СОЮЗ СОВЕТСКИХ СОЦИАЛИСТИЧЕСКИХ РЕСПУБЛИК

СЕРП И МОЛОТHAMMER& SICKLE

КРАТКОЕ ВВЕДЕНИЕSHORT INTRODUCTION

КОММУНИСТИЧЕСКАЯ ПАРТИЯCOMMUNIST PARTY

КЛЮЧЕВЫЕ ЛЮДИKEY FIGURES

НАСЕЛЕНИЕ И РУССКИЕPOPULATION&RUSSIANS

РЕЛИГИЯRELIGION

CПУТНИК-1SPUTNIK-1

UNICODE: U+262DThe two tools are symbols of the industrial proletariat and the peasantry; placing them together symbolizes the unity between industrial and agricultural workers. This emblem was originally conceived during the Bolshevik revolution as a hammer on a plough, but it had the same meaning.

Today, this still is a popular symbol amongst communists and other leftists worldwide. Although Western Europe permits public display without consequence, for several Eastern European countries it is the symbol of a "totalitarian and criminal ideology," and the public display along with other communist symbols such (Red Star) is considered a criminal offence.

Some anthropologists argued that the symbol was actually Russian Orthodox, used by the Communists to fill the religious needs of a new "state religion."

Disintegration of the federal political structures and central government of the USSR resulted in the independence of all 15 republics of the Soviet Union between March 11th 1990 and December 25th 1991.

The direct cause of the dissolution was failed attempt by Mikhail Gorbachev to revitalize the Soviet economy through a process of limited political liberalisation (glasnost/perestroika) within the confines of a totalitarian communist one-party state.

The broader result of the dissolution was the fall of Communism as a global ideology and the end of the Cold War. Multi-ethnic communist federal states proved particularly vulnerable to disintegration during this time – the Soviet Union was but one example of three such states that collapsed in Europe as a result of the fall of communism, the others being the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, which broke up in a series of wars in 1991–1992, and Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, which had its peaceful velvet divorce in 1993.

According to data from the 1989 Soviet census, the population of the Soviet Union was 70% East Slavs, 12% Turkic peoples, and all other ethnic groups below 10%. Alongside the atheist majority of 60% there were sizable minorities of Russian Orthodox followers (approx. 20%) and Muslims (approx. 15%). Most of the population used the Cyrillic alphabet (near 90%) and spoke the Russian language (near 70%).

The Soviet Union was one of the world's most ethnically diverse countries, with more than 100 distinct national ethnicities living within its borders. Besides Soviet Union nations, other ethnic groups that lived in USSR include Abkhaz, Adyghes, Aleuts, Assyrians, Avars, Bashkirs, Bulgarians, Buryats, Chechens, Chinese, Chuvash, Cossacks, Evenks, Finns, Gagauz, Germans, Greeks, Hungarians, Ingushes, Inuit, Jews, Kalmyks, Karakalpaks, Karelians, Kets, Koreans, Lezgins, Maris, Mongols, Mordvins, Nenetses, Ossetians, Poles, Roma, Romanians, Tats, Tatars, Tuvans, Udmurts, and Yakuts.

Sputnik (Satellite in Russian) was the first artificial satellite to be put into Earth's orbit. It was launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957, and was the first in a series of satellites collectively known as the Sputnik program.

The unanticipated announcement of Sputnik 1's success precipitated the Sputnik crisis in the United States and ignited the Space Race within the Cold War.

The launch ushered in new political, military, technological, and scientific developments. While the Sputnik launch was a single event, it marked the start of the Space Age.

A satellite state is a political term that refers to a country that is formally independent, but under heavy political and economic influence or control by another country. Other such terms include puppet state and neo-colony.

At the end of WWII, most Eastern and Central European countries were occupied by the Soviet Union. USSR remained in these countries after the war's end. Through a series of coalition governments including Communist parties, and then a forced liquidation of coalition members unlinked by the Soviets, Stalinist systems were established in each country. Stalinists gained control of existing governments, police, press and radio outlets in these countries.

The SFR of Yugoslavia is sometimes also referred to as a Soviet satellite, though it broke from the Soviet Union in the 1948 Tito-Stalin split and subsequently helped to form the Non-Aligned Movement. The People's Republic of Albania, under the leadership of Stalinist Enver Hoxha, broke ties with the Soviet Union in 1960 following the Soviet de-stalinization.

