The Soviet Union

For 69 years the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics covered a sixth of the planet's land, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Bering Strait across 11 time zones. It was the first state built on Marxist-Leninist principles, the industrial power that bore the heaviest human losses of World War II, and the rival superpower of the United States through four decades of Cold War. It launched the first satellite and sent the first human into orbit. When it came apart in December 1991, it did so with remarkable speed and little fighting at the center, leaving 15 independent countries, millions of people living as minorities in new states, and border questions that still shape conflicts in Ukraine and the Caucasus.

At its end the union covered about 22.4 million square kilometers, more than twice the area of the United States. Most of it lay in the cold north: the plains of European Russia and Ukraine, the Ural Mountains, the immense taiga and permafrost of Siberia, and a Pacific coast facing Alaska and Japan. To the south it took in the Caucasus range, the deserts and irrigated oases of Central Asia, and the Pamir Mountains, where its highest summit, then called Communism Peak, reached 7,495 meters. Its territory now belongs to 15 states: Russia, which holds about three-quarters of it, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus, and Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan in Central Asia.

The Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, won a civil war, and joined Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and a Transcaucasian federation in a union treaty on December 30, 1922. Under Joseph Stalin the state industrialized at great speed and great human cost, through forced collectivization, famine, and mass repression. Victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 left Soviet forces across Eastern Europe. Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms after 1985 loosened censorship and central control, and the republics pressed for sovereignty. After a failed hard-line coup in August 1991, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus declared the union finished in the Belovezha Accords. Gorbachev resigned on December 25, and the union formally dissolved the next day. Russia took over the Soviet seat on the UN Security Council as the continuing state.

• The Russian Empire
  The tsarist state that stretched from the Baltic to the Pacific and, for a time, into North America preceded by
• Russia
  The largest country on Earth, spanning Europe and Asia across eleven time zones successor state
• Ukraine
  Europe's breadbasket of black-earth steppe, the Dnieper, and the Black Sea successor state
• Belarus
  A landlocked heart of Eastern Europe, forest and marsh between giants today part of
• Central Asia
  The five stans, landlocked between Russia, China, and Iran today part of
• Kazakhstan
  The world's largest landlocked country, a steppe nation astride two continents today part of
• Russia
  The largest country on Earth, spanning Europe and Asia across eleven time zones today part of
• The Baltic States
  Three small nations on Europe's most closely watched frontier today part of
• The Caucasus
  A mountain isthmus where Europe and Asia refuse to settle the line today part of
• Ukraine
  Europe's breadbasket of black-earth steppe, the Dnieper, and the Black Sea today part of