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The Soviet Union, officially founded in the 1920s when Joseph Stalin became General Secretary of the Communist Party, underwent two decades of economic disaster, war, and then rise to a superpower status. Before the Soviet Union there was Bolshevik or Soviet Russia which had emerged as communist as a result of the takeover of Russia during WWI by the communist Bolsheviks from the Provisional Kerensky Government in 1917 along with civil war. The Civil War pitted the non-communist, pro-Czarist whites against those of Lenin and Trotsky. Because of Trotsky's buildup of the Red Army, the whites were all but destroyed, either fleeing or being ruthlessly executed. Around the same time the civil war was dying down, Soviet Russia was threatened by the newly independent country of Poland to the West, having before the war belonged to the Austria-Hungarian, German, and Russian Empires. After the German surrender in World War I, Poland was granted independence. The Soviet-Polish War in the late 1910s culminated in a stalemate between the Bolsheviks and the Poles, although both sides claim victory. A result of the war forced Bolshevik Russia to acknowledge the newly-founded country of Poland. The USSR was founded in the 1920s, around the same time Mussolini became "virtual" fascist dictator of Italy. The USSR posed a threat to the Eastern, new states of Central Europe. Fearing communist power, some states, such as Austria, adopted dictatorial-presidential regimes having lacked experience in democracy. In the early Soviet Union, Lenin, who was aging at the time, called for the enactment of the New Economic Policy (NEP) which called for a short period of capitalism and private property before it plunged into a long era of communism. The New Economic Policy was supposed to inspire short-termed prosperity in the Soviet Union so as to not bring it wholly unprepared into an era of ultimate Marxist-Leninism. After the New Economic Policy, Vladimir Lenin died in the mid-1920s. Lenin initially wanted Trotsky to become his successor, rather than Stalin. However, Stalin's management of the Communist Party managed to exalt him to power in the Soviet Union along with working with other members of the Communist Party. Trotsky was soon looked at as being too "bourgeois" and the complete contrast of a "proletariat," having originated from a wealthy Jewish family. Stalin was looked at as a low-class peasant whose father and mother were both formely serfs. (Serfdom was present in Russia until the 1860s when Czar Alexander II abolished it.) It was decided that Stalin would make a better and more efficient leader than Trotsky. Stalin's USSR followed the New Economic Policy. Stalin initiated fear into the hearts of nearly every soul in the Soviet Union. His secret police force, the NKVD, would make sure to erase any "troublemaker" in Stalin's USSR. Freedom of speech was virtually eradicated as Stalin claimed it was impractical to the common good. In fact, nearly every human right was eradicated in the USSR. The USSR was the first country in the world at the time to legalize abortion and was the first country in the world to adopt the teachings of Marx. The USSR saw the death of tens of millions of people, all of who were land-owning peasants (kulaks), undesirables, Ukrainians, and people sent to labor camps. Stalin enacted the Five Years Plan in the 1930s in order to boost Soviet production in food. The Five Years Plan called for the deaths of millions of Ukrainians and kulaks. The kulaks, or land-owning peasants, were targeted by Stalin as anti-communist and against the terms of the Five Years Plan. He had millions of them annilihated. During the Five Years Plan, people were forced to work on collective farms for the state so as to harvest food for the state itself. The policy of the Five Years Plan was collectivization, or the harvesting of resources for the state. The Ukrainians, as a result of the Five Years Plan and heavy collectivization, plunged itself into an era of famine which Stalin or the Soviet Union could not help. Nearly 20 million Ukrainians perished from the famine. To the West of the Soviet Union, were the fascist states of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Stalin, like other leaders of Europe at the time, feared Hitler and his Germany and would engage in acts of appeasement in order to satisfy Hitler's demands. Hitler despised the communists to a lesser or similar degree of his hatred for Jews. (Karl Marx, the founder of modern communism in the 19th Century, was originally a Jew himself.) In 1936, the Spanish Army rebelled against the Spanish Republic in Northern Africa. The Spanish Army, led by the fascist general Franco, was transported to the Spanish mainland from German planes. For three years straight, Spain engaged in a civil war that pitted the nationalist Spainards against those of the Popular Front Republic. The French and British decided to not intervene in the Spanish Civil War but the Soviet Union did by sending supplies and weapons to the Popular Front Republic. However, the Nationalists under Franco possessed more weapons and support from the fascist regimes of Hitler and Mussolini and so managed to topple the Popular Front Republic, replacing it with a fascist-like government. (Despite receiving aid from Hitler during the Spanish Civil War, Franco decided it was best if his war-torn country not get involved in World War II.) In 1939, Hitler dominated all of Germany, Czechslovakia, and Austria and was ready to invade Poland. However, invading Poland would trigger a possible war with the Soviets, which Hitler felt was unnecessary at the time. So, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact, which basically partioned Poland into a western, German side and an eastern, Soviet side. On September 1, 1939, the Nazi Gestapo, or secret police, claimed that Polish soldiers had attacked Germany and so, in defense, Germany attacked Poland. Soviet soldiers entered Eastern Poland several days later. Great Britain and France both declared war on Germany in Poland's defense but were unable to do anything to stop the tide from turning against Poland. Poland was all but defeated as a country by the Germans and Soviets by the end of September. The period following the annexation of Poland in accordance with the Nazi-Soviet Non Aggression Pact was known as Sitzkrieg, or "Phony War," since no major German or Allied confrontations occurred for the rest of 1939 in Western Europe. In order to mobilize his country even more, Stalin ordered the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia to put down their arms and provide the Soviets with military bases in their countries. However, when Stalin tried to do the same with Finland, the Finns resisted in a short, but costly conflict known as the "Winter War." Finnish soldiers rode