Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic

The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian SSR, was a constituent republic of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1991, ruled under the Soviet one-party model by the Communist Party of Ukraine, the republican branch of the CPSU. The first iterations of the republic went back to the Russian Revolution: after the Bolsheviks beat the independent Ukrainian People's Republic in the Ukrainian-Soviet War they founded the Ukrainian People's Republic of Soviets in December 1917, answering first to the RSFSR, and it was succeeded by the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1918. From 1922 it was one of the four founding union republics. Its history was marked by the collectivisation of agriculture and the famine of the early 1930s, by rapid industrialisation and the Russification of the cities, and by the devastation it suffered in the Second World War. It declared independence in August 1991 and became Ukraine. Its population lost some eight million people in the war, and the republic was rebuilt with heavy industry and armaments in the postwar decades.