On December 30, 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was created.
This event was preceded by the end of the hostilities of the Civil War, after which the Bolsheviks who came to power in the territory of the former Russian Empire began to actively look for the most promising forms of political integration of the Soviet republics under their control.
The question of the unification of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Transcaucasia into a single state arose in the spring of 1922, causing controversy among the Bolshevik leadership.
The People's Commissar for Nationalities of the RSFSR, Joseph Stalin, proposed simply expanding Soviet Russia, including new subjects on the rights of autonomies.
However, Vladimir Lenin insisted on his vision of a single state on a federal basis.
On October 6, 1922, the plenum of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) adopted the Leninist draft resolution on relations between the RSFSR and other Soviet republics.
On December 29 of the same year, the draft union treaty was agreed upon at a conference of plenipotentiary delegations elected by the Councils of the Congresses of the Republics.
The next day, the 1st Congress of Soviets of the USSR approved the Declaration and Treaty on the formation of a new state, which included the RSFSR, the Ukrainian SSR, the BSSR and the Transcaucasian SSR.
Politicians, historians and public figures, in an interview with RT, appreciated the historical significance of the creation of the Soviet Union.
- What goals and objectives did the Bolsheviks pursue when creating the USSR? Why did they choose this particular form of state and territorial-administrative structure?
Scientific Director of the Russian Military Historical Society, Head of the Center for the History of Wars and Geopolitics of the IVI RAS Mikhail Myagkov
- On the eve of the creation of the USSR, there were various proposals concerning the form of a new state association - the same Stalinist project, which assumed the autonomy of the republics within the RSFSR without the possibility of exit.
But Lenin criticized this initiative, proposing the creation of a union state on a federal basis.
Within its framework, the republics had not only internal autonomy, but virtually all the prerogatives of the state.
Most importantly, they had the right to secede from the Union.
Other members of the Soviet leadership were forced to accept Lenin's position.
In my opinion, it was a time bomb laid under the statehood of the USSR.
Therefore, as soon as the CPSU lost its authority and collapsed, the "parade of sovereignties" immediately began.
1st Congress of Soviets of the USSR
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Lenin, on the other hand, insisted on just such a form of state organization, since at that time he thought that the countries of the East, which were colonies or semi-colonies of European countries, after their liberation would be able to join the USSR on an equal footing.
He was interested in the future of the world revolution, and not the statehood of the Russian people.
Member of the Federation Council of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation Vladimir Dzhabarov
- Mistakes were made right away when the USSR was created.
The union in this form was good as long as the country was united by a common ideology and there was a rigid system of party power.
The Bolsheviks believed in a world revolution, but the development of the world took a different path.
As soon as the party under Gorbachev began to leave the political arena, the USSR had no leverage to maintain a common statehood.
The right of the republics to secede played its fatal role.
As a result, 15 independent states turned out to be in the place of the USSR, and we still feel the problems that arose then.
Deputy Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Dmitry Novikov
- The creation of the USSR was an objective result of the processes taking place at that time in the world.
As a result of the First World War, four empires disappeared from the map: German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian.
The destruction of the Russian Empire was a direct consequence of the fact that the old socio-economic and socio-political system in the form of the tsarist autocracy became decrepit and lost several wars.
The tsarist government finally lost the progressive role that it once played in national history.
But the bourgeois Provisional Government that came to power in Russia in 1917 turned out to be even less capable, and as a result, the country disintegrated within a short period of time - Transcaucasia, Ukraine and other territories separated from it.
In order to recreate a single state and develop it,
defending the interests of the working class and the peasantry, the Bolsheviks took power into their own hands.
Then the creation of the USSR, perhaps, was the only possible way to peacefully and democratically unite the country.
Lenin proposed to do this through a treaty.
Instead of that loose state formation, which was the result of the unsuccessful policy of the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks were able to create a very strong federation in a short time.
At the same time, following the path of creating a unitary state meant blowing up the country along the line of interethnic contradictions.
which was the result of the unsuccessful policy of the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks were able to create a very strong federation in a short time.
At the same time, following the path of creating a unitary state meant blowing up the country along the line of interethnic contradictions.
which was the result of the unsuccessful policy of the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks were able to create a very strong federation in a short time.
At the same time, following the path of creating a unitary state meant blowing up the country along the line of interethnic contradictions.
All speculations about the fact that Stalin allegedly had a conflict with Lenin on this basis are untenable.
Stalin was responsible for implementing the national policy that Lenin proposed.
The design of the Union allowed new republics to join it over time: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Moldova.
Options for the entry of Mongolia and Bulgaria were also considered, but other decisions were eventually made on them.
Head of the Just Russia faction in the State Duma of the Russian Federation Sergey Mironov
- Among the Bolsheviks at first there was no unity.
Some of them perceived the Russian revolution as the beginning of the world revolution.
And even the very name of the new state had no connection with historical Russia.
Think about what the "Union of Soviet Republics" is.
The very meaning of this name suggests that this is an open association in form, which, according to some Bolsheviks, would eventually include other Soviet republics created during the world revolution in different parts of the planet.
