10 iconic images of the USSR 30 years after its fall

* This article was published on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the USSR and republished now for 30 years.

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The huge and powerful Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) defined much of the history of the 20th century and has left memorable images.

30 years after its dissolution, which is celebrated on December 26, BBC Mundo shows you some emblematic photos of that era.

The authors of the “Bibilia” of the Soviet Union. In 1848 the German philosophers Frederick Engels and Karl Marx published “The Communist Manifesto”, a key pamphlet that would inspire the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia and later the mighty USSR.

A unique image of Vladimir Lenin. The leader of the Bolshevik revolution, who would later become the first president of the Soviet Union, gives a speech to members of the Red Army in 1919.

The famous parades on Red Square. Since 1919 the wide esplanade in front of the Kremlin in Moscow has been the showcase of Soviet and Russian military power to this day. Here, a 1965 parade displaying new missiles.

A new world order. Soviet leader José Stalin (right) together with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the famous Yalta Conference in 1945. There the three great powers that had won the Second World War shared the control of European territories. Many historians consider that moment as the start of the cold war.

The Soviet hero of the conquest of space. This photo was autographed by Yuri Gagarin, the cosmonaut who in 1961 became the first human to reach Earth’s orbit. Gagarin was a global star.

Allies in the Cold War. Cuban leader Fidel Castro with his Soviet counterpart Nikita Kruschev in May 1963. The photo of the two smiling was taken during an official Castro visit to Moscow that lasted … four weeks.

“I am a Berliner”. In 1963, US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy visited the western part of a divided Berlin. There, in full confrontation with the Soviet Union, he made a famous speech in which he said in German: “I am a Berliner.” It was a message of support for the West German government after East Germany erected the Berlin Wall.

The affection of the leaders. This iconic image from 1979 shows a very intimate encounter between the leaders of East Germany, Erich Honecker, and the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev. The so-called “socialist brotherly kiss” consisted of a hug combined with a series of three kisses alternating cheeks. The kisses were given in the mouth on rare occasions, when the two leaders were considered very close.

Despair in the Iron Curtain. An East German girl tries to carve a hole in the Berlin Wall, the symbol of the East-West confrontation and the scar left by the Cold War. The wall fell in 1989.

The agony of the USSR. In this August 1991 photo, four months before the official dissolution of the Soviet Union, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev is seen shaking hands with Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Gorbachev had just suffered an attempted coup, driven by hard sectors of the Communist Party that opposed his reforms of democratization and liberalization of the economy. Yeltsin backed the Soviet president amid massive demonstrations demanding his continuity. But the USSR was already sentenced.

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