A report on Soviet Union

Lenin, Trotsky and Kamenev celebrating the second anniversary of the October Revolution

The Russian famine of 1921–22 killed an estimated 5 million people.

Construction of the bridge through the Kolyma (part of the Road of Bones from Magadan to Jakutsk) by the workers of Dalstroy.

Five Marshals of the Soviet Union in 1935. Only two of them – Budyonny and Voroshilov – survived Great Purge. Blyukher, Yegorov and Tukhachevsky were executed.

The Battle of Stalingrad, considered by many historians as a decisive turning point of World War II.

From left to right, the Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill confer in Tehran, 1943.

Map showing greatest territorial extent of the Soviet Union and the states that it dominated politically, economically and militarily in 1960, after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 but before the official Sino-Soviet split of 1961 (total area: c. 35,000,000 km2)

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (left) with US President John F. Kennedy in Vienna, 3 June 1961.

Nikolai Podgorny visiting Tampere, Finland on 16 October 1969

Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev and US President Jimmy Carter sign the SALT II arms limitation treaty in Vienna on 18 June 1979

Mikhail Gorbachev in one-to-one discussions with US President Ronald Reagan

The Pan-European Picnic took place in August 1989 on the Hungarian-Austrian border.

T-80 tank on Red Square during the August Coup

Changes in national boundaries after the end of the Cold War

Internally displaced Azerbaijanis from Nagorno-Karabakh, 1993

Country emblems of the Soviet Republics before and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union (note that the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (fifth in the second row) no longer exists as a political entity of any kind and the emblem is unofficial)

Sukarno and Voroshilov in a state meeting on 1958.

1960s Cuba-Soviet friendship poster with Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev

Soviet stamp 1974 for friendship between USSR and India as both nations shared strong ties, although India was a prominent member of Non-Aligned Movement

Gerald Ford, Andrei Gromyko, Leonid Brezhnev and Henry Kissinger speaking informally at the Vladivostok Summit in 1974

Mikhail Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush signing bilateral documents during Gorbachev's official visit to the United States in 1990

Military parade on the Red Square in Moscow, 7 November 1964

The Grand Kremlin Palace, the seat of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, 1982

Nationalist anti-government riots in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, 1990

A medium-range SS-20 non-ICBM ballistic missile, the deployment of which in the late 1970s launched a new arms race in Europe in which NATO deployed Pershing II missiles in West Germany, among other things

From left to right: Yuri Gagarin, Pavel Popovich, Valentina Tereshkova and Nikita Khrushchev at the Lenin's Mausoleum in 1963

The DneproGES, one of many hydroelectric power stations in the Soviet Union

Workers of the Salihorsk potash plant, Belarus, 1968

Volzhsky Avtomobilny Zavod (VAZ) in 1969

Soviet stamp depicting the 30th anniversary of the International Atomic Energy Agency, published in 1987, a year following the Chernobyl nuclear disaster

Soviet stamp showing the orbit of Sputnik 1

Population of the Soviet Union (red) and the post-Soviet states (blue) from 1961 to 2009 as well as projection (dotted blue) from 2010 to 2100

Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, visiting the Lviv confectionery, Ukrainian SSR, 1967

Young Pioneers at a Young Pioneer camp in Kazakh SSR

Svaneti man in Mestia, Georgian SSR, 1929

An early Soviet-era poster discouraging unsafe abortion practices

Cover of Bezbozhnik in 1929, magazine of the Society of the Godless. The first five-year plan of the Soviet Union is shown crushing the gods of the Abrahamic religions.

The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow during its demolition in 1931

A paranja burning ceremony in the Uzbek SSR as part of Soviet Hujum policies

World War II military deaths in Europe by theater and by year. Nazi Germany suffered 80% of its military deaths in the Eastern Front.

2001 stamp of Moldova shows Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space

People in Donetsk celebrate the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, 9 May 2018

Soviet singer-songwriter, poet and actor Vladimir Vysotsky in 1979

Valeri Kharlamov represented the Soviet Union at 11 Ice Hockey World Championships, winning eight gold medals, two silvers and one bronze

One of the many impacts of the approach to the environment in the USSR is the Aral Sea (see status in 1989 and 2014)

Landscape near Karabash, Chelyabinsk Oblast, an area that was previously covered with forests until acid rainfall from a nearby copper smelter killed all vegetation

Ethnographic map of the Soviet Union, 1941

Transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991.

