This rule, invariably present in all three constitutions of the USSR in 1922-1991, goes back to the disputes about the principles of unification of the Soviet republics that took place in 1922-1923.
On the way to the "Zemsharna Republic of Soviets"
On November 2 (15), 1917, signed by the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars Ulyanov-Lenin and the People's Commissar for Nationalities Dzhugashvili-Stalin, the "Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia" appeared (its author was Stalin). It said that all the peoples of Russia have the right "to free self-determination, up to separation and formation of an independent state."
At the same time, in the preamble of the document, the goal of realizing such rights was "an honest and lasting union of the peoples of Russia." Thus, the Bolsheviks immediately made it clear that they recognize only such a “self-determination” of nationalities, as a result of which forces come to power striving for an alliance with Soviet Russia.
During the civil war, the Bolsheviks established several Soviet republics in those provinces of the former empire, which in 1917-1918. proclaimed their independence and where bourgeois-nationalist governments were originally in power. The Bolsheviks retreated only before force when they tried to carry out the Sovietization of Finland, Poland, the Baltic republics and in 1920 recognized their independence and inviolability of borders. In Transcaucasia and Central Asia, where there was less opposition to the Bolsheviks, already in 1920-1921. Soviet power was proclaimed everywhere.
By 1922, this was the situation. Some republics (Crimea, Tataria, Bashkiria, Yakutia, Karelia) were already explicitly included in the RSFSR, and exactly the same fate was being prepared for the Far Eastern Republic (FER). Ukraine, Belarus. Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Bukhara, Khorezm remained formally independent, but the local Bolsheviks in them supported the idea of uniting the republics. The question was on what grounds it would take place.
In general, in connection with the slogan of the world proletarian revolution, the idea was very popular that all national borders throughout the world, after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, would be liquidated. Soviet propagandists sang the praises of the "Zemsharny Soviet Republic", the creation of which, it seemed, was not far off.
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Lenin's "Union of the Republics of Europe and Asia"
In August 1922, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) formed a commission to prepare the question of the union of republics for the plenum of the Central Committee. The substantiation of this question was instructed to write to Stalin, as the People's Commissar and the main ideologist of the national question in the party. Stalin submitted to the commission a note according to which all Soviet republics joined the RSFSR. Historians have dubbed this project the “Stalinist plan of autonomization”. On September 24-25, 1922, the Politburo commission discussed Stalin's note and took it as a basis.
Lenin cautiously objected to the Stalinist plan. On September 26, he sent Lev Kamenev, the deputy chairman of the SNK and the Council of Labor and Defense (a union body of the Soviet republics), as well as the actual chairman of the Politburo at that time, his draft amendments to Stalin's note. It contained one significant change. Lenin proposed, instead of the republics joining the RSFSR, "a formal unification, together with the RSFSR, into a union of Soviet republics of Europe and Asia."
Lenin explained this formulation as follows: "It is important that we do not give food to the" independents ", do not destroy their independence, but create another floor, a federation of equal republics."
Kamenev is the author of the wording
The next day, Lenin met with the Georgian communist Budu Mdivani, chairman of the Union Council of the Transcaucasian Federation and a supporter of the independence of the Soviet republics. Then he came to the final conviction that the Soviet Union must be built in the form of a federation of equal republics. The RSFSR was supposed to join this federation along with Ukraine, Belarus and Transcaucasia. The question of whether the TSFSR will be a single member of this union or its republics - Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan - will enter there separately, has remained open for now.
On October 6, Lenin sent Kamenev a categorical note stating that in the future Union Central Executive Committee of Soviets (CEC) "a Russian, a Ukrainian, a Georgian, etc., in turn, would preside." Kamenev immediately agreed with Lenin's proposal and drew up an "Expanded Form of the Union of Soviet Republics." In it, he proposed not only to secure the equality of the republics in the union, but also their right to a free exit from it. Thus, Lev Kamenev should be recognized as the author of this formulation.
Fight against "Great Russian chauvinism"
In the discussions preceding the Congress of Soviets, which decided on the formation of the USSR, Lenin became an increasingly intolerant opponent of his comrades-in-arms - Dzerzhinsky, Stalin, Ordzhonikidze - who, as he believed, tried to revive "Great Russian chauvinism" by limiting the independence of the republics. " Freedom of withdrawal from the union "… will turn out to be an empty piece of paper, incapable of protecting Russian aliens from the invasion of that truly Russian person, a Great Russian chauvinist … what a typical Russian bureaucrat is," he wrote on the day, December 30, 1922, when the congress adopted Declaration on the formation of the USSR. Therefore, Lenin continued in his letter the next day, in order for the independence of the republics to be a fact and not an empty formality, “internationalism on the part of the oppressive or the so-called“great nation”… must consist … in such inequality,which would compensate on the part of the oppressor nation, the big nation, the inequality that actually develops in life”.
It is easy to see the lack of logic in these Leninist arguments. What kind of oppression could there be in a state that, it was declared, had abolished the exploitation of man by man? Moreover, Lenin spoke not even about the rights of the republics, but about the rights of nationalities - so that a Russian person, by the fact of his nationality, would have less rights in the USSR than a representative of any other people. However, it was precisely this attitude of Lenin that was meticulously embodied in the USSR throughout its history.
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As for the independence of the republics, then, as Lenin predicted, the right to secede from the Union turned into an empty formality. Only this happened not because of the "Great Russian chauvinism" allegedly embodied in the Russian bureaucrat, but for a completely different reason. Namely - due to the fact that Lenin himself with his fellow party members destroyed all democracy in the country.
The right of the union republics to secede from the USSR was an outwardly attractive sign on the façade of a unitary communist power. It invariably wandered from one version of the USSR constitution to another because no one in the party leadership until the end of the 1980s, even in a nightmare, could imagine that someone could refer to this right and try to actually use it.
Yaroslav Butakov