On November 7, 1917, at 9:40 p.m., with a roar from this cannon, the first proletarian-controlled regime in the history of the world, the Soviet government, was born!
In twenty years, under the leadership of this government, a poor and backward agricultural country was miraculously transformed into an industrialized and powerful nation.
For the first time in more than 230 years, beginning with the reforms of Peter the Great, the Russian nation was able to take the world by force of arms, and not just by force of arms.
In the Second World War, they saved the day with great sacrifice and made indelible contributions to the maintenance of world peace. As a superpower that once had a great impact on the world, the Soviet Union explored a new path of national development in the 20th century. How did this unprecedented social practice work?
Winter is the season when Moscow is at its most charming, and on January 21, 1924, when snow and wind swept through the city's streets, there was no charm in the city, but only a sense of endless sadness.
On this, the coldest day of the year, tens of thousands of workers, peasants and soldiers stood in long lines to say goodbye to their leader. Lenin, the founder of Soviet power, had spent his last ounce of energy for the fledgling regime.
The winds from Siberia roared like snowflakes, and the faces of the mourners were filled with loss and uncertainty. Who will lead the group on this unfinished journey?
Russia's Gorky Institute of Literature, Dean Sey Yessin:
Russians are very well adapted to impersonal social life, and that's why we have socialism. When we unite, we are very strong. When we unite for an idea or around a person, you understand that we are in great need of heroes for which we can fight to the end.
Russia is a nation that admires heroes, needs heroes, and at the same time is full of heroes. Throughout history, the individual temperament of politicians has decisively influenced the fate of entire nations. Peter the Great's reforms brought Russia closer to the European powers of the time; Ekaterina II's reforms created a large number of independent thinking Russian intellectuals; and Lenin's dedication to the revolution made this land bravely take up the historical responsibility of opening up a new shipping lane for mankind.
Before Lenin ascended to the stage of history, there had been many ****productivist groups in Russia. One of them, a female ****productivist named Vera Zasulich, wrote a letter to Marx in which she asked whether the socialism proposed by Marx, which was closely linked to big industry and the working class, could be realized in Russia. Marx replied that it should be realized first in the developed countries of Europe.
At that time, almost all believers in socialism agreed that socialism was a bottom-up revolution led by the working class, and that it should first have its genesis in old capitalist countries such as Britain and the United States, which had a developed industrial base, and that Russia, with its weak industrial base, did not yet have the conditions to do so.
Lenin, on the other hand, who had a deep understanding of Russian reality, argued: "If the tsarist system could last for centuries thanks to 130,000 noblemen, feudal lords who exercised police power in their own regions, each in his own way, why can't we rely on the Party, with its 130,000 loyal activists, to last for decades?" .
Emanuel Wallerstein, Professor, Yale University, USA:
Was the Russian Revolution necessary? I don't know. But it happened because the country collapsed, and that's why it happened. It happened, not because Lenin planned it, but because Lenin seized the opportunity offered to his Bolsheviks to do what he wanted to do.
The victory of the October Revolution greatly inspired the Bolsheviks' determination and confidence to transform the old world and build a new one, and it was believed that under Lenin's leadership Soviet Russia would take a completely different path, that the people would exercise power, that all people would have jobs, and that they would never again be exploited. However, building a new society was a difficult process.
Four years after the October Revolution, the Soviet regime, which had survived the blockade and encirclement of the developed countries of Europe and America and had just quelled a rebellion at home, was hit by a bottom-up, sudden storm.
This is an oil painting by the painter F. Serov, created in 1921, which reflects the storm that swept the country.
In the spring of 1921, there was a widespread famine in Soviet Russia, with more than 30 million ordinary people struggling on the brink of starvation. As the wartime ****productivist policy had shown great power in the just-concluded war in defense of the new regime, the Soviet regime decided to continue the policy of collecting the peasants' surplus grain without compensation. However, this policy aroused discontent among the peasants, and some rich peasants even took the opportunity to take up arms. Even the sailors of Kronstadt, the strong bastion of Bolsheviks in the October Revolution, supported the peasants' demands.
She Yessin, director of Russia's Gorky Institute of Literature:
When the question arises as to whether to have a bowl of porridge or a theory, people usually choose the bowl of porridge. You are full then you will go and sing, if you have no food in your stomach, then you have only silence. Lenin implemented the New Economic Policy because after the war there was no other way to develop the economy.
