CONSTITUTIONAL PRECONDITIONS FOR THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION: HISTORICAL AND LEGAL REFLECTIONS

Abstract

This article is devoted to a historical and legal reflection on the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics through the prism of an analysis of its constitutional and institutional features. In contrast to the prevailing international legal approach in the academic literature, an “internal” constitutional view of the Soviet Union’s disintegration is proposed.
The article substantiates the thesis that, from a legal point of view, the collapse of the USSR in the form in which it took place was largely due to the specific features of the Soviet state system. First, Soviet quasi-federalism – the imitation of a federal national-territorial administrative system contributed to the fact that, given the political will, the union republics, which were already formally considered as independent “states”, could move from an imposed imitation of statehood to its practical implementation. Second, the actual dependence of the USSR’s existence on maintaining control over the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic – the RSFSR was the largest union republic in terms of territory, population and economic potential, which served as the geopolitical core of the USSR, and on its territory all the highest organs of state power of the USSR and the supreme bodies of the Communist Party of Soviet Union were located; in the event of institutional confrontation between the USSR and the RSFSR, the Soviet system would become completely unviable. Third, the existence of state authorities formally independent of Communist party entities – even though in practice the state authorities actually implemented the political will of the CPSU, any weakening of party control over socio-political processes and the loss of the CPSU’s monopoly on political power carried the risk of the republican state authorities regaining their real powers, while the union authorities could not exist at all without a territorial base, material and technical support, which only the union republics could provide them.