This book tells the story of the Soviet Union’s making, evolution, and breakdown. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was the successor to the Romanov Empire, which had broken apart in war and revolution. It became the predecessor of 15 nation states in a region, which once encapsulated my generation’s hopes for democratic change in Eastern Europe. Today, it is a hotbed of authoritarianism, crony‐capitalism, and war, although democrats still hold their ground. The history of the Soviet Union has been told numerous times, in some very good and some not‐so brilliant tomes. Historians have conceived this history as the story of Russia and the Russians, as a tale of the rise and fall of a specific form of modernity, as the instantiation and failure of an ideological project, or as a repressive empire, a “prison house of nations” in the catchy formulation of a 1958 publication that adapted Lenin’s description of the Tsarist state for its successor.¹

This book focuses on three themes: welfare, warfare, and empire. The Soviet Union was a socialist state with the aspiration to build a better, fairer, and more prosperous society than capitalism could. It inspired generations of leftists all over the world and disappointed as many of them over the decades. It promised a superior level of welfare but seldom delivered it. Instead, its second major trait often won out: The USSR was also a police state, which devoted much of its resources to preparation and execution of warfare. A nightmare to liberals and conservatives in the West, it served as a warning to anybody contemplating an alternative to capitalism. Finally, while this country was dominated by Russia and the Russians, it was not identical to them. The Soviet Union was a multinational state, an “empire of nations,”² or, indeed, a Red Empire. Following much recent writing, then, this book tries to escape the narrative of Russia = USSR = Russia. Such a Russocentric tale marginalizes all the non‐Russian societies and current nation states. It thus obscures, rather than aids, our understanding of the contemporary world in its historical context.

This book is organized chronologically. Part I, The First Age of Violence, chronicles the years 1904 to 1924, when the Romanov Empire was unmade in two wars and two revolutions, and then reconstituted as a Bolshevik empire in an immensely destructive civil war. Chapter 1 covers the twilight of the old empire from the beginning of the Russo‐Japanese War in 1904 to the outbreak of World War I a decade later. These were years of political upheaval, with a first revolution in 1905/1906 forcing the Tsar to grant major political concessions without giving up on his claim to autocratic power. They were also years of rapid cultural, social, and economic transformation, providing the contradictions that would explode in the subsequent period, but also containing the possibility for alternative, less dictatorial historical paths.

Chapter 2 chronicles the empire’s World War I, all the way through to the German defeat in the west in November 1918. After initial successes against their German, Austrian, and Ottoman foes in 1914, the Tsar’s armies increasingly struggled with the demands of modern war. 1915 became a year of military catastrophe when, during the Great Retreat, Russian forces abandoned large swathes of the Romanov’s western lands, destroying the country and deporting populations as they went. After a partial stabilization in 1916, political catastrophe followed in 1917. The Tsar was deposed in a first revolution in February, which began the breakdown of the empire. Russia itself was ruled by an uneasy alliance of a caretaker government staffed by liberals with the socialist Petrograd Soviet overseeing its actions. Meanwhile, other regions – Finland, Ukraine, Central Asia, and the Trans‐Caucasus – became increasingly autonomous from the imperial center in Petrograd. While the periphery thus started to break away, in the capital, the refusal of the Provisional Government to end the war, the ongoing economic crisis, and the relentless agitation for a more radical revolution by Vladimir Lenin’s radical communists (the Bolsheviks) pushed the Petrograd Soviet further and further to the left. In October, the Provisional Government was thoroughly discredited and moderate socialists had lost support among the revolutionary masses of Petrograd. Lenin’s men now took power in the name of the Soviet. This second revolution accelerated the imperial breakdown amidst the world war. The further fragmentation of the Tsar’s domains would become the major story of 1918. Bolshevik Russia was increasingly restricted to the old heartland around Moscow. The rest of the old empire was ruled either by German occupation troops or their local puppets, by non‐Russian politicians, or by competing Russian governments. Once the defeated Germans retreated from Ukraine and the Baltics after their defeat in November 1918, the Russian Empire thus was no more. The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, then, was only one moment in a larger process of military and revolutionary dissolution of the old empire.

