Moskau Roter Platz September 1964

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was founded in November 1917 by the Bolshevik Party. Led by Vladimir Lenin and, after 1923, by Josef Stalin, the Bolsheviks (later known as the Communists) established Communist rule in the former Russian Empire after the conclusion of a bitter civil war in 1921. The Soviet Union, as the new political entity was known, called for the world Communist revolution in the name of the international working class and advocated, in its propaganda, the eventual disappearance of national, cultural, religious, and economic distinctions. Since powerful elites could not be expected to voluntarily give up control, the Communists predicted a violent revolution that would destroy these classes. As a result of this prediction, middle-class societies in Europe and North America perceived the Soviet Union as a cultural and economic threat.

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) was a founder of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), inspirer and leader of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), and the architect, builder, and first head (1917–24) of the Soviet state. He was the founder of the organization known as Comintern (Communist International) and the posthumous source of “Leninism,” the doctrine codified and conjoined with Karl Marx’s works by Lenin’s successors to form Marxism-Leninism, which became the Communist worldview.