The History of the Soviet Union

After the revolutions of 1917 and a bloody civil war, the Soviet Union was founded on December 30, 1952. On December 21, 1991, it was dissolved. Between those two dates lay a period of 69 years in which the Soviet Union shaped the world – through Stalinist terror, by defeating the armies of Nazi Germany, as a nuclear power in the Cold War, and through Gorbachev's policy of openness and transparency. Its legacy still weighs on the post-Soviet region to this day. Within the union, Stalin caused famines, ordered deportations, founded gulags, and carried out arbitrary shootings. But the country also underwent a process of fundamental modernization, demonstrated not least by the fact that the first man in space was a Soviet. Susanne Schattenberg covers the years spent under the Soviet star and reveals their ongoing impact.