Russia was removed from World War I and, in many ways, from Europe by the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917. It then embarked on a daring attempt to establish a communist state based on Karl Marx’s theories. In terms of both local and international ramifications, the Russian Revolution of 1917 had at least as much of an influence as the French Revolution of 1789. Similar to 1789, there was a significant political, social, and economic change in 1917. Like their French counterparts, the Russian revolutionaries also asserted that their philosophy was universal and transcendent, and they firmly believed that the Russian revolution would serve as the catalyst for revolutions across the globe.
The Western nations, particularly the United States, dreaded and mistrusted the new Russia because of its atheistic and anticapitalist communist ideology. The US administration declined to provide diplomatic recognition to the new Russian government until 1933 because it anticipated and hoped that the communist rule would fall. The communists’ declared goal to spread communism throughout the world, including western Europe and the United States, heightened the fear and animosity between Russia and the West. This is because both the US and the USSR, the new name for the communist state, were concentrating on domestic rather than global issues during the interwar period, these tensions were somewhat subdued. This was especially true during World War II due to their shared alliance against Hitler’s Germany. However, same tensions reappeared and dominated international politics during the Cold War after World War II ended and the US and the USSR emerged as the world’s two superpowers.
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Russia under Tsarism
However, in order to comprehend the Russian Revolution, one must comprehend the state in which it took place. Russia was the most conservative of the Great Powers and the final major autocracy in Europe at the start of the twentieth century. Since 1789, Russia has seen some liberalizing advances, but it has remained authoritarian, economically underdeveloped, and mostly cut off from the rest of Europe. Nonetheless, it was a vast and varied empire that occupied one-sixth of the world’s land area and was home to hundreds of other ethnic groups in addition to the Russians. These included the mostly Turkic Muslims of Central Asia, non-Slavic Europeans like Finns and Latvians, and other Slavic peoples like Ukrainians and Poles. Many of these groups had been brought into the Russian Empire by imperial expansion or warfare, and the task of controlling and integrating them plagued the empire through much of its history.
In the ninth century, a Slavic state with its capital in Kiev (modern-day Ukraine) initially appeared; shortly after, Prince Vladimir converted from Byzantium to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. The Orthodox Church and the state were deeply intertwined after that. The church preserved Russian culture, customs, and identity during the three hundred years of Mongol occupation from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. The Russian Orthodox Church and the state were led by Russian monarchs who adopted the title “tsar,” which is the Russian translation of the Latin Caesar. As the hub and future of Christendom, Moscow asserted its claim to the title of “Third Rome” (after Constantinople). The Romanovs, the final tsar dynasty, governed from 1613 until the 1917 revolution.
In terms of both politics and economy, Russia lagged behind the other European nations in 1900. With the tsar as the head of both church and state, the government continued to be an inflexible and unchecked autocrat. Local governments didn’t exist until the 1860s, and national representative organizations didn’t exist until 1905. Even then, their power was severely constrained. Through a stringent censorship system, a widespread secret police, and an internal passport system that limited people’s freedom of travel around the nation, the government outlawed political parties and suppressed opposition. Russia in 1900 was similar to France in 1780 in terms of politics.
Russia’s economy changed slowly as well. Decades after feudalism had mostly vanished from the rest of Europe, Russia remained a feudal economy until the liberation of the serfs in 1861.
Nearly 90% of people were peasants in 1900, and two-thirds of them lacked literacy. Russia did not experience industrialization or the Industrial Revolution until the late nineteenth century, although it had started in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century. As a result, there was little of the urban working class, which Karl Marx believed was essential for a revolution.
Hints of Change and Reform
But there were indications of reform and transformation in Russia as early as the eighteenth century. Napoleon’s soldiers and the French Revolution disseminated liberal, revolutionary, and Enlightenment concepts throughout Europe, including Russia. An antitsarist uprising was launched in 1825 by a group of former Russian military officers, some of whom had served in the Napoleonic wars, been exposed to Western liberalism, and become dissatisfied with their own nation’s conservative administration.