The Cold War was the continuing state of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World – primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies – and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States and its allies from roughly 1946 to 1991. Although the chief military forces never engaged in a major battle with each other, they expressed the conflict through military coalitions, strategic conventional force deployments, extensive aid to states deemed vulnerable, proxy wars, espionage, propaganda, conventional and nuclear arms races, appeals to neutral nations, rivalry at sports events, and technological competitions such as the Space Race.

Along with the broadcasts of the BBC and the VOA to Eastern Europe, a major propaganda effort begun in 1949 - Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, dedicated to bringing about the peaceful demise of the Communist system in the Eastern Bloc. RFE was a product of some of the most prominent architects of America's early Cold War strategy.

While Stalin's death in 1953 slightly relaxed tensions, the situation in Europe remained an uneasy armed truce.[111] The Soviets, who had already created a network of mutual assistance treaties in the Eastern Bloc by 1949,[112] established a formal alliance therein, the Warsaw Pact, in 1955.

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 occurred shortly after Khrushchev arranged the removal of Hungary's Stalinist leader Mátyás Rákosi. In response to a popular uprising, the new regime formally disbanded the secret police, declared its intention to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and pledged to re-establish free elections. The Soviet army invaded. Thousands were arrested, imprisoned and deported to the Soviet Union, and approximately 200,000 fled Hungary in the chaos. Hungarian leader Imre Nagy and others were executed following secret trials.

In 1968, a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia called the Prague Spring took place. It included program of liberalizations, which described increasing freedom of the press, freedom of speech and freedom of movement, along with an economic emphasis on consumer goods, the possibility of a multiparty government, limiting the power of the secret police and potentially withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact.

In answer to the Prague Spring, the Soviet army invaded Czechoslovakia with support from most of their Warsaw Pact allies. The invasion created a wave of emigration, estimating 70,000 fleeing initially, with eventually reaching the total of 300,000. The invasion sparked intense protests from Yugoslavia, Romania and China and from Western European communist parties.

The Berlin Wall was a barrier constructed by East Germany starting on August 13TH 1961, that completely cut off West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and THE East Berlin. The barrier included guard towers placed along large concrete walls which circumscribed a wide area that contained anti-vehicle trenches, "fakir beds" and other defenses.

The Soviet-dominated Eastern Bloc officially claimed that the wall was erected to protect its population from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the "will of the people" in building a socialist state in East Germany.

The Berlin Wall finaly fell on November 9th 1989, paving the way for reunification of Germany which was formally concluded on October 3rd 1990.

Tetris is a puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov in the Soviet Union. It was released on June 6, 1984, while he was working for the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the USSR in Moscow. He derived its name from the Greek numerical prefix tetra- and tennis, Pajitnov's favorite sport.

The objective of the game is to manipulate these tetrominoes, by moving each one sideways and rotating it by 90 degree units, with the aim of creating a horizontal line of ten blocks without gaps. When such a line is created, it disappears, and any block above the deleted line will fall.

The first human spaceflight was accomplished on April 12, 1961 by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. The only countries to have independent human spaceflight capability are Russia and China. As of 2011, human spaceflights are being actively launched by the Soyuz programme conducted by the Russian Federal Space Agency and the Shenzhou program conducted by the China National Space Administration.

A nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine which was under the direct jurisdiction of the central Moscow's authorities. An explosion and fire released large quantities of radioactive contamination into the atmosphere, which spread over much of Western USSR and Europe. It is considered the worst nuclear power plant accident in history, and is one of only two classified as a level 7 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale (the other being the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster). The battle to contain the contamination and avert a greater catastrophe ultimately involved over 500,000 workers and cost an estimated 18 billion rubles, crippling the Soviet economy.

Laika, literally meaning "Barker" was a Soviet Space Dog that became the first animal to orbit the Earth – as well as the first animal to die in orbit.

THE SYMBOL CAN BE SEEN AS A PERMUTATION OF THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX TWO-BARRED CROSS (THE PATRIARCHAL CROSS), A VARIANT OF THE CHRISTIAN CROSS, THE RELIGIOUS SYMBOL OF CHRISTIANITY.

The Foreign Ministers of Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and the Czech Republic called for an EU-wide ban on communist symbols in 2010.

