The Soviet Union was founded by the victors of the Russian Civil War, which lasted from

1917 until 1922, and which led to

somewhere in the neighborhood of a few hundred thousand to as many as several million deaths.

Many of those being civilian deaths, as part of twin terror campaigns, often referred to as the white terror and the red terror,

for atrocities committed by the dominant Russian army, the White Guard, and the communist

Bolshevik army, respectively. However many deaths there were, and whomever perpetrated those

killings, the Russian economy was demolished by this civil

war, and this infrastructural devastation was amplified by a severe drought, followed by a famine,

which happened alongside a typhus pandemic, that itself killed millions of people in 1920 alone.

Poverty at this time was immense, starvation and homelessness were common,

and a bunch of neighboring states that were pulled into the Union,

after having declared independence from Russia in recent years,

were suffering under the same conditions.

The central government had not yet

spun up sufficiently to do much about these issues in the aftermath of this significant

internal conflict. That essentially describes the birth of the Soviet Union, which was formed to align with ideologies

held by the Russian Communist Party, and was initially made up of the Russian Soviet

Federative Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Belarusian Soviet Socialist

Republic, and the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic.

These four nations were unified as states of a larger nation, and the New Economic Policy,

or NEP, which was proposed by a political theorist and politician named Vladimir Lenin in 1921 formed the

backbone of the economic system that they shared.

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