Not without reason, the globe was depicted on the coat of arms of the USSR.
For the sake of the world revolution, people were ready to sacrifice the fate of their own country.
The union as a form of a new state was determined by the slogan with which the Bolsheviks came to power: the right of peoples to self-determination.
It was believed that this self-determination occurred in the course of the revolution and the Civil War.
As they later said about our political-state system, it "has developed historically."
The union Soviet republics were formed according to the national, ethnic principle, which, in theory, should have taken into account all regional characteristics.
But this approach turned out to be formal.
With all the external federalist shell of the USSR, the state functioned as a rigidly unitary one, all issues, including those at the local level, were resolved centrally in Moscow.
At the same time, national cadres were brought up and formed in the republics, who at a certain moment felt that they too could and should have their own influence and their own voice.
These were the main differences
The last chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR Ruslan Khasbulatov
- Experience has shown that the allied format was optimal.
Lenin had to firmly defend the right of the republics to self-determination.
It was this form of existence of the state that allowed him to achieve outstanding success.
But then Gorbachev came with his democratization, under the guise of which separatist processes began.
The leaders of the union republics ceased to be communists, and the local communist parties turned into nationalist structures.
Declaration on the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
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Writer Alexander Prokhanov
The Bolsheviks wanted to create a new humanity.
They wanted to break the ties connecting generations with this world of darkness and violence, injustice and degradation.
They wanted to create a new world by destroying the old one.
They wanted to create a "kingdom of heaven" on earth.
They wanted to build a world of absolute justice, social above all.
This is a huge ideological task that determined the entire course of further Soviet development.
This task was set by individual thinkers throughout the history of mankind, and only the Bolsheviks decided to carry it out on the scale of an entire nation.
When this goal began to be realized, the Bolsheviks faced many problems: military, political, economic.
Solving them, they created a structure called the Soviet Union.
Chairman of the political party "Russian People's Union" Sergey Baburin
- The country, which began to crumble long before the Bolsheviks, after the February Revolution, continued to crumble even after they came to power.
The Bolsheviks decided to collect everything back.
There were no options to create a single republic, since even in their ranks there was strong separatism.
Therefore, they decided to settle on a federal structure on a national basis, creating the Soviet Union.
Dean of the Higher School of Technology, Moscow State University M.V. Lomonosov Vitaly Tretyakov, former editor-in-chief of Nezavisimaya Gazeta
- After the February Revolution, to which the Bolsheviks had nothing to do, the Russian Empire actually collapsed.
The country needed to be reconstructed.
To do this, it was necessary to choose some kind of political model.
Lenin settled on an open system, which other countries could later join.
At that time, the Bolsheviks acted quite logically.
Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin and Mikhail Kalinin
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Member of the Federal Political Council of the Party of Growth Sergei Stankevich, in the 1990s - member of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, First Deputy Chairman of the Moscow Council, adviser to Russian President Boris Yeltsin
The Bolsheviks did not hide their goals.
They planned a world revolution, first in Europe and then in the rest of the world.
And in order for new countries to join, a form was chosen in which the republics that became part of the union did not actually lose their sovereignty.
It was a global communist project.
Sergey Filatov, in the 1990s - First Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Council of the Russian Federation and Head of the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation
- The Bolsheviks built the country under their own control, so that it was convenient for them.
But the result was a totalitarian system, which in many respects was ineffective.
Co-Chairman of the Board of the Union of Writers of Russia, Professor of the Faculty of Political Science of Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov Sergei Perevezentsev
— The answer lies in the so-called national policy of the Bolsheviks.
The state, destroyed in 1917, was called the Russian Empire - after the name of the main people who lived on its territory.
Great Russians, Little Russians and Belarusians were considered a single Slavic people.
Even before the revolutionary events of 1917, the leader of the Bolsheviks, Lenin, frankly wrote that the main threat to the revolution in Russia was the great-power Russian chauvinism invented by him.
After the Bolsheviks won the Civil War, the moment came for the creation of a new state of the Soviet type.
At the same time, the task was initially set to crush any national encroachments on the part of the Russian people as the main enemy of socialism under construction.
When it came to the unification of the separately existing Soviet socialist republics, the question arose about the form of the state.
One part of the Bolsheviks supported the RSFSR, which would include other republics on the rights of autonomy - that is, in fact, they advocated the preservation of historical Russia.
But other Bolsheviks, supported by Vladimir Lenin, proposed a different form of unification - a federal one.
As a result, thanks to Lenin, the point of view won, according to which all the republics united in a federation with the right to secede from it.
One of the reasons for this decision was the desire to eliminate the significant position of the Russian people in the newly created USSR.
In addition, the Bolsheviks looked at Russia as a training ground for the preparation of a world revolution.
It was assumed that as the socialist revolutions won, the new republics would join the USSR on the principle of confederation.
It was even enshrined in the Constitution of 1924.
The ultimate goal of the formation of the USSR was the creation of the World Soviet Socialist Republic.
Participants of the 1st Congress of Soviets of the USSR
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- How did the creation of the USSR change the life of the population of the territories that became part of the country?
Mikhail Myagkov
— It was a giant impetus to the national and cultural development of all peoples living in the territory of the former Russian Empire.
It was at the expense of Russia (the RSFSR at that time) that the formation of new republics took place.
They received funds for a colossal breakthrough in their economic and cultural development.
Plants, factories, progress in agriculture and science, unprecedented rates of liquidation of illiteracy - all this thanks to the Soviet Union, and above all - at the expense of the RSFSR.
Russia has always given the union republics more than it received from them.
Vladimir Dzhabarov
“The results were impressive.
We raised the country from the ruins after the First World War, then we won the Great Patriotic War, broke the back of Nazism, became a space power, made many discoveries.
The country became the second largest superpower in terms of industrial production.
Sergei Mironov
— The formation of the USSR in itself, of course, could not immediately change people's lives.
The organs and structures of power have simply changed, as well as the people who had this power.
The life of ordinary citizens in the first years almost did not change.
Big changes took place in the course of the transformations that were carried out in the union state from the second half of the 1920s.
Collectivization, industrialization, new cities and construction sites, mass repressions, resettlement of peoples - this is what radically influenced the life of society.
By 1941, 20 years after the creation of the USSR - a moment by historical standards - the life of the people and citizens had become radically different.
These years were contradictory - great achievements were combined with great tragedies.
But this is our common history - and Russia, and Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, and all post-Soviet countries.
Ruslan Khasbulatov
“Life has changed radically.
The semi-slave existence has ceased.
There was a flourishing of culture.
Creativity of writers, scientific achievements of scientists - all this became available to the people.
And this is the merit of the Bolsheviks.
Alexander Prokhanov
- The Bolsheviks were engaged in the elimination of illiteracy, cultural construction.
A huge number of people, having received knowledge and the opportunity to move freely, went into industry.
A fundamentally new generation has grown up in the country, believing in socialism and defeating Nazi Germany.
Sergei Stankevich
- On the one hand, there were processes that can be considered modernization: the mass eradication of illiteracy, urbanization, the creation of heavy industry.
But all this happened at the cost of colossal sacrifices, very brutally and with the use of mass repressions.
What role did the creation of the Soviet Union play in world history?
Dmitry Novikov
— The creation of the USSR had a huge impact on world history.
A fundamentally new model of the nation state and economic structure emerged.
The Leninist-Stalinist modernization and the first Stalinist five-year plans showed unique growth rates that have never been seen in the world.
In a certain sense, only China managed to repeat such an economic miracle at the beginning of this century.
That this was achieved in the USSR and the PRC is no accident, because both countries followed the path of socialist development.
In addition, the USSR taught the world a number of important lessons: along with the feat of revival and the feat of rapid development, it showed how it is possible to overcome the social-class split, poverty, and ensure a high level of social guarantees.
At the same time, for the first time in history, it was in the Soviet Union that citizens received such broad voting rights.
In the future, only the USSR was able to take the most severe blow of the entire Nazi machine, not to crumble, but to mobilize and win a series of victories that decided the outcome of the world battle with fascism.
USSR Constitution
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Sergei Mironov
— The USSR throughout almost the entire 20th century played a key role both in the world economy and in world politics.
In fact, the creation of the USSR predetermined the bipolarity of the world and the course of all further global processes, decisively influenced the structure of the modern world order.
We can safely call the 20th century the century of the USSR.
Alexander Prokhanov
- The creation of the USSR is a huge deed, thanks to which heights were achieved in science, in art, in human relations, in the ideas of equality, brotherhood.
All this baggage has been assimilated by mankind.
Sergei Baburin
— Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the Soviet Union was a global leader in social development.
This is its backbone civilizational role.
Vitaly Tretyakov
- Everything turned upside down.
The hopes of the Western powers that the territories of the former Russian Empire would become someone's colonies did not come true.
In the Soviet Union, there were large-scale social transformations, the fight against illiteracy.
Western countries, in order to avoid revolutions on their territory, were forced to restructure their domestic politics.
Russia is a large country, and the implementation of a new model of political and economic structure in it could not but affect the entire course of world history.
Sergei Stankevich
- It was an important socio-historical experiment, on the basis of which it was possible to draw conclusions about the dangers of the practice of running ahead in matters of ideology.
Attempts to establish sociality ahead of time in a relatively poor society through mass violence, sooner or later had to turn into a disaster.
It was a bad experience, we overcame it and now we are going the other way, having created a modern viable state.
Sergey Perevezentsev
This role is ambiguous.
There were many positive things in the USSR, for example, the policy of endowing the inhabitants of the USSR with broad constitutional social rights.
This led to the fact that the collective West had to think about improving the quality of life in their own countries.
But there were also negative moments.
In particular, the Soviet Union had two huge shortcomings.
First, it is a fundamental struggle against religion, primarily against Orthodoxy.
Secondly, the desire to erase national borders and inventing an oxymoron called "the Soviet people."
Nothing came of this, moreover, national contradictions became one of the main reasons for the collapse of the USSR.