Soviet Union

The Soviet Union was a human nation located on Earth in the Sol System. Its territory on Earth extended from its borders with Poland, Finland, Ukraine and the Baltic states in the west across Eurasia to its borders with China and Korea in the far east. The Soviet government also administered an interplanetary colony on the planet Venus in the Sol System. During its existence, the Soviet Union was one of humanity's most important political and military powers.

Due to the slow economic development of the Russian Empire and the country's relatively poor living standards compared to those in Western Europe, radical socialists began to agitate for revolution against the tsarist regime to improve the living standards of Russian peasants. The relatively poor performance of the Russian military against Japan in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War caused these tensions to escalate in 1905, leading to a general strike and the Revolution of 1905. Tsar Nicholas II agreed to constitutional reforms extending voting rights and requiring the tsar to share his power with a parliament. These reforms took effect in 1906, and temporarily satisfied moderate reformists in the country. However, radical socialists were left dissatisfied by the new constitution.

Between 1914 and 1916 the Russian Empire fought in the Great War on the side of Great Britain and France. The war ended in 1916 with a massive exchange of orbital weapons and long-range rockets. Orbital weapon and rocket attacks by the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire devastated many major Russian metropolitan areas, including the Russian imperial capital of Saint Petersburg as well as the cities of Moscow, Kazan, Odessa, Tbilisi and Murmansk. The destruction of Saint Petersburg resulted in the deaths of Tsar Nicholas II, most of the imperial line of succession, and many senior government and military officials loyal to the tsar. In October 1916 Bolshevik revolutionaries led by Vladimir Lenin took advantage of the power vacuum arising from the succession crisis and declared the establishment of a communist state - the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) - based in Tsaritsyn (later renamed Volgograd). At around the same time, nationalist movements in several former territories of the Russian Empire - including Poland, Finland, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - also exploited the power vacuum and declared independence from Russia.

Popular discontent with the tsar's regime had been growing for some time in Russia due to the failure of the military to achieve its objectives in the Great War, as well as the conscription, rationing and poor economic conditions the population was subjected to during the conflict. The Bolsheviks enjoyed significant public support and the support of elements of the former imperial military. However, the anti-Bolshevik White movement soon arose in opposition to the establishment of a communist state in Russia. The White movement was a diverse coalition of anti-communist interests favouring political monarchism, capitalism and social democracy, each with democratic and anti-democratic variants. After the communist revolution swept through Russia virtually unopposed in 1916, in 1917 the White Army began launching attacks against the RSFSR controlled from their headquarters at Ekaterinodar (later renamed Krasnodar) in southern Russia, beginning the Russian Civil War.

The successful October Revolution in Russia caused a "Red Scare" in Western nations which had escaped widespread destruction during the Great War, particularly the United States. The U.S. had remained neutral during the war but was politically and ideologically aligned with the capitalist democracies of Europe, such as Great Britain and France. While the destruction of most former imperial powers in Europe temporarily left the United States as the world's undisputed global superpower, some American politicians expressed fears that communist movements could take advantage of the weakened state of governments in Western Europe to establish a "communist super state" stretching across all of Eurasia, which in a few decades would be powerful enough to threaten the United States. The United States briefly considered intervening in the Russian Civil War on the side of the White movement in an effort to remove the communists from power in the country, but the lack of will and ability of war-weary and devastated Western European countries to support an intervention in Russia made this idea infeasible. Instead, the United States provided loans on generous terms to politically and ideologically aligned Western European nations to strengthen their institutions against the threat of communist movements. The American backing of the League of Nations intervention in China in 1923 was also motivated by a desire to prevent China from falling to a communist takeover.

Despite the ongoing Russian Civil War and fears of communism from many Western nations at the time, the RSFSR was generally regarded as the representative of the Russian state in the international community. It was generally referred to as "Soviet Russia". Soviet Russian representatives participated in the negotiations with the former Great War combatants in Switzerland, leading to the signing of the Treaty of Geneva in 1918. In 1919, Soviet Russia became a founding member of the League of Nations.

By 1920 the Bolshevik Red Army, which acted as Soviet Russia's de facto military, had pushed the White Army across Siberia. Lacking significant support from foreign nations, the White movement was decisively defeated, and the Soviet Union was established under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin. Although it was no longer an independent state, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic continued to exist as the largest and most significant socialist republic comprising the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union was the largest country in the world by land area upon its establishment, although it was still smaller than the Russian Empire that preceded it as several former Russian territories (notably Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic states) declared independence shortly after the end of the Great War and the October Revolution. The Russian Empire's colonists on Mars and Venus also supported the White movement during the Russian Civil War. After the Bolsheviks won the war, the Russian Empire's former Martian and Venusian colonies declared independence from the Soviet Union, collectively forming a new country known as Novorossiya. Novorossiya, which was the first human nation entirely located on planets other than Earth, included the territories on Mars and Venus which the Russian Empire had annexed from the German Empire and its allies during the Great War.