Although the Decembrist uprising was put down, it conveyed a message and established a standard for subsequent demonstrations and anti-autocracy activities. However, rather than being the result of uprising or revolution, the century’s most significant changes occurred from the top down. The “Tsar Liberator,” Tsar Alexander II (r. 1855–81), instituted a number of liberalizing changes, most notably the liberation of the serfs in 1861, the establishment of municipal self-government, and the modernization of the judiciary. After Alexander II was slain in 1881, his successors resumed more harsh and authoritarian governance, but the liberation of the serfs in particular sparked significant social and economic transformations in Russia.
After independence, the financial situation of many peasants actually deteriorated, and many of them moved to the cities in quest of employment. In the latter two decades of the nineteenth century, Russia saw a boom in both urbanization and industry. Coal output rose forty-two times between 1861 and 1900, while pig iron production surged tenfold. Railroad mileage increased from 1888 to 1913. With the rise of an urban working class (the proletariat), new industrial entrepreneurs (the bourgeoisie), and a rising middle class, the nation’s social fabric also started to shift. The population as a whole also increased significantly, from about 73 million in 1861 to 170 million by 1914.
Numerous bottom-up reform initiatives, including some revolutionary ones, were sparked by this political and social turbulence. “Westernizers” supported a constitutional political system and swift economic growth, believing that Russia’s destiny was linked to that of Western Europe. On the other hand, Slavophiles (literally, “fond of Slavs”) resisted Westernization and supported traditional institutions like the Orthodox Church and the peasant commune (mir) because they thought Russia was superior to the West in terms of culture, morality, and politics. The populists (Narodniki) likewise prioritized the peasants and sought to establish mir as the foundation of society, viewing it as a precursor to socialism. They started a program of “going to the people” in the 1870s to teach revolutionary concepts to the peasants.The nihilists, who advocated releasing people from all religious, political, and familial responsibilities and repudiated all institutions, including the government and the church, represented an even more extreme approach. In the middle of the nineteenth century, all of these groups were gaining traction, but Marxism as a whole was hardly visible in Russia and would remain so for many years to come.
In the nineteenth century, Europeans were becoming more and more interested in Russia, particularly its culture. Russia had a cultural rebirth in the nineteenth century despite its political and economic stagnation—or maybe because of it. Russian books, such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (which some people believe to be the best novel ever written), became well-known worldwide. With compositions like Pyotr Illich Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker and Swan Lake, Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and A Night on Bald Mountain, and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, Russian classical music became well-known to people all over the world (then and now).
1905: The Revolution’s Prelude
In the nineteenth century, Russian culture was thriving and the economy was changing due to industrialization, but the autocracy remained inflexible, outdated, and progressively unsuccessful both domestically and internationally. In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, Russia suffered a crushing defeat, marking the first time in modern history that an Asian country beat a European one.
A revolt against the autocracy emerged in the midst of the battle. It started with a sizable but nonviolent protest in front of the tsar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg in January 1905, spearheaded by Father Gapon, an Orthodox priest. Hundreds of demonstrators were killed when guards opened fire on them on what became known as Bloody Sunday. Nationwide strikes and protests were sparked by the killing, and by the fall, the nation was immobilized. By the end of the year, the revolutionary movement had faded as the tsar, Nicholas II (1894–1917), published a conciliatory manifesto permitting the creation of an elected legislature (the Duma). The Duma was the first national representative body in Russian history. Despite its lack of authority, it helped facilitate the formation of legitimate political parties and groupings, including socialists and liberals.
Russian society saw a significant transformation and growth during Nicholas II’s rule. According to one historian, this era was marked by “self-scrutiny, experimentation with new institutions and dreams” as well as “a time of troubles.” More economic advancements and reforms were made, the middle class expanded, and the number of independent farmers rose. More political and artistic freedom was allowed after 1905, and Russia developed into a hub for the avant-garde in both music (like Igor Stravinsky) and the visual arts (like Wassily Kandinsky’s abstract painting). However, the more open environment also brought to light the tensions that had been suppressed for so long within the Russian Empire, such as growing pressure from revolutionaries and political liberals as well as growing nationalism from Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Armenians, and the Turkic peoples of Central Asia. Marxism-Leninism and World War I were the two factors that ultimately brought down the empire.