The blockade siege and military pressure from the outside world, the food crisis and political insurgency at home prompted the Soviet regime to adopt a new approach to economic development. Only in this way could the regime be consolidated and the living standards of the people improved. To this end, Lenin told his party comrades, "We knew after the seizure of power that there was no ready-made method of concretely transforming the capitalist system into a socialist one. I do not know of any socialist who has dealt with these questions. We have to make judgments based on experiments."
In March 1921, the Soviet regime began to implement the New Economic Policy and started by solving the problems of the peasants by changing the unpaid collection of surplus grain to market buying and selling.
Professor Xu Tianxin of the Department of History at Peking University in China:
That is to say, concessions should be made to the peasants, and the peasants should be allowed to run their own economy individually, and the market should be allowed to exist, and the capitalist market economy should be utilized in order to restore production and develop the economy, and to prepare for the conditions for the construction of socialism.
Russian Institute of World History Director A.O. Chubaryan:
Of course, it's not completely capitalist at all, and the main part of the new policy involves commerce, tax cuts, allowing small businesses to exist, and it's all an attempt to resurrect the economy.
In the area of commerce, the New Economic Policy was first introduced with the direct exchange of industrial goods for agricultural goods, but the older Russian women were much more accustomed to monetary transactions and were reluctant to barter. Moreover, industrial goods were slow to arrive.
So the Soviet regime announced the restoration of free trade within the country and the re-establishment of the banking system.
Today, the Moscow State Department Store, in operation for 85 years, attracts tourists from all over the world. However, more than 80 years ago, foreigners were hard to see here.
The developed countries of the time, such as Europe and the United States, were fearful of Russia's fledgling Soviet regime and bent on strangling it in its cradle. Not only did the United States refuse to recognize it diplomatically, but officials in Washington responded to requests for tourist visas to the Soviet Union with a surprising, "We don't know of such a country!" . In the midst of such hostility, the difficulty for Soviet Russia to obtain foreign money and technology was palpable.
In August 1921, under the gaze of astonished Moscow citizens, a 23-year-old American youth named Armand Hammer walked into the Kremlin.
Hammer's father was one of the founders of the U.S. ****production party, and like his father, Hammer took an interest in the fledgling Soviet regime, bringing much-needed medical equipment to Russia.
It was in this office that the young American businessman listened with great enthusiasm to Lenin's talk about the new economic policies, most of which interested Hamer in the industrial sector.
Professor Xu Tianxin of the Department of History at Peking University in China:
Because as we all know, the Soviet Union's internal war repelled the foreign armed intervention and drove the foreign capitalists away, and now after the victory, Lenin agreed that the foreign capitalists should come back to Russia to operate some projects that the Soviet Union did not have the power to operate at that time. In particular, to develop minerals in Siberia, to harvest forests and so on. This was a very wise and far-sighted move.
On Oct. 28, the first concession contract for foreigners was officially signed here, and Hammer was granted a concession to operate an asbestos mine. Meanwhile, with Lenin's support, Hamer became a central figure in U.S.-Soviet trade in the 1920s and '30s.
He lobbied in the U.S. business community and contacted more than 30 major U.S. companies to form the United States Company, which shipped U.S. products to Soviet Russia in exchange for Russian goods, thus beginning the U.S.-Soviet barter trade.
But Soviet Russia did not want to simply import products from abroad. Lenin told Hammer, "What we really need is American capital and technology so that we can get our wheels turning again."
The Gass is one of the iconic symbols of the Soviet era. And it was the American automobile manufacturer Henry Ford who first produced the "Gass" in the Soviet Union.
Ford originally viewed the Soviets as an "implacable enemy" and claimed that he "wouldn't ship a lug nut there" unless the Soviet ideology became to his liking. Hammer advised him, "If that happens, you'll be out of business there for too long, and it's a huge market."
Afterward, Ford proved very pleased with the deal with the Soviet Union.
In the city of Gorky, Ford set up an automobile joint venture with the Soviet Union, and from 1932 onward, 100,000 Gass-branded buses and trucks rolled off the assembly line each year, running on Soviet roads.
The implementation of the New Economic Policy restored the Soviet economy. Lenin was so pleased with this that he said, "At the end of the war, Russia was like a man half beaten to death ...... and now, thank God, he is actually able to walk around on crutches!"