However, the Bolshevik revolution was also a beginning, as chapter 3 shows. It tells the story of how and why the Bolsheviks managed to re‐gather most of the old empire under the Red flag. This process was violent: a civil war. We can distinguish several steps, easily summarized by year. 1919 was the year of a struggle between “Reds” and “Whites” – labels deriving from the French Revolution, which can easily mislead, as we shall see. Not only were some of the “Whites” socialists flying the red flag; but in Ukraine and elsewhere, the civil war also had ethnic and national components. From early 1920, the reconquest of the empire continued with the military acquisitions of the Transcaucasian republics, the brutal pacification of Central Asia, a hard‐fought war against the new Polish state, and bloody counter‐insurgencies against peasant and military rebels in the Bolshevik heartland. By 1923, the new empire was more or less complete, although in some areas fighting continued. The new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was enshrined in the constitution of 1924. It covered much of the old Romanov Empire, except Finland, the Baltic Republics, and Poland.

Part II, The Interwar Years, contains only one chapter, which focuses on how the new empire was consolidated during the 1920s. As fighting ended at different moments in different parts of the empire, there is some chronological overlap with the previous chapter. The short “decade” from 1921 to 1928 was a period of economic recovery from the prolonged fighting. State building, strengthening of the dictatorship, and the formalization of the legal and constitutional structure of the new empire were the orders of the day. Yet, the new Bolshevik rulers engaged in fierce political fights about both the further direction of the country and the composition of its leadership team. By 1928, Stalin’s faction had won and proceeded to push the country into its second period of upheaval.

Part III, The Second Age of Violence, comprises two chapters, covering the years from 1928 to 1949, a period of renewed internal and external warfare. Chapter 5 shows how Stalin and his men transformed the exhausted empire into a warfare state ready for the next engagement. This transformation came in the form of two extremely violent “revolutions from above” (1928 to 1932 and 1937 to 1938), separated by three years of relative calm in most areas. Chapter 6 then turns to World War II, which began in Asia in 1937, in Europe in 1939, and in the Pacific in 1941. The chapter contains an analysis of the extent and nature of Soviet participation in these interconnected wars: from a defensive posture at its Asian frontier in 1937 to 1939, to aggression in Europe in 1939 to 1941 (when the regathering of the old empire was completed), to catastrophe when the Germans attacked on June 22, 1941, the starting point of the “Great Patriotic War” of the Soviet Union. Once the initiative had been regained in the Battles of Moscow (Winter 1941) and Stalingrad (1942–1943), the Red Army returned to the offensive and won the war in Europe before turning east to help defeat Japan in the summer of 1945. Fighting against local guerilla forces continued along the new and expanded western frontier of the empire well into the 1940s, with a final round of deportations in 1949 marking something of an end point. In neighboring China, too, the war only ended with the victory of the communists in the civil war in 1949.

Part IV, From Warfare to Welfare, is made up of two chapters analyzing how the Soviet Union recovered from the prolonged periods of violence that had shaped its form, character, and content. Chapter 7 describes the years of postwar normalization. Its chronological boundaries overlap with both the previous and the following chapters. The narrative starts with the completed liberation of Soviet territory in 1944, covers the years between the war’s end in 1945 and Stalin’s death in 1953, as well as the early post‐Stalin years when collective leadership of the dictator’s closest underlings ran the empire. It ends with Nikita Khrushchev’s 1957 victory in what in effect was a prolonged succession struggle. Stalin tried to reconstruct the prewar dictatorial structure at home after the war was won, and he consolidated his empire abroad by surrounding it with nominally independent states in Europe. In Asia, he attempted to continue the pre‐1941 tactic of encouraging proxy wars as a means of securing the Soviet Union’s “eastern front.” This attempt backfired in the Korean War (1950–1953), which threatened to lead to a direct confrontation with the United States. After Stalin’s death this war was quickly brought to an end and the dictator’s deputies put in place a variety of reforms they had long considered but had not been able to implement as long as the dictator was alive. Now, first attempts were made to dismantle his warfare state and normalize life within the new empire. The political liberalization of the 1950s, however, constantly threatened to undermine the very empire Stalin had built – the foundation of the security of the Soviet project.

Eventually, then, efforts were made to build a socialist welfare state to reward the population for the years of exhausting warfare. The contradictions, dead ends, but also successes of this process are covered in Chapter 8. It begins the years of mature socialism with the pension reform in 1956 and ends it with the start of economic and political reform (perestroika) in 1985. It thus covers most of the years Khrushchev was First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1953–1964, until 1957 as part of a leadership team, from then on his own) as well as those of the successors Leonid Brezhnev (1964–1982, from 1966 with Stalin’s title of “General Secretary”), Iurii Andropov (1982–1984), and Konstantin Chernenko (1984–1985).

