Anniversaries

This month sees the 100 year anniverary of the formation of the USSR. As Robert Coalson wrote for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, in an article back in January this year, “on December 30, 1922, representatives of the Soviet governments of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Transcaucasian Republic took to the stage of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater to proclaim the formation of a new country that within less than two generations would become a global superpower: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics......with the 20/20 hindsight of a century’s distance, 1922 emerges as a fateful year for the peoples of Russia and its neighborhood...in terms of politics, foreign affairs and culture, events transpired and decisions were made that laid the rails for decades of institutionalized totalitarian oppression.”

The article goes on to highlight other portentous events of 1922 such as the appointment of Stalin as General Secretary and the re-organisation of the Cheka into the GPU.

Brian Whitmore writing for the Atlantic Council - also in January of this year, asks, rather prophetically,  'Is 2022 shaping up to be a similarly fateful year? In addition to being cognizant of the symbolic power of anniversaries, with the West divided and distracted and the United States largely preoccupied with the threat from China, Putin also appears to see an opportunity at the moment to establish hegemony over some of the former Soviet space.'

2022 has indeed also been a fateful year.

To commemorate this anniversary, The Guardian has put together a selection of photos of key moments in the history of the Soviet Union: