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 RussiaEmergence of the USSRThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was established as a federation
on Dec. 30, 1922. The death of Lenin on Jan. 21, 1924, precipitated an
intraparty struggle between Joseph Stalin, general secretary of the party,
and Trotsky, who favored swifter socialization at home and fomentation of
revolution abroad. Trotsky was dismissed as commissar of war in 1925 and
banished from the Soviet Union in 1929. He was murdered in Mexico City on
Aug. 21, 1940, by a political agent. Stalin further consolidated his power
by a series of purges in the late 1930s, liquidating prominent party
leaders and military officers. Stalin assumed the prime ministership on
May 6, 1941.
The term
Stalinism
has become defined as an inhumane, draconian
socialism. Stalin sent millions of Soviets who did not conform to the
Stalinist ideal to forced-labor camps, and he persecuted his country's
vast number of ethnic groups—reserving particular vitriol for Jews
and Ukrainians. Soviet historian Roy Medvedev estimated that about 20
million died from starvation, executions, forced collectivization, and
life in the labor camps under Stalin's rule.
Soviet foreign policy, at first friendly toward Germany and
antagonistic toward Britain and France and then, after Hitler's rise to
power in 1933, becoming anti-Fascist and pro–League of Nations, took
an abrupt turn on Aug. 24, 1939, with the signing of a nonaggression pact
with Nazi Germany. The next month, Moscow joined in the German attack on
Poland, seizing territory later incorporated into the Ukrainian and
Belorussian SSRs. The Russo-Finnish War (1939–1940) added territory
to the Karelian SSR set up on March 31, 1940; the annexation of Bessarabia
and Bukovina from Romania became part of the new Moldavian SSR on Aug. 2,
1940; and the annexation of the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and
Lithuania in June 1940 created the 14th, 15th, and 16th Soviet republics.
The Soviet-German collaboration ended abruptly with a lightning attack by
Hitler on June 22, 1941, which seized 500,000 sq mi of Russian territory
before Soviet defenses, aided by U.S. and British arms, could halt it. The
Soviet resurgence at Stalingrad from Nov. 1942 to Feb. 1943 marked the
turning point in a long battle, ending in the final offensive of Jan.
1945. Then, after denouncing a 1941 nonaggression pact with Japan in April
1945, when Allied forces were nearing victory in the Pacific, the Soviet
Union declared war on Japan on Aug. 8, 1945, and quickly occupied
Manchuria, Karafuto, and the Kuril Islands.
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