In 1927, the Soviet Union's Chess Federation established the title of Grandmaster of the Soviet Union, for their own players, since at that time Soviets were not competing outside their own country.

* The Cold War had caused an arms race and increasing competition between to the two major players in the world: the Soviet Union and USA.

Category: Soviet chess players

At the same time, officials in Canada and the Soviet Union negotiated an arrangement that would see the top players of each nation – amateur or professional – play in an eight game " Summit Series " in September 1972 between the world's two greatest hockey nations.

* Summit Series ( disambiguation ), competitions between Soviet and Canadian professional ice hockey players

Fischer later accused the Soviet players of arranging draws and having " ganged up " on him to prevent him from winning the tournament.

Category: Soviet chess players

* The 1979 Dniprodzerzhynsk mid-air collision, killing seventeen Pakhtakor Soviet football team players and staff members.

Category: Soviet chess players

Category: Olympic ice hockey players of the Soviet Union

Category: Soviet ice hockey players

Category: Soviet chess players

This tournament was the strongest Soviet final up to that time, as it included several players, such as Paul Keres and Vladas Mikėnas, from countries annexed by the USSR, as part of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939.

But several tournaments involving Soviet players only were still organized.

By this juncture, Smyslov had advanced into the group of the top three Soviet players, along with Botvinnik and Keres ( who was playing in Nazi-occupied Europe during the War ).

*** For 1979 and 1987, a single team comprising the NHL's best players faced the Soviet national ice hockey team in a two-game series.

The story involves a romantic triangle between two top players, an American and a Russian, in a world chess championship, and a woman who manages one and falls in love with the other ; all in the context of a Cold War struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, during which both countries wanted to win international chess tournaments for propaganda purposes.

During the series, NHL president John Ziegler stated that Soviet players would never be able to join the NHL because of the way the Soviet hockey programme worked, and that NHLers would never be able to play in the Winter Olympics.

Soviet players would be allowed to play in the NHL within three years, and an arrangement that would allow NHL players to play in the Olympics was announce within nine.

The United States team, made up of amateur and collegiate players and led by coach Herb Brooks, defeated the Soviet team, who had won nearly every world championship and Olympic tournament since 1954.

Category: Soviet chess players

Starting in the mid-1960s, Larsen enjoyed a very successful run in major tournaments around the world, and he and Fischer became the two strongest players outside the Soviet Union.

Russian abacus began to lose popularity only after the mass production of microcalculators had started in the Soviet Union in 1974.

The current conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh ( NK ) began in 1988 when Armenian demonstrations against Azerbaijani rule broke out in both Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia and the Nagorno-Karabakh Supreme Soviet voted to secede from Azerbaijan and join Armenia.

The formation of the ministry began in 1992, a year after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Belarus becoming an independent state.

By winning operationally, strategically it could not keep up the momentum as the superiority of the Soviet Union's industrial base and economy began to take effect.

However, sealed trains began carrying large numbers of prisoners to the Soviet Gulags.

The Khmer Rouge and the PRK began a costly struggle that played into the hands of the larger powers China, the United States and the Soviet Union.

After Stalin took political control of most of Eastern Europe and began to subvert other governments in the Balkans, Attlee's and Bevin's worst fears of Soviet intentions were realized.

In August 1962, after some unsuccessful operations by the US to overthrow the Cuban regime ( Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose ), the Cuban and Soviet governments secretly began to build bases in Cuba for a number of medium-range and intermediate-range ballistic nuclear missiles ( MRBMs and IRBMs ) with the ability to strike most of the continental United States.

Several Soviet Socialist Republics began resisting central control, and increasing democratization led to a weakening of the central government.

While the CIA and MI6 and the People's Liberation Army of China financed the operation along with the Pakistan government against the Soviet Union Eventually the Soviet Union began looking for a withdrawal route and in 1988 Geneva Accords were signed between Communist-Afghanistan and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan ; under the terms Soviet troops were to withdraw.

Before long, and much to the embarrassment of the authorities, the media began to expose severe social and economic problems the Soviet government had long denied and actively concealed.

The Soviet Union also began experiencing upheaval as the political consequences of glasnost reverberated throughout the country.

Beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, many governments presiding over planned economies began marketization ( or as in the Soviet Union, the system collapsed ) and moving toward market-based economies by allowing individual enterprises to make the pricing, production, and distribution decisions, granting autonomy to state enterprises and ultimately expanding the scope of the private sector through privatization.

According to C. Michael Hogan, the Daugava River began experiencing environmental deterioration in the era of Soviet collective agriculture ( producing considerable adverse water pollution runoff ) and a wave of hydroelectric power projects.

With the withdrawal of Soviet support and supplies, the Ethiopian Army's morale plummeted, and the EPLF, along with other Ethiopian rebel forces, began to advance on Ethiopian positions.

The military, bureaucracy and the United States was nervous with good reasons where the support for the Soviet Union began to rise in both East and West.

Archaeological exploration of the pre-Islamic period of Afghanistan began in Afghanistan in earnest after World War II and proceeded until the late 1970s when the nation was invaded by the Soviet Union.

The United States began assisting Georgia in reform process soon after the country gained independence from Soviet Union.

Before long, much to the embarrassment of the authorities, the media began to expose severe social and economic problems which the Soviet government had long denied and covered up.

This began to undermine the faith of the public in the Soviet system.

The Nazis began the systematic genocide of over 11 million people, including the majority of the Jews of Europe and Gypsies as well as millions of Polish and Soviet Slavs.

That aggressive strategy worked as Germany pulled out of the League of Nations ( 1933 ), rejected the Versailles Treaty and began to re-arm ( 1935 ), won back the Saar ( 1935 ), remilitarized the Rhineland ( 1936 ), formed an alliance (" axis ") with Mussolini's Italy ( 1936 ), sent massive military aid to Franco in the Spanish Civil War ( 1936 – 39 ), seized Austria ( 1938 ), took over Czechoslovakia after the British and French appeasement of the Munich Agreement of 1938, formed a peace pact with Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union in August 1939, and finally invaded Poland in September 1939.

After Noli's regime decided to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, a bitter enemy of the Serbian ruling family, Belgrade began making wild allegations that the Albanian regime was about to embrace Bolshevism.