- Soviet Union

397 related topics with Alpha

1937 portrait of Stalin used in state propaganda

Joseph Stalin

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In 1894 Stalin began his studies at the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary (pictured here in the 1870s).

Police photograph of Stalin, taken in 1902, when he was 23 years old.

Stalin first met Vladimir Lenin at a 1905 conference in Tampere. Lenin became "Stalin's indispensable mentor".

A mugshot of Stalin made in 1911 by the Tsarist secret police.

The first issue of Pravda, the Bolshevik newspaper of which Stalin was editor

Joseph Stalin in 1917 as a young People's Commissar.

The Moscow Kremlin, which Stalin moved into in 1918

Stalin wearing a Order of the Red Banner. According to info published in Pravda (Pravda. 24 December 1939. No: 354 (8039)), this photograph was taken in Ordzhonikidze's house in 1921.

Stalin (right) confers with an ailing Lenin at Gorky in September 1922

(From left to right) Stalin, Alexei Rykov, Lev Kamenev, and Grigori Zinoviev in 1925

Stalin and his close associates Anastas Mikoyan and Sergo Ordzhonikidze in Tbilisi, 1925

Aleksei Grigorievich Stakhanov with a fellow miner; Stalin's government initiated the Stakhanovite movement to encourage hard work. It was partly responsible for a substantial rise in production during the 1930s.

Photograph taken of the 1931 demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow in order to make way for the Palace of the Soviets

Soviet famine of 1932–33. Areas of most disastrous famine marked with black.

Review of Soviet armoured fighting vehicles used to equip the Republican People's Army during the Spanish Civil War

Exhumed mass grave of the Vinnytsia massacre

Victims of Stalin's Great Terror in the Bykivnia mass graves

Stalin greeting the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in the Kremlin, 1939

With all the men at the front, women dig anti-tank trenches around Moscow in 1941

The center of Stalingrad after liberation, 2 February 1943

The Big Three: Stalin, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the Tehran Conference, November 1943

British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, U.S. President Harry S. Truman and Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference, July 1945

Stalin at his 71st birthday celebration with (left to right) Mao Zedong, Nikolai Bulganin, Walter Ulbricht and Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal

Stalin's casket on howitzer carriage drawn by horses, caught on camera by US assistant army attaché Major Martin Manhoff from the embassy balcony

A mourning parade in honour of Stalin in Dresden, East Germany

A statue of Stalin in Grūtas Park near Druskininkai, Lithuania; it originally stood in Vilnius, Lithuania

Lavrenti Beria with Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, on his lap and Stalin seated in the background smoking a pipe. Photographed at Stalin's dacha near Sochi in the mid-1930s.

Chinese Marxists celebrate Stalin's seventieth birthday in 1949

A poster of Stalin at the 3rd World Festival of Youth and Students in East Berlin, East Germany, 1951

Interior of the Joseph Stalin Museum in Gori, Georgia

A contingent from the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist–Leninist) carrying a banner of Stalin at a May Day march through London in 2008

Stalin's tomb in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis

Marxist–Leninist activists from the opposition Communist Party of the Russian Federation laying wreaths at Stalin's Moscow grave in 2009

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; 18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death in 1953.

Allied troops in Vladivostok, August 1918, during the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War

Cold War

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The "Big Three" at the Yalta Conference: Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin, 1945

Post-war Allied occupation zones in Germany

Clement Attlee, Harry S. Truman and Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference, 1945

Post-war territorial changes in Europe and the formation of the Eastern Bloc, the so-called "Iron Curtain"

Remains of the "Iron Curtain" in the Czech Republic

C-47s unloading at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin during the Berlin Blockade

President Truman signs the North Atlantic Treaty with guests in the Oval Office.

Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin in Moscow, December 1949

General Douglas MacArthur, UN Command CiC (seated), observes the naval shelling of Incheon, Korea from USS Mt. McKinley, 15 September 1950

US Marines engaged in street fighting during the liberation of Seoul, September 1950

NATO and Warsaw Pact troop strengths in Europe in 1959

From left to right: Soviet head of state Kliment Voroshilov, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and Finnish president Urho Kekkonen at Moscow in 1960.