Central Compilation and Translation Bureau of China Researcher Zheng Yi-fan:
What is the result of this, the result is that, the introduction of the market, in fact, is the same as the introduction of commodities, money, the market mechanism into the socialist construction of the Soviet Union inside, in the history of the development of Marxism, this is a major breakthrough.
On Nov. 20, 1923, Lenin told the Soviet Plenum: "Socialism is now no longer a distant future, or some abstract phantom,...... the Russia of the New Economic Policy will become a socialist Russia."
This was Lenin's last public speech.
On this table, history is forever fixed on January 22, 1924 Lenin tore a calendar page from here every day before leaving his office. But on that day, he was no longer able to tear the page.
The Soviets had lost a revered elder brother, a genial leader, a helmsman who had charted Russia's future according to the requirements of practice.
She Yessin, director of Russia's Gorky Institute of Literature:
Lenin gave mankind a stark example that there can be another way of life for mankind. It is possible that after his death, Russia took another path to a prosperous life. Unfortunately, this practical activity implemented by Lenin was not continued in the end. I think that the whole world lost an opportunity to face the future.
The next person to lead the Soviet regime was Stalin, who was known to the world as a tough and decisive man. Perhaps by sheer coincidence, Lenin took as his pseudonym the name of the Lena, a great river that originates in Siberia, and his successor took as his last name "steel," a very hard metal. as his family name.
As the literal meaning of the two names suggests: in Lenin's time, the country's economic policy was quite flexible; Stalin, on the other hand, accelerated the pace of the country's industrialization with a hard-line approach.
Paul Kennedy, professor at Yale University, USA:
They believed that this vast country, if it wanted to develop, had to centralize all its resources, had to limit the bourgeoisie, limit the capitalist system, and control all its resources, including agricultural resources.
Zuo Fengrong, a researcher at the Institute of International Strategic Studies at the Party School of the Central Committee of the Chinese People's Government:
Stalin believed that the funds for industrialization could only be accumulated internally by myself, and internally, of course, it should mainly come from agriculture, so he explicitly put forward the theory of tribute tax, which means that the farmers, in addition to the food they have to pay, should pay for the tasks of the state, in addition to the industrial goods, he has to put the industrial goods in the form of a tax on the farmers. On the industrial goods, he wants to set the price of the industrial goods a little bit higher, and then this makes the farmers pay more money when they buy things, that is to say, through such a way to accumulate funds for industrialization.
The "scissors difference" between industry and agriculture as a means of accumulating funds for industrialization meant that the New Economic Policy (NEP), which had been introduced to protect the interests of the peasants, would be abandoned. Stalin said: "We adopted the NEP because it served socialism, and when it no longer served socialism, we threw it out."
In Stalin's view, times had changed and the NEP was no longer conducive to socialist industrialization because the Soviet Union needed speed. Stalin often said, "To retard speed is to lag behind, and laggards are beaten."
In the 1920s, as the West recovered from World War I, the gross industrial product of each of the major industrialized countries reached or exceeded 1.5 times the pre-World War I level. Some European and American economists claimed that capitalism had wiped out poverty, and the unprecedented prosperity gave them confidence and continued to blockade the Soviet economy.
In 1927, Britain announced the severance of Anglo-Soviet relations and the annulment of the Anglo-Soviet trade agreement signed in 1921. British Foreign Secretary Neville Chamberlain initiated a meeting of the six foreign ministers to "fight the ****production international".
The lone Soviet Union looked as if it was vulnerable. Although the New Economic Policy had some success, as late as 1928 the Soviet Union's industrial output was less than half that of Germany and one-eighth that of the United States, and there were fewer than 30,000 tractors in the country, with 99 percent of the farming done by animal and human power.
Yuri Zhukov, Russian author of a biography of Stalin:
In order to ensure that the country continued to develop, new and powerful measures had to be taken, and therefore, in order for the country to cease to be an agricultural country, and in order for the country to cease to import from abroad commodities from the smallest to the largest, such as pencils, and from the largest to the largest, such as airplanes, it was necessary to build up its own industry.
This is why the New Economic Policy was abandoned.
And the plight of China, an equally large near-neighbor in Asia, reinforced the ironclad leader's will to prioritize heavy industry. Stalin said, "Without heavy industry, then we will not have all the modern weapons of defense, and then we will be in a position more or less similar to the one in which China currently finds itself: it has no heavy industry of its own, no military industry of its own, and now it can be ravaged by whoever pleases."
