Closer cooperation between the USSR and the West developed in the early 1930s.

From 1932 to
1934, the country participated in the World Disarmament Conference. In 1933, diplomatic
relations between the United States and the USSR were established when in November, the
newly elected President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, chose to recognize Stalin's
Communist government formally and negotiated a new trade agreement between the two
countries.[44] In September 1934, the country joined the League of Nations. After the Spanish Civil
War broke out in 1936, the USSR actively supported the Republican forces against
the Nationalists, who were supported by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.[45]
In December 1936, Stalin unveiled a new constitution that was praised by supporters around the
world as the most democratic constitution imaginable, though there was some skepticism.
American historian J. Arch Getty concludes: "Many who lauded Stalin's Soviet Union as the most
democratic country on earth lived to regret their words. After all, the Soviet Constitution of 1936
was adopted on the eve of the Great Terror of the late 1930s; the "thoroughly democratic"
elections to the first Supreme Soviet permitted only uncontested candidates and took place at the
height of the savage violence in 1937. The civil rights, personal freedoms, and democratic forms
promised in the Stalin constitution were trampled almost immediately and remained dead letters
until long after Stalin's death."[46]

Five Marshals of the Soviet Union in 1935. Only two of

them—Budyonny and Voroshilov—survived the Great
Purge. Blyukher, Yegorov and Tukhachevsky were executed.
Stalin's Great Purge resulted in the detainment or execution of many 'Old Bolsheviks' who had
participated in the October Revolution. According to declassified Soviet archives,
the NKVD arrested more than one and a half million people in 1937 and 1938, of whom 681,692
were shot.[47] Over those two years, there were an average of over one thousand executions a
day.[48][aa]
In 1939, after attempts to form a military alliance with Britain and France against Germany failed,
the Soviet Union made a dramatic shift towards Nazi Germany.[52] Almost a year after Britain and
France had concluded the Munich Agreement with Germany, the Soviet Union made agreements
with Germany as well, both militarily and economically during extensive talks. Unlike the case of
Britain and France, the Soviet Union's agreement with Germany, the Molotov–Ribbentrop
Pact (signed on 23 August 1939), included a secret protocol that paved the way for the Soviet
invasion of Eastern European states and occupation of their territories.[53] The pact made possible
the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and eastern
Poland.

Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria with Stalin's daughter, Svetlana,

on his lap. As head of the NKVD, Beria was responsible for many political repressions in the
Soviet Union.
On 1 September, Germany invaded Poland and on the 17th the Soviet Union invaded Poland as
well. On 6 October, Poland fell and part of the Soviet occupation zone was then handed over to
Germany.
On 10 October, the Soviet Union and Lithuania signed an agreement whereby the Soviet Union
transferred Polish sovereignty over the Vilna region to Lithuania, and on 28 October the boundary
between the Soviet occupation zone and the new territory of Lithuania was officially demarcated.
On 1 November, the Soviet Union annexed Western Ukraine, followed by Western Belarus on the
2nd.
In late November, unable to coerce the Republic of Finland by diplomatic means into moving its
border 25 kilometres (16 mi) back from Leningrad, Stalin ordered the invasion of Finland. On 14
December 1939, the Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations for invading Finland.
[54]
In the east, the Soviet military won several decisive victories during border clashes with
the Empire of Japan in 1938 and 1939. However, in April 1941, the USSR signed the Soviet–
Japanese Neutrality Pact with Japan, which the Soviets would unilaterally break in 1945,
recognizing the territorial integrity of Manchukuo, a Japanese puppet state. The pact ensured
Japan would not enter the war against the USSR on the side of Germany later.
World War II
Main article: Soviet Union in World War II
Further information: Eastern Front (World War II), Great Patriotic War (term), World War II
casualties of the Soviet Union, German atrocities committed against Soviet prisoners of
war, Soviet war crimes, and Rape during the occupation of Germany

