Parade of Sovereignties

The parade of sovereignties was the sequence in which the union republics and autonomous units of the USSR adopted declarations of sovereignty from 1988 to 1991. The first top-level declaration came from the Estonian SSR Supreme Soviet on 16 November 1988, and the Lithuanian SSR stated the supremacy of its own laws on 26 May 1989, followed by the Latvian SSR on 28 July 1989 and the Azerbaijani SSR on 23 September 1989. On 11 March 1990 the Lithuanian Supreme Council announced the restoration of the 1938 Lithuanian constitution, the first union republic to declare independence, and on 12 June 1990 the Russian SFSR Congress of People's Deputies adopted its own sovereignty declaration. By December 1990 all fifteen union republics had adopted one, and the sequence had become a contest of authority between the centre and the republics.

The core claim of the declarations was that the constitution and laws of the republic took precedence over union law. That broke the constitutional order of the USSR from below, and despite central counter-legislation such as the law of 26 April 1990 on the division of powers between the union and the federal republics and the law on the fundamentals of economic relations of April 1990, it produced the so-called war of laws and the paralysis of union institutions. The declarations were not identical. Lithuania's act of March 1990 declared independence restored, while most declarations did not deny the union as such and demanded only the priority of republican law; among the autonomous units many declared sovereignty without claiming full independence from the RSFSR or the USSR.

The same wave ran through the autonomous units. The Nakhichevan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic declared withdrawal from the USSR on 19 January 1990, ahead of Lithuania's declaration, and between July 1990 and June 1991 most autonomous republics and oblasts of the RSFSR adopted declarations of sovereignty or resolutions upgrading their status. Outside the RSFSR, some declared entities, including South Ossetia in Georgia (20 September 1990), the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic in Azerbaijan (2 September 1991) and Transnistria and Gagauzia in Moldova in 1990, hardened into long-term breakaway territories.

The name itself is a political label rather than a neutral category. Russian-language accounts attribute its coinage to the RSFSR people's deputy Pyotr Zerin, who used the phrase at the emergency congress of RSFSR people's deputies on 10 December 1990, Rossiyskaya Gazeta carrying it the next day; a related usage distinguishes the declarations of the union republics from the renegotiation of autonomy by the lower units, especially the autonomous republics of the RSFSR that sought to remain inside the union while becoming parties to a Union of Sovereign States. Either way the phrase presupposes the outcome it describes.

The parade proceeded through a series of collisions that stripped the centre of binding authority. The Union's legal space was in effect empty by late 1991, and six republics refused to take part in the Union referendum of 17 March 1991. After the failure of the August coup most republics declared independence, the Soviet State Council recognised the independence of the three Baltic states on 6 September, and the Belovezha Accords of 8 December created the Commonwealth of Independent States. Only three of the fifteen union republics, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, signed those accords, and the other twelve remained formally constituent parts of the USSR until the Council of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet declared the Union's existence terminated on 26 December 1991. A sovereignty declaration was therefore not the same as independence, and the record supports two conclusions at once: the process helped destroy the unified state, and its claim of layered sovereignty extended the founding principle of the Union, the 1922 treaty and the constitutional right of secession.