Republics of the Soviet Union

At a glance

What were the republics of the Soviet Union before 1922?

Between the October Revolution and 1922 there was no Soviet Union. There was a Soviet Russia, which called itself first the Russian Republic, then the Russian Soviet Republic and from July 1918 the RSFSR, and there were soviet republics in many of the borderlands of the former Russian Empire. Some, like Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belarus, became founding members of the USSR; others, like the Estonian Workers' Commune, were defeated within months; a few, like the Far Eastern Republic or Bukhara and Khorezm, were not formally socialist at all.

A Soviet legal encyclopaedia of the 1920s, the Granat dictionary, explained that separate republics kept "international independence and diplomatic relations" and so could break the blockade of Soviet Russia through trade treaties. It also admitted that their treaties with the RSFSR were "not so much international as state-law" in character, and that the republics belonged to "a union bearing the common name RSFSR".

The border data behind this map draws the entry only for 1920 and 1921; in 1917–1919 the same space appears as the Russian Republic, and from 1922 as the Soviet Union. The data does not explain the choice. A reasonable inference is that the two drawn years match the period of the bilateral treaties, when the RSFSR and its allied republics formed a bloc of formally separate states.

What was the Soviet state called in 1917 and 1918?

Its name changed several times, and no act named the state on the day of the revolution. The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which met as the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd on 25 October 1917 (7 November in the Western calendar), set up a "Provisional Workers' and Peasants' Government", the Council of People's Commissars or Sovnarkom, to rule "until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly". It named the government, not the state.

The documents that followed show the name settling step by step:

• 2/15 November 1917. The Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia was signed by Lenin and Stalin "in the name of the Russian Republic" (Imenem Respubliki Rossiiskoi).
• January 1918. The Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People, adopted by the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets and published on 12/25 January, proclaimed Russia "a Republic of Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies" and stated that "the Russian Soviet Republic is established on the principle of a free union of free nations, as a federation of Soviet national republics."
• 15/28 January 1918. The same congress established "the Russian Socialist Soviet Republic" "as a federation of the soviet republics" of the peoples of Russia.
• 10 July 1918. The constitution fixed the name Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, RSFSR, and ordered the letters R.S.F.S.R. on the flag.

Even later the word order varied: the resolution of 13 November 1918 annulling the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk speaks of the "Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic". The claim that Soviet Russia became the "Russian Soviet Republic" on 7 November 1917 is not supported by any document found for this entry; that name appears in January 1918.

What did the first Soviet decrees do?

The Second Congress gave the new government its programme in a single night. The Decree on Peace called on all the warring powers to open negotiations for "an immediate peace without annexations … and without indemnities". The Decree on Land declared that "landed proprietorship is abolished forthwith without any compensation" and placed the estates, with crown, monastery and church lands, at the disposal of local land committees and soviets. Lenin chaired the first Sovnarkom, with Trotsky for foreign affairs and Stalin for nationality affairs.

The Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia set out four principles: the equality and sovereignty of the peoples of Russia; their right to free self-determination "even to the point of separation and the formation of an independent state"; the abolition of national and religious privileges; and the free development of national minorities.

The new state also acted quickly against its opponents. On 7/20 December 1917 Sovnarkom created the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, the Cheka, under the Polish revolutionary Feliks Dzerzhinskii, "to persecute and break up all acts of counter-revolution and sabotage all over Russia". The Constituent Assembly met only once, on 5 January 1918, before it was dissolved; that story belongs to the Russian Republic.

What did the 1918 constitution of the RSFSR say?

The Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets adopted the first Soviet constitution on 10 July 1918. Iakov Sverdlov signed it as chairman of the congress and of the central executive committee (VTsIK).

It set up a pyramid of soviets, from the All-Russian Congress through the VTsIK to Sovnarkom, and an openly unequal franchise. Article 25 gave urban soviets "one delegate for 25,000 voters" and the provincial congresses "one delegate for 125,000 inhabitants". Since one figure counts voters and the other inhabitants, this is not a simple five to one, but it favoured the towns.

Article 65 took the vote away from whole groups: people who employed hired labour for profit, those who lived on unearned income, private merchants and brokers, "monks and clergy of all denominations", former police and Okhrana agents, "members of the former reigning dynasty", and anyone deprived of rights by a soviet. Other articles proclaimed the separation of church and state and the motto "He shall not eat who does not work" (Article 18). Article 11 allowed regions with "a special form of existence and national character" to form autonomous unions, the basis for the autonomies created from 1918.

