USSR is Formed

ThTranscaucasia Federation divided in 1936 into the republics of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. The USSR also became known as the Soviet Union and the huge new communist state was the successor to the Russian Empire as well as being the worlds first country to adopt a Marxist socialist policy.

In 1917, during the Russian Revolution and then the subsequent period of civil war leading up to the formation of the USSR the Bolshevik’s under Vladimir Lenin dominated the country. A coalition of workers and soldiers committees then called for the establishment of a socialist state. Once formed as the USSR, all levels of government were controlled by the communists and the party’s politburo with an increasingly powerful general secretary effectively ran the country. All forms of soviet industry was then owned by and managed by the state. All agricultural land was divided into state run farms.

In the following decades the Soviet Union was always dominated by the Russian leaders and it grew into one of the worlds most powerful and influential states. Eventually it comprised of 15 republics, as well as those listed earlier it also contained Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. After almost seventy years of existence the Soviet Union was dissolved back into those separate republics in late December 1991 following the collapse of the hard-line approach of its communist rulers for a less totalitarian form of government.