Communism throughout Europe and Asia was known as the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War. The Soviet Union, China, and their allies ruled these nations. Eastern Bloc countries were sometimes referred to as second-world countries during the Cold War. The Eastern Bloc and the U.S. and its allies were the first-world nations. The Eastern and […]
At its height, the USSR was the world’s biggest nation. The USSR occupied 11 of the world’s 24 time zones and had an area almost as large as North America, with 22,402,200 square kilometers (8,649,500 square miles). The Soviet population peaked at 288 million in the late 1980s, making it the third-largest country on Earth.
From 1922 to 1991, the Soviet Union was a federal socialist state comprised of 15 communist republics. The Bolsheviks, extreme leftist revolutionaries, ousted Czar Nicholas II and the centuries-old Romanov monarchy in 1917, sparking a civil war that led to the creation of the Soviet Union. An agreement signed in 1922 between the Soviet Union