The Battle of Stalingrad, considered by many

historians as a decisive turning point of World War II
Germany broke the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941
starting what is known in Russia and some other post-Soviet states as the Great Patriotic War.
The Red Army stopped the seemingly invincible German Army at the Battle of Moscow.
The Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted from late 1942 to early 1943, dealt a severe blow to
Germany from which they never fully recovered and became a turning point in the war. After
Stalingrad, Soviet forces drove through Eastern Europe to Berlin before Germany surrendered in
1945. The German Army suffered 80% of its military deaths in the Eastern Front. [55] Harry
Hopkins, a close foreign policy advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt, spoke on 10 August 1943 of the
USSR's decisive role in the war, saying that "While in Sicily the forces of Great Britain and the
United States are being opposed by 2 German divisions, the Russian front is receiving attention
of approximately 200 German divisions."[ab] Up to 34 million soldiers served in the Red Army
during World War II, 8 million of which were non-Slavic minorities.[57]

Residents of Leningrad leave their homes destroyed by

German bombing. About 1 million civilians died during the 871-day Siege of Leningrad,
mostly from starvation. From left to right, the Soviet
General Secretary Joseph Stalin, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime
Minister Winston Churchill confer in Tehran, 1943
The USSR suffered greatly in the war, losing around 20 million people (modern Russian sources
put the number at 26.6 million).[49][58] This includes 8.7 million military deaths. The majority of the
losses were ethnic Russians, followed by ethnic Ukrainians.[57] Approximately 2.8 million Soviet
POWs died of starvation, mistreatment, or executions in just eight months of 1941–42. [59][60] More
than 2 million people were killed in Belarus during the three years of German occupation,
[61]
almost a quarter of the region's population, including around 550,000 Jews in the Holocaust in
Belarus.[62] During the war, the country together with the United States, the United Kingdom and
China were considered the Big Four Allied powers,[63] and later became the Four Policemen that
formed the basis of the United Nations Security Council.[64] It emerged as a superpower in the
post-war period. Once denied diplomatic recognition by the Western world, the USSR had official
relations with practically every country by the late 1940s. A member of the United Nations at its
foundation in 1945, the country became one of the five permanent members of the United
Nations Security Council, which gave it the right to veto any of its resolutions.
The USSR, in fulfillment of its agreement with the Allies at the Yalta Conference, broke the
Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact in April 1945 which Japan had been honoring despite their
alliance with Germany,[65] and invaded Manchukuo and other Japan-controlled territories on 9
August 1945.[66] This conflict ended with a decisive Soviet victory, contributing to the
unconditional surrender of Japan and the end of World War II.
Soviet soldiers committed mass rapes in occupied territories, especially in Germany.
[67]
The wartime rapes were followed by decades of silence.[68][69][70] According to historian Antony
Beevor, whose books were banned in 2015 from some Russian schools and
colleges, NKVD (Soviet secret police) files have revealed that the leadership knew what was
happening, but did little to stop it.[71] It was often rear echelon units who committed the rapes.
According to professor Oleg Rzheshevsky, "4,148 Red Army officers and many privates were
punished for committing atrocities".[72] The exact number of German women and girls raped by
Soviet troops during the war and occupation is uncertain, but historians estimate their numbers
are likely in the hundreds of thousands, and possibly as many as two million.[73]
 U.S. Lend Lease shipments to the USSR.
During the war the USSR provided an unknown number of shipments of rare minerals to the
US Treasury as a form of cashless repayment of Lend-Lease.
The Soviet Union was greatly assisted in its wartime effort by the United States via Lend Lease.
In total, the U.S. deliveries to the USSR through Lend-Lease amounted to $11 billion in materials:
over 400,000 jeeps and trucks; 12,000 armored vehicles (including 7,000 tanks, about 1,386[74] of
which were M3 Lees and 4,102 M4 Shermans);[75] 11,400 aircraft (of which 4,719 were Bell P-39
Airacobras, 3,414 were Douglas A-20 Havocs and 2,397 were Bell P-63 Kingcobras)[76] and
1.75 million tons of food.[77] As Soviet soldiers were bearing the brunt of the war, Roosevelt's
advisor Harry Hopkins felt that American aid to the Soviets would hasten the war's conclusion. [78]
Roughly 17.5 million tons of military equipment, vehicles, industrial supplies, and food were
shipped from the Western Hemisphere to the USSR, 94% coming from the US. For comparison,
a total of 22 million tons landed in Europe to supply American forces from January 1942 to May
1945. It has been estimated that American deliveries to the USSR through the Persian Corridor
alone were sufficient, by US Army standards, to maintain sixty combat divisions in the line. [79][80]
Cold War
Main article: Cold War

