Question: How many countries were in the Soviet Union?

Republics of the Soviet Union











This article is part of a series on thePolitics of the Soviet Union
Leadership
Leaders
President listVice President
Collective leadership
State Council
Presidential Council
Communist Party


Congress
Central Committee
History
General Secretary

Politburo
Secretariat
Orgburo

Legislature



Congress of Soviets
(Central Executive Committee)
Supreme Soviet
Soviet of the Union
Soviet of Nationalities
Presidium
Congress of People's Deputies
Speaker
1989 Legislative election
Governance



Constitution

Official names
1924
1936
1977

Government
Ministries
State Committees
Cabinets
Premiership
First Deputy Premier
Deputy Premier
Administrator of Affairs
Judiciary
Law
Supreme Court
Military Collegium
People's Court
Procurator General
Ideology

Soviet democracy
Marxism–Leninism
LeninismStalinismKhrushchevism
De-Stalinization
Society



Economy
Agriculture
Consumer goods
Five-Year Plan
Kosygin reform
New Economic Policy
Science and technology
Era of Stagnation
Material balance planning
Transport
War communism
Culture

Demographics
Education
Family
Phraseology
Religion

Repression
Censorship
Censorship of images
Great Purge
Gulag system
Collectivization
Human rights
Ideological repression
Suppressed research
Political abuse of psychiatry
Political repression
Population transfer
Propaganda
Red Terror

Other countries
Atlas
vt






Eastern Bloc
Soviet Socialist Republics
Armenia
Azerbaijan
Byelorussia
Estonia
Georgia
Kazakhstan
Kirghizia
Latvia
Lithuania
Moldavia
Russia
Tajikistan
Turkmenia
Ukraine
Uzbekistan
Allied states
Afghanistan
Albania
Angola
Benin
Bulgaria
China
Congo
Cuba
Czechoslovakia
East Germany
Ethiopia
Grenada
Hungary
Kampuchea
Laos
Mongolia
Mozambique
North Korea
Poland
Romania
Somalia
South Yemen
Vietnam
Yugoslavia
Related organizations
Cominform
Comecon
Warsaw Pact
World Federation of Trade Unions
World Federation of Democratic Youth
Dissent and opposition