The maximum territorial extent of Soviet influence, after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and before the official Sino-Soviet split of 1961

Western colonial empires in Asia and Africa all collapsed in the years after 1945.

1961 Soviet stamp commemorating Patrice Lumumba, assassinated prime minister of the Republic of the Congo

The United States reached the Moon in 1969.

Che Guevara (left) and Fidel Castro (right) in 1961

Soviet and American tanks face each other at Checkpoint Charlie during the Berlin Crisis of 1961.

Aerial photograph of a Soviet missile site in Cuba, taken by a US spy aircraft, 1 November 1962

NATO and Warsaw Pact troop strengths in Europe in 1973

US combat operations during the Battle of Ia Drang, South Vietnam, November 1965

A manifestation of the Finlandization period: in April 1970, a Finnish stamp was issued in honor of the 100th anniversary of Vladimir Lenin's birth and the Lenin Symposium held in Tampere. The stamp was the first Finnish stamp issued about a foreign person.

The invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union in 1968 was one of the biggest military operations on European soil since World War II.

Suharto of Indonesia attending funeral of five generals slain in 30 September Movement, 2 October 1965

Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat with Henry Kissinger in 1975

Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet shaking hands with Henry Kissinger in 1976

Cuban tank in the streets of Luanda, Angola, 1976

During the Khmer Rouge regime led by Pol Pot, 1.5 to 2 million people died due to the policies of his four-year premiership.

Mao Zedong and US President Richard Nixon, during his visit in China

Leonid Brezhnev and Jimmy Carter sign the SALT II treaty, 18 June 1979, in Vienna

Iranian people protesting against the Pahlavi dynasty, during the Iranian Revolution

Protest in Amsterdam against the deployment of Pershing II missiles in Europe, 1981

The Soviet invasion during Operation Storm-333 on 26 December 1979

President Reagan publicizes his support by meeting with Afghan mujahideen leaders in the White House, 1983.

President Reagan with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during a working luncheon at Camp David, December 1984

The world map of military alliances in 1980

US and USSR/Russian nuclear weapons stockpiles, 1945–2006

Delta 183 launch vehicle lifts off, carrying the Strategic Defense Initiative sensor experiment "Delta Star".

After ten-year-old American Samantha Smith wrote a letter to Yuri Andropov expressing her fear of nuclear war, Andropov invited Smith to the Soviet Union.

Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan sign the INF Treaty at the White House, 1987.

The beginning of the 1990s brought a thaw in relations between the superpowers.

"Tear down this wall!" speech: Reagan speaking in front of the Brandenburg Gate, 12 June 1987

Otto von Habsburg, who played a leading role in opening the Iron Curtain.

Erich Honecker lost control in August 1989.

The human chain in Lithuania during the Baltic Way, 23 August 1989

Since the end of the Cold War, the EU has expanded eastwards into the former Warsaw Pact and parts of the former Soviet Union.

A map showing the relations of Marxist–Leninist states after the Sino-Soviet split as of 1980:
The USSR and pro-Soviet socialist states
China and pro-Chinese socialist states
Neutral Socialist nations (North Korea and Yugoslavia)
Non-socialist states

The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc, which began following World War II.

The League of Nations assembly, held in Geneva, Switzerland, 1930

World War II

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Global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945.

Adolf Hitler at a German Nazi political rally in Nuremberg, August 1933

Benito Mussolini inspecting troops during the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935

The bombing of Guernica in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, sparked fears abroad in Europe that the next war would be based on bombing of cities with very high civilian casualties.

Japanese Imperial Army soldiers during the Battle of Shanghai, 1937

Red Army artillery unit during the Battle of Lake Khasan, 1938

Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini, and Ciano pictured just before signing the Munich Agreement, 29 September 1938

German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (right) and the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, after signing the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, 23 August 1939

Soldiers of the German Wehrmacht tearing down the border crossing into Poland, 1 September 1939

Soldiers of the Polish Army during the defence of Poland, September 1939

Finnish machine gun nest aimed at Soviet Red Army positions during the Winter War, February 1940

German advance into Belgium and Northern France, 10 May-4 June 1940, swept past the Maginot Line (shown in dark red)

London seen from St. Paul's Cathedral after the German Blitz, 29 December 1940

Soldiers of the British Commonwealth forces from the Australian Army's 9th Division during the Siege of Tobruk; North African Campaign, September 1941

German Panzer III of the Afrika Korps advancing across the North African desert, April-May 1941

European theatre of World War II animation map, 1939–1945 – Red: Western Allies and the Soviet Union after 1941; Green: Soviet Union before 1941; Blue: Axis powers

German soldiers during the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Axis powers, 1941

Soviet civilians leaving destroyed houses after a German bombardment during the Battle of Leningrad, 10 December 1942

Japanese soldiers entering Hong Kong, 8 December 1941

The USS Arizona (BB-39) was a total loss in the Japanese surprise air attack on the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Sunday 7 December 1941.

