How did the fall of the soviet union effect poland

The Soviet state was born in 1917. That year, the revolutionary Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian czar and established a socialist state in the territory that had once belonged to the Russian empire. In 1922, Russia proper joined its far-flung republics in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The first leader of this Soviet state was the Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin.

The Soviet Union was supposed to be “a society of true democracy,” but in many ways it was no less repressive than the czarist autocracy that preceded it. It was ruled by a single party–the Communist Party–that demanded the allegiance of every Russian citizen. After 1924, when the dictator Joseph Stalin came to power, the state exercised totalitarian control over the economy, administering all industrial activity and establishing collective farms. It also controlled every aspect of political and social life. People who argued against Stalin’s policies were arrested and sent to labor camps or executed.