one: on 14 November 1927 the Central Committee and Central Control Commission expelled Leon Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev from the party.

He then replaced the New Economic Policy, the limited market economy of the 1920s, with forced industrialisation through Five-Year Plans. "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries," he told industrial managers on 4 February 1931. "We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under."

The countryside paid for it. From the winter of 1929–30, peasants were driven into collective farms. In "Dizzy with Success", published in Pravda on 2 March 1930, Stalin claimed that "by February 20 of this year 50 per cent of the peasant farms throughout the U.S.S.R. had been collectivised", and then blamed local officials for the excesses. The campaign was scaled back, and by 1 January 1931 only 26 per cent of households were collectivised, according to the historians R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft, before it was pressed again. Peasants labelled as "kulaks" were deported: according to the demographer Anatoly Vishnevsky, 1,803,000 people in 1930–31 alone, with another 2,177,000 arriving in the "special settlements" in 1932–40. The law of 7 August 1932, known as the "law of three ears of grain", made theft of collective-farm property punishable by "shooting with confiscation of all property", or at least ten years in prison.

What caused the famine of 1932–33 and the Holodomor?

Collectivisation, ruthless grain procurement and the regime's response to the crisis caused one of the worst famines of the twentieth century. It struck hardest in Ukraine, the largely Ukrainian-populated Kuban in the North Caucasus, the Volga region and Kazakhstan. In Ukraine it is known as the Holodomor, "death by hunger"; in Kazakhstan, where the forced settlement of nomads had already caused mass death from 1930, as the Asharshylyk.

The death toll is disputed among demographers and historians:

• USSR-wide. Davies and Wheatcroft give a best estimate of 5.5 to 6.5 million famine deaths in 1932–33. Demographers working with the Ptoukha Institute in Kyiv and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute put excess mortality for the whole USSR at 8.7 million in 1932–34.
• Ukraine. The same Kyiv–Harvard team estimates 3.9 million excess deaths in 1932–34, plus a birth deficit of 600,000; the historian Andrea Graziosi gives 3.5 to 3.8 million.
• Kazakhstan. Graziosi gives 1.3 to 1.5 million deaths, 33 to 38 per cent of all Kazakhs; the historian Sarah Cameron writes of "more than 1.5 million", a quarter of the republic's population.

The regime made the famine worse by its decisions. A directive signed by Molotov and Stalin on 22 January 1933 blamed the "mass departure" of peasants from Ukraine and the Kuban "for bread" on "enemies of Soviet power" and agents of Poland, and ordered those who left to be arrested and sent back. The word "famine" itself was banned; in Ukraine, Graziosi notes, it was first used officially in December 1987.

Whether the Holodomor was genocide is debated. Graziosi divides scholars into those who support the genocide thesis and those who treat the famine as a "complex phenomenon", and concludes that after September 1932 "Stalin at a certain moment decided to use hunger to break the peasants' opposition to collectivization". Davies and Wheatcroft, while stating that Stalin's "policies towards the peasants were ruthless and brutal", describe a leadership struggling with a famine "caused partly by their wrongheaded policies, but … unexpected and undesirable". Parliaments have taken positions too. The German Bundestag, in a resolution of 30 November 2022, called the famine "politically induced" (politisch herbeigeführt), stated that from today's perspective a historical-political classification as genocide "suggests itself", and declared that it shares that classification.

What was the Great Terror?

The Great Terror of 1937–38 was a campaign of mass arrests and executions organised by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, on the orders of the party leadership. Its legal tools had been prepared since the murder of the senior party leader Sergei Kirov in Leningrad on 1 December 1934. A law passed that same day ordered that cases of "terrorist acts" be investigated within ten days, tried without the parties, and that death sentences be carried out "immediately" with no appeal. Graziosi writes that Stalin "most probably did not organize, but quite certainly 'creatively' used" the murder.

The terror reached into the party elite and the army, but most of its victims were ordinary people. NKVD Operational Order No. 00447 of 30 July 1937, signed by Nikolai Yezhov, set regional quotas for "former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements": its limits add up to about 76,000 people to be shot and 193,000 to be sent to camps, figures the order called "approximate" and which regional NKVD chiefs could exceed only with Yezhov's approval. Whole national groups were also moved: in 1936 some 69,300 Poles from the border zone with Poland, and in 1937 some 172,000 Koreans from the Far East, whom Ellman calls the first Soviet people to be deported as a whole.