Why did Soviet Russia sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk?

Because it could not fight on. After an armistice in December 1917, Trotsky followed a line of "neither war nor peace", hoping that Soviet defiance would spark revolution in Europe. When the German army resumed its advance on 18 February 1918 and demanded that Soviet forces leave Ukraine and the Baltic provinces, Lenin won a majority in the party's Central Committee for accepting the terms. The treaty was signed on 3 March 1918.

Its terms were harsh. Under Article 3, the territories west of an agreed line "will no longer be under her sovereignty". Russia had to give up Ardahan, Kars and Batum, demobilise, and make peace with the Ukrainian People's Republic and withdraw its troops and Red Guards from Ukraine. The Fourth Congress of Soviets ratified it in March 1918 as an "incredibly hard, forced and humiliating peace". The Left Socialist Revolutionaries left Sovnarkom in protest.

The government moved from Petrograd to Moscow at the same time. Nadezhda Krupskaia recalled that "on March 12 the Soviet Government moved to Moscow", after evacuating on 11 March. After Germany's defeat, the central executive committee declared on 13 November 1918 that the treaty was annulled "in its entirety and in all points", and the Red Army moved west into the lands the German Empire had occupied.

How did the Russian Civil War begin, and who fought it?

There is no single starting date. Soviet power had met armed resistance since October 1917, but the state archive of Cheliabinsk dates the start of full-scale civil war to a clash at its railway station on 14 May 1918 between soldiers of the Czechoslovak Legion and Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war. The Legion had been promised passage by rail across Siberia to Vladivostok and on to Europe; the Cheliabinsk clash became the spark of its revolt against Soviet power along the railway.

Sovnarkom decreed the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army on 15 January 1918. Trotsky, its commissar from March 1918, recruited former tsarist officers as "military specialists"; according to the historian Lewis Siegelbaum the army had about 700,000 soldiers at the end of 1918 and "nearly three million" a year later.

Against it stood the Whites, a loose coalition of armies under former tsarist generals, alongside Cossack hosts, national governments and peasant armies. Foreign troops also landed. In a public statement of 3 August 1918 the United States said that military intervention "would be more likely to add to the present sad confusion" than cure it, that American troops would only "render such protection and help as is possible to the Czecho-Slovaks", and that it contemplated "no interference with the political sovereignty of Russia".

Soviet power reached the Crimea, after the defeat of General Wrangel's army, in the autumn of 1920, and Vladivostok only on 25 October 1922. The historian Jonathan Smele speaks of several "Russian" Civil Wars, 1916–1926.

The Red Terror. On 5 September 1918 Sovnarkom resolved that "securing the rear by means of terror is a direct necessity", that class enemies were to be isolated "in concentration camps", that "all persons connected with White Guard organisations, conspiracies and mutinies are to be shot", and that the names of those shot were to be published. The Cheka carried out the policy. In the Crimea alone, according to the historian D. Sokolov, the terror that followed the Soviet victory in the autumn of 1920 killed thousands of Wrangel's soldiers and officers and civilians. No reliable national total of Red Terror victims was found in the sources for this entry; estimates depend on how the terror is defined and which years are counted.

The human cost. Civil War deaths are even harder to count. A 2020 Russian review by Nurbii Pocheshkhov and colleagues concludes that "most historians" put the total population losses at about 14 to 18 million, of which only about 900,000 were deaths on the battlefield; the rest are attributed mainly to disease, hunger and terror.

What was War Communism?

War Communism is the name later given to the economic policy of Soviet Russia during the Civil War. Its main elements were the nationalisation of industry, the state monopoly of grain, and the forced requisitioning of food from the peasants. A decree of 28 June 1918 nationalised large-scale industry. On 11 January 1919 Sovnarkom introduced the prodrazverstka, the "apportionment" of grain and fodder to be delivered to the state by the producing provinces. Armed food detachments from the cities, a regular feature of what Siegelbaum calls the "food dictatorship", provoked violent clashes and led peasants to sow less, leaving "little margin for crop failures".