“The First Bolshevik” in Russian Literature
Literature and the arts were the primary medium for social critique and political protest in nineteenth-century Russia due to tsarist censorship and the secret police, which suppressed most forms of political resistance. Born and dying in the same years as Karl Marx, Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818–83) wrote two of the century’s most important literary works.Turgenev was the most well-known author in Russia in the middle of the nineteenth century and the first Russian author to become well-known outside of the nation, although he is today less well-known than his contemporaries Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. His Sportsman’s Sketches(1852), which portrayed the appalling state of peasants, was extensively read throughout the nation (even by Tsar Alexander II), sparked debate and discussion about the peasantry’s plight, and likely played a role in the tsar’s 1861 liberation of the serfs. Fathers and Sons, his masterwork from 1862, is a tale of passionate love, generational strife, and the conflicts between reform and revolution as well as between change and tradition.
Many of these conflicts were exemplified by Turgenev. He was born into an educated family that spoke French at home, grew up on a wealthy estate run by serfs, and lived in the West for a long time. He claimed to have “found myself a Westernizer” after studying in Germany, yet he never wavered in his love for Russia and the Russian countryside. He fell in love with a young, but married Spanish prima donna when he was twenty-five years old, and he followed her throughout Europe for the remainder of his life in an unfulfilled romance. He passed away in France, and his body was returned to Russia to be buried.
The protagonist of Fathers and Sons is Bazarov, a young physician and student who claims to be a nihilist and opposes anything that cannot be proven by science, experimentation, and observation. He rejects all authority—in fact, “everything”—and feels that “the ground must be cleared” in order to rebuild civilization. He challenges and condemns liberalism, conservatism, and romanticism throughout the book. His host, Nikolai, is a thoughtful and kind estate owner who had set his own serfs free before the Emancipation mandated it, but Bazarov treats the elderly man rudely and without empathy. Some reviewers of the book have referred to Bazarov as “the first Bolshevik” because of his revolutionary rhetoric, unwavering philosophy, and dedication to science, even though Lenin’s Bolshevik party wasn’t established until thirty years after the book’s publication.
Marxism and Leninism
In the mid-1800s, Karl Marx and others established the concept of communism. Although much of Marxism had been assimilated into the socialist groups and parties that flourished with the growth of the urban working classes, the term “communism” essentially vanished from political discourse in much of Europe after the 1850s. Marxism had limited impact in Russia for the majority of the nineteenth century due to the lack of both a working class and parliamentary politics. Therefore, it is rather paradoxical that Marx’s communist doctrine was reborn in Russia, the least developed of the main European powers, rather than in a highly developed capitalist state.
People seeking fundamental change in the Russian Empire found the Marxist theory appealing for a variety of reasons. First of all, like the Marxist concentration on urban workers, the proletariat, whom they believed would be more responsive, many Russian radicals had given up in frustration at trying to radicalize the Russian peasants (an aim of the populists in earlier decades). Many Russian intellectuals, who played a crucial role in the nation’s reform and revolutionary movements, were also drawn to the scientific and antireligious aspects of Marxism. Many were drawn to Marxism because it promised to make Russia more “enlightened” and contemporary. Marxist theory also contributed to the explanation that Russia’s backwardness was not a defect in Russian nature but rather a result of historical progress. Lastly, because the Russian government and secret police believed Marxism to be innocuous, it had certain tactical benefits!
The Marxist Social Democratic Labour Party was founded in 1898 by radical Russians residing outside of Russia. Despite its tiny membership, within a few years, the emerging party split into two groups, with the Bolsheviks (majority) demanding for a quick revolution in Russia and the Mensheviks (minority) arguing for a more gradual way. It was the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, who in 1917 would seize power in the Russian Revolution.
Lenin was born into a middle-class family in 1870. Lenin became further radicalized when his older brother was executed in 1887 for a plan to kill the czar. After being involved in revolutionary activities, he was detained and sent to Siberia for three years. He spent the most of his time outside of Russia after 1900, preparing for a future revolution there.
Lenin and other Russian Marxists saw Russia as a bit of a conundrum and a task. Marx had predicted that a highly developed capitalist state with a sizable but exploited proletariat would undergo a revolution. In 1900, Russia was still mostly a rural nation that was only starting to industrialize, with barely 3% of its people belonging to the working class. Lenin offered many changes to Marx’s initial theory in order to address this conundrum. He arguedin his 1902 article “What Is to Be Done?” that a “vanguard of the proletariat,” a tiny, disciplined elite that would assist workers in developing revolutionary awareness and leading them to revolution, was required since the Russian working class was so small and weak. This role would be played by the Bolsheviks.