Although many of the Soviet Union's largest cities had been destroyed in the orbital weapon and rocket attacks at the conclusion of the Great War, and despite the additional toll of the Russian Civil War, the Soviet Union lost considerably smaller portions of its population and economy compared with most European countries due to the nation's vast size and the fact that much of its industry was located outside major urban centres. However, despite Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin's ultimate desire for the establishment of world socialism, the need to rebuild the country after the Great War and the Civil War meant that this goal was superseded by domestic concerns. Vladimir Lenin died in office in 1924. He was succeeded as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Soviet Union by Leon Trotsky, after a power struggle with Joseph Stalin. Trotsky remained in office until his death in 1954.

Efforts by the Soviet government to forcibly collectivise agricultural production led to a famine in the early 1930s which killed several million Soviet citizens, disproportionately in the grain-producing areas of Kazakhstan.

In 1908, the Tunguska event had occurred in Siberia. The government of the Russian Empire had deployed the army to quarantine several thousand square kilometres of the forest around the site of the event, but explained that it had simply been an air burst caused by a meteroid. In reality, an unmanned space probe of the Cramori Empire had actually crashed at Tunguska while searching the galaxy for Creator artifacts. This was not publicly revealed by the Soviet government until the 1970s. Soviet scientists continued the former Russian Empire's attempts to reverse engineer the probe's fusion rocket propulsion system, both for use as an advanced propulsion system for Soviet spacecraft but also to develop fusion rectors for generating electricity as well as fusion weapons for deterrence. The Soviet Union launched a large-scale expedition to the far side of Luna in 1938. This was the first manned space mission launched from the Russian state for more than two decades. Although the purpose of this mission was kept secret, its objective was to establish facilities for extracting helium-3 for use in fusion rockets, power stations and weapons. Reconnaissance spaceflights conducted by the United States established that the Soviet Union had commenced mining operations on Luna by 1948 or earlier.

By the mid-1940s the Soviet economy had surpassed the pre-Great War economy of the Russian Empire in size. During the 1950s the Soviet Union had the world's third largest national economy, only being exceeded in this respect by the United States and India.

In 1950, after the reconstruction of Moscow had been largely completed following its destruction at the end of the Great War, the Soviet government moved its seat to the city from Volgograd.

In 1955, the Soviet Union surprised the global scientific community by successfully demonstrating a spacecraft powered by a fusion rocket. The rocket was capable of propelling a spacecraft to 50% of the speed of light, temporarily making the Soviet Union the leading nation in space technology development at the time ahead of its main rivals in this area, the United States and Germany. Later that year, the Soviet Union test-flew a fusion rocket-powered ship to the orbit of Pluto. At the time, this was the furthest distance that humans had ever traveled from Earth.

By 1960, the Soviet Union had become one of the world's leading political and military powers, along with the United States and Japan. The Soviet government had industrialised the country, which the former Russian Empire had failed to do. However, the Soviet Union never succeeded in achieving Lenin's ultimate goal of world socialism, and rather than giving workers control over the means of production the Soviet economy essentially operated under a system of state-controlled capitalism. Under subsequent leaders, the Soviet government became more authoritarian. The country did not have the civil liberties enjoyed by citizens of the United States and Western European countries, and from the mid-20th century the country also had generally lower living standards than Western European countries, the U.S. and Japan.

During the second half of the 20th century, a three-way "cold war" developed between the United States, the Soviet Union and Japan over diplomatic influence in Asia, especially in the new Southeast Asian countries which had become independent from European imperial powers after the Great War. The Soviet Union wanted to spread communism into Asia so that it would have ideologically and politically-aligned allies in the region; Japan also wanted to expand its diplomatic and economic influence in the region and prevent international interference in its territorial holdings in Taiwan, Penghu, the Liaodong Peninsula and Korea; while the United States wanted to prevent both Soviet and imperial Japanese influence from spreading in Asia by ensuring that China remained anti-communist and strong enough to resist both Japanese and Soviet influence. The Soviet Union also competed with the United States and Western European countries for influence in Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union was relatively successful in building alliances with some anti-Western African and South American governments.

In 1960, the Soviet Union became the first human nation to begin using a fusion power station to deliver energy to its civilian electrical grid. Although the station, located in Smolensk Oblast, was capable of supplying nearly the entire energy needs of Western Russia, it was soon retired once the Soviets had developed anti-gravity power stations. In 1960, the Soviet Union also became the second nation (after Germany) to land humans on the surface of Titan, one of the moons of Saturn.

In 1964, the Soviet Union became the first human nation to successfully test a fusion weapon. The weapon was tested at the Sukhoy Nos cape of Severny Island. The 100 megaton explosion of the weapon was powerful enough to shatter windows as far away as Finland and Scandinavia.

In 1965 the Soviet Union began to develop a colony in the Eistla Regio region of Venus. Development of a colony in the Promethei Terra region of Mars subsequently began in 1968. The Soviet Union's predecessor, the Russian Empire, previously had colonies on both planets, but after the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War the former Russian imperial interplanetary colonies had united and declared their independence as Novorossiya.

