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( Republics of the Soviet Union)
The Republics of the Soviet Union were, according to the Article&_160;76 of the 1977 Soviet Constitution, sovereign Soviet Socialist states that had united with other Soviet Republics in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Article&_160;81 of the Constitution stated that "the sovereign rights of Union Republics shall be safeguarded by the USSR".[1] According to the European Court of Human Rights,[2] the governments of the Baltic countries,[3][4] the United States,[5] and the European Union,[6] the three Soviet Baltic republics (Estonian SSR, Latvian SSR, and Lithuanian SSR) were occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940 under the provisions of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Russian government and state officials, however, maintain that the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states was legitimate.[7] In the final decades of its existence, the Soviet Union consisted of fifteen Soviet Socialist Republics (SSR), often called simply Soviet Republics. Within the USSR they were also called union republics (Russian ??????? ??????????, soyuznye respubliki). All of them were considered to be socialist republics, and all of them, with the exception of the Russian SFSR, had their own Communist parties, part of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. All of the former Republics are now independent countries, with twelve of them (all except the Baltic states) being very loosely organized under the heading of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Constitutionally, the Soviet Union was a federation. In accordance with Article&_160;72 of the 1977 Constitution, each republic retained the right to secede from the USSR. Throughout the Cold War, this right was widely considered to be meaningless; however, Article&_160;72 was used in December 1991 to effectively dissolve the Soviet Union, when Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus seceded from the Union.
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