The Soviet Union: 100th Anniversary 1922 Episode Rating Graph

The Soviet Union was formed on 30th December 1922 after five years of civil war. Stalin’s iron fist and his Great Purge gave him unopposed murderous rule over the country, while heroically defeating Hitler’s onslaught on Kursk and Stalingrad between 1941-43 effectively won WWII for the allies, and helped mark out his geopolitical world and power until his death in 1953.

With the pace of the 1950’s Cold War increasing, alongside the the space race and the Berlin Wall, the decision to join forces with Cuba and build missile sites there brings the world to the brink of disaster. While the Cuban Missile Crisis is averted and a peace settlement reached, not long after JFK is assassinated in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald, a US Marine veteran who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959.

With the escalation of nuclear missiles globally, Brezhnev invades Czechoslovakia in 1968, as the proxy East vs West war in Vietnam continues. Following the catastrophic invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, a new era begins with Mikhail Gorbachev, as his bold statements quickly lead to a withdrawal from Afghanistan, and by 1989, the collapse of communism. That same year the symbolic Berlin Wall falls, with the end of the Soviet Union formally declared in August 1991.