The October 1917 coup d’état resulted in artificially created Soviet Socialist Republics on the former provinces of the Russia Empire - in fact subservient states integrated into a unitary union state – with conventional and unlawfully defined borders, which during the collapse of Soviet Union and after the Belavezha accords, signed without indispensable negotiations on the revision of the old boundaries making sense only in a unitary state, has become a source of numerous ethnic and territorial conflicts in the post-Soviet space, as well as the cause of the loss of tens of thousands of square kilometers of historical Russian territories populated with over 25 million ethnic Russians.