Key
At the selected date, the colour of each place shows who held it. To learn its story, click or tap a country or marker.
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In 1924, the Soviet Union was poor and mostly peasant. Its ruling party had won the civil war, yet it had still to decide what to make of that victory. Thirty years later, the Union was an industrial and nuclear power with an empire in Eastern Europe, and Joseph Stalin had ruled it more completely than any tsar. This atlas traces his rise to power and the means by which he kept it. It also asks what his rule cost those who lived under it, following the collective farms and famines, the new steel cities, the camps, the Terror, the deported nations and the war.
The twelve chapters follow the four questions IB Paper 2 asks of every authoritarian state: why it emerged, how it was maintained, how it affected people’s lives and how it was challenged. On the map, red shows Soviet territory and hatched red shows the lands annexed after 1939. Pale hatches identify famine regions and the homelands of deported peoples; diamond markers identify memory sites. Scrub the timeline and open any territory or marker to explore, then take the Field Exam when you are ready.
Keys: ←→ chapters · space play time · +− zoom · ⌘K search · ? all keys.
You can return to the library of twenty-one atlases at any time: select the balloon at the top left.