The final two chapters, forming Part V, deal with Imperial Discontent. From 1985, the new General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, made a concerted attempt to end the Cold War, dismantle the empire of satellites in Europe, and decisively to demobilize the remnants of the Stalinist warfare state. The goal was to finally shift to building a democratic, socialist welfare state within the borders of the Soviet Union. This attempt failed spectacularly. Reform led to crisis, crisis to breakdown, and in 1991 the Union broke apart along national lines. We are still living with the fallout of this momentous event, which created a whole new world of nation states with roots deep in the first and second epochs of violence, but no longer held together by an empire. A short final Chapter 10 serves as an afterword. It sketches the trials and tribulations of the successor states, their struggles with and against democracy, capitalism, authoritarianism, and war.

This book is the result of explaining Soviet history for over a decade to undergraduate students, first at the University of Western Australia, then at the University of Melbourne. My teaching during these years was supported by immensely influential histories written by Geoffrey Hosking, Ronald G. Suny, Alec Nove, and Stephen Lovell, which are listed at the end of this preface together with other useful overviews. Kevin McDermott’s “war‐revolution model,” served as a conceptual starting point and Joshua A. Sanborn’s path‐breaking Imperial Apocalypse inspired the early chapters, with profound implications for the rest of the narrative. The influence of Richard Pipes will be obvious to anybody who has read his classic book on how the Russian Empire was unmade but reborn as the Soviet Union. My views of the pivotal Stalin and his world are informed by Oleg Khlevniuk’s and Sheila Fitzpatrick’s masterful books. For demographic information I relied heavily on Naselenie Rossii v xx veke. Istoricheskie ocherki, 3 vols (Moscow: Rosspen, 2000–2011), as well as the census data now available online at http://demoscope.ru/weekly/pril.php. For the 1937 census I consulted V. B. Zhiromskaia, I. N. Kiselev, and Iu. A. Poliakov, Polveka pod grifom “sekretno”: vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1937 goda (Moscow: Nauka, 1996), and V. B. Zhiromskaia and Iu. A. Poliakov, Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1937 goda: obshchie itogi. Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Moscow: Rosspen, 2007). David Stahel, Josh Sanborn, and Ben Mercer read and commented on parts of the manuscript, Elizabeth Gralton and Yuri Shapoval on a full draft. Debra McDougall worked persistently on making the penultimate product more readable. Caroline Maxwell (elmindexing.co.uk) took on the task of indexing at short notice and with admirable efficiency. Parts of Chapter 2 were first presented as the Inaugural Hansen Lecture at the University of Melbourne in October 2017. A companion essay to the lecture was published in the Australian Book Review (October 2017): 10–15.

That I could step back, reassess, and consolidate what I have learned over a decade was due to an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT140101100). Several chapters were drafted while I was an Academic Visitor at The Australian National University in Semester 2, 2016. I would like to thank the School of History and in particular its Head, Nicholas Brown, for being so welcoming and for providing office space and library privileges, and ANU Apartments for accommodating our changing plans in the delightful Judith Wright Court. Turner School made our daughter Anna welcome and soothed her longing for her North Fremantle friends. A first draft of the manuscript was finished while on a research trip to Kyiv, Ukraine, at the end of 2016. The final revisions were made during my first half year as Hansen Chair at the University of Melbourne in 2017. Una McIlvenna’s invitation to lecture on Russia and the Soviet Union in a team‐taught course on the history of empires helped to finalize the early chapters.

A book like this volume is a serious effort in compression. Decisions need to be made about what to include, and more importantly, what to exclude. I attempted to highlight scholarly controversies without transforming what is essentially a narrative interpretation into a historiographical discussion. I also tried to strike a balance between historicism and writing a history of the present, which explains a part of the world we live in. For reasons of space I was not able to document my intellectual debts in my usual “Germanic” fashion. The footnotes in this volume only document direct quotations and the bibliographies at the end of each chapter are reading lists for an English‐language audience, not a list of all works consulted. They do not include Russian, Ukrainian, German, or French literature and are by necessity incomplete. Updates on these reading lists will be posted periodically on www.markedele.com, which also includes links to maps and a page with annotated links to primary sources in English, Russian, and other languages, for readers who want to study aspects of this history in more depth. Wherever possible, I quoted from English translations and if available from free online sources. Dates are according to the Julian calendar until February 1918, when Russia adopted the Gregorian calendar then already used in the West. In cases where events are of international interest, both the Julian and the Gregorian date are given, with the earlier date denoting the old style, the later the new style.

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