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60 free Soviet Union trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Soviet Union trivia quiz covers the USSR from the October Revolution to the night the red flag came down over the Kremlin. It opens with the basics: what 'soviet' means, which four republics signed the founding treaty, how big the country was, and what the hammer, sickle and star on the flag stood for. From there it moves through the leaders in turn: Lenin's birthplace and embalming, Stalin's Georgian origins and seminary years, Khrushchev's Secret Speech and corn obsession, Brezhnev's doctrine and Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika. The darker chapters get honest questions too: collectivisation, the Holodomor, the Great Purge and the Gulag. So do the triumphs of the space programme, from Sputnik and Laika to Gagarin's 108 minutes and the Baikonur launch pad, plus the Warsaw Pact, the KGB, the anthem that spent 21 years without words, the Chernobyl disaster and the coup, accords and resignation that ended the union in 1991. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Soviet Union, its leaders, institutions and events, and each explanation adds one further fact. Good for history students, Cold War buffs and quiz nights. If you want the country that came before and after, try our Russia trivia page; for the wider superpower standoff, see Cold War trivia.
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Q 01What does the Russian word 'sovet', the root of 'soviet', mean?
Council
Workers' councils by that name first appeared during the 1905 Revolution and re-emerged in 1917 to share power with the Provisional Government.
Q 02In which year was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics formed?
1922
The Russian SFSR and its subordinate republics merged after the Bolshevik victory in the civil war; the state lasted until 1991.
Q 03How many other countries did the Soviet Union border?
Twelve
It was the largest country by area and third most populous, covering about a sixth of Earth's land surface.
Q 04How many union republics did the USSR consist of from 1956 until its dissolution?
15
The number varied from 4 to 16 over time; the Karelo-Finnish SSR lost its union status in 1956 and was absorbed into Russia.
Q 05Which union republic was demoted in 1956 to an autonomous republic within the Russian SFSR?
Karelo-Finnish SSR
Its population was by then about 80 percent Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian, and the decision was taken without consulting residents.
Q 06Which three Baltic republics maintain that their 1940 incorporation into the USSR was illegal occupation?
Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia
Their position rests on the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and is backed by the European Union and European Court of Human Rights.
Q 07On the Soviet flag, what did the hammer represent?
Urban industrial workers
The sickle stood for the peasants; together they symbolised the alliance of the two classes said to form the state.
Q 08The red of the Soviet flag honoured the banner of which 1871 uprising?
The Paris Commune
The plain red flag was a revolutionary symbol long before 1917; the hammer and sickle were the modern industrial addition.
Q 09What change did a 1980 amendment make to the Soviet flag?
Removed the emblem from the reverse side
The legal description of the flag was left unchanged; the 1955 design was the basis for all the union republics' flags.
Q 10Which song served as the Soviet national anthem before 1944?
The Internationale
A new anthem was needed after the Comintern was dissolved in 1943 to reassure the wartime Allies; more than 200 entries were submitted.
Q 11For roughly how long after 1956 was the Soviet anthem performed without any lyrics?
About 21 years, until 1977
The original words praised the by-then disgraced Stalin; Sergey Mikhalkov, who wrote them, also wrote the 1977 replacement.
Q 12Who composed the music of the Soviet anthem, originally as the Hymn of the Bolshevik Party?
Alexander Alexandrov
Stalin personally chose the tune, and the melody survives today as the anthem of the Russian Federation.
Q 13What was the birth surname of Vladimir Lenin?
Ulyanov
His birthplace, Simbirsk on the Volga, was renamed Ulyanovsk in his honour.
Q 21What term did the Bolsheviks use for better-off peasants who owned several animals and hired labourers?
Kulaks
They were blamed for grain shortages and targeted for 'liquidation as a class' during collectivisation.
Q 22What does the Ukrainian word 'Holodomor' mean?
Death by hunger
The 1932–33 famine in Soviet Ukraine has been recognised as a genocide by Ukraine and more than 30 other UN states since 2006.
Q 23Whose 1934 assassination gave Stalin the pretext for the Moscow show trials and the Great Purge?
Sergei Kirov
The Leningrad party boss was shot by Leonid Nikolaev; historians still argue over whether Stalin arranged it.
Q 14What 1887 family event pushed the young Lenin towards revolutionary politics?
His brother's execution
Aleksandr Ulyanov was hanged for plotting against the Tsar; Lenin was expelled from Kazan University the same year for protesting.
Q 15To which Siberian village was Lenin exiled in 1897, where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya?
Shushenskoye
He had moved to Saint Petersburg in 1893 and was arrested for sedition four years later.
Q 16In which town in Georgia was Joseph Stalin born?
Gori
His birth name was Ioseb Jughashvili; he was the only one of his parents' three children to survive infancy.
Q 17For what career was the teenage Stalin training at the Tiflis Theological Seminary?
Orthodox priest
He took the nickname 'Koba' from the bandit hero of Alexander Kazbegi's novel The Patricide.
Q 18How did the young Stalin raise funds for Lenin's Bolshevik faction?
Robberies, kidnappings and protection rackets
His 1907 raid on a bank stagecoach in Tiflis killed around 40 people.
Q 19On what date did Stalin die?
5 March 1953
His death triggered a power struggle in which Khrushchev prevailed over Beria and Malenkov.
Q 20Between which years did the Soviet Union carry out the collectivisation of agriculture?
1928 to 1940
By February 1930 more than half of peasant households were in collective farms, up from 7.5 percent four months earlier.
Q 24The Great Purge is nicknamed the 'Yezhovshchina' after which man?
The NKVD chief who ran it at its peak
Nikolai Yezhov headed the NKVD from September 1936 to August 1938 and was himself executed after Stalin reversed course.
Q 25What is the scholarly estimate of the death toll of the Great Purge?
700,000 to 1.2 million
Being expelled from the party, once a routine matter, came to mean near-certain arrest and often execution between 1936 and 1953.
Q 26What does the acronym GULAG stand for?
Main Directorate of Corrective Labour Camps
The agency was set up in 1930 under the OGPU; the camp system was officially abolished on 25 January 1960.
Q 27Which Nobel laureate's 1973 book The Gulag Archipelago gave the camp system its international notoriety?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
He survived eight years in the camps and likened them to 'a chain of islands'.
Q 28Roughly how many Soviet deaths did World War II cause, the most of any country?
About 27 million
Germany's 1941 invasion was the largest land invasion in history and opened the Eastern Front.
Q 29What did the USSR sign with Nazi Germany in 1939 after failing to build an anti-Nazi coalition?
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
Its secret protocol carved up Eastern Europe; the Soviets invaded Poland later that September.
Q 30On what date was the Warsaw Pact established?
14 May 1955
It was the Eastern Bloc's answer to West Germany joining NATO; its only joint military action was the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia.