“The Will of the Peoples of the Soviet Republics” – Picture of the Day – Kommersant

On December 29, 1922, in Moscow, a conference of delegates to the congresses of councils of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian and Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republics, and the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic agreed on the text of the declaration and treaty on the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. On December 30, the First Congress of Soviets of the USSR opened at the Bolshoi Theater, which approved and adopted the texts of the declaration and the treaty.

“The will of the peoples of the Soviet republics, who recently gathered at the congresses of their Soviets and unanimously decided to form the USSR, serves as a reliable guarantee that this Union is a voluntary association of peoples with equal rights, that each republic is guaranteed the right to freely secede from the Union, that access to the Union is open to all socialist Soviet republics, both existing ones and those that will arise in the future, that the new union state will be a worthy crowning of the foundations laid back in October 1917 for peaceful coexistence and fraternal cooperation of peoples, that it will serve as a faithful bulwark against world capitalism and a new decisive step towards way of uniting the working people of all countries into a World Socialist Soviet Republic,” the declaration said. republics, on the basis of the powers given to us, we decide to sign an agreement on the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

As can be seen from this text, the architects and creators of the USSR, unlike a significant part of their political successors, did not complain about the lack of ideas about the future. The solemnity and pathos of the moment, as well as the very choice of words, could hardly help but evoke associations among the participants, witnesses and contemporaries with the signing of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. The American declaration was adopted 146 years before the Soviet one and now, after the First World War, it seemed like an optimistic start, the launch of a new world, which eventually came to crisis, tragedy and failure. In Moscow, other, new “founding fathers” gathered, ready to establish a state – the prototype of a real world republic.

The short business preamble of the agreement contained a statement on the creation by the four participating republics of a common state on the grounds listed in the next 26 paragraphs. The first paragraph established the jurisdiction of the Union – from representation in international relations and issues of war and peace to the right of a general amnesty and correction of republican regulations in the part that did not comply with the agreement. Paragraphs two through nineteen contained a description of the system of organs of power in the USSR – the highest power belongs to the Union Congress of Soviets, which is elected by the congresses of councils of cities and provinces, and not by republican ones, as was the case with the First Congress. The congress elected a permanent Central Executive Committee (371 members), and one of its members – the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of 19 people. The Central Executive Committee of the USSR formed the government – the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR; the functionality and subordination of the Supreme Council of the National Economy, as well as the republican Central Executive Committees and Councils of People’s Commissars were determined. Paragraph 20 contained a fundamental rule for the de facto unitary construction of the formation of the union budget: “The republics that are part of the Union have their own budgets, which are components of the all-Union budget approved by the Central Executive Committee of the Union. The budgets of the republic in their revenue and expenditure parts are established by the Central Executive Committee of the Union. The list of incomes and the amounts of income deductions used for the formation of the budgets of the union republics are determined by the Central Executive Committee of the Union. Paragraphs 21–23 dealt with a single union citizenship, a common flag, coat of arms and state seal, as well as the capital. The 24th paragraph required the introduction of appropriate changes and additions to the republican constitutions – in the RSFSR, for example, the constitution was adopted in 1918. In paragraph 25, the role of the only political entity capable of changing or supplementing the treaty was assigned to the Union Congress of Soviets – which initially made the last, 26th paragraph very ephemeral. It read: “Each of the union republics retains the right to freely secede from the Union.”

The 1922 treaty formed the basis of the first of the three constitutions of the USSR, adopted in 1924. Its main parameters were, of course, transferred and reproduced in the constitutions of the USSR in 1936 and 1977, the adoption of which was followed both times by the adoption of the constitutions of the union republics. The clause on the right of the republics to secession was preserved in all union constitutions, but only in 1990 were Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Georgia the first to decide to use it, the example of which was eventually followed by almost all the other republics – there were fifteen of them in the “classical” composition of the USSR . An attempt made in 1991 by the first and last president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, to prepare and agree on a new version of the union treaty was not crowned with success, not only because of the conservative coup attempted by part of the union leadership in August, but also because of fundamental disagreements over the division of powers between the center and the republics, including in the area of ​​the budget. In December 1991, the Supreme Councils of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia announced the denunciation of the Treaty on the Formation of the USSR of December 30, 1922. The corresponding resolution of the Supreme Council of the RSFSR was canceled in March 1996 by the State Duma of the Russian Federation, but the deputies specified that their decision did not affect the sovereignty of Russia and other former Soviet republics.

Ivan Tyazhlov