US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British PM Winston Churchill seated at the Casablanca Conference, January 1943

Map of Japanese military advances through mid-1942

US Marines during the Guadalcanal Campaign, in the Pacific theatre, 1942

Red Army soldiers on the counterattack during the Battle of Stalingrad, February 1943

American 8th Air Force Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombing raid on the Focke-Wulf factory in Germany, 9 October 1943

U.S. Navy SBD-5 scout plane flying patrol over USS Washington (BB-56) and USS Lexington (CV-16) during the Gilbert and Marshall Islands campaign, 1943

Red Army troops in a counter-offensive on German positions at the Battle of Kursk, July 1943

Ruins of the Benedictine monastery, during the Battle of Monte Cassino, Italian Campaign, May 1944

American troops approaching Omaha Beach during the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, 6 June 1944

German SS soldiers from the Dirlewanger Brigade, tasked with suppressing the Warsaw Uprising against Nazi occupation, August 1944

General Douglas MacArthur returns to the Philippines during the Battle of Leyte, 20 October 1944

Yalta Conference held in February 1945, with Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin

Ruins of the Reichstag in Berlin, 3 June 1945.

Atomic bombing of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945.

Ruins of Warsaw in 1945, after the deliberate destruction of the city by the occupying German forces

Defendants at the Nuremberg trials, where the Allied forces prosecuted prominent members of the political, military, judicial and economic leadership of Nazi Germany for crimes against humanity

Post-war border changes in Central Europe and creation of the Communist Eastern Bloc

David Ben-Gurion proclaiming the Israeli Declaration of Independence at the Independence Hall, 14 May 1948

Bodies of Chinese civilians killed by the Imperial Japanese Army during the Nanking Massacre in December 1937

Schutzstaffel (SS) female camp guards removing prisoners' bodies from lorries and carrying them to a mass grave, inside the German Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, 1945

Prisoner identity photograph taken by the German SS of a Polish Catholic girl who died in Auschwitz. Approximately 230,000 children were held prisoner and used in forced labour and Nazi medical experiments.

Polish civilians wearing blindfolds photographed just before their execution by German soldiers in Palmiry forest, 1940

Soviet partisans hanged by the German army. The Russian Academy of Sciences reported in 1995 civilian victims in the Soviet Union at German hands totalled 13.7 million dead, twenty percent of the 68 million persons in the occupied Soviet Union.

B-29 Superfortress strategic bombers on the Boeing assembly line in Wichita, Kansas, 1944

A V-2 rocket launched from a fixed site in Peenemünde, 21 June 1943

Nuclear Gadget being raised to the top of the detonation "shot tower", at Alamogordo Bombing Range; Trinity nuclear test, New Mexico, July 1945

Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union had partitioned Poland and marked out their "spheres of influence" across Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania.

Dissolution of the Soviet Union

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The first exhibition on the crimes of Stalinism, called "Week of Conscience", was held in Moscow on November 19, 1988

Environmental concerns over the Metsamor nuclear power plant drove initial demonstrations in Yerevan.

Figure of Liberty on the Freedom Monument in Riga, focus of the 1986 Latvian demonstrations

Anti-Soviet rally in Vingis Park of about 250,000 people. Sąjūdis was a movement which led to the restoration of an Independent State of Lithuania.

Andrei Sakharov, formerly exiled to Gorky, was elected to the Congress of People's Deputies in March 1989.

Baltic Way 1989 demonstration in Šiauliai, Lithuania showing coffins decorated with national flags of the three Baltic republics placed symbolically beneath Soviet and Nazi flags

Photos of victims (mostly young women) of an April 1989 massacre in Tbilisi, Georgia

Nursultan Nazarbayev became leader of the Kazakh SSR in 1989 and later led Kazakhstan to independence.