LATVIA (Likums "Par sapulcēm, gājieniemun piketiem"2003)www.politika.lv/index.php?id=5122

POLAND (Kodeks karny 1997)http://bit.ly/criminal_code_pl (PDF)

HUNGARY (Criminal Code 269/B.§ 1993)http://bit.ly/criminal_code_hungary (PDF)

LITHUANIA (2008)http://bbc.in/lt_soviet_ban (BBC)

ANGOLAN FLAGcog + machete + star

COMMUNIST PARTY OF TURKEY LOGOcog wheel + hammer

WORKER'S PARTY OF KOREAbrush + sickle + hammer

EAST GERMAN FLAGhammer + compassesALBANIA (COMMUNIST)pickaxe + rifle

COUNTRIES BANNING THE SYMBOL

VARIATIONS OF THE SYMBOL

ФЛАГ СССР

ГОСУДАРСТВЕННЫЙ ГЕРБ

MOSCOW

ESTABLISHED: BEFORE 1147POPULATION (1989): 8,769,117TIME ZONE: MSD (UTC+04:00)

COORDINATES: 55°45’N 37°37’EGOOGLE MAP: WWW.BIT.LY/Q5SFLO

ADOPTED IN 1923

С С СР

Officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991. The USSR had a single-party political system dominated by the Communist Party until 1990. Although nominally a union of Soviet republics (15 in all after 1956) with the capital in Moscow, it was actually a highly centralized state with a planned economy. The Russian Revolution of 1917 brought the downfall of the Russian Empire.

After the Bolsheviks won the ensuing Russian Civil War, the Soviet Union was founded in December 1922 with the merger of the Russian Soviet Federative

Socialist Republic, Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.

The USSR and it's Eastern European satellites engaged in the Cold War, which it ultimately lost in the face of economic troubles and both domestic and foreign political unrest. In the late 1980s, the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform the state with his policies of perestroika and glasnost, but USSR collapsed and was formally dissolved in December 1991. The Russian Federation assumed its rights and obligations.

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world. It emerged from the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin. The party led the 1917 October Revolution that overthrew the Russian Provisional Government and established the world's first socialist state. Given the central role under the Constitution of the Soviet Union, the party controlled all tiers of government in the Soviet Union and

tolerated no opposition. Its organization was subdivided into communist parties of the constituent Soviet republics as well as the mass youth organization, Komsomol. The party was also the driving force of the Third International (Comintern).

The party ceased to exist after the coup d'état attempt in 1991 and was succeeded by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation in Russia and the communist parties of the now independent former Soviet republics.

ОФИЦИАЛЬНЫЕ НАЗВАНИЯ

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ISLAMPROTESTANT, GEORGIAN &

ARMENIAN ORTHODOX, ROMAN CATHOLIC

15%JEWISH OTHER: PAGAN,

SHAMANISM,BUDDHISM, HUNDU,

TAOISM...1%7%ATHEISTS

60%(ESTIMATED) LESS THAN

RUSSIANORTHODOX

20%

VLADIMIR ILYICH LENIN

1870-1924ВЛАДИМИР ИЛЬИЧ ЛЕНИН

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in the town of Simbirsk. He was deeply influenced by the revolutionary political views of his older brother, Alexander Ulyanov, who introduced him to the ideas of Karl Marx. Lenin was a Russian revolutionary, author, lawyer, economic theorist, political philosopher, creator of the Soviet Communist Party, leader of the 1917 October Revolution, and founder of the USSR. As head of the Bolsheviks he led the Red Army to victory in the Russian Civil War, before establishing the world's first officially socialist state. As a theorist, his extensive theoretical and philosophical contributions to Marxism produced Leninism.

Lenin: Revolutionary - a documentary about Vladimir Lenin: http://bit.ly/lenin-video

JOSEPH STALIN

1878-1953ИОСИФ ВИССАРИОНОВИЧ СТАЛИН

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953. While formally the office of the General Secretary was elective and was not initially regarded as the top position in the Soviet state, Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin managed to consolidate more power in his hands, putting down all opposition groups within the party.

This included Leon Trotsky, the principal critic of Stalin among early Soviet leaders, who was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929. Instead, Stalin's idea of socialism in one country became the primary line of the Soviet politics.