The undeveloped state of Russian capitalism posed another challenge. Were Russian Marxists only supposed to wait for capitalism to develop its contradictions, as Marx appeared to say was essential? Lenin’s solution was for Russia to move straight from feudalism to communism, bypassing the capitalist stage of development. However, in order for this to occur, the Russian communist state would require support from other more affluent nations to supply the material abundance required for communism to function. He thought this would occur because a revolution in Russia would sever the weakest link in the global capitalist system, which was maintained by Western imperialism. Lenin saw imperialism as “the highest stage of capitalism” and its last phase. Workers in other, more advanced capitalist governments would be motivated to carry out their own revolutions when the Russians created their revolutionary state. Marx’s vision might thus be realized if these nations assisted in maintaining the Russian revolution.
Lenin was marginalized and in exile, so his views were, at most, theoretical and speculative. The Bolsheviks received little notice in Russia, and they had little involvement in the 1905 revolution. However, Lenin’s theories are crucial to comprehending how the 1917 revolution occurred and why Marx’s vision of the Soviet Union was so far from its actual form. In subsequent years, the Soviet leaders referred to their communist philosophy as Marxism-Leninism.
The First World War and the Two Revolutions
If the Russian state hadn’t collapsed during World War I, Lenin and the Bolsheviks may have vanished into obscure history books. All of the European states were devastated by the war, but the Russian Empire was most severely affected. The Russians suffered significantly more losses than any of the other belligerents, and their deteriorating governmental structure was unable to handle the situation. Despite being a loving family guy, Nicholas II was a feeble and weak leader. He tried to oversee military activities at the front throughout the most of the conflict. His wife, Alexandra, and a powerful but eccentric monk named Grigory Rasputin, who possessed a hypnotic ability to halt Alexandra’s hemophiliac son’s bleeding, were placed in charge of running the country.
By early 1917, the nation and the military were on the verge of disintegration. Due to a lack of supplies, soldiers were occasionally deployed into combat without even boots or guns. Food shortages were common because more than 14 million peasants were serving in the military. The capital city of Petrograd was rocked in March of that year by bread riots (started by women), strikes, and protests (St. Petersburg was renamed after the war to escape the German sound of it). When called upon to uphold law and order, troops rebelled against their commanders. Nicholas had no choice but to resign. Romanov dominion, which lasted for three centuries, had ended.
A provisional government established by the Duma promised to form a constitutional government and hold free elections. However, it made a grave mistake by keeping Russia in the war, which damaged its legitimacy and appeal. In the meantime, alternative governing organizations known as soviets (councils) had been founded nationwide by labourers and soldiers. In Petrograd, where the Bolsheviks and other socialists held significant influence, the Petrograd Soviet assumed some municipal administration duties and began to put the temporary government under growing pressure.
Lenin confronted the temporary government head-on when he returned from exile to Petrograd in April 1917, rallied the Bolsheviks, and demanded “all power to the Soviets” while promising “peace, land, and bread.” The Bolsheviks became stronger throughout the country’s soviets over the course of the following few months, and by autumn, they had secured a majority in the Petrograd Soviet and other places. On November 7, the Winter Palace was overrun by Bolsheviks and their allies in the Petrograd Soviet, who also overthrew the interim administration and took control. Director Sergei Eisenstein portrayed these events in his 1927 film October, which included hundreds of people blasting their way into the Winter Palace. The actual incident was essentially bloodless, and the October filming caused more damage to the Winter Palace than the actual events on November 7. However, the Eisenstein version came to represent the Russian Revolution, and November 7 was commemorated annually in the Soviet Union as the day of the first communist revolution with parades, speeches, and enormous posters of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.
The Bolsheviks were one of the most well-organized political groups in Russia during the revolution, while not being the biggest or most well-liked. Lenin was a charismatic leader and significant theoretician. These traits were sufficient to guarantee a Bolshevik triumph in the confusion and near-anarchy of the conflict and the fall of the monarchy. Lenin acted swiftly to create the Soviet Union as the government, eliminate or neutralize other parties, and consolidate power. The Bolsheviks came to be known as the Communist Party. In March 1918, the new government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ending Russia’s involvement in the war, in accordance with Lenin’s pledge. Russia lost 25% of its pre-war population and 75% of its steel and iron-producing regions as a result of having to give in to Germany’s territorial demands. However, Lenin thought that these losses were just incidental and transient because the Bolshevik takeover of power was only the beginning of a global revolution, and Germany would soon follow.
