Country Profile: Russia
— -- A country that is still working to recover from the damage incurred during its Cold War past, Russia now struggles to establish strategic political partnerships, and to maintain domestic security.
Formerly the biggest communist country in the world, Russia and its corresponding republics turned away from communist rule in the early 1990s, and it broke up into 15 independent republics. At its height, the communist superpower covered 8.6 million square miles.
History of Setbacks
After a serious military setback during World War I, a civil war pitted the ruling class of aristocracy against the disgruntled working class peasants and military, who joined together to form workers' councils, or soviets.
After a series of riots, military mutinies, and assassinations that came to a peak in 1917, the liberal, soviet-backed, pro-Communist Bolsheviks rose to power, and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin became the country's leader, and soon formed the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, and moved the capital from St. Petersburg to Moscow.
Despite reforms that centralized its republics, and rebuilding the country's infrastructure, many people lived in poverty and millions died from famine.
Lenin died in 1924, and Joseph Stalin became the next ruler of the emerging communist superpower. While Stalin is credited for leading the country through World War II and strengthening Russian dominance of the Soviet Union, he did it at a cost of tens of millions of lives during his "Great Purge."
‘Space Race’ and the Cold War
From the end of World War II until the late 1980s, the Soviet Union and the democratic nations of the West waged a conflict dubbed the "Cold War," which revolved around the ideological differences between communism and capitalism.
As a result, the U.S.S.R. also supported a series of military and economic initiatives, and was a huge support to other burgeoning communist nations such as Cuba and China, and a series of satellite countries in Eastern Europe, also known as the Eastern Bloc.
Related Stories
ABC News Live