Anti-Soviet partisans
Albania
Bulgaria
Croatia
Estonia
Latvia
Lithuania
Poland
Romania
Serbia
Ukraine
Guerrilla war in the Baltic states
Forest Brothers
Operation Jungle
Soviet occupation
Protests and uprisings
Plzeň 1953
East Germany 1953
Georgia 1956
Poznań 1956
Hungary 1956
Novocherkassk 1962
Czechoslovakia 1968
Invasion
Red Square 1968
Charter 77 (Czechoslovakia)
Solidarity (Poland)
Jeltoqsan (Kazakhstan)
Braşov rebellion (Romania)
January Events (Lithuania)
The Barricades (Latvia)
April 9 tragedy (Georgia)
Black January (Azerbaijan)
Cold War events
Marshall Plan
Czechoslovak coup
Tito–Stalin split
Berlin Blockade
Korean War
Secret Speech
Sino-Soviet Split
Berlin Wall
Cuban Missile Crisis
Vietnam War
Cuban intervention in Angola
Afghan War
Moscow Olympics
Gulf War
Decline
Singing Revolution
Polish Round Table Agreement
Revolutions of 1989
Fall of the Berlin Wall
January Events
in Latvia
Breakup of Yugoslavia
Yugoslav Wars
End of the Soviet Union
Fall of communism in Albania
Dissolution of Czechoslovakiavt
The Republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or Union Republics (Russian:Сою́зные Респу́блики, tr.Soyúznye Respúbliki) were the ethnically based proto-states of the Soviet Union.[1] For most of its history, the USSR was a highly centralized state; the decentralization reforms during the era of Perestroika ("Restructuring") and Glasnost ("Openness") conducted by Mikhail Gorbachev are cited as one of the factors which led to the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.
Overview
According to Article76 of the 1977 Soviet Constitution, a Union Republic was a sovereign Soviet socialist state that had united with other Soviet Republics in the USSR. Article81 of the Constitution stated that "the sovereign rights of Union Republics shall be safeguarded by the USSR".[2]
In the final decades of its existence, the Soviet Union officially consisted of fifteen Soviet Socialist Republics (SSRs). All of them, with the exception of the Russian Federation (until 1990), had their own local party chapters of the All-Union Communist Party.
Outside the territory of the Russian Federation, the republics were constituted mostly in lands that had formerly belonged to the Russian Empire and had been acquired by it between the 1700 Great Northern War and the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907.
In 1944, amendments to the All-Union Constitution allowed for separate branches of the Red Army for each Soviet Republic. They also allowed for Republic-level commissariats for foreign affairs and defense, allowing them to be recognized as de jure independent states in international law. This allowed for two Soviet Republics, Ukraine and Byelorussia, (as well as the USSR as a whole) to join the United Nations General Assembly as founding members in 1945.[3][4][5]
All of the former Republics of the Union are now independent countries, with ten of them (all except the Baltic states, Georgia and Ukraine) being very loosely organized under the heading of the Commonwealth of Independent States. However, most of the international community did not consider the Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia) to have legitimately been part of the USSR. The Baltic states assert that their incorporation into the Soviet Union in 1940 (as the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian SSRs) under the provisions of the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was illegal, and that they therefore remained independent countries under Soviet occupation.[6][7] Their position is supported by the European Union,[8] the European Court of Human Rights,[9] the United Nations Human Rights Council[10] and the United States.[11] In contrast, the Russian government and state officials maintain that the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states was legitimate.[12]. Constitutionally, the Soviet Union was a federation. In accordance with provisions present in the Constitution (versions adopted in 1924, 1936 and 1977), each republic retained the right to secede from the USSR. Throughout the Cold War, this right was widely considered to be meaningless; however, the corresponding Article72 of the 1977 Constitution was used in December 1991 to effectively dissolve the Soviet Union, when Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus seceded from the Union.
In practice, the USSR was a highly centralised entity from its creation in 1922 until the mid-1980s when political forces unleashed by reforms undertaken by Mikhail Gorbachev resulted in the loosening of central control and its ultimate dissolution. Under the constitution adopted in 1936 and modified along the way until October 1977, the political foundation of the Soviet Union was formed by the Soviets (Councils) of People's Deputies. These existed at all levels of the administrative hierarchy, with the Soviet Union as a whole under the nominal control of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, located in Moscow within the Russian Federation.
Along with the state administrative hierarchy, there existed a parallel structure of party organizations, which allowed the Politburo to exercise large amounts of control over the republics. State administrative organs took direction from the parallel party organs, and appointments of all party and state officials required approval of the central organs of the party.
Each republic had its own unique set of state symbols: a flag, a coat of arms, and, with the exception of Russia until 1990, an anthem. Every republic of the Soviet Union also was awarded with the Order of Lenin.

A hall in Bishkek's Soviet-era Lenin Museum decorated with the flags of Soviet Republics
Poster of the unity of the Soviet republics in the late 1930s. All republics, except Russia, are shown with their respective traditional clothes.
Poster of the unity of the Soviet republics in the late 1940s. Note that the map also points out the Karelo-Finnish SSR capital, Petrozavodsk.

Union Republics of the Soviet Union
The number of the union republics of the USSR varied from 4 to 16. In majority of years and at the later decades of its existence, the Soviet Union consisted of 15 Soviet Socialist Republics. Rather than listing the republics in alphabetical order, the republics were listed in constitutional order, which, particularly by the last decades of the Soviet Union, did not correspond to order either by population or economic power.