on skies armed with submachine guns while the Soviets were slower. The guerrilla-inspired attacks from the Winter War inspired Soviet citizens to do the same to the invading Germans. Finland was defeated although it had put up a tough fight against the Soviets. In 1940, Hitler's Germany had mobilized efficiently enough to attack the Allies. Starting in 1940, Hitler's armies made their way first through Norway, Scandinavia (except Sweden which was neutral), the Benelux Countries (the Netherlands and Belgium), and France. The British and French had expected the war with the Germans to be another "Great War" or World War I in which millions of soldiers fought in a trench stalemate. However, this wasn't so. In order to combat the possibilities of a trench stalemate, the German military engineered the plan of Blitzkrieg, or "Lightning War," in which tanks and planes were used simulataneously to inflict maximum damage on the enemy. This plan managed to work as Norway and the Benelux Countries were all but defeated and annexed by the Third German Reich. France finally collapsed to the German onslaught when Paris was captured. In Britain, which was perhaps the only Allied country left to withstand the Germans, Prime Minister Chamberlain, who was the key figure in the appeasement movement, was replaced by the firebrand and patriot Winston Churchill who decided that Britain was the only country left to stand and face totalitarianism. The United States, at the time, was neutral, deep within an isolationalist stance at the time. Its president, however, was Franklin D. Roosevelt, a man of hope and inspiration that led America through the Great Depression through his left-wing "New Deal" movement. However, the time of the Great Depression was up and replaced with an era of war. FDR secretly wanted to get his country involved in the war but the American public's response to the German annexations were mostly uncaring and unconcerning. When the United States entered WWI in 1917, the nation that perhaps many European countries thought lacked the military to defeat the Germans let alone any other Central Power (Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Empire). However, the nation gradually mobilized in the name of war and defense, manufacturing millions of guns and putting millions of men in uniform. Soon, millions of Americans were serving on the trenches on the Western Front by 1918. It was the American isolationists that decided that after the war, the United States would return to the pre-WWI status quo. An isolationalist president, Warren G. Harding, spearheaded the movement of isolationism for his successors, namely Calvin Coolidge who replaced him after his death in office along with the philanthropist Herbert Hoover. Beginning in the end of 1940, Hitler hoped to invade Britain and annex it for the Greater German Reich in a military operation referred to as "Operation Sealion." However, it would be very costly to launch a campaign into a country of firebrands and patriots that had not been invaded since 1066 when the Normans invaded it. They decided to bomb out Britain through their German Air Force, or Luftwaffe, of which was at the forefront of the world's airforces at the time. The British responded to a nation-wide air battle across Britain known as the Battle of Britain. The German Air Force was soon defeated and from then on, it began to deterioate to nothingness. The Soviets, in the East, had not mobilized effectively enough to withstand a spontaneous German attack. Stalin knew it was a matter of time until the Soviets and Germans themselves were fighting since the communists and fascists despised each other. But his country did not mobilize in the time of Germany's war with the Allies. Rather, it was attacked by Hitler after he was humiliated by the Battle of Britain. The German military launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviets, which was the largest and most massive land invasion to date. When German forces entered countries oppressed by Soviet authority, they were greeted as liberators but these "liberators" soon began killing off their Jewish, homosexual, handicapped, and undesirable populations. When Yugoslavia was invaded by the Germans, the communist leader Tito led communist guerillas against the Germans. The same was in other countries of Slavic origin, since the Germans considered the Slavs inferior and unhuman. The Soviets were being pushed back and defeated; Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Empire itself, was being fought over itself. The Soviets managed to make a gradual turning point at the Battle of Stalingrad (present day Volgograd) in 1943 when the presumably best German Army surrendered to the Soviets. The tide was turned against the Germans again when the German Afrikakorps under General Erwin Rommel were defeated and Sicily was occupied. In 1944, thousands of Allied soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy, France in order to liberate that country that had been oppressed by German occupation for four years. In the East, the Soviets soon ousted the Germans from their soil and started heading for Poland and Central Europe. Soon, Austria, Yugoslavia, and other nations were soon liberated by the Reds. Seeing how the Soviets were approaching Warsaw, the Polish Home Guard iniated a short period of resistance and rebellion against the occupying Germans in Warsaw. However, Stalin did not see a future Poland in which the Home Guard was to be present in. So, he ordered troops to stay outside of the city until the rebellion was suppressed, which it was brutally. Then the Soviets occupied Warsaw and took Poland. The Americans and British were approaching Berlin as well as were the Sovies. However, the Soviets were permitted to take the city and its casualities, which mounted to about hundreds of thousands. The Fuhrer himself, Adolf Hitler, committed suicide while the Soviets were in his city. In April 1945, the last Nazi government officials surrendered, ending six years of bloody and gory conflict. While much of the West refers to World War II as the Second World War, present-day Russia and the Soviet Union refer and referred to it as the Great Patriot War (1941-1945) which began when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union.

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11y ago
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16y ago

The Great Patriotic War 1941-45.

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15y ago

It was called "The Great War"

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13y ago

the great patriotic war

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14y ago

i think it was called The Red army

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Q: What did soviet union call world war two?
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