The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a unique state that united the working people in 1/6 of the globe. The USSR was founded on December 30, 1922 at the First All-Union Congress of Soviets.
The cessation of the existence of the USSR was announced on December 8, 1991, as a result of the signing of the “Belovezhskaya Accords” by the presidents who had seized power in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, Yeltsin, Kravchuk and Shushkevich. But the USSR lives in the hearts of people in the space of 1/6 of the earth.
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After the collapse of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union united hundreds of peoples in a vast area - from the Baltic to Chukotka, from the Arctic Ocean to the Central Asian sands. The unity of nations was fastened by their friendship and communist ideology.
Marxism, which arose in the 19th century, did not provide ready-made recipes for the future socialist state. Specific features could appear only in the course of revolutionary construction. And at the beginning of the 20th century, the Bolsheviks, having founded their party, did not hurry to paint in detail the concept of the future national structure. However, the conditions for the development and decay of the Russian Empire dictated their specifics.
Most of the peoples who lived on the territory of Tsarist Russia became part of the empire at the stage of feudalism. But at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century capitalism developed in the Russian Empire, and a national bourgeoisie appeared on the outskirts. Under these conditions, the struggle of peoples on the outskirts of the empire against national oppression has entered a fork. On the one hand, progressive public figures, fighting against tsarism, advocated unity with the Russian workers, for the joint struggle against autocracy. On the other hand, the national bourgeoisie sought to tear "their own" nationalities from the Russian people, from the Russian working people, cherishing dreams of creating their own "republics" and "emirates".
In the conditions of the popularity of socialist ideas, the national bourgeoisie was dressed in “socialist” clothes: the Ukrainian Petliurists, the Georgian Mensheviks, the Armenian Dashnaks, the Azerbaijani Musavatists, and others called themselves “socialists.” But under the "socialist" clothes hid nationalist gut.
The Bolsheviks on the outskirts of the Russian Empire had to fight "on two fronts": both against tsarism and against the nationalists.
The leader of the Bolshevik Party, VI Lenin spoke for the right of peoples to self-determination. The final Bolshevik understanding of the right of nations to self-determination was formulated at the April conference of the party in 1917. Lenin emphasized that this right includes both the right to secession and the right to unite peoples in one state. His goal: the international organization of the proletariat. “We, for our part, do not want a separation at all. We want as large a state as possible, as close as possible to the union of the largest possible number of nations living next to the Great Russians; we want this in the interests of democracy and socialism, in the interests of bringing to the struggle of the proletariat the greatest possible number of working people of different nations. We want a revolutionary proletarian unity, unity, not division, ”Lenin declared in October 1917. So the goal of the revolution was proclaimed the creation of the Soviet Union.
In the modern bourgeois great-power chauvinistic press, on the Internet one can often find allegations that the Bolsheviks "divided Russia" into the republics. Sometimes such statements are caused not even by malicious intent, but by elementary illiteracy. Even Russian President V. Putin once said that Lenin "laid the atomic bomb" on Russia, creating republics instead of provinces. Putin in general often demonstrated historical ignorance.
The same with the emergence of national republics in the ruins of the Russian Empire. Their occurrence was dictated by the very development of the situation after the February Revolution and the fall of autocracy, the movement of peoples towards self-determination. Moreover, the national bourgeoisie even overtook the working masses in the creation of state formations, in their desire to tear the national outskirts from the center of the country.
Thus, the “Central Rada”, which proclaimed the autonomy of Ukraine, was established in March 1917, when Lenin was still in exile, in Switzerland. The Great Belarusian Council was convened in July 1917. The 1st All-Russian Muslim Congress, which demanded the reorganization of Russia on national-federal principles, was held in Moscow in May 1917.
Thus, the question of republican division, the creation of a federation instead of a unitary division in a province, was predetermined. The question was only in what kind of republics would these be — bourgeois or workers' and peasants?
On November 7 (November 20, a new style), the Ukrainian bourgeoisie in Kiev, which did not recognize the October Revolution, proclaimed the creation of the “Ukrainian People’s Republic”. The working people of Ukraine responded to this act on December 12 (25), proclaiming the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in Kharkov.
