Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, previously known as the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the Russian Federative Soviet Republic, and the Russian Soviet Republic, and unofficially as Soviet Russia, was a communist state from 1917 to 1922, and afterwards the largest and most populous constituent republic of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1991, until becoming a sovereign part of the Soviet Union with priority of Russian laws over Union-level legislation in 1990 and 1991, the last two years of the existence of the USSR. The Russian SFSR was composed of sixteen smaller constituent units of autonomous republics, five autonomous oblasts, ten autonomous okrugs, six krais and forty oblasts. Russians formed the largest ethnic group. The capital of the Russian SFSR and the USSR as a whole was Moscow and the other major urban centers included Leningrad, Stalingrad, Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk, Gorky and Kuybyshev.
On 7 November 1917 , as a result of the October Revolution, the Russian Soviet Republic was proclaimed as a sovereign state and the world's first communist state guided by communist ideology. The first constitution was adopted in 1918. In 1922, the Russian SFSR signed a treaty officially creating the USSR. On 12 June 1990, the Congress of People's Deputies adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty. On 12 June 1991, Boris Yeltsin, supported by the Democratic Russia pro-reform movement, was elected the first and only President of the RSFSR, a post that would later become the Presidency of the Russian Federation. The August 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt in Moscow with the temporary brief internment of President Mikhail Gorbachev destabilised the Soviet Union. Following these events, Gorbachev lost all his remaining power, with Yeltsin superseding him as the pre-eminent figure in the country. On 8 December 1991, the heads of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Belovezha Accords declaring dissolution of the USSR and established the Commonwealth of Independent States as a loose replacement confederation. On 12 December, the agreement was ratified by the Supreme Soviet ; therefore the Russian SFSR had renounced the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR and de facto declared Russia's independence from the USSR itself and the ties with the other Soviet republics.
On 25 December 1991, following the resignation of Gorbachev as President of the Soviet Union, the Russian SFSR was renamed the Russian Federation. The next day, the USSR was self-dissolved by the Soviet of the Republics on 26 December, which by that time was the only functioning parliamentary chamber of the All-Union Supreme Soviet. After the dissolution, Russia took full responsibility for all the rights and obligations of the USSR under the Charter of the United Nations, including the financial obligations. As such, Russia assumed the Soviet Union's UN membership and permanent membership on the Security Council, nuclear stockpile and the control over the armed forces; Soviet embassies abroad became Russian embassies.
The 1978 constitution of the Russian SFSR was amended several times to reflect the transition to democracy, private property and market economy. The new Russian constitution, coming into effect on 25 December 1993 after a constitutional crisis, completely abolished the Soviet form of government and replaced it with a semi-presidential system. The economy of Russia became heavily industrialized, accounting for about two-thirds of the electricity produced in the USSR. By 1961, it was the third largest producer of petroleum due to new discoveries in the Volga-Urals region and Siberia. In 1974, there were 475 institutes of higher education in the republic providing education in 47 languages to some 23,941,000 students. A network of territorially organized public-health services provided health care. The economy began to be liberalized starting in 1985 under Gorbachev's "perestroika" restructuring policies, including the introduction of non-state owned enterprises.
Nomenclature
Under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the Bolsheviks established the Soviet state on. This happened immediately after the October Revolution toppled the interim Russian Provisional Government which had governed the new Russian Republic after the abdication of the Russian Empire government of the Romanov imperial dynasty of Tsar Nicholas II the previous March. The October Revolution was thus the second of the two Russian Revolutions of the turbulent year of 1917. Initially, the new Soviet state did not have an official name and was not recognized by neighboring countries for five months.Anti-Bolsheviks soon suggested new names, however. By 1919 they had coined the mocking label Sovdepia for the nascent state of the Soviets of Workers' and Peasants' Deputies. Speakers of colloquial English coined the term "Bololand"
to refer to the land of the Bolos.
On 25 January 1918 the third meeting of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets proclaimed the establishment of the Russian Soviet Republic. In July 1918, the Fifth All–Russian Congress of Soviets adopted both the new name, Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, and the Constitution of the Russian SFSR.
Internationally, the Russian SFSR was recognized as an independent state in 1920 only by its bordering neighbors in the Treaty of Tartu and by the short-lived Irish Republic of 1919–1922 in Ireland.
On 30 December 1922, with the treaty on the creation of the Soviet Union, Russia, alongside the Transcaucasian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR, formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The final Soviet name for the constituent republic, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, was adopted in the later Soviet Constitution of 1936. By that time, Soviet Russia had gained roughly the same borders of the old Tsardom of Russia before the Great Northern War of 1700 to 1721.
