Party and Federation in the USSR: The Problem of the Nationalities and Power in the USSR

Abstract

THE SIXTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION PROVIDES AN opportunity to draw up a balance-sheet. It is even more appropriate as the Soviet leaders have used the occasion to adopt a new constitution, and have thus implied that a new stage is about to begin for Soviet society and for the system of government which emanates from it and embodies it. This stage, called advanced socialism, has several characteristics: ‘the formation of a new historic community - the Soviet people, the development of the dictatorship of the proletariat into the state of the whole people, the transformation of the CPSU from a revolutionary party of the workers into the party of all the people, the strengthening of the homogeneity of Soviet society’. The phrases ‘homogeneity and cohesion of society’ are probably those which recur most frequently in the presentation of the new constitution, especially when its national implications are described. ‘The constitution of the USSR is at the same time a constitution of a state of the whole people — the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — and of the fifteen sovereign republics which compose it and finally of the thirtyeight national-state formations with differing forms of autonomy. The new historic community — the Soviet people — numbers 250 million citizens, representing more than one hundred nations and nationalities of the USSR. But it is also a single social monolith, a single historical phenomenon with a single economy, a single culture, a single Soviet way of life, a single ideology’