3x60' | History/People | HD

GBR 2022

3DD

Officially known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR was a state presided over, controlled and tormented by a one-party government. That of the Communist Party.
No other nation has inflicted such destruction on its people in the name of progress. Power corroded the leadership, leaving the masses to suffer in the name of history. It was a nation the size of a continent, stretching from Moscow to Vladivostok and from Leningrad to Stalingrad, the ungovernability of such a vast country was inevitable.
Complicated and contradictory figures came and went: Stalin the despot hero whose cruelty knew few limits who united a nation to defeat Hitler. Khrushchev the shrewd libertarian, who preached reform but allowed an escalation of the arms race. Brezhnev, that illegible member to the old guard, who sent history backwards. And of course Gorbachev, who brought about great changes, modernization and detente, but who saw the Soviet Union collapse under his rule: the unsustainable nation.
Over the course of many years, this vast country has closed itself off from the rest of the world, paranoid, economically uncertain, repressive, continuing to cast a vast shadow over the world. The 20th century has been shaped by its convulsions, its purges, its wars and its leaders.