Russian Federation | Nation of Braveness

Following the October Revolution, a civil war broke out between the new regime and the counter-revolutionary White movement, while the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk concluded hostilities with the Central Powers in World War I. Russia lost its Ukrainian, Polish, Baltic, and Finnish territories by signing the treaty.

The Allied powers launched a military intervention in support of anti-Communist forces and both the Bolsheviks and White movement carried out campaigns of deportations and executions against each other, known respectively as theRed Terror and White Terror. By the end of the Russian Civil War the Russian economy and infrastructure were heavily damaged. During the same period, the famine of 1921 claimed 5 million victims.

The Russian SFSR together with three other Soviet republics formed the Soviet Union on 30 December 1922. Out of the15 republics that later constituted the Soviet Union, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the largest republic in terms of size and making up over half of the total USSR population, dominated the Soviet Union for its entire 69-year history; the USSR was often referred to, though incorrectly, as "Russia" and its people as "Russians".

Following Lenin's death in 1924, Joseph Stalin, an elected General Secretary of the Communist Party, managed to put down all opposition groups within the party and consolidate much power in his hands. Leon Trotsky, the main proponent of the world revolution, was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929, and Stalin's idea of socialism in one country became the primary line. In 1930s a number of open political trials gained much attention in the USSR and the world. The continued internal struggle in the Bolshevik party culminated in the Great Purge, a period of mass repressions in 1937-38, in which hundreds of thousands of people were executed, including experienced military leadership.

Since the end of 1920s, the government launched a planned economy, rapid industrialization of the largely rural country, and collectivization of its agriculture. Millions of citizens were relocated during the dekulakization campaign that accompanied the collectivization. Millions of people passed through the Gulag from 1929 to 1953,with millions more being deported and exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union.The temporary transitional disorganisation of the country's agriculture, combined with the harsh state policies and a drought, led to the famine of 1932–1933. However, though with a heavy price, the Soviet Union was transformed from an agrarian economy to a major industrial powerhouse in a short span of time.

In 1933, in Germany, Hitler and his Nazi party came to power, being outspoken enemies of communism and proponents of external aggression and German expansion. Very soon the Soviet foreign policy changed dramatically, completely dropping the idea of seeking the world revolution (the very mention of it was eradicated from the new 1936 Soviet Constitution). The USSR entered the League of Nations, and Soviet diplomacy tried to establish counter-Nazism security pacts with major European countries, but these attempts mostly failed.

The Appeasement policy of Great Britain and France towards Hitler's annexions of Ruhr, Austria and finally ofCzechoslovakia (following the Munich agreement of 1938) enlarged the might of Nazi Germany and put a threat of war to the Soviet Union. Around the same time the German Reich allied with Japanese Empire, a rival of the USSR on the Far East and an open enemy in the Soviet–Japanese Border Wars in 1938-1939.

In August of 1939, after another failure of talks with Britain and France, the Soviet government agreed to conclude the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Germany, pledging non-aggression between the two countries and dividing their spheres of influence in Eastern Europe. This allowed Hitler to finally start World War II and to conquer Poland,France and other countries acting on single front. At the same time the USSR was able to regain some of the former territories of the Russian Empire in Eastern Europe (see Soviet invasion of Poland and Winter War), and to gain one and a half more years for building up the Soviet military.

On 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany broke the non-aggression treaty and invaded the Soviet Union with the largest and most powerful invasion force in human history,^[74] opening the largest theater of the Second World War. Although the German army had considerable success early on, their onslaught was halted in the Battle of Moscow.

Subsequently the Germans were dealt major defeats first at the Battle of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942–1943, and then in the Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943. Another German failure was the battle of Leningrad, in which the city was fully blockaded on land between 1941–44 by German and Finnish forces, suffering starvation and more than a million deaths, but never surrendering.

Under Stalin's administration and the leadership of such prominent commanders as Georgy Zhukov and Konstantin Rokossovsky, Soviet forces drove through Eastern Europe in 1944–45 and captured Berlin in May of 1945. After marking this by the Moscow Victory Parade of 1945, the Soviet Army ousted Japanese from China's Manchukuo and North Korea, contributing to the allied victory over Japan.

1941–1945 period of World War II is known in Russia as Great Patriotic War. In this conflict, which included many of the most lethal battle operations in human history, Soviet military and civilian deaths were 10.6 million and 15.9 million respectively, accounting for about a third of all World War II casualties. The Soviet economy and infrastructure suffered massive devastation but the Soviet Union emerged as an acknowledged superpower.

The Red Army occupied Eastern Europe after the war, including the eastern half of Germany. Dependent socialist governments were installed in these satellite states. The USSR maintained control over these nations by many means, sometimes by military force, as in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Becoming the world's second nuclear weapons power, the USSR established the Warsaw Pact alliance and entered into a struggle for global dominance with the United States, which became known as the Cold War.

The Soviet Union exported its Communist ideology to newly formed independent allies, the People's Republic of China and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, while also helping these countries in industrialization and development. Subsequently the ideas of Communism gained ground inCuba and many other countries.

After Stalin's death and a short period of collective leadership, a new leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced the cult of Stalin's personality and started the process of de-Stalinization. Gulaglabor camps were abolished and a great many of prisoners released; the general easement of repressive policies became known later as Khruschev thaw.

In 1957 the Soviet Union launched the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, and the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to orbit the Earth aboard the first manned spacecraft, Vostok 1, on April 12, 1961. Tensions with the United States heightened when the two rivals clashed over the deployment of the U.S. Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Soviet missiles in Cuba.

Following the ousting of Khrushchev, another period of collective rule ensued, until Leonid Brezhnev established himself in the early 1970s as the pre-eminent figure in Soviet politics. Brezhnev's rule oversaw economic stagnation, since the reforms, attempted by the Prime Minister Alexey Kosygin, were stifled. Those reforms had been aimed into shifting the emphasis of the Soviet economy from heavy industry and military production to light industry and the production ofconsumer goods. However that would mean significant decentralization of economy and implementing capitalist-like elements, and the Communist leadership wouldn't accept this.

In 1979 the Soviet forces entered Afghanistan at the request of the existing communist government. The subsequent occupation drained economic resources and dragged on without achieving meaningful political results. Ultimately Soviet forces were withdrawn from Afghanistan in 1989 because of international opposition, persistent anti-Soviet guerilla warfare (enhanced by the U.S.), and a lack of support from Soviet citizens. Tensions rose between the U.S. and Soviet Union in the early 1980s, fueled by anti-Soviet rhetoric in the U.S., the ongoing Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, theSDI proposal, and the controversial downing in 1983 of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by the Soviets.

Prior to 1991, the Soviet economy was the second largest in the world, but during its last years it was afflicted by shortages of goods in grocery stores, huge budget deficits and explosive growth in money supply leading to inflation. From 1985 onwards, the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachevintroduced the policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) in an attempt to modernize the country and make it more democratic. However, this unexpectedly led to the rise of nationalist movements and dissolution of the Soviet Union.

In August 1991, an unsuccessful military coup, directed against Gorbachev and aimed at preserving the Soviet Union, instead led to its collapse. InRussian SFSR, Boris Yeltsin came to power and declared the end of socialist rule. The USSR splintered into fifteen independent republics and wasofficially dissolved in December 1991. Boris Yeltsin was elected the President of Russia in June 1991, in the first direct presidential election in Russian history.