Were there every any proposals to split the Russian SFSR?

Kermode

More of a history question than an alternate history question, but feel free to speculate on the latter too.

The Soviet Union was ostensibly a federation of 15 different states, but it was no secret that it was really just Russia and its satelites. This is clear by every metric, but it's most dramatic on a map:

Soviet_Union_Administrative_Divisions_1989.jpg


Note that Soviet Russia was so large that it was itself a federation!

With that in mind, were there ever any proposals to split the Russian SFSR into smaller SSRs? Not necessarily any that were entertained by leadership — I would be rather surprised if there were! — but rather, if anything had ever been floated or mulled by some academic or advisor or lower-level official or something. I I figure that the most likely times would be either around the establishment of the USSR (when, possibly, some people could have been thinking about truly dismantling the Tsardom) or during Gorbachev's time in office (when there was talk of reform), but I'm just spitballing now.
 

BiasHangover

Banned
Kermode said:
More of a history question than an alternate history question, but feel free to speculate on the latter too.

The Soviet Union was ostensibly a federation of 15 different states, but it was no secret that it was really just Russia and its satelites. This is clear by every metric, but it's most dramatic on a map:
Click to expand...
If the SSRs were satellite's, what were the Warsaw Pact members? Satellite-Satellites?
 

Eldritch Po l i t b u ro

Perhaps all of the ASSRs could've been upgraded to full SSRs and the remaining Russian SSR could've been split in three: Western Russian SSR, Central Russian SSR, and Eastern Russian SSR

Also just spitballing
 

Lalli

thenextgui said:
Karelia used be a separate SSR before being annexed by the Russian SFSR
Click to expand...

And Tuva was semi-independent country before annexed by USSR and put under to Russain ASSR in 1944.

But I haven't heard that there would had been serious proposals for independent republics emerging from Russia. Some tried but these were failures and ended usually quickly.

One problem with many Russian republics that many locate inside of Russia. Many too have big Russian minority or Russians might are even majority nationality. So if Yeltsin or someone alternate Russian president would had just decided agree with such idea I think that only realistic ones are Tuva, Chechny and Dagestan. Perhaps even Tatarstan and Kalmykia too but their problem is that they locate inside of Russia.
 
SealTheRealDeal

SealTheRealDeal

I think you'd need to divorce the SSRs from any notion of them being national republics.* Basing them instead on economic specialization could make sense for economic planning purposes.

*And this would have to go for the others as well, so for example most of Ukraine is probably part of the "Black Earth Republic"
 

thenextgui

The division of Russia into multiple SSRs would also remove the constant power struggle between RSFSR and the CPSU, and prevent the Declaration of State Sovereignty of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from occurring as OTL. Whether this would lead to a more or less stable situation is uncertain.
 

David T

The decision to base the Union on nationalities/languages meant in effect that only peripheral areas could be taken from the RSFSR. There was no "Siberian" or "North Russian" language.

The real question was whether there was was any point in having a USSR distinguished from the RSFSR. Stalin ddn't think so; he simply wanted to incorporate the "independent" Soviet republics like Ukraine into the RSFSR as autonomous republics having the same status as the Bashkirs or Yakuts. Lenin disagreed:

"Lenin summoned Stalin. He severely criticized his project and exerted on him strong pressure to modify all those points which formalized the hegemony of the RSFSR over the other republics. He wished for an arrangement whereby all the republics, the RSFSR included, constituted a new federation, with a separate government, called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of Europe and Asia. Stalin yielded to Lenin on this and agreed to abandon the idea of “autonomization” advocated in the first article of his project in favor of a federal union of equal states. But he refused to concede on the second article. Lenin’s demand for the creation of new federal central organs — an All-Union Central Executive Committee, Sovnarkom, and Council of Labor and Defence — to supersede those of the RSFSR seemed to him administratively cumbersome and superfluous. Stalin thought that Lenin’s purpose could be achieved as well by the simpler device of renaming the organs of the RSFSR as all- Union ones. But Lenin disagreed and criticized Stalin for being impatient and excessively addicted to administrative procedures." Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union (Harvard Univeristy Press 1964), pp. 272-3

Lenin's view prevailed but almost to the end of the USSR the RSFSR lacked some of the institutions of the other Union Republics--e.g., its own Academy of Sciences and its own Communist Party Central Committee and Politburo (though Khrushchev did set up a CPSU Bureau for the RSFSR). , As I stated in another post: "the point seems to be that the USSR itself, though multinational (as indeed the Russian Empire had been in its population) was fundamentally a Russian state: the majority of its population had Russian as their first language (and even many of those who didn't knew it about as well as their "own" language). Russians could therefore realize their national aspirations on an all-Union level. There was no need to duplicate all-Union institutions on the soil of the republic which constituted the majority of the USSR. As Gorbachev put it, "What is Russia? It is the Union. What is the Union? It is mostly Russia." https://books.google.com/books?id=Y5QYDQAAQBAJ&pg=PT164 In short, Soviet identity and Russian identity were not regarded as two distinct things."
 
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Vladyslav

Vladyslav

This question can be divided into two sub-questions
1) Why didn't Russian ASSRs get promoted to SSR like Kazakhstan in 1936?
I can't find an exact quote now, but when Tatarstan and Bashkortostan raised this issue when adopting the Constitution of 1936, Stalin identified three criteria for obtaining SSR status:
a) External border with a foreign state or access to the sea due to the declared right to secede from the USSR.
b) The dominance of the "titular" nationality. Therefore, the Crimea, where according to the 1926 census the Crimean Tatars made up only 25% of the population, remained the ASSR. The Karelian-Finnish USSR was an exception to this principle due to the Finnish question, so when it ceased to be relevant, Karelia returned to the RSFSR
c) Large size, which allows you to be economically independent and defensive due to the right to secession. Therefore, after the Soviet annexation in 1944, Tuva became part of the RSFSR, and was not a separate SSR.
These were not formalized criteria, but rather informal principles. Tatarstan, and to a lesser extent Bashkortostan, raised the their status question until the collapse of the USSR.
2) Why not divide the RSFSR into several Russian republics (Siberian Russian SSR, Volga Russian SSR, etc.)?
As someone has already mentioned, the USSR was formally a federation of nation-states and the RSFSR corresponded to this principle. On the other hand, there was a precedent when one nationality had several national-territorial units, but these were small nations' enclave areas. There was an idea of dividing the RSFSR into regions that corresponded in size to other SSRs. The oblasts and krais, created in 1923-1929, embodied it until Stalin's disunification in the 1930s, when they became analogous to the sub-republican oblasts, which replaced the okrug division. I know that this idea was discussed in the government at least in the 1980s and figured in some opposition programs until Yeltsin came to power in the RSFSR.
I should also mention the project of national principle of the USSR structure abandoning, which, according to Arkady Volsky, was developed by Andropov, but any documents are still not in the public domain and this would be the longest political suicide note.
 
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