The Soviet Union - Part 1: Red October to Barbarossa | History Documentary

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The Soviet Union was officially formed in 1922, a country, a political experiment, an ideal, a great scar across history…

Officially known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR was a one-party state, governed, controlled, and tormented by a single-party rule. That of the Communist Party. No nation has inflicted such destruction on its own population in the name of progress. Power corroded the leadership, leaving the masses to suffer in the name of history. The very people who were supposed to be governing themselves.

There are many factors that affected the Soviet Union’s turbulent history, but the sheer ungovernable vastness of the country was inescapable. It was a nation the size of a continent stretching from Moscow to Vladivostok and from Leningrad to Stalingrad. What we might consider European Russia was dwarfed by the reaches of Siberia. Enacting any kind of policy took force. Complicated, contradictory figureheads would come and go, men, who held this impossible country it seemed by sheer will. Stalin the despot-hero whose cruelty knew few bounds united a nation to defeat Hitler. Khrushchev the crafty libertarian, who preached reform yet allowed an arms race to escalate. Brezhnev, that unreadable member of the old guard, sent history backward. And of course, Gorbachev, who brought vast change, modernization, and détente, yet saw the Soviet Union collapse under his rule – the untenable nation.

Over many painful years, this vast country locked itself away from the rest of the world, paranoid, economically uncertain, and repressive, while still casting a vast shadow across the world. The 20th century was shaped by its convulsions, its purges, its wars, and its leaders.

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