DSST Soviet Union cheat sheet

Kievan Rus adopted Orthodox Christianity under Vladimir I in 988, orienting Russia toward Byzantium rather than Latin Europe.

The Mongol (Golden Horde) overlordship from the 1240s to 1480 shaped Muscovite autocracy and the tribute system; Ivan III ended tribute at the Ugra River stand in 1480.

Serfdom was codified progressively: the Law Code (Sudebnik) of 1497 restricted peasant movement to the St. George's Day period; the Ulozhenie of 1649 made serfdom hereditary and attached peasants to land.

Peter the Great (1682-1725) built St. Petersburg (founded 1703), imposed the Table of Ranks (1722), and subordinated the Church to the Holy Synod.

The emancipation of the serfs by Alexander II in 1861 granted personal freedom but kept redemption payments and communal (obshchina) land tenure, producing rural discontent.

The zemstvo system of elected local self-government was introduced in 1864; judicial reforms of 1864 created jury trials and an independent bar.

Revolutionary groups: the Populists (Narodniki) of the 1870s looked to the peasantry; the People's Will assassinated Alexander II in 1881; the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party split in 1903 into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

The 1905 Revolution followed Bloody Sunday (January 1905) and produced the October Manifesto and the Duma; the Fundamental Laws of 1906 preserved autocratic power.

Stolypin's agrarian reforms (from 1906) aimed to replace communal tenure with private peasant farms, but were incomplete when he was assassinated in 1911.

February 1917: bread riots and strikes in Petrograd led to the abdication of Nicholas II in March 1917, ending the Romanov dynasty.

Dual power: the Provisional Government shared authority with the Petrograd Soviet; the April Theses of Lenin called for 'All power to the Soviets' and no support for the Provisional Government.

The July Days (1917) weakened the Bolsheviks temporarily; the Kornilov affair in August strengthened them by arming workers in defense of Petrograd.

October Revolution: the Bolsheviks seized power on 7 November 1917 (25 October, O.S.); the Constituent Assembly was elected in November 1917 and dissolved by force in January 1918.

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918) ceded vast territories to Germany and ended Russia's participation in the First World War.

The Russian Civil War (1918-1921) pitted Reds against Whites and foreign interventionists; War Communism included grain requisitioning (prodrazverstka) and nationalization.

The Kronstadt rebellion of March 1921 by sailors demanding Soviet democracy was crushed and prompted the shift to the New Economic Policy.

The Cheka, founded December 1917, was the Bolshevik secret police; it was renamed GPU and later OGPU.

NEP was introduced by Lenin in March 1921: grain requisitioning was replaced by a tax in kind (prodnalog), allowing peasants to sell surpluses.

NEP permitted limited private trade and small-scale private enterprise while the state retained control of heavy industry, banking, and foreign trade.

The 'scissors crisis' of 1923 saw industrial prices rise relative to agricultural prices, hurting peasants; the state responded with price controls.

The 1921 famine followed drought and requisitioning and prompted foreign relief (ARA); Lenin's 1922 'On Cooperation' envisioned gradual socialist transformation.

The 1922 'Lenin's Testament' criticized Stalin's power; the 1922-23 'Georgian affair' and Lenin's death in January 1924 intensified the succession struggle.

Trotsky's Left Opposition (from 1923) advocated rapid industrialization and attacked bureaucratization; the United Opposition of 1926-27 was defeated and Trotsky exiled in 1929.

Bukharin and the Right favored continuing NEP and gradual collectivization; Stalin turned against them in 1928-29.

The 1927 war scare and the grain procurement crisis of 1927-28 led to the abandonment of NEP and the First Five-Year Plan (1928).

The First Five-Year Plan (1928-1932) set ambitious industrial targets and emphasized heavy industry over consumer goods.

Collectivization began in earnest in 1929: peasants were forced into kolkhozy; 'dekulakization' targeted wealthier peasants, and the 1932-33 famine followed.

The 1936 'Stalin Constitution' proclaimed universal suffrage and civil rights in theory while the one-party system and party control remained.

The Great Purges (1936-1938): show trials of Old Bolsheviks (Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin), mass arrests, and executions; the NKVD (from 1934) administered terror.

Stakhanovism (from 1935) celebrated high production norms and was used to raise labor intensity and productivity standards.

The 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact (Molotov-Ribbentrop) included secret protocols dividing Eastern Europe; the Winter War with Finland followed in 1939-40.

The Comintern, founded 1919, served Soviet foreign policy; the 1935 Popular Front line encouraged alliances with Western leftist parties.

Industrial output targets were often reported as met through statistical inflation; labor discipline was enforced through internal passports (1932) and labor decrees.

Operation Barbarossa began on 22 June 1941; the Soviet Union suffered massive initial losses as Stalin's purges had weakened the officer corps.

The Battle of Stalingrad (1941-1943) ended with the surrender of the German 6th Army in February 1943 and marked the turning point on the Eastern Front.

The Siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days (1941-1944) and caused massive civilian deaths; the Battle of Kursk (1943) was the largest tank battle.

The Soviet Union bore the heaviest casualties of the war, with estimated military and civilian deaths in the tens of millions.

Lend-Lease aid from the US and Britain supplied transport, food, and materials; Soviet industry was evacuated east of the Urals in 1941-42.

The Big Three conferences: Tehran (1943), Yalta (February 1945), and Potsdam (July-August 1945) shaped postwar Europe and the occupation of Germany.

The Soviet Union entered the war against Japan on 9 August 1945, and the war in Europe ended with Germany's surrender in May 1945.

The war legitimized Stalin's rule and produced the 'Great Patriotic War' narrative, which became a central element of Soviet identity.

The Fourth Five-Year Plan (1946-1950) rebuilt heavy industry and restored production, prioritizing heavy industry and defense.

The Cold War began with the Truman Doctrine (1947) and Marshall Plan; the Soviet response included the Cominform (1947) and the Molotov Plan (Comecon, 1949).

The Berlin Blockade (1948-49) and the formation of NATO (1949) and the Warsaw Pact (1955) institutionalized the division of Europe.

The Zhdanovshchina (1946-1948) enforced ideological conformity in culture and science, including attacks on 'cosmopolitanism'.

The 'Leningrad Affair' (1949-50) and the 'Doctors' Plot' (1952-53) were purges that targeted party officials and Jewish professionals.

Yugoslavia's Tito broke with Stalin in 1948 and was expelled from the Cominform; the Soviet Union pursued a policy of non-alignment in the Third World.

The Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in 1949 and its first hydrogen bomb in 1953, beginning the nuclear arms race.

Stalin died on 5 March 1953; the succession initially produced collective leadership (Khrushchev, Malenkov, Beria) before Khrushchev consolidated power.

Khrushchev's 'Secret Speech' at the 20th Party Congress (February 1956) denounced Stalin's crimes and launched de-Stalinization.

The 'Thaw' in culture allowed limited liberalization; Boris Pasternak's 'Doctor Zhivago' was published abroad in 1957 and banned at home.

The Virgin Lands campaign (from 1954) aimed to increase grain output in Kazakhstan and Siberia; results were mixed.

The 1957 launch of Sputnik and the 1961 flight of Yuri Gagarin boosted Soviet prestige and intensified the space race.

The Berlin Wall was erected in 1961; the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 ended with a US-Soviet withdrawal of missiles from Cuba and Turkey.

The Sino-Soviet split emerged in the late 1950s and became public in 1960-63, dividing the communist world.

Khrushchev's 1961 Party Program promised the attainment of communism by 1980; his administrative reforms included the 1957 sovnarkhoz reorganization.

Khrushchev was ousted in October 1964 by a party coup led by Brezhnev and Kosygin, who criticized his 'hare-brained schemes'.

Brezhnev's 'stability of cadres' policy ended the frequent turnover of officials and entrenched a gerontocracy.

The 1965 Kosygin reforms attempted limited economic decentralization but were reversed by the late 1960s.

The Prague Spring of 1968 was crushed by Warsaw Pact forces, and the 'Brezhnev Doctrine' asserted the right to intervene in socialist states.

Detente produced the SALT I (1972) and ABM treaties, the Helsinki Accords (1975), and expanded trade with the West.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 ended detente and led to Western sanctions and a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

The 'era of stagnation' was characterized by declining growth, an emphasis on heavy industry, and a shadow economy; the 1977 Constitution declared the USSR a 'developed socialist society'.

The dissident movement included Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn; the Helsinki Watch groups monitored compliance with the 1975 accords.

The 1973 oil shock temporarily boosted Soviet hard-currency earnings, masking structural economic weakness.

Gorbachev became General Secretary in March 1985 and pursued perestroika (economic restructuring), glasnost (openness), and demokratizatsiya (democratization).

The 1986 Chernobyl disaster exposed the limits of glasnost and the costs of secrecy; the 1987 Law on State Enterprises introduced limited market mechanisms.

The 1989 elections to the Congress of People's Deputies produced a new legislature and weakened party control; the 1990 Article 6 repeal ended the party's monopoly on power.

Nationalist movements in the Baltic states, Georgia, and Ukraine challenged the union; the 1988 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict revealed ethnic tensions.

The 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the end of the Brezhnev Doctrine; the Warsaw Pact was dissolved in 1991.

The August 1991 coup by hardliners failed, accelerating the collapse; the Belovezha Accords of December 1991 dissolved the USSR and created the CIS.

Gorbachev resigned on 25 December 1991, and the USSR formally ceased to exist on 31 December 1991.

Economic reforms included the 1988 Law on Cooperatives and the 1990 Shatalin plan for a rapid transition to a market economy, which was not fully implemented.