The October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution created the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, the RSFSR, as the successor state to the Russian Empire. In December 1922, by which time the Bolsheviks had in fact established control over the territory of the former empire (except those areas taken from it by the treaties that marked the end of World War I) their state became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), comprising four soviet socialist republics (SSRs): Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Transcaucasian (by 1936 there were 11 SSRs; the number eventually grew to 15). The USSR’s prime importance, however, was not its size—it was the largest country in the world—nor its considerable wealth of raw materials, but the nature of its regime. As the first Communist state, it preached, and sought to propagate abroad, an ideology that purported to have a message for the modern world, industrial and precapitalist alike. Its regime, therefore, served as a model or laboratory, whose policies and achievements were designed to serve as a stimulus for other countries the globe over.