Azerbaijani stamp with photos of Black January

Viacheslav Chornovil, a prominent Ukrainian dissident and a lead figure of Rukh

Leonid Kravchuk became Ukraine's leader in 1990.

Saparmurat Niyazov, last head of the Turkmen SSR and first president of Turkmenistan

Following Georgia's declaration of independence in 1991, South Ossetia and Abkhazia declared their desire to leave Georgia and remain part of the Soviet Union/Russia.

Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first democratically elected president

Barricade erected in Riga to prevent the Soviet Army from reaching the Latvian Parliament, July 1991

Tanks in Red Square during the 1991 August coup attempt

Signing of the agreement to establish the Commonwealth of Independent States, 8 December

The state emblem of the Soviet Union and the СССР letters (top) in the façade of the Grand Kremlin Palace were replaced by five double-headed Russian eagles (bottom) after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the eagles having been removed by the Bolsheviks after the revolution.

The upper chamber of the Supreme Soviet in its ultimate session, voting the USSR out of existence, December 26

Russian GDP since the end of the Soviet Union (from 2014 are forecasts)

Animated map showing independent states and territorial changes to the Soviet Union in chronological order

Pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk celebrate the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, May 9, 2018

The dissolution of the Soviet Union (1988–1991) was the process of internal disintegration within the Soviet Union (USSR) which resulted in the end of the country's and its federal government's existence as a sovereign state, thereby resulting in its constituent republics gaining full sovereignty.

Communist states in Europe before the Tito–Stalin split of 1948

Eastern Bloc

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Soviet Union stamp of 1950, depicting the flags and peoples of the Eastern Bloc.

The Big Three (British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Premier of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin) at the Yalta Conference, February 1945

World War II Polish Prime Minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk fled Poland in 1947 after facing arrest and persecution

Political situation in Europe during the Cold War

Germans watching Western supply planes at Berlin Tempelhof Airport during the Berlin Airlift

Countries which once had overtly Marxist–Leninist governments in bright red and countries the USSR considered at one point to be "moving toward socialism" in dark red

Communist countries and Soviet republics in Europe with their representative flags (1950s)

Trybuna Ludu 14 December 1981 reports martial law in Poland

Russian Orthodox Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, once the most dominant landmark in Baku, was demolished in the 1930s under Stalin

Prominent examples of urban design included Marszałkowska Housing Estate (MDM) in Warsaw

During World War II, 85% of buildings in Warsaw were destroyed by German troops

A line for the distribution of cooking oil in Bucharest, Romania in May 1986

Reconstruction of a typical working class flat interior of the khrushchyovka

Propaganda poster showing increased agricultural production from 1981 to 1983 and 1986 in East Germany

A Robotron KC 87 home computer made in East Germany between 1987 and 1989

Per capita GDP in the Eastern Bloc from 1950 to 2003 (1990 base Geary-Khamis dollars) according to Angus Maddison

GDP per capita of the Eastern Bloc in relations with GDPpc of United States during 1900–2010

Czechoslovaks carry their national flag past a burning Soviet tank in Prague

The Cold War in 1980 before the Iran–Iraq War

Changes in national boundaries after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc

European countries by total wealth (billions USD), Credit Suisse, 2018

A map of communist states (1993–present)

The "three worlds" of the Cold War era between April–August 1975:
1st World: Western Bloc led by the United States and its allies
2nd World: Eastern Bloc led by the Soviet Union, China and their allies
3rd World: Non-Aligned and neutral countries

The Eastern Bloc, also known as the Communist Bloc, the Socialist Bloc and the Soviet Bloc, was the group of socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America under the influence of the Soviet Union that existed during the Cold War (1945–1991).

Russia

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Transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia.

The Kurgan hypothesis places the Volga-Dnieper region of southern Russia and Ukraine as the urheimat of the Proto-Indo-Europeans.

Sergius of Radonezh blessing Dmitry Donskoy in Trinity Sergius Lavra, before the Battle of Kulikovo, depicted in a painting by Ernst Lissner

Tsar Ivan the Terrible, in an evocation by Viktor Vasnetsov, 1897.

Russian expansion and territorial evolution between the 14th and 20th centuries.

Napoleon's retreat from Moscow by Albrecht Adam (1851).

