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USSR and China sign 30 year treaty
This treaty which was signed by the USSR and China was broken later down the road in time. -
Josef Stalin Dies
Stalin dies and is succeeded by Georgi Malenkov as prime minister and by Nikita Khrushchev as first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. -
USSR explodes 1st H bomb
When the USSR used their first hydrogen bomb, it created more tensions between it and other world countries. now the USSR had a weapon of mass-distruction. -
Warsaw pact created
the Warsaw Pact was a defensive military alliance formed in response to the U.S's creation of NATO. -
Post Stalin Thaw Begins...
Policies started to be implemented by Kruschev to rid the USSR of all memories of Josef Stalin. This would continue with the removal of most of his policies through all leaders of the USSR still to come. -
Launch of Sputnik
The Launch of the USSR's first satellite created more tensions between them and the U.S. in the space race, further amounting to the Cold War conflicts. -
Nikita Kruschev becomes leader of USSR
Kruschev began making changes to the USSR first with his policy of Destalinization, the removal of all memories of Josef Stalin from the lives of the people living in the USSR -
U-2 Incident
On May 1st, 1960, the USSR shot down a U.S. spy plane which was flying over a no-fly area in the USSR. The Soviets took the pilot hostage creating more conflicts between the USSR and the U.S. -
Yuri Gagarin makes 1st unmanned space flight
By having the first man in space, The Soviets felt that they had won the space race, they were wrong. The U.S. became the first to put a man on the moon, furthering the space race. -
Cuban Missile Crisis errupts
The USSR set up multiple mid-range missile launch sites in Cuba. The U.S. demanded that they be removed. After much negotiation and many conflicts, the USSR agreed to remove the missiles. -
Kruschev is replaced by Brezhnev
Brezhnev ruled the USSR with ways which were much like this of Josef Stalin, except for the fact that the people had more freedoms. -
Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops invade Czechoslovakia
"Brezhnev Doctrine" enunciated, giving communist countries the right to intervene in other communist states whose policies threatened the international communist movement. -
SALT I Treaty
Soviet Union and US sign SALT-1 arms control agreement, heralding the start of detente. Negotiations lasted from November 17, 1969, until May 1972 in a series of meetings beginning in Helsinki, with the US delegation headed by Gerard C. Smith, director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Subsequent sessions alternated between Vienna and Helsinki. -
Soviet Union and US sign SALT-2 agreement
SALT II was a series of talks between United States and Soviet negotiators from 1972 to 1979 which sought to curtail the manufacture of strategic nuclear weapons. It was a continuation of the SALT I talks and was led by representatives from both countries. SALT II was the first nuclear arms treaty which assumed real reductions in strategic forces to 2,250 of all categories of delivery vehicles on both sides. -
Soviet troops invade Afghanistan, ending detente with the West.
The initial Soviet deployment of the 40th Army in Afghanistan began on December 24, 1979, under Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.The final troop withdrawal started on May 15, 1988, and ended on February 15, 1989, under the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Due to the interminable nature of the war, the conflict in Afghanistan has sometimes been referred to as the "Soviet Union's Vietnam War" or the "Bear Trap". -
Glasnost, perestroika and Chernobyl Era begins
The first major test of `glasnost' was the response to the explosion of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in the Ukraine on 26 April 1986. It was ten days before the Soviet government produced information about the true scale of the disaster which had affected countries throughout Europe. In this it was no less frank than other governments had been in the face of nuclear disasters, notably the United States, but it was a crucial part of the learning process by which information was prepared. -
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty 1987
During 1987, the USSR apparently continued to abide by the limits. In the United States, the Congress and the administration agreed that the United States would stay under the SLBM and ICBM sub-limits, although President Reagan was strongly opposed to it. -
Dissolution of the Soviet Union begins
Violence erupted in Nagorno-Karabakh—an Armenian-populated enclave of Azerbaijan—between February and April, when Armenians living in the area began a new wave of demands to transfer of NKAO from Azerbaijan to Armenia led to full scale Nagorno-Karabakh War. Gorbachev imposed a temporary solution, but it did not last, as fresh trouble arose in Nagorno-Karabakh between June and July. Turmoil began once again return in late 1988, this time in Armenia itself. -
First signs of nationalities problem that would haunt the later years of the Soviet Union's existence
Soviet troops leave Afghanistan; nationalist riots put down in Georgia; Lithuanian Communist Party declares its independence from the Soviet Communist Party; first openly-contested elections for new Congress of People's Deputies, or parliament. -
President of the Russian Federation
Soviet troops sent to Azerbaijan following inter-ethnic killings between Armenians and Azeris; Communist Party votes to end one-party rule; Gorbachev opposes independence of Baltic states and imposes sanctions on Lithuania; Yeltsin elected president of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic by the latter's parliament and leaves the Soviet Communist Party. -
Congress of People's Deputies votes for the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Just days after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin resolved to embark on a program of radical economic reform. Unlike Gorbachev's reforms which sought to expand democracy in the socialist system, the new regime embarked to completely dismantle socialism and fully restore capitalism—converting the world's largest command economy into a free-market one. During early discussions of this transition, Yeltsin's advisers debated issues of speed and sequencing, with an apparent division -
Leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus sign agreement setting up Commonwealth of Independent States.
In early December 1991, Ukraine voted for independence from the Soviet Union. A week later, on 8 December, Yeltsin met Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk and the leader of Belarus, Stanislav Shushkevich, in Belovezhskaya Pushcha. In the Belavezha Accords, the three presidents announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the formation of a voluntary Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place. According to Gorbachev, Yeltsin kept the plans of the Belovezhskaya meeting in secret. -
Largest Republic of the Soviet Union seceded
On 12 December, the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR ratified the Belavezha Accords and denounced the 1922 Union Treaty. It also ordered the Russian deputies in the Council of the Union to cease their work, leaving that body without a quorum. In effect, the largest republic of the Soviet Union had seceded. -
Gorbachev resigns as Soviet president; US recognises independence of remaining Soviet republics.
25 December 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned, declaring his office extinct, and handed over the Soviet nuclear missile launching codes to Russian President Boris Yeltsin. That same evening at 7:32 P.M. the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin and replaced with the Russian tricolor.[2] The dissolution of the world's first and largest Communist state also marked an end to the Cold War. -
The dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)
The dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formally finalized on 26 December 1991 by declaration № 142-H of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union.This declaration acknowledged the independence of the twelve republics of the Soviet Union that created the Commonwealth of Independent States.
