5 - The Soviet multinational state

Summary

Gorbachev inherited a Soviet state which was, in a celebrated Stalinist formulation, ‘national in form but socialist in content’. The USSR's fifteen union republics, united on a supposedly voluntary basis, formed an ‘integral, federal, multinational state’, according to the 1977 Constitution. They enjoyed an extensive range of formal powers, including the right to enter into diplomatic relations with other states (Art. 80) and to determine all matters of purely local significance (Art. 76). Under the previous constitution, from 1944 onwards, the union republics had even enjoyed the right to maintain their own armed forces. Emphasising the point that this was a ‘voluntary association of equal Soviet Socialist Republics’, each of the union republics enjoyed the right to secede from the USSR (Art. 72) and, towards that end, each of them occupied a territory on the periphery of the USSR within which a particular nationality was in principle predominant – Estonians in Estonia, Ukrainians in the Ukraine, and Russians in the Russian Republic, which was by far the largest. Each union republic had its own parliament (or Supreme Soviet) and its own government (or Council of Ministers). Four of them (the Russian Republic, Uzbekistan, Georgia and Azerbaijan) included autonomous republics within their borders, and there were still smaller administrative units, autonomous regions and autonomous areas, to cater for less numerous national groups.