In May 1929, the Fifth Congress of Soviets was held at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow to discuss the first five-year plan for the development of the national economy.
The theater was brilliantly lit, and a large map of the Soviet Union hung on the podium. Every time the rapporteur mentioned a construction project, a small light would go on at the corresponding place on the map. By the time the report was over, the map of the USSR was covered with colorful lights, and more than a thousand fascinating bright spots were flickering.
Yuri Zhukov, author of the Russian biography of Stalin:
The first Five-Year Plan, the whole process of formulating the plan was nearly five years, as the first Five-Year Plan, people wanted to put all the aspects of the plan, and the volume of the plan was very large, and then they tried to find a way to reduce the content of the plan, and then increased the content of the plan, and then the final result was to pass the first Five-Year Plan, which was a total of three books. volume, which was three books so thick.
No other country in the history of the world has ever planned its development process so comprehensively and meticulously, and this was a creation of the Soviets. In those days, all production, transportation, and sales were arranged by state planning. State planning strives for precision, a button produced in Leningrad sells for 1 ruble, then 700 kilometers away in Moscow the price is also 1 ruble, and 10,000 miles away in Vladivostok is still 1 ruble.
For the Soviet Union, its rise and fall over the next few decades was tied to this highly centralized, command-plan economy.
The very year that the Soviets were discussing their first Five-Year Plan, an economic crisis like no other in human history erupted. Beginning with the frenzied fall of the New York stock market on Oct. 24, 1929, the crisis quickly spread from the United States to the entire globe, striking almost all capitalist countries.
Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University's business school in the United States:
It was a global depression, preceded by a lot of considerations about social justice, where only a few people were as rich as they are today, while the majority of the population didn't benefit from the economic boom. There was a high level of inequality in American society at that time, and it's interesting that we're back to that level of inequality at that time, history is strikingly similar. As the economy collapsed, people began to learn that capitalism didn't work the way they thought it did and that there should be a role for government.
In the First World War, the losses of developed countries in Europe and the United States were $170 billion, while the losses caused by this global economic crisis from 1929 to 1933 reached $250 billion, and the crisis shook the entire capitalist world and fully exposed the shortcomings of the free market economy.
The Soviet Union, on the other hand, was a maverick in its development under the guidance of the first five-year construction program. At this time, capital, technology and talents from Europe and the United States began to turn to the Soviet Union to find a way out. The world's largest immigrant country, the United States, also appeared for the first time the tendency to emigrate outward, there have been 100,000 Americans applied to move to the Soviet Union.
Chinese Central Compilation and Translation Bureau researcher Zheng Yi Fan:
Stalin's public statements, I did not see him say what to use Western technology, the entire Five-Year Plan, or five years before the plan, the use of food, a large amount of grain from the farmers, the levy for what, is to use for export, export for foreign exchange, and then use this to import foreign technology. After the importation of these foreign equipment, the country will not be able to use, so he was talking about technology determines everything, that is to say, I now buy from abroad into so many equipment, I have to have someone to master it.
The tractor, for quite some time, was an important symbol of industrialization, because it liberated the broadest agricultural productivity.
Just in 1929, at the height of the global economic crisis, ground was broken in Stalingrad for a massive tractor factory. Ten months later, the plant was up and running.
This miraculous speed came from the effective functioning of the planned economic system and from the Soviet Union's judgment and use of the world economic situation.
The builders of the tractor factory were not only Soviets, but also Americans and Germans, and 730 American engineers worked here successively. Stalin later told U.S. President Roosevelt that about two-thirds of the large enterprises in the Soviet Union had been built using American technology. in 1932, there were about 6,800 specialists from various countries working in the Soviet heavy industry sector.
In sharp contrast to the overall slump in Europe and the United States, it was not only the Soviet Union's industrialization achievements, but also the great enthusiasm of the Soviet people to build their country.
On September 2, 1935, the Soviet newspaper Pravda published this modest missive: "Comrade Stakhanov, a coal miner from Central Irmino, in celebration of the 21st anniversary of International Youth Day, set a new all-Soviet record for windaxe labor. In a six-hour shift, Starhanov mined 102 tons of coal, which is 10 percent of the amount mined in the mine in one day and night, and earned 200 rubles in wages."