Historians still argue whether war or ideology drove the policy. The Russian historian Viktor Kondrashin notes that V. V. Kabanov, the author of a standard study of the peasant economy, moved from "objective causes" to the "decisive significance" of Bolshevik ideology, and that some authors went as far as calling War Communism an "economic plague". He also notes that the term itself was borrowed by Lenin from his rival Aleksandr Bogdanov, who used "war communism" before October 1917 for the wartime economies of all the belligerent states.

Which autonomous republics were created inside the RSFSR?

The RSFSR called itself a federation from January 1918, but most of its federal units were created from 1918 to 1921 as autonomies inside it. They ranged from "labour communes" to autonomous socialist soviet republics, and the decrees placed each "as part of the RSFSR".

The Bashkir case shows how such units came about. According to the historian Marat Kul'sharipov, the Bashkir government fought with the Whites from June 1918, but because they refused to recognise its autonomy, it went over to the Bolsheviks in February 1919; the agreement of 20 March 1919, signed by Stalin, was the price.

What happened to Soviet Ukraine and the short-lived republics of 1918?

Ukraine was the first test of self-determination. After the Central Rada in Kyiv proclaimed the Ukrainian People's Republic in November 1917, a Bolshevik-led All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets met in Kharkiv on 12/25 December 1917 and proclaimed Ukraine "a republic of Councils and a federative unit of the Russian Republic". Its government, the People's Secretariat, was formed in late December. A force of about 30,000 under Volodymyr Antonov-Ovsiienko took Kharkiv, Katerynoslav and Poltava in the following weeks.

After Brest-Litovsk, German and Austro-Hungarian troops drove the Soviet forces out, and in March 1918 the Soviet Ukrainian government withdrew to Taganrog. In November 1918, after the German collapse, a Provisional Workers' and Peasants' Government of Ukraine was formed and the Red Army invaded again; the Directory of the Ukrainian People's Republic declared war on Soviet Russia on 16 January 1919. The name "Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic" was fixed on 6 January 1919, and a first constitution followed in March 1919. Its capital was Kharkiv, and from 1934 Kyiv.

How independent was it? The Encyclopedia of Ukraine, published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, holds that Moscow controlled the Ukrainian SSR through the Communist Party of Ukraine, that its institutions "were copies of the Russian institutions", and that "the pretense of a separate Ukrainian state was maintained briefly to counteract the appeal of the Ukrainian National Republic". Soviet documents insisted on its statehood: the union treaty of 28 December 1920 recognised "the independence and sovereignty of each of the contracting parties", and added that no obligations followed for Ukraine "from the mere fact of the former belonging" of its territory to the Russian Empire.

The spring of 1918 also produced a crop of local soviet republics, most of them swept away by the German advance or by Cossack and White risings:

• Donetsk–Kryvyi Rih Republic. Proclaimed at the Hotel Metropol in Kharkiv on the last day of a regional congress of soviets, 27–30 January (9–12 February) 1918. Its status is disputed, and its name has been used politically since 2014.
• Odessa Soviet Republic. Formed in January 1918; it ended on 13 March 1918, when Austro-German troops entered Odessa.
• Soviet Socialist Republic of Taurida in the Crimea, proclaimed on 19 March 1918. Iu. V. Dubko argued that it was created "from above" on Lenin's instructions; Ruslan Izetov argues that it was largely a local initiative of Crimean Left Socialist Revolutionaries. It ended in April 1918.
• Don Soviet Republic, decreed on 23 March 1918 by a revolutionary committee under the Cossack Fedor Podtelkov. Most Cossacks turned against the Bolsheviks and German troops took Rostov; according to the historian Andrei Venkov, its government decided on 12 August 1918 to dissolve itself.
• Kuban, Black Sea, Stavropol and Terek republics, proclaimed in early 1918; several merged into a North Caucasian Soviet Republic in July 1918, overrun by the Whites by early 1919.

Were the Baltic and Belarusian soviet republics real states?

They were states on paper, set up as the Red Army moved west after the German collapse in November 1918, and none survived the wars that followed.

Estonia. A Provisional Revolutionary Committee proclaimed the Commune of the Working People of Estonia at Narva on 29 November 1918. The Russian historian Anna Volod'ko writes that it was "formally" a sovereign state, but that its governing council "had no real power and was subordinate to the leadership of the RSFSR"; its radical agrarian and anti-church policy and "a large-scale campaign of terror" cost it the support of the population. After the Estonian army took Narva on 19 January 1919, the Commune withdrew to Russian territory, and it dissolved itself on 5 June 1919, when Moscow wanted peace with Estonia. In the Treaty of Tartu of 2 February 1920 Soviet Russia "recognises unreservedly the independence" of the Estonian state and renounced "for all time" all sovereign rights over it.

