Officially known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR was a one-party state, governed, controlled, and tormented by a single party rule. That of the Communist Party. No nation has inflicted such destruction on its own population in the name of progress. Power corroded the leadership, leaving the masses to suffer in the name of history. There are many factors that effected the Soviet Union’s turbulent history, but the sheer ungovernable vastness of the country was inescapable. It was a nation the size of a continent stretching from Moscow to Vladivostok and from Leningrad to Stalingrad. What we might consider European Russia was dwarfed by the reaches of Siberia. Enacting any kind of policy took force. Over many painful years, this vast country locked itself away from the rest of the world, paranoid, economically uncertain, repressive, while still casting a vast shadow across the world.