This was an astonishing amount of mining, for it exceeded the ordinary quota by 13 times! But a week later Stakhanov set his own record, mining 175 tons of coal in one working day.
After that, Starhanov was no longer the name of an ordinary miner; he became a banner, leading a vigorous movement of technological innovation in production during the industrialization of the USSR. In all walks of life, countless Starhanov's driving force, the Soviet Union's second five-year plan during the industrial labor rate increased by 82%, much higher than the original plan of 63%.
In 1932, the first Five-Year Plan was completed and the Soviet Union was transformed from an agricultural to an industrial nation.
In 1937, the second Five-Year Plan was completed, and the Soviet Union's gross industrial product jumped to first place in Europe and second in the world.
Russian ****central chairman Gennady Andreyevich Dyuganov:
Russia, in 1929, could not produce an airplane, a combine harvester, or an automobile, and ten years later, in 1941, we had the best technology, which was the best in the world at that time.
The most precious thing is life, and life belongs to everyone only once, and a man's life should be spent in such a way that when he looks back, he will not regret his wasted years, nor will he be ashamed of his inactivity; so that at the time of his death, he will be able to say, "My whole life and all my energies have been devoted to the most magnificent cause in the world! -- the struggle for the liberation of mankind."
Beginning with the October Revolution of 1917, this country, which covers nearly one-fifth of the world's total land area, has changed radically in less than two decades. It has traveled with incredible speed the journey of industrialization that usually takes decades, if not centuries, in Europe and the United States.
The Soviet Union's uniqueness and its "planned" approach aroused great interest in the Western world, which traveled to the Soviet Union in the 1930s to learn from its mistakes. A U.S. journalist returned from the Soviet Union and told his countrymen, "I see the future, and it works. For a while, "program" was the most fashionable term.
Macro-control of economic life through state power, the most successful of which was U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt's New Deal, began to revitalize the U.S. economy by adding government intervention to the free-market economy.
Russian author of Stalin's biography Yuri Zhukov:
For example, a British woman writer, Agatha Christine, who is the author of Murder on the Orient Express, at the beginning of the book, the main character of the book is discussing Russia's first Five-Year Plan in the aisle of a compartment, and this is a very accurate reflection of the first Five-Year Plan.
At the time, the Soviet Union's success captured the world's attention, and the glow of success masked the problems behind rapid industrialization.
An extra month's salary, a technician's house with a telephone, equipped with all the necessary sofa furniture, a family sanatorium pass, two permanent special seats in the cinema - these were the material incentives that Stakhanov, the spiritual icon of the Soviet road to industrialization, received. But the thousands of builders who worked unselfishly did not get much in return, especially the masses of peasants who had to go through severe material deprivation every day.
Professor Xu Tianxin of the Department of History at Peking University in China:
Stalin's economic development had some fatal weaknesses, first of all, it was unbalanced. Heavy industry and military industry developed by leaps and bounds, but light industry and agriculture suffered a great deal, especially agriculture. The second aspect is that the people's life has not been able to get a significant improvement, has not been able to synchronize with the development of industry to improve, by the time Stalin died, per capita production of grain, per capita production of meat, has not yet reached the level of the tsarist era.
Paul Kennedy, Professor, Yale University, USA:
I don't think we should simply learn the lesson that any plan is dangerous, that any long-term consideration is wrong. I think we should learn more subtle signals. That is, what state and local governments are good at and what they are not.
The success of the planned economy at the time, however, made it impossible to reflect on its shortcomings in the same way as today. What's more, the Soviet Union, at the time, was facing the increasingly urgent threat of war.
To escape the economic crisis, fascist dictatorships were established in Germany, Japan and Italy. Just as the Soviet Union was completing its second five-year plan in 1937, China had begun a grueling, all-out war against Japan, and the war that Stalin had been worrying about eventually and inevitably invaded the vast land.
This is the Tomb of the Unknown Martyrs on Moscow's Red Square, where this flame has burned for decades, symbolizing unyielding blood and tenacious souls. The epitaph reads, "Your names are unknown, your deeds will live on for all time." Buried beneath the mausoleum are thousands of Red Army soldiers who died in the Soviet Patriotic War.
In 1939, World War II broke out.
At 3 a.m. on June 22, 1941, German troops raided the Soviet Union. Within a week, the Soviets lost more than 1 million troops and all the western industrial areas fell.