Stalin speech - November 7, 1941 with English subtitles: http://bit.ly/stalin-speech

LEONID BREZHNEV

1906-1982ЛЕОНИД БРЕЖНЕВ

He was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, presiding over the country from 1964 until his death in 1982. His 18 year term was one of the longest, second only to that of Stalin. During Brezhnev's rule, the global influence of the USSR grew dramatically, in part because of the expansion of the Soviet military during this time, but his tenure as leader has often been criticized for marking the beginning of a period of economic stagnation, overlooking serious economic problems which eventually led to the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.

Leonid Brezhnev’s visit to Fidel Castro footage by Iconic: http://bit.ly/brezhnev-castro

NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV

1894-1971НИКИТА ХРУЩЁВ

He led the USSR during part of the Cold War serving as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and as a Premier. Khrushchev was responsible for the partial de-Stalinization of the USSR, for backing the progress of the early Soviet space program and several relatively liberal reforms. He was removed from power in 1964 by his party colleagues and replaced with Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary and Alexei Kosygin as Premier.

Nikita Khrushchev: Between black & white by Russia Today: http://bit.ly/khrushchev

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV

1931- МИХАИЛ ГОРБАЧЁВ

He is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the USSR from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991. He was the only general secretary in the history of the Soviet Union to have been born during the Communist rule.

In 1990, Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for "his leading role in the peace process which today characterizes important parts of the international community". Together with Bill Clinton and Sophia Loren, he was awarded the 2004 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children .

Mikhail Gorbachev resigns: http://bit.ly/gorb-res

SPUTNIK-2 LAUNCH

ПЕРВЫЙ ЧЕЛОВЕК В КОСМОСЕFIRST MAN IN SPACE

ЛАЙКАLAIKA

КАТАСТРОФА ЧЕРНОБЫЛЯCHERNOBYL DISASTER

ГОСУДАРСТВО-САТЕЛЛИТSOVIET SATELLITE STATES

РАСПАД СОВЕТСКОГО СОЮЗАDISSOLUTION OF THE SOVIET UNION

VERSION 1.0/AUG-2011 | PUBLISHED BY LAB604 | DATA AND TEXT SOURCE: WIKIPEDIAPUBLISHED UNDER CREATIVE COMMONS - ATTRIBUTION-NONCOMMERCIAL CC BY-NC LICENCE

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ХОЛOДНАЯ ВОЙНATHE COLD WAR

SOCIALIST PEOPLE'SREPUBLIC OF

ALBANIAPOP.: 3,072,000

PEOPLE'SREPUBLIC OF

BULGARIAPOP.: 8,990,055

CZECHOSLOVAKSOCIALISTREPUBLIC

POP.: 15,600,000

PEOPLE'SREPUBLIC OF

ROMANIAPOP.: 23,102,000

PEOPLE'SREPUBLIC OF

HUNGARYPOP.: 10,397,959

SOCIALIST FEDERALREPUBLIC OF

YUGOSLAVIAPOP.: 23,724,919

MONGOLIANPEOPLE’SREPUBLIC

POP.: 2,318,000

DEMOCRATICREPUBLIC OF

AFGHANISTANPOP.: 15,395,716

SATELLITESTATES INEUROPE

SATELLITESTATESIN ASIA

MOSCOW

NEXT LINE

HIGH SCORE17000

PEOPLE'SREPUBLIC OF

POLANDPEOPLE'SREPUBLIC OF

POLANDPOP.: 23,930,000

EASTGERMANY

EASTGERMANY

POP.: 16,111,000

ТЕТРИСTETRIS

www.tetris.comGO PLAY!

http://bit.ly/bw-groupBERLIN WALL PHOTO COLLECTION

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EUROPE DURINGTHE COLD WAR

WARSZAW PACT

HUNGARIAN UPRISING

PRAGUE SPRING (PRAŽSKÉ JARO)THE RISE AND FALL OFTHE BERLIN WALL

NIXON & GORBACHEV MEET

INVASION OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA

BRATISLAVA, ŠAFARIKOVO NAM.INVASION OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA

PRAHA, T-62 IN PRAGUE

HUNGARIAN UPRISING OF 1956.PREPARING THE BERLIN WALL

DDR CLOSING BORDER

CHRONOLOGY OF INDEPENDENCE DECLARATIONS

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