Soviet Union - Into the war: 1940–45

Soviet Union

Table of Contents

Introduction
The Russian Revolution
- Late tsarist Russia
- The February Revolution
- Lenin and the Bolsheviks
- The Bolshevik coup
- The Bolshevik dictatorship
- Brest-Litovsk
- “War Communism”
- The Civil War and the creation of the U.S.S.R.
- The Communist International
- Culture and religion under communism
- Foreign policy
- The communist regime in crisis: 1920–21
- Lenin’s disillusionment
- The struggle for succession
The U.S.S.R. from the death of Lenin to the death of Stalin
- The NEP and the defeat of the Left
- Toward the “second Revolution”: 1927–30
- The Party versus the peasants
- Industrialization, 1929–34
- Internal, 1930–37
- Foreign policy, 1928–40
- Into the war: 1940–45
- Postwar
The U.S.S.R. from 1953 to 1991
- The Khrushchev era
  - The transition
  - The 20th Party Congress and after
  - Nationality policy
  - The cultural Thaw
  - Economic problems
  - Khrushchev’s fall
- The Brezhnev era
  - Collective leadership
  - Economic policy
  - Cultural retrenchment
  - Nationality policy
  - Foreign policy
- The Interregnum: Andropov and Chernenko
- The Gorbachev era
  - Gorbachev’s succession
  - Economic and social reforms
  - Political restructuring
  - Economic policy
  - Foreign policy
  - The attempted coup

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The period between the Pact of 1939 and the German invasion saw internal consolidation. In the governmental sphere the membership and candidate membership of the Politburo, as elected after the 17th Party Congress in 1934 and recruited at a Central Committee plenum in 1935, had consisted entirely of veteran Stalinists. It almost immediately lost 9 of the 17 persons involved: one murdered, one probably a natural death, one a suicide, five executed, and one dismissed. The 18th Party Congress in 1939 elected the eight survivors, Andreyev, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Kaganovich, Kalinin, Mikoyan, Molotov, and Stalin, plus Nikita Khrushchev, to full membership, ...(100 of 33818 words)

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