The Soviet Union was succeeded by fifteen independent states: the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The institutional inheritances of these countries from their Soviet past have varied substantially. The three Baltic states moved rapidly toward Western institutional integration (all three joined the European Union and NATO in 2004) and constructed political and economic systems that have, by 2026, been Western-style democracies and market economies for thirty years. The Central Asian states preserved most of the late-Soviet bureaucratic structures, replacing the Communist Party with personal presidential regimes of varying degrees of authoritarianism; in some cases the post-1991 leaders were literally the former first secretaries of the local Communist parties (Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan, Niyazov in Turkmenistan, Karimov in Uzbekistan). The South Caucasus states (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan) followed mixed trajectories with frequent political reversals and several major regional wars (the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in 1988-94, 2020, and 2023). Belarus retained a unusually intact Soviet institutional inheritance under Aleksandr Lukashenko's continuous presidency since 1994. Ukraine and Moldova have followed more contested paths involving substantial constitutional change and territorial conflict.
The Russian inheritance
The largest of the successor states — the Russian Federation, with about half the union's population and three-quarters of its territory — was, in international legal terms, the union's continuator state: it inherited the Soviet seat on the UN Security Council, the Soviet nuclear arsenal, the Soviet foreign embassies and treaty obligations, and the Soviet diplomatic recognition. The economic transition of the 1990s, conducted under Yeltsin's government with the assistance of Western advisers and the International Monetary Fund, was a substantial failure: GDP fell by about forty percent through the 1990s, the rouble collapsed in August 1998, life expectancy for Russian men dropped to below sixty years (a peacetime record for any developed economy), and a small number of well-connected businessmen acquired the privatised industrial assets of the former Soviet economy in opaque transactions that produced the so-called oligarchic class.
The political transition followed by the 2000s was, by most reasonable assessments, an authoritarian consolidation. The successor to Yeltsin from 1999, Vladimir Putin — a former KGB officer of mid-level rank in East Germany — restored substantial state control over the energy sector, the broadcast media, and the political opposition. The two Chechen wars (1994-1996, 1999-2009) substantially reorganised the relationship between Moscow and the constituent republics of the federation. The 2014 annexation of Crimea and the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine represented a profound break with the principles of the post-1991 European order and with the international recognition of Soviet successor-state borders that had been the principal achievement of the 1991 settlement. The Soviet Union's foreign-policy legacy — the strategic relationship with the West, the institutional architecture of European security, the economic interdependence of the post-1991 European space — was substantially destroyed in the early 2020s. This volume does not attempt to write the history of the present.
The institutional inheritances
Some of the Soviet Union's institutional creations have outlived it in substantively unchanged form. The Soyuz rocket family, designed by the Korolev bureau in the 1960s, has continued to launch crewed missions to the International Space Station (where it was, for nearly a decade after the retirement of the American Space Shuttle in 2011, the only operational human-rated launcher in the world). The Moscow Metro and the Leningrad/St Petersburg Metro continue to use the original Soviet-era stations with their Stalin-period sculptural and mosaic programmes; the Mayakovskaya, Komsomolskaya, and Novoslobodskaya stations are among the most architecturally distinguished public transit spaces anywhere. The Soviet-era housing stock — the prefabricated panel apartment blocks of the 1960s, the so-called Khrushchyovki, and their later Brezhnev-era successors — still houses the majority of the urban population of every former Soviet republic.
The Soviet system of higher education, particularly its strong technical and scientific institutions (the Moscow State University, the Lomonosov MSU; the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, MIPT; the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, MEPhI; the Bauman MSTU; the corresponding institutions in Kyiv, Minsk, Novosibirsk, Tashkent, and others), has continued to produce mathematicians, physicists, and engineers at world standards. The Russian and Ukrainian software industries, which by the 2000s and 2010s had become substantial global presences, were direct beneficiaries of the late-Soviet technical-educational infrastructure.
The languages
Russian remains a major international language, spoken as a first or fluent second language by perhaps 250 million people across the former Soviet space, the diaspora, and the contemporary Russian Federation. The other Soviet-era state languages — Ukrainian, Belarusian, Georgian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, the Baltic languages, the Central Asian languages — have all survived as the official languages of their respective successor states, with state-supported standardisation, education, and cultural infrastructure. The Soviet-era language policy of mandatory Russian-language secondary education has produced a generation across the former union with substantial Russian-language competence in addition to native-language fluency. The pattern is changing in the younger generation (Russian-language competence is now substantially lower among people educated after 2000 in the Baltic states, Georgia, and to a lesser extent Ukraine), but the linguistic inheritance remains substantial.
Where the Soviet Union can still be felt
The country itself — the union of fifteen socialist republics under continuous Communist Party rule — no longer exists and cannot be visited. Many of its physical traces, however, are accessible, sometimes in surprisingly intact form. The Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square still preserves Lenin's body in continuous public display (the embalming was done by a special team in 1924 and has been maintained continuously by a dedicated laboratory ever since). The Soviet-period war memorials — Mamayev Kurgan at Volgograd (the giant Motherland Calls statue, 1967), the Brest Fortress memorial, the Park Pobedy in Moscow — are major sites of public memory and substantial visitor traffic. The Cosmonautics Museum in Moscow preserves the Soviet space programme in substantively complete form. The Aurora cruiser in St Petersburg is still moored where she fired the signal shell for the Winter Palace assault in 1917. Major Soviet-era cinema (Tarkovsky, Bondarchuk, Klimov), Soviet popular music, and Soviet literature continue to find new audiences across the former union and abroad.
The travel section of this volume describes twenty places where the Soviet inheritance is particularly accessible. Among them are several that visitors might not expect to find on a Soviet itinerary — the Star City cosmonaut training centre outside Moscow, the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan (the only launch site for crewed Soyuz missions until recently), the closed nuclear city of Sarov (where Sakharov designed the Soviet hydrogen bomb), the Aral Sea (or what remains of it; the Soviet irrigation programmes of the 1960s reduced the world's fourth-largest lake to about ten percent of its 1960 surface area, a disaster of which the abandoned ships at Moynaq are the visible monument).
The Soviet Union was, by every reasonable measure, one of the largest political projects of the twentieth century, and its end was the largest single geopolitical event of the century's last decade. Its inheritances — political, economic, demographic, cultural, linguistic — continue to shape the lives of perhaps three hundred million people. Whether the country should be mourned, celebrated, condemned, or simply remembered with detachment is a question that the inhabitants of its successor states are still working out among themselves. This volume's editorial position is that the question is properly theirs to answer.
"We are all Soviet people. Even those of us who were against the Soviet Union." — Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time (2013)
End of Chapter X · End of Volume VI