Latvia and Lithuania. A Latvian Soviet Republic was declared on 17 December 1918 and styled the Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic from 15 January 1919; according to Archontology, its government left Latvian territory around 3 January 1920, and Soviet Russia made peace with Latvia on 11 August 1920. A Lithuanian Soviet Republic existed from 16 December 1918.

Belarus and Litbel. On 30 December 1918 a party conference in Smolensk resolved to create an independent socialist republic in six governorates. Its manifesto is dated "1 January 1919, Minsk", but according to Archontology it was approved in Smolensk early on 2 January. Moscow then cut it to two governorates and had it merge with Lithuania. The Lithuanian–Belorussian Soviet Republic, known as Litbel, was proclaimed in Vilna on 20 February 1919. According to the Belarusian historian Aleksandr Raichenok, Moscow judged it "inexpedient" by August 1919, during the war with Poland, and it faded out.

The Polish–Soviet War decided the western border. Soviet Belarus was proclaimed a second time in Minsk on 31 July 1920, as the Red Army advanced on Warsaw. After the Soviet defeat, the Treaty of Riga of 18 March 1921, signed by Poland and by the RSFSR also on behalf of Soviet Ukraine and Belarus, recognised "the independence of the Ukraine and of White Ruthenia". It also cut Soviet Belarus, by one Belarusian calculation, from about 107,000 to 46,000 square versts, roughly 60 per cent of its territory.

Finland. The Finnish People's Delegation, the Red government in the Finnish Civil War, issued its declaration in Helsinki on 28 January 1918, and on 1 March signed a treaty with Soviet Russia, edited by Lenin, that named the Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic. The Reds lost the war in the spring of 1918 to the Finnish Whites, helped by German troops, and the Republic of Finland stayed independent.

How did Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia become Soviet?

The three republics of the South Caucasus, independent since 1918, were sovietised in 1920–1921 by the Red Army's 11th Army; national and Russian historians still read these events differently.

Baku Commune, 1918. The Azerbaijani historian Aygun Azimova dates the Baku Council of People's Commissars under Stepan Shaumian from 25 April to 31 July 1918 and calls it a "Bolshevik–Dashnak regime" formed after the massacre of Muslims in March. After the Baku soviet voted to invite the British, the commissars gave up power; twenty-six of them were later shot without trial near Krasnovodsk on 20 September 1918. The Russian historian Aleksei Bezugolnyi writes that the Commune's story "was consciously mythologised and distorted by Soviet historiography", and that Baku saw two ethnic massacres in 1918, of Azerbaijanis in March and of Armenians in September.

Azerbaijan, April 1920. The Azerbaijan Democratic Republic fell in two days. According to the 1922 Encyclopaedia Britannica, on 28 April 1920 the 11th Army, "some 50,000 strong, entered Baku without fighting", while local Bolsheviks declared the government deposed. The 11th Army's command telegraphed Lenin that "the multimillion reserves of oil are henceforth torn from the hands of the international bourgeoisie".

Armenia, November–December 1920. With Armenia losing a war against the Turkish Nationalists, a Revolutionary Committee formed in Baku entered the country with the Red Army and declared on 29 November 1920: "By the will of the risen working masses of Armenia, led by the Communist party, we declare Armenia a Soc. Sov. republic." On 2 December the Soviet envoy Legran signed an agreement with General Dro and A. Terterian in Yerevan, and the last Armenian government handed over power. The American consul in Tiflis reported that the overthrow of the Armenian cabinet "followed occupation by Russian troops from Baku of the Armenian frontier towns". The Armenian historian Khachatur Stepanyan, by contrast, stresses that the Yerevan agreement secured a "peaceful transfer of power".

