Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was proclaimed on the 7th of November 1917, hours after Bolshevik forces overthrew the provisional government headed by Alexander Kerensky. For seventy-four years it existed as a political entity unlike any before it: first the world's first communist state, then the dominant core of an empire stretching across eleven time zones. At its peak it covered about 17,125,200 square kilometres, making it the largest of the fifteen Soviet republics. And yet, for most of that time, it had no anthem of its own, no separate presidency, and no distinct voice at the United Nations. It was simultaneously the heart of the Soviet Union and invisible within it. How did a state that began without even a name become the foundation of a superpower? And how did it dissolve, in the span of a few December weeks in 1991, into something called the Russian Federation? Those are the questions this documentary will pursue.
Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky led the Bolsheviks into power on the 7th of November 1917, but the new government they controlled had no official name and went unrecognised by neighbouring countries for five months. Anti-Bolsheviks moved quickly to fill that vacuum with mockery. By 1919 they had coined the term Sovdepia, a contraction mocking the Soviets of Workers' and Peasants' Deputies. Speakers of colloquial English contributed their own label, calling the territory Bololand, after the slang term for Bolsheviks that appeared from 1919 onward.
The Bolsheviks resolved the naming question in stages. On the 25th of January 1918, the third meeting of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets formally proclaimed the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Then in July 1918, the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets adopted a constitution and adjusted the name slightly to Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic. The final version of the name, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, was not fixed until the Soviet Constitution of 1936.
International recognition came slowly and selectively. In 1920, only bordering neighbours, specifically Estonia, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania, recognised the Russian SFSR as an independent state through the Treaty of Tartu. The short-lived Irish Republic of 1919-1922 also extended recognition. On the 30th of December 1922, the Russian SFSR joined the Ukrainian SSR, the Byelorussian SSR, and the Transcaucasian SFSR to sign the treaty creating the Soviet Union. From that point forward, the republic's identity was inseparable from the larger union it had helped build.
By 1921, heavy industry output in the Russian SFSR had collapsed to 20 percent of its 1913 levels. Coal production fell from 27.5 million tons in 1913 to 7 million tons in 1920. Factory output dropped from 10,000 million roubles to 1,000 million roubles over the same period. According to the historian David Christian, the grain harvest fell from 80.1 million tons in 1913 to 46.5 million tons in 1920. The ruble essentially ceased to function; barter replaced money, and 90 percent of wages were paid in goods rather than currency.
The Russian famine of 1921-22, also known as the Povolzhye famine, struck hardest along the Volga and Ural River regions and killed an estimated 5 million people. Combined with the toll of seven years of war, the scale of suffering was staggering. In March 1921, at the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party, the leadership declared the policy of war communism fulfilled and introduced the New Economic Policy at Lenin's suggestion, allowing non-state enterprises, including cooperatives, for the first time.
One of the boldest early ambitions was GOELRO, which stood for the State Commission for Electrification of Russia. The national power output of Imperial Russia had stood at 1.9 billion kilowatt-hours in 1913. Lenin's goal was 8.8 billion kilowatt-hours. Soviet propaganda declared this target basically met by 1931. Output continued rising: 13.5 billion kilowatt-hours by the end of the first five-year plan in 1932-36 billion by 1937, and 48 billion by 1940. By 1961, the Russian SFSR had become the third largest producer of petroleum in the world, driven by new discoveries in the Volga-Urals region and Siberia.
On the 3rd of March 1944, acting on orders from Joseph Stalin, Soviet authorities disbanded the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and forcibly deported its entire population. The accusation was collaboration with German invaders. The territory was divided between other administrative units of the Russian SFSR and the Georgian SSR. The following year, the Karachay Autonomous Oblast had already been dissolved in 1943 by Stalin when the Karachay people were exiled to Central Asia on the same grounds.
The Crimean ASSR suffered a related fate. On the 18th of May 1944, it was reduced from an autonomous republic to an oblast, alongside the criminal deportation of the Crimean Tatars, now recognised as genocide, as collective punishment for alleged collaboration with the German occupation. A decade later, in January 1954, the Crimean Oblast was transferred from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR under the new Soviet leadership of Georgy Malenkov.
Not all border changes involved punishment. At the end of World War II, Soviet forces occupied southern Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Islands off the coast of East Asia, and these became part of the Russian SFSR. On the 17th of April 1946, the Kaliningrad Oblast, the northeastern portion of the former East Prussia and home to the Baltic seaport of Königsberg, was annexed by the Soviet Union and added to the Russian SFSR. On the 9th of January 1957, under Nikita Khrushchev, both the Karachay Autonomous Oblast and the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic were restored and transferred back to the Russian SFSR from the Georgian SSR.
Throughout most of the Soviet period, the Russian SFSR occupied a paradoxical position: it was the largest republic by far, accounting for about two-thirds of the electricity produced in the USSR, yet it lacked the separate institutional presence enjoyed by smaller republics. The Russian SFSR had no separate Communist Party of its own for most of the Soviet era, no KGB office, and until 1990, no presidency. As one economist noted during studies of inter-republic exchange in the late Soviet era, the degree of inequality was very high and Russia was consistently the losing side, with the product created by Russia largely supporting consumption in other union republics.
