Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics

Credit to the original Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics

The Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics (Russian: Союз Советских Cуверенных Республик Soyuz Sovyetskikh Suvyeruennykh Respublik, commonly referred to as the Soviet Union or the USSR), is a nation composed of many ethnic republics stretching from East Europe to the northwest Pacific Ocean. The Soviet Union is the largest nation in the world, and is the successor state to the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The Communist era (1917 - 1986)
Following the Russian Revolution and the victory of the communists, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was established as a federation on Dec. 30, 1922 and the New Economic Policy started which installed the community (called soviets) as owners of land and property. The death of Lenin on Jan. 21, 1924, precipitated an intraparty struggle between Joseph Stalin, general secretary of the party, and Trotsky, who favored swifter socialization at home and fomentation of revolution abroad. Trotsky was dismissed as commissar of war in 1925 and banished from the Soviet Union in 1929. He was murdered in Mexico City on Aug. 21, 1940, by a political agent. Stalin further consolidated his power by a series of purges in the late 1930s, liquidating prominent party leaders and military officers. Stalin assumed the premiership May 6, 1941.

Soviet foreign policy, at first friendly toward Germany and antagonistic toward Britain and France and then, after Hitler's rise to power in 1933, becoming anti-Fascist and pro-League of Nations, took an abrupt turn on Aug. 24, 1939, with the signing of a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany. The next month, Moscow joined in the German attack on Poland, seizing territory later incorporated into the Ukrainian and Byelorussian SSRs. The war with Finland (1939-40) added territory to the Karelian SSR set up March 31, 1940; the annexation of Bessarabia and Bukovina from Romania became part of the new Moldavian SSR on Aug. 2, 1940; and the annexation of the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in June 1940 created the 14th, 15th, and 16th Soviet Republics. The illegal annexation of the Baltic republics was never recognized by the U.S. for the 51 years leading up to Soviet recognition of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania's independence on Sept. 6, 1991. The Soviet-German collaboration ended abruptly with a lightning attack by Hitler on June 22, 1941, which seized 500,000 square miles of Russian territory before Soviet defenses, aided by U.S. and British arms, could halt it. The Soviet resurgence at Stalingrad from Nov. 1942 to Feb. 1943 marked the turning point in a long battle, ending in the final offensive of Jan. 1945. Then, after denouncing a 1941 nonaggression pact with Japan in April 1945, when Allied forces were nearing victory in the Pacific, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan on Aug. 8, 1945, and quickly occupied Manchuria, Karafuto, and the Kuril islands.

The USSR built a cordon of Communist states running from Poland in the north to Albania and Bulgaria in the south, including East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania, composed of the territories Soviet troops occupied at the war's end. With its Eastern front solidified, the Soviet Union launched a political offensive against the non-Communist West, moving first to block the Western access to Berlin. The Western powers countered with an airlift, completed unification of West Germany, and organized the defense of Western Europe in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Stalin died on March 6, 1953, and was succeeded the next day by G. M. Malenkov as premier.

The new power in the Kremlin was Nikita S. Khrushchev, first secretary of the party. Khrushchev formalized the Eastern European system into a Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) and a Warsaw Pact Treaty Organization as a counterweight to NATO. The Soviet Union exploded a hydrogen bomb in 1953, developed an intercontinental ballistic missile by 1957, sent the first satellite into space (Sputnik I) in 1957, and put Yuri Gagarin in the first orbital flight around the earth in 1961. Khrushchev's downfall stemmed from his decision to place Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba and then, when challenged by the U.S., backing down and removing the weapons. He was also blamed for the ideological break with China after 1963. Khrushchev was forced into retirement on Oct. 15, 1964, and was replaced by Leonid I. Brezhnev as first secretary of the party and Aleksei N. Kosygin as premier.

U.S. President Jimmy Carter and the ailing Brezhnev signed the SALT II treaty in Vienna on June 18, 1979, setting ceilings on each nation's arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles. The U.S. Senate refused to ratify the treaty because of the invasion of Afghanistan by Soviet troops on Dec. 27, 1979. On Nov. 10, 1982, Soviet radio and television announced the death of Leonid Brezhnev. Yuri V. Andropov, who had formerly headed the K.G.B., was chosen to succeed Brezhnev as general secretary. By mid-June 1983, Andropov had assumed all of Brezhnev's three titles.

After months of illness, Andropov died in Feb. 1984. Konstantin U. Chernenko, a 72-year-old party stalwart who had been close to Brezhnev, succeeded him as general secretary and, by mid-April, had also assumed the title of president. In the months following Chernenko's assumption of power, the Kremlin took on a hostile mood toward the West of a kind rarely seen since the height of the cold war 30 years before. Led by Moscow, all the Soviet bloc countries except Romania boycotted the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles for the U.S.-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games, in the view of most observers. After 13 months in office, Chernenko died on March 10, 1985. He had been ill much of the time and left only a minor imprint on Soviet history.

Chosen to succeed him as Soviet leader was Mikhail S. Gorbachev, at 54 the youngest man to take charge of the Soviet Union since Stalin. Under Gorbachev, the Soviet Union began its long-awaited shift to a new generation of leadership. Unlike his immediate predecessors, Gorbachev did not also assume the title of president but wielded power from the post of party general secretary. In a surprise move, Gorbachev elevated Andrei Gromyko, 75, for 28 years the Soviet Union's stony-faced foreign minister, to the largely ceremonial post of president. He installed a younger man with no experience in foreign affairs, Eduard Shevardnadze, 57, as foreign minister. The Soviet Union took much criticism in early 1986 over the April 24 meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear plant and its reluctance to give out any information on the accident.

