What Does USSR Stand For?

What does USSR stand for, word by word?

Each member was called a Soviet Socialist Republic, or SSR, so you will see names like the Georgian SSR or the Kazakh SSR in history books. Putting a U in front of the family of SSRs gives you USSR.

Why Russian signs read CCCP

In Russian the name is Союз Советских Социалистических Республик, shortened to СССР. Those Cyrillic letters look like the Latin letters CCCP, but they are pronounced "S S S R," because the Cyrillic С is an S sound and Р is an R sound. That is why old space suits, sports jerseys and posters show CCCP while English books write USSR.

The fifteen Soviet republics

By the end, the USSR was made up of fifteen union republics. Each became an independent country when the union dissolved:

• Slavic republics: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus
• Baltic republics: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania
• Caucasus: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia
• Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan
• Also: Moldova

For the modern short forms of one of these countries, see the Ukraine abbreviation page, and the wider set of codes on the country abbreviations page.

A short history of the Soviet Union

The Soviet state grew out of the Russian revolutions of 1917 and the civil war that followed. The union treaty of 1922 joined Russia with several neighboring republics. For most of its life the country was ruled by a single party, the Communist Party, and the government planned and owned most of the economy.

After World War II, the USSR and the United States became rival superpowers in the long contest known as the Cold War. Each side built military alliances, the West through NATO and the Soviet side through the Warsaw Pact. The two also raced in space, and the USSR launched the first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957. Its security agency, the KGB, was the counterpart of agencies like the CIA.

In 1991, after years of economic trouble and independence movements in the republics, the union was formally dissolved. Russia took over the Soviet seat on the United Nations Security Council.

USSR vs Russia and other mix ups

• USSR vs Russia: Russia was one republic inside the USSR, the largest one. Calling the whole Soviet Union "Russia" was common in casual talk but not accurate.
• USSR vs Soviet Union: these mean the same thing. Soviet Union is the everyday name, and USSR is the formal short form.
• USSR vs CIS: the Commonwealth of Independent States is a looser group of former Soviet republics formed as the union ended. It is not a single country.
• USSR vs SSR: an SSR was one member republic, while the USSR was the whole union.

Writing and saying USSR

Say it as four letters: "U S S R." Write it in capitals. Older texts sometimes used periods, U.S.S.R., but most modern writing drops them. In a sentence, use "the" in front: "the USSR," just as you would say "the Soviet Union."

• "The USSR sent the first person into orbit."
• "My grandmother was born in the USSR, in what is now Latvia."
• "The map shows Europe before the USSR broke up."
• "Many sports records from that era list the country as USSR."

Agency and country letters from the same era sit in the government acronyms collection.