Georgia, February–March 1921. In the Treaty of Moscow of 7 May 1920 Soviet Russia recognised Georgia's independence. A secret instruction from the deputy foreign commissar Lev Karakhan to Ordzhonikidze, quoted by Ambartsumian, explains why: "Georgia is needed by us as a temporary buffer; being Soviet, she could not serve in this role." On 14 February 1921 the Politburo allowed the 11th Army to support an uprising organised by the party in southern Georgia; the army crossed the border the next day and was in Tiflis ten days later. A revolutionary committee formed at Shulaveri on 16 February proclaimed the Georgian Socialist Soviet Republic; its proclamation was first printed, undated, in Baku on 20 February. The common date of 25 February 1921 is therefore the day Tiflis fell, not the day of the proclamation.

The Treaty of Kars of 13 October 1921, signed by Soviet Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia with Turkey "with the participation of the RSFSR", fixed the new border. On 12 March 1922 the three republics formed the Federative Union of Socialist Soviet Republics of Transcaucasia, which became the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic on 13 December 1922, just in time to join the USSR as one member.

What were the people's republics of Bukhara, Khorezm and the Far East?

These were the republics that were Soviet in alliance but not socialist in form, created where Moscow needed a buffer or a softer transition.

Khorezm. Soviet troops entered the Khanate of Khiva from December 1919 and took Khiva on 1 February 1920; the next day Khan Said Abdullah abdicated, according to the Uzbek historian Mo'minov "under pressure" from the Soviet government. The Khorezm People's Soviet Republic was proclaimed on 26 April 1920. Its constitution, adopted by the first All-Khorezm Kurultai on 30 April, declared that the Khivan people, "freed now from external oppression, declares itself independent". On 13 September 1920 it signed an economic agreement with the RSFSR based on a union treaty between the two states.

Bukhara. The Emirate of Bukhara received a Soviet ultimatum on 30 March 1920. Mikhail Frunze, commander of the Turkestan Front, told Lenin in a cipher telegram preserved in the Russian State Military Archive that since an internal revolution was too slow, the only course left was "the organisation of revolution through the direct participation of our forces". The storming began on 29 August 1920 with artillery and aircraft; on 2 September Frunze reported that "the fortress of Old Bukhara has been taken today by storm by the united efforts of Red Bukharan and our units" and that the emir had fled. The Bukharan People's Soviet Republic was proclaimed on 6 October 1920. Soviet accounts called it a revolution of the Young Bukharans; the Uzbek historian A. Gafurov calls it an unlawful armed invasion that left "holy Bukhara" in ruins.

The Bukharan constitution of 23 September 1921 guaranteed, in the words of the Granat encyclopaedia, "general democratic freedoms and special guarantees of the right of private property". Both became socialist republics in 1923–1924 and were then dissolved in the national delimitation of Central Asia.

The Far Eastern Republic. In eastern Siberia the Bolsheviks created a democratic buffer state against Japan, whose troops occupied the Russian Far East. The American writer Henry Kittredge Norton records that on 6 April 1920 at Verkhne-Udinsk Aleksandr Krasnoshchekov presented a declaration of independence that was "first written in English and then translated into Russian". Its constitution of 1921 called it "a democratic republic", but the Granat encyclopaedia was franker: the Far Eastern Republic was "only a temporary episode in the history of the RSFSR", created "under pressure of international circumstances". After its army took Vladivostok, a People's Assembly attended by only 94 of its 124 deputies voted on 14 November 1922 to dissolve itself, and the next day the VTsIK made its territory a region of the RSFSR.

Tuva, Mongolia and Gilan. Soviet influence reached beyond the old empire's borders. In Tuva, the former Uriankhai region, a constituent khural met in August 1921 and declared a state "free, independent of anyone in its internal affairs" under Soviet patronage. In Mongolia a provisional government formed at Kiakhta in March 1921 asked Soviet Russia for help against the White general Ungern; the Mongolian People's Republic followed in 1924. In Iran the Soviet Caspian flotilla shelled Enzeli on 18 May 1920, and Mirza Kuchik Khan's movement in Gilan proclaimed a Persian Soviet Socialist Republic in June 1920, which collapsed in 1921 after Soviet troops withdrew.

What were Kronstadt, the NEP and the famine of 1921?

By the winter of 1920–1921 the Whites had been defeated, but War Communism had brought the country to the edge of collapse. Unrest grew into strikes, and on 26 February the local Communist authorities declared martial law. On 28 February 1921 the crews of the battleships Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol at the naval base of Kronstadt adopted a set of demands, and on 1 March a meeting of over 16,000 people, at which the VTsIK chairman Kalinin was shouted down, approved them. The sailors asked for new elections to the soviets, "freedom of speech and press for workers, peasants, Anarchists and Left Socialist Parties", the release of socialist prisoners and equal rations. A committee under Stepan Petrichenko took over the fortress.

