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Throughout the 20th century communism spread to various parts of the world, largely as a result of Soviet influence, often through revolutionary movements and post-World War II geopolitical shifts. The Cold War period saw a global ideological struggle between the communist bloc, led by the Soviet Union, and the capitalist West, led by the ...
Predictions of the Soviet Union's impending demise were discounted by many Western academic specialists, [7] and had little impact on mainstream Sovietology. [8] For example, Amalrik's book "was welcomed as a piece of brilliant literature in the West" but "virtually no one tended to take it at face value as a piece of political prediction."
According to the scholar Marcel H. Van Herpen, the end of the Soviet Union marked the end of the last European empire, and some authors called it the death of Russian colonialism and imperialism. [181] As the Soviet Union began to collapse, social disintegration and political instability fueled a surge in ethnic conflict. [182]
The entry of the Soviet Union in the war against Japan along with the atomic bombings by the United States led to Japan's surrender, marking the end of World War II. The Soviet Union suffered the greatest number of casualties in the war, losing more than 20 million citizens, about a third of all World War II casualties.
It promised the workers would rise, destroy capitalism, and create a socialist society under the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The awkward problem, regarding Marxist revolutionary theory, was the small proletariat , in an overwhelmingly peasant society with limited industry and a very small middle class .
The Soviet Union played a crucial role in the Allied victory in World War II, but at a tremendous human cost, with millions of Soviet citizens perishing in the conflict. The Soviet Union emerged as one of the world's two superpowers, leading the Eastern Bloc in opposition to the Western Bloc during the Cold War.
An animated series of maps showing the fall of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which later led to conflicts in the post-Soviet space By the late 1980s, people in the Caucasus and Baltic states were demanding more autonomy from Moscow , and the Kremlin was losing some of its control over certain ...
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics [r] (USSR), [s] commonly known as the Soviet Union, [t] was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. . During its existence, it was the largest country by area, extending across eleven time zones and sharing borders with twelve countries, and the third-most populous co