MAPS OF HISTORY · ON THIS DAY · December 30 · 1922
ON THIS DAY · 30 DECEMBER 1922
The USSR is founded
30 Dec 1922 — Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia and Transcaucasia federate into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: nationality in the form, the Party in the content. The settled map has a name.
THE MOMENT IN CONTEXT
Look at the settled map. The red has flooded back out almost to the old imperial frontiers, and on 30 December 1922 it acquired a name: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, founded at Moscow as a federation of Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia and Transcaucasia — nationality in the form, the Party in the content. The last foreign troops had left Vladivostok in October. The empire had been destroyed and rebuilt on the same ground under a new flag, by a party that had promised peace, land and bread and delivered civil war, requisition and famine — and yet had won, and would now rule for seven decades.
From Chapter 12 — What Had Been Made of The Russian Revolution, 1905–1924 (JAN 1924).
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TEACH THIS IN 5 MINUTES
- Why it happened — The civil war forged the state. The USSR of 1924 was the child of its war, not of 1917’s hopes. Centralization, one-party rule, the security police, the militarized economy and the…
- The turn — Lenin dies at Gorki, 21 January 1924. The revolution’s founder died at fifty-three, his final warnings unheeded and his succession unsettled. Lenin’s death matters less for the man than…
- What it changed — Stalin’s rise. The man who held the dull administrative offices — General Secretary above all — controlled who joined the Party, who was promoted, who was posted…
Then ask the room: Was the Soviet outcome — a one-party dictatorship — the inevitable result of 1917, or a contingent product of the civil war and its aftermath? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
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