The Soviet Union is one country
An old model or guideline was retired in favor of a new one.
TaughtThe USSR is the largest country on Earth, a single red mass covering a sixth of the land surface, stretching from Poland to the Pacific.
NowThe Soviet Union dissolved on 26 December 1991 into fifteen independent countries: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and ten others.
What actually happened
If you graduated before 1992, the single largest political feature of every map you ever studied no longer exists. Russia is still the world's largest country, but it lost roughly a quarter of the USSR's territory and about half its population.
The fifteen successor states are Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Several capital names changed with independence, and countless internal place names were changed away from Russian forms. The dissolution also created a bloc of countries that had never appeared as separate entities on a Western classroom map in living memory. This is the single largest single-day change to world political geography in the era this site covers, and the atlas in your school library was obsolete the day it happened.
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Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica: Dissolution of the Soviet Unionbritannica.com
- US State Department: The collapse of the Soviet Unionhistory.state.gov
Who was taught this
Still standard through 1991, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 1991 learned the earlier version.