Former Union Republics of the Soviet Union

Other non-union Soviet republics
The Socialist Soviet Republic of Byelorussia, in the winter of 1919
The Lithuanian–Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic was proclaimed in 1919 but fell very soon.
The Galician Soviet Socialist Republic
The Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic
The Don Soviet Republic
The Kuban Soviet Republic
The Kuban-Black Sea Soviet Republic
The Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic
The Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic (1918–19)
The Mughan Soviet Republic
The Soviet Republic of Naissaar
The Odessa Soviet Republic
The North Caucasian Soviet Republic
The Stavropol Soviet Republic
The Taurida Soviet Socialist Republic
The Terek Soviet Republic
The Ukrainian People's Republic of Soviets
The Ukrainian Soviet Republic
The Black Sea Soviet Republic
The Far Eastern Republic existed in 1920-1922 as a formally independent state, was de facto under Soviet control.
The Persian Socialist Soviet Republic, in what is now Iran.
The Slovak Soviet Republic
The Bavarian Soviet Republic
The Bremen Soviet Republic
The Hungarian Soviet Republic
The Limerick Soviet
The Chinese Soviet Republic
The Turkestan Soviet Federative Republic was proclaimed in 1918 but did not survive to the founding of the USSR, becoming the short-lived Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of the RSFSR.  The Crimean Soviet Socialist Republic (Soviet Socialist Republic of Taurida) was also proclaimed in 1918, but did not became a union republic and was made into an autonomous republic of the RSFSR, although the Crimean Tatars had a relative majority until the 1930s or 1940s according to censuses. When the Tuvan People's Republic joined the Soviet Union in 1944, it did not become a union republic, and was instead established as an autonomous republic of the RSFSR.
The leader of the People's Republic of Bulgaria, Todor Zhivkov, suggested in the early 1960s that the country should become a union republic, but the offer was rejected.[16][17][18] During the Soviet–Afghan War, the Soviet Union proposed to annex Northern Afghanistan as its 16th union republic in what was to become the Afghan Soviet Socialist Republic.[19]
Unrealized Soviet states
The Bessarabian Soviet Socialist Republic
The Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee
The Korean ASSR
Workers' communes
The Volga Germans Workers' Commune
The Estland Workers' Commune
The Karelian Workers' Commune
The Petrograd Workers' Commune, later the Northern Oblast Communes Association
Autonomous Republics of the Soviet Union

Several of the Union Republics themselves, most notably Russia, were further subdivided into Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics (ASSRs). Though administratively part of their respective Union Republics, ASSRs were also established based on ethnic/cultural lines.


Former Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics of the Soviet Union


The republics at the dissolution of the Soviet Union

Under Mikhail Gorbachev, openness and restructuring were intended to liberalise and open up the Soviet Union. However, they had a number of effects which caused the power of the republics to increase. First, political liberalization allowed the governments within the republics to gain legitimacy by invoking democracy, nationalism, or a combination of both. In addition, liberalization led to fractures within the Communist Party which resulted in reduced ability to govern the Union effectively. The rise of nationalist and right-wing movements, notably led in Russia by Boris Yeltsin, in the previously homogeneously Communist political system led to the crumbling of the Union's foundations. With the central role of the Communist Party removed from the constitution, the Communist Party lost its control over the political system and was banned from operating after an attempted coup d'état.
Throughout the unravelling of the restructuring, the Soviet government attempted to find a new structure which would reflect the increased power of the republics. Some autonomous republics, like Tatarstan, Checheno-Ingushetia, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Crimea, Transnistria, Gagauzia sought the union statute in New Union Treaty. Efforts to found a Union of Sovereign States proved unsuccessful and the republics began to secede from the Union. By 6 September 1991, the Soviet Union's State Council recognized the independence of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania bringing the number of union republics down to 12. On 8 December 1991, the remaining leaders of the republics signed the Belavezha Accords which agreed that the USSR would be dissolved and replaced with a Commonwealth of Independent States. On 25 December, President Gorbachev announced his resignation and turned all executive powers over to Yeltsin. The next day the Council of Republics voted to dissolve the Union. Since then, the republics have been governed independently with some adopting significantly more liberal policies while others, particularly in Central Asia, have retained leadership personnel from the Soviet time to this day.
See also

Dissolution of the Soviet Union
Flags of the Soviet Republics
Emblems of the Soviet Republics
Eurasian Economic Union
National delimitation in the Soviet Union
Bavarian Soviet Republic
Hungarian Soviet Republic
Slovak Soviet Republic
Limerick Soviet
Paris Commune
Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee (Polish SSR)
Republics of Russia
Federal subjects of Russia
Post-Soviet states (former Soviet Republics)
Notes