The scale is known from the NKVD's own records. A report by the 1st Special Department of the Soviet Interior Ministry, signed by Colonel Pavlov on 11 December 1953, counted for 1937–38 1,575,259 arrests, 1,344,923 convictions and 681,692 death sentences. Adding deaths in prisons and camps, the economist Michael Ellman estimated total repression deaths in 1937–38 at 950,000 to 1.2 million; Wheatcroft and Davies had earlier suggested about 1 to 1.5 million. In his Secret Speech of 1956, Khrushchev told the party congress that of the 139 members and candidates of the Central Committee elected in 1934, "98 persons, that is, 70 percent, were arrested and shot (mostly in 1937-38)". The mass operations were halted by a resolution of 17 November 1938, which banned "any mass operations of arrest and deportation".

The terror also struck the statisticians. The census of 6 January 1937 counted about 162 million people, far fewer than the 168 million Stalin had claimed for the end of 1933; the gap reflected the famine years as well as inflated earlier estimates. On 25 September 1937 the Council of People's Commissars declared the census defective; its organisers were arrested, and the head of the statistical administration, Ivan Kraval', and the census bureau chief, Olimpy Kvitkin, were shot. A new census in January 1939 was published with a total of 170,557,093.

What was the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact?

On 23 August 1939 the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop signed a ten-year non-aggression treaty in Moscow. A secret additional protocol divided eastern Europe into spheres of influence: Finland, Estonia and Latvia fell to the Soviet side; Poland was to be divided "approximately by the line of the rivers Narew, Vistula, and San"; and the Soviet side declared its "interest in Bessarabia". Fifty years later, on 24 December 1989, the Congress of People's Deputies declared the secret protocols "legally untenable and invalid from the moment of signing".

After Germany invaded Poland, a Soviet note of 17 September told the Polish ambassador that the Red Army would cross the border "to take under its protection the life and property of the population of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia"; the territories of the Second Polish Republic were divided, and a further treaty of 28 September moved Lithuania into the Soviet sphere. In the spring of 1940 the NKVD shot Polish officers, police and officials held as prisoners. A note by the KGB chairman Alexander Shelepin of 3 March 1959 gives the total as 21,857, including 4,421 in the Katyn forest near Smolensk.

The Soviet Union attacked Finland on 30 November 1939. The Winter War ended with the Moscow peace treaty of 12 March 1940, under which the Republic of Finland ceded the whole Karelian Isthmus with Vyborg and the shores of Lake Ladoga. In the summer of 1940 the Soviet Union annexed the three Baltic states and Romanian Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Laws of early August 1940 admitted the Moldavian (2 August), Lithuanian (3 August), Latvian (5 August) and Estonian (6 August) SSRs into the Union; a further law of 2 August gave northern Bukovina and southern Bessarabia to Ukraine.

What happened when Germany invaded in 1941?

At 4 a.m. on 22 June 1941, as Molotov announced on the radio, German troops attacked "without a declaration of war". According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "three million German soldiers were reinforced by Finnish, Romanian, Hungarian, Italian, Slovak, and Croatian troops". By late October Minsk, Smolensk, Kyiv, Odesa and Kharkiv had fallen, and vast numbers of Red Army soldiers had been encircled and captured.

On 30 June 1941 a State Defence Committee under Stalin was given "all fullness of power in the state", and on 3 July Stalin spoke on the radio, addressing his listeners as "brothers and sisters". Behind the front, according to Soviet data quoted by later historians, 1,523 large enterprises were moved east by early 1942, most of them to the Urals, the Volga region and Siberia.