On 25 December 1991, during the collapse of the Soviet Union, which concluded on the next day, the RSFSR's official name was changed to the Russian Federation, which it remains to this day. This name and "Russia" were specified as the official state names on 21 April 1992, in an amendment to the then existing Constitution of 1978, and were retained as such in the subsequent 1993 Constitution of Russia.
Geography
At a total of about 17,125,200 km, the Russian SFSR was the largest of the fifteen Soviet republics, with its southerly neighbor, the Kazakh SSR, being second.The international borders of the RSFSR touched Poland on the west; Norway and Finland on the northwest; and to its southeast in eastern Asia were the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Mongolian People's Republic and the People's Republic of China. Within the Soviet Union, the RSFSR bordered the Slavic states: Ukrainian SSR, Byelorussian SSR, the Baltic states: Estonian SSR, Latvian SSR and Lithuanian SSR to its west and the Azerbaijan SSR, Georgian SSR, and Kazakh SSR to the south.
Roughly 70% of the area in the RSFSR consisted of broad plains, with mountainous tundra regions mainly concentrated in the east of Siberia with Central Asia and East Asia. The area is rich in mineral resources, including petroleum, natural gas, and iron ore.
History
Early years (1917–1920)
The Soviet government first came to power on 7 November 1917, immediately after the interim Russian Provisional Government headed by Alexander Kerensky, which governed the Russian Republic, was overthrown in the October Revolution, the second of the two Russian Revolutions. The state it governed, which did not have an official name, would be unrecognized by neighboring countries for another five months. The initial stage of the October Revolution which involved the assault on Petrograd occurred largely without any human casualties.On 18 January 1918, the newly elected Constituent Assembly issued a decree, proclaiming Russia a democratic federal republic under the name "Russian Democratic Federal Republic". However, the Bolsheviks dissolved the Assembly on the following day and declared its decrees null and void. Conversely, the Bolsheviks also reserved a number of vacant seats in the Soviets and Central Executive for the opposition parties in proportion to their vote share at the Congress. At the same time, a number of prominent members of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries had assumed positions in Lenin's government and lead commissariats in several areas. This included agriculture, property, justice, post offices and telegraphs and local government. Lenin's government also instituted a number of progressive measures such as universal education, healthcare and equal rights for women.
On 25 January 1918, at the third meeting of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, the establishment of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was proclaimed. On 3 March 1918, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed, giving away much of the westernmost lands of the former Russian Empire to the German Empire, in exchange for peace on the Eastern Front of World War I. In July 1918, the fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets adopted the Constitution of the Russian SFSR. By 1918, during the Russian Civil War, several states within the former Russian Empire had seceded, reducing the size of the country even more, although some were conquered by the Bolsheviks.
1920s
The Russian famine of 1921–22, also known as Povolzhye famine, killed an estimated 5 million, primarily affecting the Volga and Ural River regions.The economic impact of the Civil War was devastating. A black market emerged in Russia, despite the threat of martial law against profiteering. The ruble collapsed, with barter increasingly replacing money as a medium of exchange and, by 1921, heavy industry output had fallen to 20% of 1913 levels. 90% of wages were paid with goods rather than money. 70% of locomotives were in need of repair, and food requisitioning, combined with the effects of seven years of war and a severe drought, contributed to a famine that caused between 3 and 10 million deaths. Coal production decreased from 27.5 million tons to 7 million tons, while overall factory production also declined from 10,000 million roubles to 1,000 million roubles. According to the noted historian David Christian, the grain harvest was also slashed from 80.1 million tons to 46.5 million tons.
On 30 December 1922, the First Congress of the Soviets of the USSR approved the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR, by which Russia was united with the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic and Transcaucasian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic into a single federal state, the Soviet Union. The treaty was included in the 1924 Soviet Constitution, adopted on 31 January 1924 by the Second Congress of Soviets of the USSR.
One of the early ambitious economic plans of the Soviet government was GOELRO, Russian abbreviation for "State Commission for Electrification of Russia", which sought to achieve total electrification of the entire country. Soviet propaganda declared the plan was basically fulfilled by 1931. The national power output per year stood at 1.9 billion kWh in Imperial Russia in 1913, and Lenin's goal of 8.8 billion kWh was reached in 1931. National power output continued to increase significantly. It reached 13.5 billion kWh by the end of the first five-year plan in 1932, 36 billion kWh by 1937, and 48 billion kWh by 1940.
Paragraph 3 of Chapter 1 of the 1925 Constitution of the RSFSR stated the following: