Republics versus the USSR.
When Inside a World There is Another, Much Bigger World.
1924 – The constitution of the USSR grants the union republics the formal right to secede.
February 1990 – The Communist Party of the USSR gives up its monopoly of power.
June 1991 – Boris Yeltsin is elected President of Russia.
Lenin would surely have turned himself in his grave, had he known how the USSR dissolved into fifteen separate states in 1991.
It was Lenin who drafted the constitution of the USSR, which laid the foundation for its ultimate collapse. The law of 1924 had been the result of a fierce debate between Lenin and Stalin: Stalin argued for a Union with a strong central authority, but Lenin favoured a federation made up of formally sovereign republics. Lenin won the day and the republics were granted the tools of an independent state, a government (council of ministers) and a parliament (supreme soviet). The constitution even allowed the republics to leave the Union, but this, of course, was only a façade: power rested as before with Moscow and no one ever contemplated allowing republics to secede.
The glue that held the USSR together for 70 years was the communist party. The constitution gave the Party a “leading role”, which in practice meant that the soviets and the council of ministers were only pawns in the hands of the dictatorship of the Party. All the important decisions were taken in the higher organs of the Party (central committee and its bureaus). The subordination of the party cells and government institutions of the republics, oblasts and districts to orders from Moscow was guaranteed by a tight discipline within the party hierarchy. The Party was the “Mind, Honour and Conscience of our Epoch”.
What proved fateful to the USSR were Gorbachev's steps to weaken the Party. One of his considerations was that the party bureaucracy was incapable of reforming the state, but Gorbachev was also afraid of the Party's revenge: In 1964, the party bosses had removed Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev from office. Knowing this in 1988 Gorbachev curbed the wings of the party, weakening its sway over the government. He also convened a Congress of People's Deputies, elected half-democratically. The reforms culminated in a statement of the Communist Party's central committee in February 1990 that the Party would give up its monopoly of power.
Who filled the vacuum? Gorbachev tried to bolster his power with the help of a new institution, the presidency of the USSR. However, the powers of this office had been built on air.
In reality, the vacuum was filled in ever greater extent by the institutions of the republics – soviets and council of ministers. Suddenly, the presidents of the supreme soviets, formerly puppets of the party, surfaced as figures with real sway. The Estonian SSR had Arnold Rüütel, the Russian SFSR had Boris Yeltsin. Within a world there was suddenly another, much bigger world. By 1991, Russia and the other republics had grown so much in size that they had difficulty in fitting into the old USSR.
- Estonian SSR
- Latvian SSR
- Lithuanian SSR
- Russian SSR
- Byelorussian SSR
- Ukrainian SSR
- People´s Republic of Poland
- German Democratic Republic
- Czechoslovak Socialist Republic
- People's Republic of Hungary
- Socialist Republic of Romania
- Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
- The Moldavian SSR
- The People´s Republic of Bulgaria