The war turned on a few great battles, dated here as in the Russian General Staff study edited by Grigory Krivosheev:

• Moscow. The defensive operation lasted from 30 September to 5 December 1941; the Soviet counter-offensive from 5 December 1941 to 7 January 1942 drove the Germans back from the capital.
• Leningrad. The Germans cut the city off by land on 8 September 1941, when Shlisselburg fell. Soviet troops opened a land corridor on 18 January 1943 and lifted the blockade completely on 27 January 1944. Most of the dead starved. Soviet estimates of 1943–1952 counted 632,000 to 642,000 civilian deaths; later estimates range above 800,000, and some reach 1.5 million.
• Stalingrad. The defensive operation ran from 17 July to 18 November 1942; the counter-offensive that began on 19 November encircled the German forces in the city, and the last of them surrendered on 2 February 1943. In the final phase alone, from 10 January, over 91,000 prisoners were taken, including 24 generals.
• Kursk. The Red Army held a German summer offensive between 5 and 23 July 1943 and then went over to the attack.
• Berlin. The final operation began on 16 April 1945. Germany's unconditional surrender took effect at 23:01 Central European Time on 8 May, already 9 May in Moscow, which is why Russia celebrates Victory Day on 9 May.

The German occupation brought the Holocaust to Soviet territory. According to the USHMM, "at least 1.5 million and possibly more than 2 million" Jews were murdered in mass shootings or gas vans on Soviet territory; at Babyn Yar outside Kyiv, 33,771 Jews were shot on 29–30 September 1941. Soviet prisoners of war died in vast numbers: the USHMM states that about 5.7 million fell into German hands and some 3.3 million died, while Krivosheev counts 4,559,000 servicemen missing or captured.

The Western Allies sent supplies. The first American Lend-Lease aid was on its way by the end of October 1941, and American deliveries to the Soviet Union totalled $11.3 billion. Their weight is debated. The Soviet planning chief Nikolai Voznesensky put all Allied deliveries at "only about 4 per cent" of Soviet domestic production; the Russian politician and author Nikolai Ryzhkov, agreeing with the American historian Warren Kimball, puts deliveries of industrial goods at about 7 per cent of Soviet industrial output.

How many Soviet people died in the Second World War?

About 27 million. A state commission set up under Gorbachev in 1989 calculated, by comparing the population before and after the war, that the Soviet Union lost 26.6 million people between 22 June 1941 and the end of 1945. The figure was announced at the Supreme Soviet in May 1990 as "almost 27 million". The demographers Evgeny Andreev, Leonid Darsky and Tatiana Kharkova, whose work underlay it, considered 26 to 27 million the most accurate range.

The figure changed with the politics of each era. In March 1946 Stalin gave an official figure of 7 million; under Khrushchev it was raised to 20 million. Of the 26.6 million, the Krivosheev study counts 8,668,400 deaths among the armed forces: killed, died of wounds or disease, executed by military tribunals or not returned from captivity. Most of the dead were therefore civilians. Michael Ellman and Sergei Maksudov point out that the total also includes victims of Soviet repression during the war and Soviet citizens who died fighting on the German side. Figures of 40 million or more, sometimes heard, include the children who were never born because of the war: Ellman and Maksudov calculated a hypothetical total demographic loss of 35 to 36 million, or about 40 million on pre-war birth rates.

The regime was harsh to its own soldiers too. Stalin's Order No. 227 of 28 July 1942, "Not a step back!", set up blocking detachments to shoot "panic-mongers and cowards" on the spot, and penal companies. According to Krivosheev, 427,910 men were sent to penal battalions and companies during the war.

Which peoples did Stalin deport?

During the war the regime accused entire nationalities of collaboration and deported them to Siberia, Kazakhstan and Central Asia. A decree of 28 August 1941 ordered the resettlement of the Germans living in the Volga region, and a further decree of 7 September 1941 in effect abolished their autonomous republic, dividing its territory between the Saratov and Stalingrad regions. The decree on the Chechens and Ingush of March 1944 justified their removal with the claim that "many Chechens and Ingush betrayed the Motherland". Between 1943 and 1944 the North Caucasus and Crimea followed. According to an NKVD report of September 1944, Germans, Karachays, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Kalmyks and Crimean Tatars, 1,514,000 people in all, had been deported as whole peoples.

The operation against the Chechens and Ingush alone involved 100,000 NKVD troops and 19,000 operatives. Many more deportees died after arrival in the special settlements, where on 1 October 1945 a total of 2,230,500 people of all categories were held. In 2015 Ukraine's parliament recognised the deportation of the Crimean Tatars as genocide and made 18 May a day of remembrance.

