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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 ...
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
On 23 August 1939, the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Germany which included a secret protocol that divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence, anticipating potential "territorial and political rearrangements" of these countries. [2] Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, starting World War II.
Before World War II, no greater than 1%–2% of those countries' trade was with the Soviet Union. [174] By 1953, the share of such trade had jumped to 37%. [174] In 1947, Joseph Stalin had also denounced the Marshall Plan and forbade all Eastern Bloc countries from participating in it. [175]
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 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.
With the fall of the communist governments in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, the influence of state-based Marxist–Leninist ideologies in the world was weakened, but there are still many communist movements of various types and sizes around the world.
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 .