“The next few years will confront Russia with a supreme test. Can the nation realize its aspirations through internal reconstruction and international cooperation, or will it once again seek to make its mark by resorting to military force and exploitation of international tensions"”

—Richard Pipes, Emeritus Professor of History, Harvard University

For most of the twentieth century the word Russia was often used synonymously with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or Soviet Union. The Soviet Union emerged from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, in which Vladimir I. Lenin and his followers took over the vast but tottering Russian empire and imposed a totalitarian system of communist rule. Russia became the core of the USSR’s fifteen republics. Lenin and his successors maintained and expanded the multi- ethnic empire they inherited, banned private property and forcibly collectivized farms (a process that resulted in the...