Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (also known as the Soviet Union and USSR) was a large prominent Eurasian nation state (compose of what is now the Russian Federation, the Ukraine and several Eastern European states) and the world's first communist state.
The USSR was created by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution of 1917, overthrowing the ineffective Duma and formalized into a unified nation state in 1922. After Lenin's Death in 1924, Joseph Stalin assumed controll of the USSR, which proceeded to rapidly expand the Industrial base of the Soviet union through a crash force economic development plan which was successful in industrializing the nation and collectivised agriculture, albiet at the cost of many lives. Any dissent was quickly put down by massive anti-"counter revolutionary" campaigns.
The Soviet Union played a key role in the second world war, providing millions of soldiers massive amounts of equipment (most notably the PPSH-41 Sub Machine gun, the T-34 medium tank, the IS-3 Heavy Tank, Lavochkin La-5 fighter and Katyusha rocket launchers, all of them in very large numbers), pushing back the Nazis into germany. After the war, Stalin installed a series of Stalinist rulers to rule over several new Eastern European communist nations, which (combined with the devoloment of the Atomic Bomb, which the soviets developed a few years after the US) lead to a forty-five year long war between the communist Warsaw Pact countries and the US-led western North Atlantic Treaty organization. During this period, the soviet union started the space race and maintained a massive standing army. The cold war ended in the 1980s with the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev, who introducd programs of economic and political reform. Despite this, various internal economic forces (and not one Ronald Reagan, as some conservatives would have you believe) eventually led to the collapse of the Eastern Bloc communist countries in 1989 followed by the Soviet Union itself in 1991, breaking up into several diferent economically crippled nation states, most notably the Ukraine and the Russian Federation.
The Soviet Union on SD.net
The Soviet Union, and its military equipment are a fairly common source of debate among SD.net's population as well as being fairly common subject in RAR! threads. Vympel is the current resident expert on the armed forces of the Soviet Union and Russian Federation on SD.net.