How did the Cold War begin, and how did Stalin's rule end?

Victory made the Soviet Union a world power. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945 Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan "in two or three months after Germany has surrendered", in exchange for southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands; Poland's eastern frontier was to follow the Curzon Line. The Potsdam Conference agreed in principle to the "ultimate transfer to the Soviet Union of the City of Koenigsberg", renamed Kaliningrad on 4 July 1946. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan from 9 August 1945, and Czechoslovakia ceded Transcarpathia by a treaty of 29 June 1945.

In eastern and central Europe, communist governments took power under Soviet protection. In September 1947 the Cominform was founded to coordinate the communist parties; on 24 June 1948 Soviet forces blockaded West Berlin, until 12 May 1949; and on 29 August 1949 the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. In Korea, divided at the 38th parallel, the Soviet Union backed Kim Il Sung's North.

At home, Stalin's last years were grim. A famine in 1946–47 killed more than a million people, according to the historian Veniamin Zima. A party resolution of 14 August 1946 attacked the writers Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova; from January 1949 a campaign against "cosmopolitans" targeted critics and intellectuals; and leaders of the Leningrad party were shot on 1 October 1950. On 13 January 1953 Pravda announced the arrest of a group of "saboteur-doctors" accused of killing Soviet leaders, whom TASS linked to the American Jewish aid organisation known as the "Joint".

Stalin suffered a stroke on 1 March 1953 at his dacha near Moscow and died on 5 March. On 4 April the Interior Ministry announced that the doctors' arrests had been "incorrect" and that they were fully rehabilitated.

What changed under Khrushchev?

After Stalin's death a collective leadership took over. Malenkov became head of government, Lavrenty Beria ran the police, and Nikita Khrushchev led the party secretariat. An amnesty of 27 March 1953 released, according to the historian James von Geldern, over 1.5 million prisoners within three months. Beria was arrested on 26 June 1953 and executed in December.

On 25 February 1956, in a closed session of the 20th Party Congress, Khrushchev denounced Stalin's "cult of personality" and the terror against the party. The speech was not published in the Soviet Union, but it began a "thaw" and mass rehabilitations. Its limits soon became clear. When Hungarians rose against their communist government, Soviet troops launched a massive attack on Budapest on 4 November 1956. The Heinrich Böll Foundation estimates that some 2,500 insurgents and 700 Soviet soldiers were killed; the Hungarian historian Ferenc A. Szabó gives more than 3,000 deaths in the fighting and official Soviet losses of 669 killed and 51 missing.

Khrushchev survived an attempt by Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich and other old Stalinists to remove him in June 1957. He launched the Virgin Lands campaign, which ploughed up 19 million hectares of steppe, mainly in northern Kazakhstan and the Altai region, in 1954 alone. The space programme gave the Soviet Union its greatest prestige: Sputnik 1, an 83-kilogram aluminium sphere, became the first artificial satellite on 4 October 1957, and on 12 April 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, in a flight of 108 minutes.

Relations with the United States swung between summits and crises. On 1 May 1960 an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over Soviet territory; after the Vienna summit with Kennedy in June 1961, the East German government sealed off West Berlin on 13 August 1961 with barriers that became the Berlin Wall. In October 1962 the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Kennedy ordered a naval "quarantine" on 22 October, and on 28 October Khrushchev announced that the weapons would be dismantled and returned to the Soviet Union; Robert Kennedy had secretly promised that American Jupiter missiles would be removed from Turkey.

At home, nationwide price rises for meat and butter in 1962 led to a strike at the locomotive works in Novocherkassk. On 2 June troops fired on the demonstrators. According to KGB data published by the historian Tatyana Bocharova, 26 people were killed and 87 injured; other historians give 24 dead. Seven participants were later executed. In October 1964 Khrushchev's colleagues removed him, and TASS announced that he had been replaced "on grounds of age and health".

Was the Brezhnev era really a time of stagnation?

Leonid Brezhnev led the Soviet Union for eighteen years, a period of stability for the elite and military parity with the United States, but also of economic slowdown, repression of dissent and a costly war in Afghanistan. It is often called the era of "stagnation", a label that the economic data partly support.