Map showing greatest territorial extent of the Soviet Union

and the states that it dominated politically, economically and militarily in 1960, after
the Cuban Revolution of 1959 but before the official Sino-Soviet split of 1961 (total area: c.
35,000,000 km ) 2 [ac]

During the immediate post-war period, the Soviet Union rebuilt and expanded its economy, while
maintaining its strictly centralized control. It took effective control over most of the countries of
Eastern Europe (except Yugoslavia and later Albania), turning them into satellite states. The
USSR bound its satellite states in a military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, in 1955, and an economic
organization, Council for Mutual Economic Assistance or Comecon, a counterpart to
the European Economic Community (EEC), from 1949 to 1991.[81] Although nominally a
"defensive" alliance, the Warsaw Pact's primary function was to safeguard the Soviet Union's
hegemony over its Eastern European satellites, with the Pact's only direct military actions having
been the invasions of its own member states to keep them from breaking away. [82] The USSR
concentrated on its own recovery, seizing and transferring most of Germany's industrial plants,
and it exacted war reparations from East Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria using
Soviet-dominated joint enterprises. It also instituted trading arrangements deliberately designed
to favour the country. Moscow controlled the Communist parties that ruled the satellite states, and
they followed orders from the Kremlin. Historian Mark Kramer concludes: "The net outflow of
resources from eastern Europe to the Soviet Union was approximately $15 billion to $20 billion in
the first decade after World War II, an amount roughly equal to the total aid provided by the
United States to western Europe under the Marshall Plan."[83] Later, the Comecon supplied aid to
the eventually victorious Chinese Communist Party, and its influence grew elsewhere in the
world. Fearing its ambitions, the Soviet Union's wartime allies, the United Kingdom and the
United States, became its enemies. In the ensuing Cold War, the two sides clashed indirectly
in proxy wars.
De-Stalinization and Khrushchev Thaw (1953–64)
Main article: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (left) with US

President John F. Kennedy in Vienna, 3 June 1961
Stalin died on 5 March 1953. Without a mutually agreeable successor, the highest Communist
Party officials initially opted to rule the Soviet Union jointly through a troika headed by Georgy
Malenkov. This did not last, however, and Nikita Khrushchev eventually won the ensuing power
struggle by the mid-1950s. In 1956, he denounced Joseph Stalin and proceeded to ease controls
over the party and society. This was known as de-Stalinization.
Moscow considered Eastern Europe to be a critically vital buffer zone for the forward defence of
its western borders, in case of another major invasion such as the German invasion of 1941. For
this reason, the USSR sought to cement its control of the region by transforming the Eastern
European countries into satellite states, dependent upon and subservient to its leadership. As a
result, Soviet military forces were used to suppress an anti-communist uprising in Hungary in
1956.
In the late 1950s, a confrontation with China regarding the Soviet rapprochement with the West,
and what Mao Zedong perceived as Khrushchev's revisionism, led to the Sino–Soviet split. This
resulted in a break throughout the global Marxist–Leninist movement, with the governments
in Albania, Cambodia and Somalia choosing to ally with China.
 Republics of the Soviet Union in 1954–1991
During this period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the USSR continued to realize scientific and
technological exploits in the Space Race, rivaling the United States: launching the first artificial
satellite, Sputnik 1 in 1957; a living dog named Laika in 1957; the first human being, Yuri
Gagarin in 1961; the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963; Alexei Leonov, the first
person to walk in space in 1965; the first soft landing on the Moon by spacecraft Luna 9 in 1966;
and the first Moon rovers, Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2.[84]