![]() ![]() This year will see many centennial anniversaries that Russian President Vladimir Putin and others who argue that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a “geopolitical catastrophe” might prefer not to remember. ![]() In terms of politics, foreign affairs, and culture, events transpired and decisions were made that laid the rails for decades of institutionalized totalitarian oppression. Russia entered 1922 with a shaky government ruling largely by martial law, a civil war still raging, a famine spreading across the Volga region, parts of the country still occupied by foreign intervention forces – and isolated as an international pariah.īut by the end of the year, the Bolsheviks had marked the fifth anniversary of the 1917 coup known as the October Revolution, had all but ended the civil war against so-called White monarchist and capitalist forces, largely pushed out the foreign troops, and signed their first peacetime international treaty - with Weimar Germany.Īnd on December 30, 1922, representatives of the Soviet governments of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Transcaucasian Republic took to the stage of Moscow's Bolshoi Theater to proclaim the formation of a new country that within less than two generations would become a global superpower - the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.īut with the 20/20 hindsight of a century's distance, 1922 emerges as a fateful year for the peoples of Russia and its neighborhood, a year in which the country broke decisively with its past.
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