Hitler smiled as he claimed to be celebrating in Moscow's Red Square, but soon he couldn't smile any longer, as the German army was not only stifled on all fronts, but began to suffer a counterattack.
Hitler could not understand how the Soviet Union, which had already lost its western industrial base, was getting stronger as the war went on.
Yuri Zhukov, Russian author of a biography of Stalin:
If we had not built steel complexes in Kuznetsk and Zabaloz, and if we had not built tractor factories in Stalingrad, Kharkov and Chelyabinsk during the Second Five-Year Plan, we would not have been able to build these factories directly into tank factories.
Wen Yi, a researcher at the Institute of World History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences;
Because of the conditions of the war, what about the adoption of an almost 24-hour working system, that is, the machines did not rest and people rested, a system of shifts, the industry in Siberia also developed very quickly.
Even in 1942, the toughest year of the war, Soviet aircraft production reached more than 20,000, almost double that of the Germans.
The Soviet Union's immense industrial capacity overwhelmed Nazi Germany and became the sword of victory. At the height of the fighting, workers at the Stalingrad Tractor Factory drove freshly built tanks straight out of the factory to meet the Germans.
On May 1, 1945, the world war against fascism finally ushered in the final victory.
The Soviet Red Army conquered Berlin, and the red flag was planted on top of the Reichstag. The German army lost 10 million troops on the Soviet-German battlefield***, accounting for 73% of its total casualties in the Second World War, and the Soviet Union defended justice and peace at the cost of 20 million people's sacrifice. It was one of the saddest pages in human history, and for that alone, the Soviet Union deserved the title of a great power!
In February 1945, with the defeat of the Germans already assured, Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill, the heads of the three most powerful countries in the world at the time - the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain - met in Yalta to discuss the establishment of a post-war world structure.
It was the world's recognition of the Soviet Union's great military and political power and its respect for the great power responsibilities it bore.
Under the clear skies of the mid-20th century, the two great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, looked across the ocean and *** together dominated the world's direction for decades to come.
In 1957, the world's first artificial Earth satellite broke into space with the word "Soviet" engraved on its body.
April 12, 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut Gagarin on the "East" spacecraft, the first time to realize the dream of mankind into space
. The view of the Earth from space was the height of human civilization and the height of the Soviet Union as the first socialist country in the world. As time passes, this height will be recorded in history forever.
Whether it can be surpassed will depend on whether the vision of Russia's generations of navigators is far-reaching enough.
This is a book that has been sealed for fifty years, written by the French literary master Romain Rolland.
In 1935, Romain Rolland visited the Soviet Union at the invitation of Gorky, where he was amidst flowers and cheers. Later he wrote to Stalin, "I saw a powerful country, the whole country under the Bolsheviks doing constant battle with a thousand obstacles, in a heroic and well-ordered climax, building a new world."
Central Compilation and Translation Bureau of China Researcher Zheng Yi Fan:
After they went there to see the country, they did find that there were various problems in the Soviet Union, such as Stalin's personal admiration at that time, the bureaucratic style at that time, and the poverty of the vast number of peasants and the general public, as well as the conscious blockade of foreign countries at home.
In his diary, Romain Rolland wrote: "It is inevitable that at the present time these policies contain something negative; I have not the slightest doubt that the better future of the world is linked to the victory of the Soviet Union."
Out of his love for the Soviet Union, Romain Rolland decided that this diary would not be published until fifty years later; he did not want to cause even the slightest harm to the Soviet Union because of this book, and he thought that fifty years later the Soviet Union must have solved these problems.
In 1984, Romain Rolland's Moscow Diary was officially published. But the Soviet leaders did not find and correct, as Romain Rolland expected, some of the policy shortcomings, including the highly planned economic system, in time, so much so that the accumulation of problems was lost, and the opportunity to let the socialist system improve itself was lost.
In 1991, the red flag of the Kremlin quietly fell, and the red wheel of the year inscribed 74 circles on the stage of the rise of great powers.
The rapid rise of the Soviet Union was the striking event of the 20th century. As a great unprecedented practice, its experience and lessons have become valuable assets for human development. For, history must be judged on a large scale, and the completion of social change may take decades, centuries or even longer.
For a great nation, setbacks mean new departures. Today, Russia is on the road to national renaissance