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Soviet Union: Russian Republic
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The Soviet Union was a federation of Soviet Socialist Republics (SSR). The first Republics were established shortly after the October Revolution of 1917. At that time, republics were technically independent from one another but their governments acted in closely coordinated confederation, as directed by the CPSU leadership. In 1922, four Republics ( Russian SFSR, Ukrainian SSR, Belarusian SSR, and Transcaucasian SFSR) joined into the Soviet Union. Between 1922 and 1940, the number of Republics grew to sixteen. Some of the new Republics were formed from territories acquired, or reacquired by the Soviet Union, others by splitting existing Republics into several parts.
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The Soviet Union was a multinational empire, established by czarist and communist conquest from Moscow. Its dominant Russian nationality was a bare majority within its imperial structure. The Soviet Union was driven by the impulse to spread its ideology wherever opportunities presented themselves.
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The tensions in the Soviet Union came to a head in August 1991 when a group of right wing military and KGB leaders staged a coup in Moscow while Gorbachev was on vacation in the Crimea. Boris Yeltsin gained international acclaim when he occupied the Russian White House and faced down the threats of the leaders of the coup. At one point Yeltsin climbed atop a tank and rallied the people to oppose the coup. Lacking organization and support by the military itself, the coup collapsed after three days. Gorbachev was forced to greatly reduce the power of the Communist Party in order to prevent further attempts to seize power. Unwilling to consolidate his power by using brute force, Gorbachev was unable to reestablish real control over the nation following the coup.
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The disintegration of the Soviet Union began on the peripheries, in the non-Russian areas. The first region to produce mass, organized dissent was the Baltic region, where, in 1987, the government of Estonia demanded autonomy. This move was later followed by similar moves in Lithuania and Latvia, the other two Baltic republics. The nationalist movements in the Baltics constituted a strong challenge to Gorbachev's policy of glasnost. He did not want to crack down too severely on the participants in these movements, yet at the same time, it became increasingly evident that allowing them to run their course would spell disaster for the Soviet Union, which would completely collapse if all of the periphery republics were to demand independence.
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For many years, Soviet leaders maintained that the underlying causes of conflict between nationalities of the Soviet Union had been eliminated and that the Soviet Union consisted of a family of nations living harmoniously together. In the 1920s and early 1930s, the government conducted a policy of korenizatsiya (indigenization) of local governments in an effort to recruit non-Russians into the new Soviet political institutions and to reduce the conflict between Russians and the minority nationalities. One area in which the Soviet leaders made concessions perhaps more out of necessity than out of conviction, was language policy. To increase literacy and mass education, the government encouraged the development and publication in many of the "national languages" of the minority groups. While Russian became a required subject of study in all Soviet schools in 1938, in the mainly non-Russian areas the chief language of instruction was the local language or languages. This practice led to widespread bilingualism in the educated population, though among smaller nationalities and among elements of the population that were heavily affected by the immigration of Russians, linguistic assimilation ... was common, in which the members of a given non-Russian nationality lost facility in the historic language of their group.
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Elections to the Congress of People's Deputies, which took place throughout the Soviet Union in March and April 1989, returned many pro-independence republicans, as many CPSU candidates were rejected. The televised Congress debates allowed the dissemination of pro-independence propositions. Indeed, 1989 would see numerous nationalistic expressions protests. Initiated by the Baltic republics in January, laws were passed in most non-Russian republics giving precedence for the republican language over Russian. April 9 would see the crackdown of nationalist demonstrations by Soviet troops in Tbilisi. There would be further bloody protests in Uzbekistan in June, where Uzbeks and Meskhetian Turks clashed in Fergana.
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