The Soviet Union in the Cold War

The Soviet Union emerged from World War II as one of two global superpowers, its Red Army occupying half of Europe and its ideology inspiring revolutionary movements worldwide. For over four decades, the USSR and the United States locked the planet in a contest that was military, ideological, economic, and cultural — a struggle that came terrifyingly close to nuclear annihilation on more than one occasion.

Under Stalin, the Soviet Union consolidated control over Eastern Europe, developed its own nuclear weapons by 1949, and built a command economy that achieved rapid industrialization at enormous human cost. The Khrushchev era brought de-Stalinization and the space race triumph of Sputnik and Gagarin, but also the Hungarian uprising and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Brezhnev's long tenure saw military parity with the West but economic stagnation that the system could never overcome.

Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms of glasnost and perestroika, intended to save the Soviet system, instead unleashed forces that destroyed it. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 cascaded into the collapse of communist regimes across Eastern Europe, and on December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist — ending an experiment in state socialism that had lasted 74 years and reshaped the world.