Right of Secession (USSR)

A Treaty Right, a Constitutional Right

The right of secession originated in the Declaration and Treaty on the Formation of the USSR, adopted by the First All-Union Congress of Soviets on 30 December 1922. Point 26 of the treaty confirmed the republics' right freely to leave the Union, and when the 1924 Constitution absorbed the treaty, Chapter II, point 4 restated the same right. For Lenin, who had overruled the autonomization draft and insisted on a union of equal republics, it was not a formality. In his dictation of 30-31 December 1922, "The Question of Nationalities or 'Autonomisation'," he warned:

The "freedom to secede from the union" by which we justify ourselves will be a mere scrap of paper, unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvinist.

He laid political responsibility for the Georgian affair on Stalin and Dzerzhinsky and demanded real safeguards for national minorities, not merely formal equality. The right of secession was the legal product of that struggle.

A Right Left on the Statute Book

The right survived, but for decades no procedure for exercising it existed. The 1936 Constitution and Article 72 of the 1977 Constitution kept the single sentence, "Each Union Republic shall retain the right freely to secede from the USSR," while specifying nothing about how a republic was to apply, within what time frame, or how union bodies were to consider the request. Interpretation of the right was monopolized by the party leadership, and the clause remained above all a symbol of the Union's formally voluntary character.

From Symbol to Legal Weapon

In the reform years of the late 1980s the clause acquired an entirely different function. On 9 March 1990 the Georgian Supreme Soviet declared the 1922 Union Treaty unlawful with respect to Georgia, and on 11 March the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet adopted an act restoring independence that suspended the operation of Soviet constitutions and laws on its territory. The USSR Supreme Soviet responded on 15 March by declaring the Lithuanian decisions invalid, on the ground that no union law on secession had yet been adopted. That law followed on 3 April 1990, "On the Procedure for Resolving Questions Connected with a Union Republic's Secession from the USSR": a republic-wide referendum in which secession had to be approved by at least two-thirds of the citizens with the vote, with no turnout quorum, followed by a transitional period and negotiations over borders, property, and military matters.

The republics did not follow that procedure. Across 1990-91 the parliaments of Lithuania, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Belarus and others declared the 1922 Union Treaty void or terminated with respect to themselves, justifying independence through referendums and parliamentary decisions. When the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus declared at Belovezh on 8 December 1991 that the USSR had ceased to exist and founded the Commonwealth of Independent States, they too were signing through the legal opening the secession clause had left. The provision Lenin had called a scrap of paper became, in the final phase, the document that ended the Union.