On March 25, 1918, the Belarusian bourgeoisie in Minsk announced the creation of their own "people's republic". Belarusian workers proclaimed the creation of the Belarusian Soviet Republic on January 1, 1919.
In the Baltics, puppet "state" formations were created as early as the period when this territory, during the First World War, was conquered by the Germans. The liberation of the Baltic territories by the Red Army contributed to the proclamation of the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian Soviet republics.
The bourgeois republics were established in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in 1918. Their existence lasted until 1920-1921, when Transcaucasian workers, together with the Red Army, knocked out local nationalists and foreign interventionists.
The national bourgeoisie tried to create their own “state formations” in Russia too. Thus, in March 1918, the bourgeoisie of the Volga region tried to create the “States Idel-Ural”, incorporating the Volga peoples into this “state”. But this counter-revolutionary action was also crushed, and in 1919-1920 the Tatar and Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics were created as part of Soviet Russia.
Since 1917, feudal lords and the bourgeoisie made a number of attempts to form their “states” in the North Caucasus (“Mountain Republic”, etc.). However, the rout of the White Guards in the Caucasus ended with the proclamation of the Mountain ASSR as part of Soviet Russia.
So, by 1922, the bourgeois "state formations" in most of the former Russian empire were eliminated by the working people. In their place were built the Soviet republics: the Russian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR, the Byelorussian SSR, and the Transcaucasian Federation (Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan). During the design of the Union held a discussion about the forms of association. During the discussion, it was decided that the Allied republics would not become part of Russia, but would become equal. On December 30, the Union Treaty was signed.
The construction of the Union did not end there: new allied and autonomous republics were created, and in the 1920–1930s the state apparatus had to be repeatedly cleaned of nationalist elements that had penetrated there. The Soviet Union convincingly demonstrated its fortress during the Great Patriotic War, when the Soviet people defeated the Nazi hordes and liberated Europe from fascism. A new historical community formed: the Soviet people.
Rust began to erode the Union after the death of I.V. Stalin, from the 1950s, when the Khrushchevites, declaring the end of the class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat, also ceased opposition to the cultivation of nationalism. Especially in the Brezhnev years, not just random people, but overt enemies of socialism, penetrated the state and party apparatus of the CPSU. In the union and autonomous republics, there was a conniving growth of nationalist sentiment. The reactionary nationalist intelligentsia, which was no longer afraid of "repression", went hand in hand with party traitors. “Nationalists and careerists-bribe takers, covered from the Kremlin, came to power in the USSR after 1953. When the time comes, they will drop their masks, throw away membership cards and will openly rule their counties as feudal lords and feudalists, ”Mao Zedong predicted.
Since 1985, by announcing "perestroika", the counter-revolution has begun to liquidate the USSR. By 1991, in a number of republics, local nationalists had already thrown away membership cards and CPSU party clothes. March 17 held an all-Union referendum on the preservation of the Soviet Union. At 80 percent turnout, more than 77% of those who voted said “YES” to the Union. It is noteworthy that the highest percentages of YES (more than in Russia) were in the union republics: in Central Asia and Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Azerbaijan. But in the Baltic States, Moldova, Georgia and Armenia, local nationalist authorities blocked a referendum in most of the territories of these republics. And no wonder that they were afraid of the results of the referendum: the example of Azerbaijan, where the first attacks of overt nationalists were repulsed, and 93% of voters voted for the Union, spoke for itself.
On December 8, 1991, the results of the All-Union referendum were buried in Bialowieza ...
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The future socialist revolution will again raise the question of the unification of the space of the USSR. People living on the “one sixth of the earth” feel their commonality; the workers remember that they are one Soviet people, temporarily divided by cordons. In addition to the cultural and psychological unity, economic ties play a role. And, paradoxically, but the processes of globalization, contrary to their original purpose, can also play a certain role. The socialist revolution will inevitably break through the border cordons.
This means that the unification of peoples will once again put on the agenda the revival of the USSR, the creation of a new Soviet Union.
Dar Vetrov
