Kari Golden, age 9, of Sioux City, Iowa, for her question:

WHAT DO THE RUSSIAN LETTERS C.C.C.P. STAND FOR?

Largest country in the world was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It was called the Soviet Union or Russia and is abbreviated with the letters U.S.S.R.

Official name of Russia in the Russian language is Soyuz Sovetskikh  Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik. In the Russian alphabet, the initials of these words are C.C.C.P., and they appear on Russian postage stamps and athletic uniforms.  

In 1917, a revolution drove the czar from power. The Bolsheviks, who were later called Communists, seized the government and set up a dictatorship.  The Soviet Union does not exist today it broke off into individual countries in the early 1990s.