In Eastern Europe, Brezhnev ended the Prague Spring by force: troops of the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia on the night of 20–21 August 1968. Pravda justified the invasion on 26 September with what the West called the Brezhnev Doctrine: socialist countries had freedom to choose their path, but "any decision of theirs must damage neither socialism in their own country, nor the fundamental interests of the other socialist countries". Relations with China broke down entirely; in clashes on Damansky (Zhenbao) Island on the Ussuri border between 2 and 22 March 1969, the Soviet side lost 58 men killed.

The 1970s were the years of détente. Brezhnev and Richard Nixon signed the SALT I arms limitation agreement in Moscow on 26 May 1972, and on 1 August 1975 the Soviet Union signed the Helsinki Final Act, which recognised Europe's post-war borders but also committed the signatories to human rights. Dissidents used that commitment. The physicist Andrei Sakharov, winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, was exiled to Gorky on 22 January 1980; between 1970 and 1988, according to the demographer Mark Tolts, about 291,000 Soviet Jews and their relatives emigrated.

Détente ended in Afghanistan. Soviet troops entered the country on 25 December 1979 and installed a new government in Kabul; the United States and 55 other countries boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics. In August 1989 Pravda published, for the first time, a year-by-year breakdown of 13,833 Soviet soldiers killed in Afghanistan; later Russian military statistics give a somewhat higher total that could not be checked for this entry.

How badly the economy performed is still debated. The official statistics claimed per-capita growth of about 6 per cent a year from 1928 to 1987; Western estimates, summarised by William Easterly and Stanley Fischer, put it at 3.0 per cent, and the Soviet economist Grigory Khanin lower still. "All series show growth declining sharply since the 1950s," Easterly and Fischer wrote: Soviet growth was "significantly above the world average in the 1950s, and significantly below even the poor world growth of the 1980s". A 1991 report by the US General Accounting Office noted that critics charged that the CIA, the main Western source of such estimates, had "seriously miscalculated both the growth of Soviet GNP and its size relative to U.S. GNP". Meanwhile the population kept growing, from 208.8 million in the 1959 census to 241.7 million in 1970 and 262.4 million in 1979.

What were perestroika and glasnost?

Konstantin Chernenko died on the evening of 10 March 1985, and the next day the party leadership chose Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary. Gorbachev wanted to save the Soviet system by reforming it. His programme became known as perestroika ("restructuring"), and its driving force, in the words of the Gorbachev Foundation, was glasnost ("openness").

The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine on 26 April 1986 showed both the old secrecy and the need for change. According to the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), it was "the most serious accident ever to occur in the nuclear power industry". Of 134 emergency workers who developed acute radiation sickness, 28 died in 1986, and two more people died at the reactor unit of injuries unrelated to radiation; about 115,000 people were evacuated in 1986 and about 220,000 more were later relocated from Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. In 2005 an international team convened by the World Health Organization and other UN bodies concluded that "up to 4000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure".

Gorbachev's foreign policy transformed the Cold War. On 8 December 1987 he and Ronald Reagan signed the INF Treaty in Washington, eliminating a whole class of nuclear missiles. Under the Geneva Accords of 14 April 1988, Soviet troops began leaving Afghanistan, and the last left on 15 February 1989. Gorbachev's decision "to loosen the Soviet yoke on the countries of Eastern Europe", in the words of the US State Department's historians, led to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the end of communist rule across the region.

At home, a constitutional reform of 1 December 1988 created a Congress of People's Deputies of 2,250 members, elected on 26 March 1989 with a choice of candidates, which the Gorbachev Foundation calls the first parliament in Soviet history chosen in free elections. On 14 March 1990 the party's monopoly in Article 6 of the constitution was rewritten so that the Communist Party and "other political parties" would "participate" in politics; the next day the Congress elected Gorbachev the first President of the USSR. Economic reform moved more hesitantly, beginning with the Law on Cooperatives of 26 May 1988.

Why did the Soviet Union collapse?

Historians still debate the weight of the causes: a failing economy, the loss of control that came with glasnost, Gorbachev's own choices and Western pressure. What the documents show clearly is that the Union was dissolved from within, by the republics and their leaders, after national movements had grown into demands for sovereignty and independence.

