Soviet Union

The USSR from the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power to its collapse in 1991: the one-party state, the Terror, the Gulag and the planned economy.

• Repression Under Communism: Executions, Camps and Famines

  The documented human cost of communist rule — the Soviet Terror, China's famine, Cambodia's killing fields, North Korea's camps — with the evidence.

• Turkmenistan: How a Soviet Party Boss Became Turkmenbashi

  Turkmenistan's dictatorship was built by its last Communist Party chief. Today it scores 1 out of 100 for freedom and has passed power from father to son.

• Howard Zinn on Communism: What He Said and What He Left Out

  In 1988 Howard Zinn said the Russian Revolution killed 'about 100 people.' What he said about communism, in context, and what the record shows.

• Stalin's Deportations: The Forced Transfer of Whole Peoples

  How Stalin's regime deported 1.8 million 'kulaks' and entire nations — Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Soviet Germans and more — and how many died in exile.

• The Holodomor: Stalin's Famine in Ukraine, 1932–33

  How Stalin's grain seizures, village blacklists and a ban on flight turned a famine into the Holodomor, killing about four million people in Soviet Ukraine.

See all topics or every article.