Emperor Nicholas II of Russia and the Romanovs were executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918.

Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky during a 1920 speech in Moscow

Location of the Russian SFSR (red) within the Soviet Union in 1936

The Battle of Stalingrad, the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare, ended in 1943 with a decisive Soviet victory against the German Army.

The "Big Three" at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin.

Mikhail Gorbachev in one-to-one discussions with Ronald Reagan in the Reykjavík Summit, 1986.

Vladimir Putin takes the oath of office as president on his first inauguration, with Boris Yeltsin looking over, 2000.

Vladimir Putin (third, left), Sergey Aksyonov (first, left), Vladimir Konstantinov (second, left) and Aleksei Chalyi (right) sign the Treaty on Accession of the Republic of Crimea to Russia in 2014

Köppen climate classification of Russia.

Yugyd Va National Park in the Komi Republic is the largest national park in Europe.

Chart for the political system of Russia

Putin with G20 counterparts in Osaka, 2019.

Sukhoi Su-57, a fifth-generation fighter of the Russian Air Force.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, anti-war protests broke out across Russia. The protests have been met with widespread repression, leading to roughly 15,000 being arrested.

The Moscow International Business Center in Moscow. The city has one of the world's largest urban economies.

The Trans-Siberian Railway is the longest railway line in the world, connecting Moscow to Vladivostok.

Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–1765), polymath scientist, inventor, poet and artist

Mir, Soviet and Russian space station that operated in low Earth orbit from 1986 to 2001.

Peterhof Palace in Saint Petersburg, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Saint Basil's Cathedral in Moscow is the most iconic religious architecture of Russia.

Moscow State University, the most prestigious educational institution in Russia.

Metallurg, a Soviet-era sanatorium in Sochi.

The Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, at night.

The Scarlet Sails being celebrated along the Neva in Saint Petersburg

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893), in a 1893 painting by Nikolai Dmitriyevich Kuznetsov

Kvass is an ancient and traditional Russian beverage.

Ostankino Tower in Moscow, the tallest freestanding structure in Europe.

Maria Sharapova, former world No. 1 tennis player, was the world's highest-paid female athlete for 11 consecutive years.

Following a civil war, the Russian SFSR established the Soviet Union with three other republics, as its largest and the principal constituent.

Gorbachev at the White House Library in Washington, D.C., 1987

Mikhail Gorbachev

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Russian and former Soviet politician.

Gorbachev and his Ukrainian maternal grandparents, late 1930s

Gorbachev studied at Moscow State University from 1950 to 1955

Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader whose anti-Stalinist reforms were supported by Gorbachev

Gorbachev on a visit to East Germany in 1966

Part of the Great Stavropol Canal established under Gorbachev's regional leadership

Gorbachev was skeptical of the deployment of Soviet troops in Afghanistan (pictured here in 1986)

In April 1983, Gorbachev gave a speech marking the birthday of Lenin (pictured), founder of the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev in 1985 at a summit in Geneva, Switzerland

Gorbachev at the Brandenburg Gate in April 1986 during a visit to East Germany

Gorbachev's visit to Lithuania in 1990 in an attempt to stop Lithuania's declaration of independence which passed two months later

U.S. President Reagan and Gorbachev meeting in Iceland in 1986

Gorbachev with Erich Honecker of East Germany. Privately, Gorbachev told Chernyaev that Honecker was a "scumbag".

Gorbachev and his wife Raisa on a trip to Poland in 1988

Gorbachev in one-to-one discussions with Reagan at a summit in Geneva, Switzerland, 19 November 1985

Reagan and Gorbachev with wives (Nancy and Raisa, respectively) attending a dinner at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, 9 December 1987

Gorbachev meeting the Romanian Marxist–Leninist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1985. According to Taubman, Ceaușescu was Gorbachev's "favorite punching bag".

Berlin Wall, "Thank you, Gorbi!", October 1990

Gorbachev addressing the United Nations General Assembly in December 1988. During the speech he dramatically announced deep unilateral cuts in Soviet military forces in Eastern Europe.

