In the late 1920s, the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, launched a series of 'socialist offensives', a revolution that transformed the country. By the time of Joseph Stalin's death in March 1953, the USSR had become an industrial, military and nuclear giant. This chapter describes the state and society that developed out of Stalin's revolution. The drive for socialist industrialisation was impressive, but it was only one aspect of Stalin's revolution, one front of the socialist offensive. The second major front of the socialist offensive was played out in the countryside in the campaigns to collectivise agriculture. Destruction of the private farm economy went hand in glove with a general assault on private trade and other market remnants of new economic policy (NEP). Stalinism grew out of a unique combination of circumstances - a weak governing state, an increasingly hostile international context and a series of unforeseen crises, both domestic and external.

No period in peacetime in twentieth-century Russia saw such dramatic change as the years between 1985 and 1991. During this time Russia achieved a greater political freedom than it had ever enjoyed before. The Cold War ended definitively in 1989 when the Central and Eastern European states regained their sovereignty. One of the most important developments in the Soviet Union following Mikhail Gorbachev's selection as General Secretary was a change of political language. New concepts were introduced into Soviet political discourse and old ones shed the meanings they had been accorded hitherto by Soviet ideology. The most immediate stimulus to change in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Gorbachev era was the long-term decline in the rate of economic growth and the fact that the Soviet economy was not only lagging behind the most advanced Western countries but also was being overtaken by some of the newly industrialising countries in Asia.