The government branded the rebels White puppets, and about 45,000 troops stormed the fortress across the ice on 16–18 March. Many rebels fled to Finland; many others were shot or sent to camps. Casualty figures conflict. The anarchist writer Ida Mett cited figures of the military health authorities of the Petrograd district, 527 killed and 4,127 wounded on the government side between 3 and 21 March, not counting the drowned. An encyclopaedia article published by Brill, following the historian Paul Avrich, estimates the government's dead and wounded at about 10,000, and the rebels' losses at about 600 dead and more than 1,000 wounded.

While the fighting was still going on, Lenin told the Tenth Congress on 15 March 1921 that replacing requisitioning with a tax was "primarily and mainly a political question, for it is essentially a question of the attitude of the working class to the peasantry". A decree of 21 March 1921 replaced the prodrazverstka with a tax in kind, the first step of the New Economic Policy (NEP), which allowed peasants to sell their surplus. To an American newspaper he dismissed the rising as "a very petty incident".

The NEP came too late to prevent famine. In 1921 the Volga basin suffered its second crop failure in two years, and Siegelbaum writes that the famine affected at least twenty million people. After the writer Maksim Gorkii appealed abroad on 13 July 1921 ("Give bread and medicine"), the Soviet government signed an agreement with Herbert Hoover's American Relief Administration (ARA) at Riga on 20 August; the ARA went on to feed more than ten million people, and Fridtjof Nansen led a second international relief effort. How many died is uncertain. The Modern Records Centre of the University of Warwick notes that estimates range "from 1 million to 10 million people, though 5 million dead is the figure most frequently quoted"; the economist S. N. Prokopovich calculated losses of 5,053,000 people, including the fall in births, and the Soviet historian V. P. Danilov gave 5.2 million. The causes were drought, years of war and the requisitioning that had shrunk the sown area.

How did the separate republics become the Soviet Union?

In four steps, from a military alliance to a constitution.

1919: a military-political union. On 1 June 1919, while the Civil War was at its height, the VTsIK decreed "the unification of the Soviet republics: Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Belorussia for the struggle against world imperialism". Claiming to recognise the "independence" of these republics (and, in the operative text, of the Crimea), it merged their military command, economic councils, railways, finance and labour under "single collegia".

1920–1921: treaties. After the war, the RSFSR signed bilateral treaties: with Khorezm (13 September 1920), Azerbaijan (30 September 1920), Ukraine (28 December 1920), Belarus (16 January 1921), Bukhara (4 March 1921) and Georgia (21 May 1921). The Ukrainian treaty set up "a military and economic union" and merged seven commissariats, including war, the economy, foreign trade and finance, into the Russian Sovnarkom; Ukraine kept its own foreign commissariat. As late as 5 November 1922 Ukraine signed a treaty with Germany in its own name.

1922: the Genoa mandate. On 22 February 1922 eight republics, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Bukhara, Georgia, the Far Eastern Republic, Ukraine and Khorezm, signed a protocol in Moscow entrusting the RSFSR to represent them at the Genoa economic conference and to sign in their name.

Autonomisation against union. On 10 August 1922 the Politburo asked for a commission on "the relations between the RSFSR and the independent republics", and the Orgburo formed it on 11 August with Stalin, Kuibyshev, Rakovskii, Ordzhonikidze and Sokol'nikov, with a representative of each republic. Its resolution of 24 September proposed a treaty on the "formal entry" of Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia "into the RSFSR", the plan known as autonomisation. Paragraph 6 provided that the decision would "not be published" but announced at the All-Russian Congress of Soviets "as the wish of these republics". The Georgian party leaders had already rejected it as "premature".

Lenin, still recovering from a stroke he had suffered in May 1922, intervened. In a letter to Kamenev of 26 September he wrote that "Stalin tends to be somewhat hasty" and proposed instead a "formal unification with the R.S.F.S.R. in a Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia": "we consider ourselves, the Ukrainian S.S.R. and others, equal, and enter with them, on an equal basis, into a new union, a new federation". On 6 October he added a note: "I declare war to the death on Great-Russian chauvinism." The Central Committee plenum of the same day resolved to unite Ukraine, Belarus, the Transcaucasian federation and the RSFSR in a "Union of Socialist Soviet Republics", "leaving each of them the right of free exit from the Union".

The Georgian Affair. The Georgian Communist leaders, who wanted to join the union directly rather than through a Transcaucasian federation, clashed with Ordzhonikidze, Moscow's man in the Caucasus, and resigned in October 1922. During the dispute Ordzhonikidze struck a supporter of the Georgian leaders; the sources disagree on the victim's name and on whether this happened in October or November. A commission under Dzerzhinskii, named on 25 November 1922, found no wrongdoing by Ordzhonikidze. On 30–31 December 1922 Lenin dictated notes calling "the whole business of 'autonomisation'" "radically wrong and badly timed", and warning that the "freedom to secede from the union" would be "a mere scrap of paper". He blamed Stalin and Dzerzhinskii for this "truly Great-Russian nationalist campaign".

30 December 1922. Congresses of soviets in Ukraine and Transcaucasia (13 December), Belarus (18 December) and the RSFSR (27 December) voted for the union. On 29 December delegations of the four republics approved the Declaration and Treaty in the Kremlin, and on 30 December the First Congress of Soviets of the USSR, in the Bolshoi Theatre, approved them "in principle". Article 26 of the treaty stated that "each of the union republics retains the right of free exit from the Union". The VTsIK ratified the documents on 3 July 1923, and the Second Congress of Soviets approved the USSR constitution on 31 January 1924, with the right of secession in Article 4.

Historians disagree on how much changed. Moshe Lewin stresses the break: under Lenin's plan, "the Russian government would not be that of the Union". Terry Martin argues that Lenin and Stalin were "in fundamental agreement" and clashed only over "important issues of implementation", and that the settlement of 1922–1923, although "called a federation, … in fact concentrated all decision-making power in the center". Comparing the texts shows why: the union of 6 October replaced entry into the RSFSR with a new level above it, but merged almost the same commissariats as Stalin's draft.

What is the legacy of the republics and the 1922 treaty?

The right of secession that Lenin feared would be a "scrap of paper" stayed in the Soviet constitutions; in 1977 it was Article 72. A law of 3 April 1990 set the procedure: a referendum won by at least two-thirds of the voters, and a transition of up to five years. On 8 December 1991 the leaders of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine met at Viskuli in the Belovezha forest and declared that they, "as founder states of the USSR, signatories of the Union Treaty of 1922", stated that the USSR "as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality ceases its existence". The fourth signatory, the Transcaucasian federation, no longer existed. On 12 December 1991 the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR denounced the treaty approved on 30 December 1922.

The early republics returned to politics in 2022. In an address of 21 February 2022, President Vladimir Putin said that "Soviet Ukraine is the result of the Bolsheviks' policy and can be rightfully called 'Vladimir Lenin's Ukraine.' He was its creator and architect." He described Lenin's design as "in essence … a confederative state arrangement" and called the right of secession a "mine" laid under the state. He also described Stalin's autonomisation as giving the republics "broad powers", although the 1922 resolution would have placed them inside the RSFSR.

Historians answered at once. Serhii Plokhy of Harvard wrote that the modern Ukrainian state arose "not thanks to Lenin but against his wishes and in direct reaction to the Bolshevik putsch", and that "if anything, Lenin laid the foundations for the formation of modern Russia, not Ukraine." Victoria Smolkin of Wesleyan University said in an interview that the possibility of Ukrainian statehood came not from the October Revolution but from "the collapse of the Russian empire nine months earlier, in February of 1917". The documents of 1917–1922 show Lenin shaping the form of Soviet Ukraine, as a formally equal republic with a right to leave, after a Ukrainian state had been proclaimed against the Bolsheviks.

Common myths about the republics of the Soviet Union

Timeline of the republics of the Soviet Union

What the map shows next

On this map the RSFSR and its treaty republics are drawn as one block at 1921 on the map; the separately drawn neighbours of that year include Poland after the Treaty of Riga and Latvia. In 1919 the map still shows the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic and the Emirate of Bukhara, both sovietised in 1920. Before 1920 the same space is drawn as the Russian Republic, and from 1922 as the Soviet Union.