In September 1990, Gorbachev met repeatedly with U.S. President George Bush at the Helsinki Summit

Tens of thousands of anti-coup protesters surrounding the White House

Leaders of the Soviet Republics sign the Belovezha Accords which eliminated the USSR and established the Commonwealth of Independent States, 1991

Gorbachev visiting Reagan, both in western wear, at Rancho del Cielo in 1992

Gorbachev, daughter Irina and his wife's sister Lyudmila at the funeral of Raisa, 1999

Gorbachev attended the Inauguration of Vladimir Putin in May 2000

Gorbachev (right) being introduced to U.S. President Barack Obama by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, March 2009

The official Soviet portrait of Gorbachev. Many official photographs and visual depictions of Gorbachev removed the port-wine birthmark from his head.

Gorbachev at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, 16 June 1992

Former US president Ronald Reagan awards the first Ronald Reagan Freedom Award to Gorbachev at the Reagan Library, 4 May 1992

The eighth and final leader of the Soviet Union, he was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991.

Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic

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The Russian SFSR (red) within the Soviet Union (red and light yellow) between 1956 and 1991

Flag adopted by the Russian SFSR national parliament in 1991

The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Russian SFSR or RSFSR, previously known as the Russian Soviet Republic and the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic as well as being unofficially known as Soviet Russia, the Russian Federation or simply Russia, was an independent federal socialist state from 1917 to 1922, and afterwards the largest and most populous of the Soviet socialist republics of the Soviet Union (USSR) from 1922 to 1991, until becoming a sovereign part of the Soviet Union with priority of Russian laws over Union-level legislation in 1990 and 1991, the last two years of the existence of the USSR.

Vladimir Lenin

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Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist.

An image of Lenin (left) at the age of three

Lenin was influenced by the works of Karl Marx.

Lenin (seated centre) with other members of the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class in 1897

Lenin undertook research at the British Museum in London.

Lenin's travel route from Zurich to St. Petersburg, named Petrograd at the time, in April 1917, including the ride in a sealed train on German territory

The engine that pulled the train on which Lenin arrived at Petrograd's Finland Station in April 1917 was not preserved. So Engine #293, by which Lenin escaped to Finland and then returned to Russia later in the year, serves as the permanent exhibit, installed at a platform on the station.

Painting of Lenin in front of the Smolny Institute by Isaak Brodsky

The Moscow Kremlin, which Lenin moved into in 1918

Bolshevik political cartoon poster from 1920, showing Lenin sweeping away monarchs, clergy, and capitalists; the caption reads, "Comrade Lenin Cleanses the Earth of Filth"

Signing of the armistice between Russia and Germany on 15 December 1917

Lenin with his wife and sister in a car after watching a Red Army parade at Khodynka Field in Moscow, May Day 1918

A White Russian anti-Bolshevik propaganda poster, in which Lenin is depicted in a red robe, aiding other Bolsheviks in sacrificing Russia to a statue of Marx (c. undefined 1918–1919)

Photograph of Lenin on 1 May 1919, taken by Grigori Petrovich Goldstein

Victims of the famine in Buzuluk, Volga region, next to Saratov

Lenin spent his final years largely at the Gorki mansion.

Lenin's funeral, painted by Isaac Brodsky, 1925

The 1985 post stamp for 115th birth anniversary of Lenin. Portrait of Lenin (based on a 1900 photography of Y. Mebius in Moscow) with the Tampere Lenin Museum.

Statue of Lenin erected by the East German Marxist–Leninist government at Leninplatz in East Berlin, East Germany (removed in 1992)

Lenin's Mausoleum in front of the Kremlin, 2007

Commemorative one rouble coin minted in 1970 in honour of Lenin's centenary

Detail of Man, Controller of the Universe, fresco at Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City showing Vladimir Lenin

He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924.

Communist Party of the Soviet Union

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A neighborhood in the Kozhukhovsky Bay of the Moskva River with a large sign promoting the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Moscow, 1975

Joseph Stalin, leader of the party from 1924 to his death in 1953

The Brezhnev era is commonly referred to by historians as the Era of Stagnation, a term coined by CPSU General Secretary Gorbachev.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the CPSU and the Soviet Union, as seen in 1986

A Politburo resolution to execute 346 "enemies of the CPSU and Soviet Power" who led "counter-revolutionary, right-trotskyite, plotting and spying activities" (signed by Stalin)

Stalinism, while not an ideology per se, refers to the thoughts and policies of Stalin.

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), also known by various other names during its history, was the founding and ruling party of the Soviet Union.