The Role of Women and the Bolsheviks
The Bolsheviks anticipated that the state and the family would “wither away” under socialism when they took power in 1917. They sought to address the idea that capitalism was especially harsh on women. In order to free women “from her old domestic slavery and all dependence on her husband,” Lenin envisioned the construction of public eating areas, kitchens, laundry facilities, and kindergartens. Marriage would eventually become unnecessary as free couplings of men and women took their place.
Early communist laws, such as those that permitted abortion, were designed to free women and promote the breakup of the family. However, a lot of this social experimentation was undone in the 1930s (under Stalin) when the government prioritized more conventional family responsibilities.
Civil War, New Economic Policy, and Consolidation
One significant issue for the new communist government was resolved by the pact with Germany, but it was soon confronted with a number of additional issues that threatened its very existence. A catastrophic four-year civil war resulted from groups opposed to the Bolsheviks organizing to oppose the new administration, including supporters of the tsar, the provisional government, or other political organizations. The Bolsheviks put Tsar Nicholas and his family to death in 1918 because they feared he would act as a focal point during the civil war.
There were other opponents of the Bolsheviks as well. As a result of the Versailles agreements, the newly established Polish government pushed into German-vacated territory and engaged in conflict with the Russians. After the Polish-Soviet War raged for twenty months, Lenin filed a peace suit. In the meantime, other ethnic groups who had previously been a part of the Russian Empire were declaring their independence and occasionally engaging in combat with the Bolsheviks in the Baltics, Finland, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus. French, British, American, and Japanese forces entered several of these battles, typically fighting against the Bolsheviks, to further complicate and exacerbate the situation.
The communists resolved the war with Poland by 1921 after defeating the majority of the White Russian (anti-Bolshevik) army. Troops from other countries had left Russia. But eight years of conflict, revolution, terror, civil war, and starvation destroyed the nation. In addition to launching a New Economic Policy (NEP) aimed at reviving the economy by granting more flexibility in commerce, industry, and agriculture, Lenin also declared a ceasefire on the internal front. There was also a consolidation phase at this time. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, sometimes known as the Soviet Union) was founded by communists in 1922. Initially made up of Russia, Byelorussia, Ukraine, and the Caucasus, it eventually grew to encompass fifteen republics. The establishment of the USSR was deemed “a decisive step by way of uniting the workers of all countries into one world Soviet Socialist Republic” when the Supreme Soviet of the USSR formally approved a constitution in 1924.
Stalin and Totalitarianism
However, Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924 cut short the NEP’s time of relative peace and recuperation. In a mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square, his body was embalmed and put in a glass tomb. It is still there today. Lenin had no obvious successor, and Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) became the Communist Party’s head following a protracted fight for control. Although Lenin established the foundation for an authoritarian regime with censorship, a secret police, and the dismantling of opposing political parties, Stalin refined it by trying to expand party and state control over almost every facet of Soviet life. This started with the first five-year plan, which was introduced in 1928 and concentrated on the collectivization of agriculture and the quick industrialization of the Soviet economy. The five-year plans, which constituted an ongoing aspect of the Soviet economy, required centralized government departments to make almost all economic decisions regarding salaries, pricing, and the production of each and every commodity. The Soviet economy was unaffected by supply and demand or other market principles.
The integration of individual peasant holdings into communal farms, known as collectivization, was greeted with strong opposition, particularly from richer farmers, many of whom slaughtered their cattle and burnt their harvests instead of giving them to the collectives. Nearly all of the land had been collectivized by 1937, but at a great cost: millions of people were either transferred to Siberian forced labour camps or perished from famine.
Stalin’s overarching objective of rapidly transforming the Soviet Union from an agrarian nation into an industrial power and reducing the economic divide with the West was largely accomplished through collectivization. Twenty million people moved from the rural to the city in the first ten years of the five-year plans as a result of the collectivization programme, which accelerated the growth of heavy industry. Stalin also achieved this aim with considerable success. Iron and steel production quadrupled between 1928 and 1939, and at that time, only the US and Germany had surpassed the USSR’s global industrial output.