In 1974, the republic hosted 475 institutes of higher education providing instruction in 47 languages to roughly 23,941,000 students. Its geography spanned roughly 70 percent broad plains and mountainous tundra concentrated in eastern Siberia, with borders touching Poland, Norway, Finland, North Korea, Mongolia, and China. The capital, Moscow, served as capital of the USSR as a whole, a fact that blurred the distinction between the republic and the union it anchored.
The Russian SFSR also shared its anthem with the entire Soviet Union for most of its existence, using the Internationale until 1944 and then the State Anthem of the Soviet Union. Only in 1990 did it adopt a separate anthem of its own, called Patrioticheskaya Pesnya, which went on to become the anthem of independent Russia before Vladimir Putin re-introduced the Soviet anthem in 2000.
On the 29th of May 1990, Boris Yeltsin was elected chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR at his third attempt. Two weeks later, on the 12th of June 1990, the Congress of People's Deputies adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty, a document that set off what became known as the War of Laws, pitting Russian legislation against Soviet Union-level authority.
The failed coup of the 19th to the 21st of August 1991 accelerated the collapse. Yeltsin stood against the plotters, and on the 23rd of August, in the presence of Mikhail Gorbachev, he signed a decree suspending all activity by the Communist Party of the Russian SFSR. On the 6th of November, he went further and banned the Communist Parties of both the USSR and the RSFSR within Russian territory.
On the 8th of December 1991, at Viskuli near Brest in Belarus, Yeltsin met with Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk and Belarusian leader Stanislav Shushkevich. They signed the Belovezha Accords, a document of a preamble and fourteen articles, which opened by declaring that the Soviet Union no longer existed as a subject of international law and geopolitical reality. On the 12th of December, the Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR ratified the agreement by 188 votes for, 6 against, and 7 abstentions.
On the 24th of December, Yeltsin notified the Secretary-General of the United Nations that the Russian Federation would assume the Soviet Union's membership in all UN organs, including the permanent seat on the Security Council. The nuclear stockpile, the armed forces, and Soviet embassies abroad all transferred to Russian control. On the evening of the 25th of December 1991, hours after Gorbachev resigned, the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time and replaced with the tricolor. The Soviet Union officially ceased to exist the following day.
The transition from the Russian SFSR to the Russian Federation was not instantaneous. During 1992, Russian law allowed continued use of the old RSFSR name on official forms, seals, and stamps. The renaming was formally approved by the Congress of People's Deputies on the 21st of April 1992, with amendments to the constitution entering force after publication on the 16th of May 1992.
The 1978 constitution was amended repeatedly to accommodate the shift toward democracy, private property, and a market economy. A constitutional crisis then produced an entirely new document, the 1993 Constitution of Russia, which came into force on the 25th of December 1993 and replaced the Soviet system with a semi-presidential structure.
Physical traces of the Russian SFSR remain visible across Russian cities. The hammer and sickle and the Soviet coat of arms appear in architectural decoration. Soviet red stars still mark military equipment and war memorials. The Banner of Victory from 1945 continues to be honored. The Matryoshka doll remains a recognisable symbol, and the towers of the Moscow Kremlin and Saint Basil's Cathedral still stand as architectural icons that were prominent during the republic's entire existence. The legality of the December 1991 ratification of the Belovezha Accords was disputed at the time, with some lawyers arguing that under the 1978 constitution the matter belonged exclusively to the Congress of People's Deputies rather than the Supreme Soviet, a question that was never fully resolved.
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Common questions
When was the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic founded?
The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was proclaimed on the 7th of November 1917, immediately after the October Revolution overthrew the interim Russian Provisional Government led by Alexander Kerensky. The formal name was established on the 25th of January 1918 at the third meeting of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets.
How large was the Russian SFSR compared to other Soviet republics?
The Russian SFSR covered about 17,125,200 square kilometres, making it the largest of the fifteen Soviet republics. Its nearest rival in size was the Kazakh SSR to its south.
Who signed the Belovezha Accords that dissolved the Soviet Union?
On the 8th of December 1991, at Viskuli near Brest in Belarus, Boris Yeltsin of Russia, Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk, and Belarusian leader Stanislav Shushkevich signed the Belovezha Accords. The document declared the Soviet Union no longer existed as a subject of international law and established the Commonwealth of Independent States in its place.
When did the Russian SFSR become the Russian Federation?
On the 25th of December 1991, hours after Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as President of the Soviet Union, the Russian SFSR was renamed the Russian Federation. The renaming was formally confirmed by the Congress of People's Deputies on the 21st of April 1992, with the amendment entering force on the 16th of May 1992.
What was the GOELRO plan in the Russian SFSR?
GOELRO stood for the State Commission for Electrification of Russia and was one of the Soviet government's first major economic programs. The national power output of Imperial Russia was 1.9 billion kilowatt-hours in 1913; Lenin's target of 8.8 billion kilowatt-hours was declared met by 1931, rising further to 48 billion kilowatt-hours by 1940.
What happened to the Chechen-Ingush ASSR under Stalin?
On the 3rd of March 1944, Stalin ordered the disbandment of the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and the forcible deportation of its entire population, accused of collaborating with German invaders. The territory was divided between other administrative units of the Russian SFSR and the Georgian SSR. Khrushchev restored the republic on the 9th of January 1957.
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