The national question returned with force from 1988. On 20 February 1988 the soviet of the Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous region asked to be transferred from Azerbaijan to Armenia. Soviet troops used violence against demonstrators: in Tbilisi on 9 April 1989, where a parliamentary commission chaired by Anatoly Sobchak investigated "the deaths of the 19 demonstrators"; in Baku on 19–20 January 1990, where Azerbaijan's parliament later counted 131 dead; and in Vilnius on 13 January 1991, where 14 people were killed in the Soviet assault around the television tower.

In the Baltic states the movements were peaceful. On 23 August 1989, the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, "more than a million people", according to UNESCO, joined hands in the Baltic Way, a 600-kilometre human chain from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius. On 11 March 1990 Lithuania declared the restoration of its independence, "trampled by a foreign power in 1940"; the Soviet Congress declared the act void. Then the republics declared their sovereignty one by one, the RSFSR on 12 June 1990 and Ukraine on 16 July 1990 among them. A secession law of 3 April 1990 required a referendum with at least two thirds of all residents entitled to vote in favour, followed by a transition of up to five years.

Gorbachev tried to save the Union with a new treaty. A referendum on 17 March 1991 asked whether voters considered it necessary to preserve the USSR "as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics in which the rights and freedoms of a person of any nationality will be fully guaranteed". According to the official results, 80.0 per cent of those eligible voted, and 76.4 per cent of them said yes. But Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, Armenia and Moldova held no official vote, and Kazakhstan asked its own question, about a "Union of equal sovereign states".

The new treaty was to be signed on 20 August 1991. On 19 August hardliners in the leadership, including the vice-president Gennady Yanaev, the KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov and the defence minister Dmitry Yazov, declared that Gorbachev was unable to carry out his duties "for health reasons" and announced a state emergency. Boris Yeltsin, the president of the RSFSR, called it "a right-wing, reactionary, anti-constitutional coup" and spoke from a tank in front of the Russian parliament building; the coup collapsed within three days. On 24 August Ukraine declared independence, and most other republics followed within weeks. The USSR Supreme Soviet suspended the Communist Party's activity throughout the country on 29 August.

The end came in December. On 1 December 1991 more than 90 per cent of Ukrainian voters confirmed independence. On 8 December the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, meeting in the Belovezha forest, declared that "the USSR as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality is ceasing its existence" and founded the Commonwealth of Independent States. Russia's parliament denounced the 1922 Union Treaty on 12 December, and on 21 December eleven republics declared at Alma-Ata that "with the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ceases to exist". On 25 December Gorbachev resigned, saying that "the line of dismembering the country and disuniting the state has prevailed, which I cannot accept". On 26 December the Soviet of the Republics, the upper house of the Supreme Soviet, formally declared that the USSR had ceased to exist.

What is the legacy of the Soviet Union?

Fifteen independent states took the place of the union republics. Russia claimed the Soviet Union's international position: in a letter of 24 December 1991, Yeltsin informed the UN Secretary-General that the USSR's membership in the United Nations, "including the Security Council", was being continued by the Russian Federation with the support of the Commonwealth states.

Memory of the Soviet Union divides its successor states. Lithuania's independence act of 1990 spoke of rights "trampled by a foreign power in 1940"; in Russia, nostalgia has remained strong. In regular surveys by the independent Levada Center, the share of Russians who regret the collapse of the USSR peaked at 75 per cent in December 2000, fell to 49 per cent in December 2012 and rose again to 66 per cent in November 2018; the most common regret was the destruction of a unified economic system.

Vladimir Putin's words of 25 April 2005 are often quoted. In his address to the Federal Assembly he said that "the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century" (in the Kremlin's own English version, "a major geopolitical disaster of the century"), adding that "tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory". The often-quoted phrase "of the 20th century" is not in the text.

Common myths about the Soviet Union

Timeline of the Soviet Union

What the map shows next

The border data draws the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1991; at 1960 on the map it reaches from the Baltic to the Pacific. Before it, the same space appears as the Russian Empire and, in 1920–21, as the Republics of the Soviet Union. After 1991 the map shows fifteen states in its place, among them the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the Republic of Lithuania. Russia's story continues in the Russian Federation entry; that of the second-largest republic in Ukraine.