By the middle of the 1930s, Stalin’s control of the Communist Party appeared to be impregnable. It appears that Stalin did not share this sentiment, as he carried out the Great Purge from 1936 to 1938 in an effort to eliminate any possible sources of dissent to the party and to him. All of the former Bolshevik revolutionaries—men who had been Lenin’s closest friends—were placed on trial, charged with treason or subversion, found guilty, and put to death during a series of political show trials in the 1936s. Millions of individuals were either killed or deported to labour camps in Siberia as a result of the purges that eventually spread across the party, the army, and the rest of society. For fear of being reported to the Soviet security police, the NKVD, Soviet citizens became reluctant to communicate honestly, even with close friends or relatives. The state oppressed and subjugated the Russian Orthodox Church, and the majority of its churches and monasteries were either demolished or shuttered. Stalin’s Soviet Union was referred to as a totalitarian state (i.e., “total” control) because by the conclusion of the purges, the Stalin administration had almost complete control over the economy, media, religion, culture, education, and even people’s private life. Stalin would continue to govern without opposition until his death in 1953.
The Russian Revolution’s Significance and Legacy
The last absolutist monarchy in Europe was overthrown by the Russian Revolution of 1917, whereas the French Revolution of 1789 was the first in Europe to do so. This alone makes the event noteworthy in European history, but the Russian and French Revolutions had significantly more of an impact. While the French revolutionaries tried to implement some of the ideas and concepts of liberalism and the Enlightenment, their Russian counterparts not only expanded upon these ideas but also constructed their state on the goals of Marxian socialism from the nineteenth century. They had some success in this, but at great expense.
On the plus side of the ledger, one could contend that the communists—especially Stalin—were successful in turning Russia from a rural, underdeveloped nation into a significant military, political, and economic force. In actuality, it was one of two world superpowers by the 1960s, alongside the United States. The Soviet Union most likely would not have been able to stave off the Nazi German invasion of World War II in 1941 if Stalin had not succeeded in his aim of industrial and military growth.
Additionally, the Soviet Union was able to accomplish this economic growth while concurrently pursuing the egalitarian and social welfare objectives of Marxism. The Soviet Union had almost no unemployment, and as a result, there was no extreme poverty. Housing, food, and public transit were all extensively subsidized by the state and reasonably priced for consumers, while health care and education (up to the university level) were free. Additionally, the gap between the affluent and the poor was far smaller than in capitalist nations, even if the government never attempted to attain total equality (and many people bemoaned the privileged status of the communist elites). These accomplishments would have thrilled Marx.
However, these benefits came at a terrible cost in terms of human rights and human life. The worst was during the Stalin period, when the forced collectivization that followed 1929 claimed millions of lives. Millions of people died from famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932–1933; the country today refers to this tragedy as “The Holodomor,” which translates to “murder by starvation.” The Gulags, the forced labour camps in Siberia and the freezing north, claimed the lives of millions more Soviet civilians. Although things improved following Stalin’s death, the Soviet political system remained a one-party state throughout its existence, allowing no independent press, protests, or political rivalry. Every book, magazine, and media outlet was restricted.
The majority of churches, synagogues, and mosques were demolished or shut down. In the Stalinist period, anybody who ventured to question the dictatorship or its policies faced incarceration or exile; in the years that followed, they faced arrest and potentially even death. People were restricted in their ability to travel inside the nation, had little control over where they lived or worked, and could only go overseas with difficulty.
In spite of all of this, the Soviet Union grew stronger and more significant on the international scene. Moscow supported the creation of communist parties and revolutionary movements worldwide through the Communist International (the Comintern), including the Communist Party of China, which took control of the nation in 1949. Although the Soviet Union suffered the most losses at the hands of Germany during World War II, the Soviet army was ultimately responsible for the liberation of Eastern Europe, the capture of Berlin, and the German capitulation in 1945. In the ensuing Cold War, this put Moscow in a position of unmatched power in the heart of Europe and put it at odds with the United States, the other new global power. The Soviet Union’s economic achievements served as a template for revolutionaries, communists, and anti-imperialists across the Third World. In fact, by the 1970s, over half of the world’s population was under Russian communist-inspired or sponsored regimes.
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