Reforms of Gorbachev and collapse of communism (1987 - 2000)
Although many thought Gorbachev would be a hard-line enforcer of the Communist Regime in the USSR, he proved to be the opposite with the beginning of his reform policies: glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). Both of the policies allowed much more freedom of speech, information and press to the Soviet people and greatly appeased the west. When there was a democratic election in 1990, this was the final strike and George H. W. Bush (then president of the United States) and Gorbachev announced the end of the Cold War in 1990.

Gorbachev struck down a coup in 1991 that aimed to rescind his reforms and disallow the basic freedoms. The coup completely failed when one of the plotters told Gorbachev about it after they decided they did not want to participate in it. The Soviet people greatly appreciated this as the second election in Soviet history approached in 1994.

Government
USSR is a federation and formally a semi-presidential republic, wherein the President is the head of state and the Prime Minister is the head of government. The USSR is fundamentally structured as a representative democracy. Executive power is exercised by the government.

Legislative power is vested in the two chambers of the Federal Assembly. The government is regulated by a system of checks and balances defined by the Constitution of the USSR, which serves as the country's supreme legal document and as a social contract for the people of the USSR. The federal government is composed of three branches:


 * Legislative: The bicameral Federal Assembly, made up of the State Duma and the Federation Council adopts federal law, declares war, approves treaties, has the power of the purse, and has power of impeachment, by which it can remove the President.


 * Executive: The president is the commander-in-chief of the military, can veto legislative bills before they become law, and appoints the Cabinet and other officers, who administer and enforce federal laws and policies.


 * Judiciary: The Constitutional Court, Supreme Court, Supreme Court of Arbitration and lower federal courts, whose judges are appointed by the Federation Council on the recommendation of the president, interpret laws and can overturn laws they deem unconstitutional.

The president is elected by popular vote for a six-year term (eligible for a second term but constitutionally barred for a third consecutive term); election last held in 2008. Ministries of the government are composed of the premier and his deputies, ministers, and selected other individuals; all are appointed by the president on the recommendation of the Prime Minister (whereas the appointment of the latter requires the consent of the State Duma). The national legislature is the Federal Assembly, which consists of two chambers; the 450-member State Duma and the 182-member Federation Council.

Subdivisions
The USSR is a federation of 24 republics. These republics have equal representation—three delegates each—in the Federation Council. This is a list with explanations of what the divisions in the Soviet Union mean.


 * Republics: nominally autonomous; each has its own constitution, president, and parliament. Republics are allowed to establish their own official language alongside Russian but are represented by the federal government in international affairs and share the same military and currency with the rest of the federation. Republics are meant to be home to specific ethnic groups in the Soviet Union.
 * Oblasts (provinces): divisions of republics, with appointed governor from the republic's government and a locally elected legislature.
 * Krais (territories): essentially the same as oblasts. The "territory" designation is historic, and the title is usually given to frontier regions.
 * Autonomous Okrugs (autonomous districts): originally autonomous entities within oblasts and krais created for ethnic minorities, their status was elevated to that of federal subjects in the 1990s. With the exception of Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, all autonomous okrugs are still administratively subordinated to a krai or an oblast of which they are a part.
 * Autonomous Oblasts (Jewish Autonomous Oblast): autonomous oblasts where the governor is elected locally by the people in the area and there is generally greater autonomy, but less than normal republics. In 1990, all of them except the Jewish AO were elevated in status to that of a republic.
 * Federal cities (Moscow and St. Petersburg): major cities that function as heads of the Soviet government and culture.

Military
The USSR military is divided into the Ground Forces, Navy, and Air Force. There are also three independent arms of service: Strategic Rocket Forces, Military Space Forces, and the Airborne Troops. In 2006, the military had 0.937 million personnel on active duty.

USSR has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. It has the second largest fleet of ballistic missile submarines. USSRs tank force is the largest in the world, its surface navy and air force are among the strongest.

The country has a large and fully indigenous arms industry, producing most of its own military equipment with only few types of weapons imported. USSR is the world's top supplier of arms, a spot it has held since 2001, accounting for around 30% of worldwide weapons sales and exporting weapons to about 80 countries.

Demographics
Theres currently living 219,143,468 in the USSR. USSRs many ethnic groups speak some 100 languages. Russian is the only official language, but the Constitution gives the individual republics the right to make their native language co-official next to Russian.

Religion
USSR is a Secular nation, with now religion attached to the state and government. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Judaism are the traditional religions of the USSR, deemed part of Russia's "historical heritage" in a law passed in 1997. Estimates of believers widely fluctuate among sources, and some reports put the number of non-believers in Russia at 16–48% of the population. Russian Orthodoxy is the dominant religion in the Russian SSR. Christianity, Catholicism and Protestantism are the dominat religions in Ukrainian SSR, Belarussian SSR and Karelo-Finnish SSR, while Islam is the dominant religion in Kazakh SSR.

Education
USSR has a free education system guaranteed to all citizens by the Constitution, and has a literacy rate of 99.4%. Entry to higher education is highly competitive. As a result of great emphasis on science and technology in education, Soviet medical, mathematical, scientific, and space and aviation research is generally of a high order.

Before 1990 the course of school training in the Socialist Soviet Union was 10-years, but at the end of 1990 the 11-year course has been officially entered. Education in public secondary schools is free; first tertiary (university level) education is free with reservations: a substantial share of students is enrolled for full pay. In 2004 state spending for education amounted to 3.6% of GDP, or 13% of consolidated state budget.

The Government allocates funding to pay the tuition fees within an established quota, or number of students for each state institution. This is considered crucial because it provides access to higher education to all skilled students, as opposed to only those who can afford it. In addition, students are paid a small stipend and provided with free housing. Apart from public higher education institutions, many private ones have emerged to address the need for a skilled work-force for high-tech and emerging industries and economic sectors.