The formation of the USSR
On November 7, 1917, the Bolshevik army, led by Marxist theoretician Vladimir Lenin and his compatriots Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, seized power in Petrograd, the capital of Russia. A protracted and bloody Russian civil war ensued, which ended in 1921 with the victory of the Bolshevik Red Army.
The Red Army not only occupied Russia, but also achieved victories in satellite states such as Ukraine, Belarus and the Caucasus, which previously belonged to the Russian Empire. Under the tsars, the non-Russian people were systematically oppressed, but Lenin promised to bring about changes when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was established on December 30, 1922.
Soviet leaders Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky in a photo of 1919
Soviet art depicted a worker's paradise
A poster from 1923 that reads: Long live May 1, created by the artist Ivan Vasilyevich Simakov.
This 1923 poster is entitled "Long live May 1st" and has been celebrated by socialists since the end of the 19th century. The Soviet Union scattered such propaganda artwork to promote the ideals of the new Soviet state as a peaceful, equal, and prosperous workers' paradise.
Stalin's enemies disappeared in the Great Purge
Nikolai Yezhov (Stalin, left) was later removed from this photo of the Moscow Canal
During the brutal purges of Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, millions of Soviet citizens were branded as "enemies", arrested by the secret police and transported to the Siberian Gulag.
In just one year, between 1937 and 1938, Stalin executed nearly 700,000 of his own people, elites, industrial tycoons, cultural figures – anyone he considered an oppositionist. Even close comrades were erased from Soviet history. Nikolai Yezhov, the former chief of the secret police, was executed by Stalin and then removed from this altered photo.
Millions of Ukrainians are starving because of man-made famine
Grain confiscated from a family in the Ukrainian village of Udachoye, ridiculed as a "kulak".
The famine in Ukraine in the early 1930s was an artificial punishment for daring to stand up to Stalin, who decided to starve them to their knees when Ukrainian peasants resisted mass resettlement to collective state farms. It is estimated that 3.9 million Ukrainians died after the Soviet army confiscated the Ukrainian grain harvest.
On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union conducted its first atomic bomb test.
This photograph documents the first successful detonation of a nuclear weapon by the Soviet Union on August 29, 1949. The 20-kiloton atomic bomb, nicknamed "The First Lightning", was created by American technology leaked to the Soviet Union by German-born atomic physicist and convicted spy Klaus Fox, whose achievements sparked a Cold War-era nuclear arms race that led to the accumulation of more than 10,000 nuclear warheads on both sides.
Stalinist architecture: "Seven Sisters"
Photograph of Moscow State University taken from a helicopter in May 1995, the building is one of seven Stalin-era towers built in Moscow after World War II.
After World War II, Stalin ordered the construction of large skyscrapers in Moscow to prove that the Soviet Union was as rich and powerful as the West. Shown here is the Gothic spire tower of Moscow State University, one of the "Seven Sisters", the epitome of Stalinist architecture.
Space Race
The Russian cosmonaut dog Laika, on display in 1957, was the first animal to orbit the Earth, traveling on the launched Sputnik-2 spacecraft.
In the 1950s, the Cold War arms race expanded into a space race for technological superiority. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union was the first to launch Sputnik 1, the first man-made object to orbit the Earth. Next, the Soviets conducted a series of experiments on animals on orbiters to test the feasibility of sending humans into space.
A hapless dog, Laika, becomes the first animal to go into space when she is launched aboard the Sputnik-2 spacecraft. Laika is a Siberian Husky that lived as a vagrant on the streets of Moscow before it was used in the Soviet space program, dying within hours from overheating and panic.
The Soviet Union also launched a 27-year-old test pilot, Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin, in 1961, sending the first man into space. Gagarin circled the Earth in the Vostok spacecraft, then catapulted and parachuted safely from an altitude of 23,000 feet above the Earth.
Khrushchev, Nixon and the "kitchen debate"
On July 24, 1959, Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Nixon engaged in a heated debate about capitalism and communism.
After Stalin's death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev instituted a policy of "de-Stalinization", dismantled the gulags, took control of the secret police, and granted more autonomy to the Soviet Republic.
But Cold War tensions continue to rise. One of the most famous contingencies was the impromptu "kitchen debate" between Khrushchev and Vice President Richard Nixon during a visit to a cultural exhibition in Moscow.
Show loyalty through the "Kiss of the Brothers of Socialism".
Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and East German President Erich Honecker kiss on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the founding of the GDR.
In 1979, a public lip-sync between Leonid Brezhnev of the Soviet Union and Erich Honecker of East Germany commemorated the 30th anniversary of the alliance of communist countries, and the "kiss of the socialist brothers" was seen by Soviet leaders as the ultimate sign of loyalty to the Communist Party.
Chernobyl disaster
View after the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine on April 26, 1986.
On April 26, 1986, a catastrophic explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine released more than 400 times more radiation than the atomic bomb that struck Hiroshima.
Dozens of emergency workers died of acute radiation poisoning, and thousands more in the region developed cancer from long-term exposure, as the Soviet government tried to cover up the extent of the disaster, but the disaster dealt a devastating blow to national pride.
Mikhail Gorbachev introduced reforms
In 1987, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev signed the INF Treaty in the East Room of the White House
When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, he introduced a series of high-profile reforms that shook the Soviet Union's policy for 60 years. Gorbachev's reforms, known in Russian as "perestroika" and "openness," were aimed at ending political repression, democratizing elections in the Soviet Union, and kick-starting the faltering Soviet economy.
Gorbachev also pulled the Soviet Union out of the disastrous war in Afghanistan and signed the first nuclear disarmament treaty with President Ronald Reagan, an outspoken anti-communist.
Failed coup d'état and the collapse of the Soviet Union
On August 19, 1991, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, stood on a tank to resist the attempted coup d'état of communist hardliners.
One of Gorbachev's reforms was the loosening of Soviet rule over non-Russian states that were part of the Soviet bloc. This created an independent, democratic momentum that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, and Gorbachev's initiative to give more autonomy to the Soviet republics.
A group of hardliners staged a failed military coup in 1991. Boris Yeltsin, on a stalled tank, became a popular leader, prompting Gorbachev to resign.
On December 25, 1991, the Soviet hammer and sickle flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time, and has since been replaced by the Russian tricolor. The USSR collapsed into 15 independent states: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.