In 1922, under Lenin’s rule, Russia became the dominant constituent part of a new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) – the world’s first constitutionally socialist state. It was comprised of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic.

The civil war had greatly damaged the Russian economy, and this – combined with severe droughts, failed harvests, economic blockades, the requisition of grain and seed-grain from peasants and a disrupted transport system – culminated in a terrible famine between 1921 and 1922. Although Lenin did eventually accept international aid, more than five million people are thought to have died, either through starvation or associated diseases. Millions also fled the new USSR, in particular those who had supported the Whites during the civil war. Known as ‘White émigrés’, they included members of the imperial government, businessmen, monarchists and officers, as well as poets and writers.

• Read more | Your guide to the USSR

No political parties other than the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union were allowed within the USSR, and soon Lenin held power at least as great as any tsar. With complete control over government and the media, the USSR was in effect a totalitarian dictatorship. The Bolshevik secret police that Lenin had established in 1917 was replaced by the State Political Directorate (known as the GPU) and the Gulag system of forced labour camps was introduced. Around 18 million people – including dissenters, criminals and prosperous peasants, known as ‘kulaks’ – are thought to have been incarcerated in the camps between their introduction in 1919 and Stalin’s death in 1953. Hundreds of thousands of these prisoners died of starvation, disease, exhaustion or execution.

Exit Lenin, enter Stalin

Lenin, who had been increasingly unwell since 1921, suffered his first stroke in May 1922. Fearing imminent death, he dictated a letter now known as Lenin’s Testament, in which he pointed out the dangers of a split within the party and outlined the strengths and weaknesses of its leaders, without specifying who should succeed him. He did, however, recommend that Stalin be removed from his position as general secretary. The full content of Lenin’s Testament was kept a secret from most of the Soviet Congress, however, and would not be shared for many decades.

After Lenin died on 21 January 1924, the Soviets created a Leninist cult of the personality that promoted the dead leader as a saint-like figure in the fight for a communist state. Religious imagery was replaced with images of Lenin, and his body – embalmed and kept on permanent display in a mausoleum
in Moscow, where it remains today – became a site of pilgrimage. Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honour, a change that persisted until a public referendum in 1991 returned it to its pre-World War I name of St Petersburg. There was now a power vacuum in the USSR. As the mastermind behind the Bolshevik seizure of power, as well as the Red Army’s success during the Russian Civil War, Leon Trotsky was seen as an obvious choice of leader for many. He was seen by some, however, as a more ‘Westernised’ member of the party, due to his time spent in exile, and many resented the trust Lenin had placed in him.

• On the podcast | Life of the Week: Stalin

Joseph Stalin, on the other hand, had played a less prominent role than Trotsky in the Bolshevik takeover, but his position as general secretary of the Communist Party had allowed him to accrue great influence and power, and Lenin himself had relied on Stalin’s administrative ability, before becoming critical of him. Three other members – Nikolay Bukharin, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev – were also contenders for leadership.

A power struggle ensued, but Stalin’s nationalistic brand of Marxism – ‘socialism in one country’ – and his focus on strengthening the USSR appealed to many in the Communist Party, and by 1929 he had become dictator of the USSR. Trotsky, a critic of Stalin’s plans, was demonised, expelled from the Communist Party, and exiled.

He was assassinated in 1940, on Stalin’s orders, in Mexico. But Trotsky was far from the only victim of Stalin’s bloodlust: between August 1936 and March 1938, Stalin carried out a ‘Great Purge’ to calm conflicts within the party. Thousands were killed, including those suspected of attempting coups.
Under Stalin’s rule, the USSR would become a world superpower, and play a major role within the Allied victory over Nazi Germany in World War II – though at a cost, as the USSR suffered more losses in the conflict than any other combatant. After 1945, Stalin would subsequently gain control over much of Eastern Europe, creating a ‘buffer zone’ of Soviet satellite states intended to shield the USSR from the West. The scene for the lengthy Cold War, which lasted four decades, was set.

Stalin died in 1953. His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, would condemn him for perverting communism, and claim that Lenin had never wanted him in power. The Soviet government would also later admit the huge scale of atrocities committed under Stalin’s rule.

The USSR eventually collapsed on 25 December 1991 – the regime that had seized power in the Russian Revolution and ruled for 74 years was no more.