100 years of USSR: The rise and fall of Soviet Union — in pictures

Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin, left, and Soviet leader Josef Stalin sit in a park at Gorki residence in 1922 just outside Moscow, Russia. Five years after the overthrow of Russia's czarist government, four of the socialist republics that had formed in the aftermath signed a treaty on Dec. 30, 1922 to create the USSR. The republics had their own governments and national languages, but all subordinate to Moscow. Lenin was already in poor health when the USSR was formed and died little more than a year later. (AP File Photo)

Visitors look at the painting, "The signing of the treaty on the formation of the USSR on December 30, 1922 in the Bolshoi Theater" by Stepan Dudnik at the State Central Museum of Contemporary History of Russia in Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2022. (AP Photo)

Soviet soldiers hoist the red flag over the Reichstag in Berlin, Germany in May 1945. The photo was made by Yevgeny Khaldei, a veteran photographer whose pictures of Soviet soldiers hoisting the red flag over the Reichstag in Berlin are among the best-known images of World War II. (AP File Photo)

Josef Stalin, secretary-general of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and premier of the Soviet state, poses at his desk in the Kremlin, Moscow, Russia in Feb. 1950. After Lenin's death, Stalin outmaneuvered rivals in the ensuing power battle. Stalin's death from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1953 was traumatic for Soviets who venerated him. (AP File Photo)

A group of peasants, who work in the fields of their collective farm, read magazines and newspapers during rest hour, at an unknown location in the Soviet Union, on May 28, 1930. Stalin implemented collectivisation, in which private landholdings were incorporated into state and collective farms. (AP File Photo)

Russians gather in front of the Lenin mausoleum with the names reading "Lenin, Stalin" on the top after completion of alterations involving the removal of stone bearing Stalin's name in Red Square in Moscow, Russia in March 7, 1962. In a speech to a Communist Party congress, Nikita Khrushchev railed for hours against Stalin, decrying his brutality and denouncing the “cult of personality” he engendered. He later ordered Stalin's body removed from the Red Square mausoleum where Lenin's body also lay. (AP File Photo)

Soviet spaceman Yuri Gagarin waves after arriving at the London Airport, for a private visit as the guest of the Russian Trade fair, July 11, 1961. The successful one-orbit flight on April 12, 1961 made the 27-year-old Gagarin a national hero and cemented Soviet supremacy in space until the United States put a man on the moon more than eight years later. (AP File Photo)

A naval rocket is exhibited in Moscow's Red Square past a banner of Vladimir Lenin, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx during the annual May Day parade in the Soviet Union in May 1, 1963. Under the shadow of the Cold War's threat of "mutually assured destruction," 1963 was the year of dawning arms control between the U.S. and the Soviet Union; they signed a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. (AP File Photo)

Cuba's leader Fidel Castro, left, and Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet premier and the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union clasp hands at the Lenin mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square on May Day in Moscow, Russia in May 1, 1963. Many observers say the closest that the world has come to full nuclear war was in the 1962 confrontation between the United States and the USSR over the presence in Cuba of Soviet nuclear missiles, which Khrushchev sent in response to the US placing nuclear-capable missiles in Turkey. (AP File Photo)

The Vostok type spaceship such as Yuri Gagarin and other cosmonauts orbited the Earth, is on public display in Moscow, April 29, 1968 for the first time. (AP File Photo)

U.S. President Ronald Reagan, left, and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev meet for the first time at the villa Fleur D'Eau at Versoix near Geneva, Nov. 19, 1985. Gorbachev signed two landmark arms agreements with the United States. He freed political prisoners, allowed open debate and multi-candidate elections, gave his countrymen freedom to travel and halted religious oppression. Gorbachev stepped down as president on Dec. 25, 1991. (AP File Photo)

An aerial view of the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Chernobyl showing damage from an explosion and fire in reactor four on April 26, 1986 that sent large amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere in Ukraine. Gorbachev's esteem in the West was undermined when a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded in 1986, spewing a cloud of radioactive fallout over much of Europe for a week before the fire could be put out. (AP File Photo)

A participant in a pro-democracy rally shows his disgust for the Soviet system by ripping apart a portrait of its founder, Vladimir Lenin in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, Feb. 25, 1990. With its brutality, technological accomplishments and rigid ideology, the Soviet Union cast a huge shadow on the world like that of a colossus that would loom forever. (AP File Photo)

Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Federation, makes a speech from atop a tank in front of the Russian Parliament building in Moscow, Russia on Monday, Aug. 19, 1991. The Soviet prime minister, defense minister, KGB head and other top officials, alarmed growing separatism and economic troubles, on August 19, 1991, put the first Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev under house arrest at his vacation dacha and ordered a halt to all political activities. (AP File photo)

Russia's President Boris Yeltsin, second right, Ukraine's President Leonid Kravchuk, second left, Belarus' leader Stanislav Shushkevich, third left, Russia's State Secretary Gennady Burbulis, right, Belarus' Prime Minister Vyacheslav Kebich, third right, and Ukraine's Prime Minister Vitold Fokin, left, sign an agreement terminating the Soviet Union and declaring the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States in Viskuli, Belarus on Dec. 8, 1991. (AP File Photo)