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The Soviet Union, [u] officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics [v] (USSR), [w] was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. During its existence, it was the largest country by area , extending across eleven time zones and sharing borders with twelve countries , and the third-most populous country .
The Soviet Union had the longest borders of any contemporary country, extending approx. 60,000 km (37,000 mi). [1] [2] They measured some 10,000 kilometers (6,213.7 mi) from Kaliningrad on Gdańsk Bay in the west to Ratmanova Island (Big Diomede Island) in the Bering Strait - the rough equivalent of the distance from Edinburgh, Scotland, westwards to Nome, Alaska.
A union of multiple subnational Soviet republics, its government and economy were highly centralized. The Soviet Union was a one-party state, governed by the Communist Party with Moscow as its capital. It was a major ally during World War II, a main participant in the Cold War, and it grew in power to become one of the world's two superpowers ...
The post-Soviet states, also referred to as the former Soviet Union (FSU) [1] or the former Soviet republics, are the independent sovereign states that emerged/re-emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Prior to their independence, they existed as Union Republics, which were the top-level constituents of the Soviet Union.
The Eastern Bloc, also known as the Communist Bloc (Combloc), the Socialist Bloc, and the Soviet Bloc, was the collective term for an unofficial coalition of communist states of Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America that were aligned with the Soviet Union and existed during the Cold War (1947–1991).
The number of the union republics of the USSR varied from 4 to 16. From 1956 until its dissolution in 1991, the Soviet Union consisted of 15 Soviet Socialist Republics. (In 1956, the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic, created in 1940, was absorbed into the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.)
The history of the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982, referred to as the Brezhnev Era, covers the period of Leonid Brezhnev's rule of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). This period began with high economic growth and soaring prosperity but ended with a much weaker Soviet Union facing social, political, and economic stagnation.
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