In 1965 the Soviet Union also conducted the first manned expedition to the orbit of Neptune.

In 1970, the Soviet Union became the first nation in human history to launch an interstellar spaceflight. In 1980, when the manned Soviet interstellar ship Red October reached its destination of Alpha Centauri, the Soviet Union became the first human nation to reach another star. After the Red October explored both Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri, the ship returned to Earth in 1994. In doing so, the Red October became the first and only human spaceship to travel to and from another star entirely under sublight power.

In 1970 the Soviet Union also tested a first-generation gravity drive for the first time.

The Soviet Union had one of the most powerful human space navies in 1976, when a fleet of worldships of the Cramori Empire entered the Sol System for the first time. The Cramori, a genocidal race who believed that they were the rightful leaders of all life forms designed by the Creators, demanded that the humans and the Europans surrender and submit to their rule. An allied force of human military spaceships, including those of the Soviet Space Forces, attacked the Cramori fleet in response, beginning the Sol-Cramori War. The Soviet ships, which at the time were the only human ships armed with fusion weapons, proved to be the most effective in fighting the Cramori in the initial battle, whose worldships were protected by powerful force fields which human spacecraft did not possess at the time. Several fusion and biological weapon projectiles fired by the Cramori fleet toward Earth were destroyed by the Soviet Kirov-class battlecruiser Peter the Great, potentially saving billions of human lives. The force fields of the Cramori worldships were eventually brought down after they were rammed by high-speed American and Japanese civilian ships equipped with second-generation gravity drives. Peter the Great singlehandedly destroyed the largest Cramori worldship in the fleet by ramming it as the crew detonated her remaining stockpile of fusion weapons as well as her on-board fusion reactor, eliminating the immediate threat the Cramori posed to Earth and Venus. The sacrifice of the crew of Peter the Great became an inspiring story in Soviet and human culture. More than one million Soviet settlers were among nearly 130 million humans killed on Mars by Cramori biological weapon attacks.

As the nations of Earth rebuilt their space battle fleets to eliminate the presence of Cramori ground forces from Mars and Europa, the Soviets were instrumental in producing and providing fusion weapons to arm the ships of other countries. Soviet military ships and Soviet-flagged civilian space vessels were then used to transport ground forces of the Red Army and other human ground forces to Mars to engage Cramori invasion forces and evacuate human survivors from the planet. The Red Army sent one of the largest ground forces to fight on Mars. After the remaining human survivors were evacuated from Mars, the United States and the Soviet Union controversially decided to destroy the planet's surface with fusion weapons and nuclear weapons to eliminate the remaining Cramori ground forces on the planet rather than continuing to fight them in a costly ground campaign, given that the Cramori biological weapon attacks had rendered Mars uninhabitable to humans for at least several thousand years.

The Soviet Union, with its command economy and autocratic system of government, proved to be one of the most effective human nations when it came to fighting the Cramori Empire. It was able to effectively marshal its vast manpower and industries to contribute huge numbers of personnel, weapons, equipment and ships to the League of Nations Space Command.

In 1984, the Soviet Union tested a second-generation gravity drive for the first time. Ships powered by second-generation gravity drives soon began to replace older vessels powered by slower and less efficient fusion rockets in the Soviet military and civilian space fleets.

In 1993, the Soviet Union established a colony on Pluto and began conducting asteroid mining operations in the Kuiper belt. However, many of these facilities were destroyed in a subsequent 2006 attack on the Outer Sol System by the Cramori Empire using faster-than-light probes.

In 2003, the Soviet Union became the third nation after the United States and the United Commonwealth to test a faster-than-light starship powered by a kugelblitz drive. The Soviet Union launched its first faster-than-light interstellar space mission to the Gliese 433 system in 2018, as part of the Operation Starshot series of missions. This was also the Soviet Union's second interstellar spaceflight, after the 1970 voyage of the slower-than-light research ship Red October to Alpha Centauri.

In 2020, a Soviet starship on a second Operation Starshot mission discovered the base of the Cramori Grand Fleet in the 61 Virginis system. However, the Soviet ship was destroyed by Cramori forces before it could return to the Sol System. A League of Nations Space Command fleet sent to investigate the disappearance of the Soviet ship was then ambushed by the Cramori Grand Fleet, leading the Cramori Empire to invade and briefly take control of the Sol System in 2030.

After the Soviet Union had largely recovered from the Cramori occupation of the Sol System and Allied Fleet Command eliminated the threat of Cramori forces in the nearby Vega system in 2082, Soviet citizens saw less of a need for maintaining the authoritarian system of one-party government and began to agitate for change. By 2092 a multi-party political system had been peacefully established in the country. The elected office of President of the Soviet Union was established, replacing the former office of the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars as the supreme leader of the Soviet Union.

The government of the Soviet Union was officially dissolved in 2155, as were the governments of all other nations on Earth. National governments were replaced by a single democratic leadership structure called the Human Federation. The unification of all of humanity under a single federal government made humanity eligible for admission into the Galactic Union.