Republics of the Soviet Union

In the final decades of its existence, the Soviet Union consisted of 15 Soviet Socialist Republics (SSR), often called simply Soviet republics. Within the USSR they were also called union republics ( soyuznye respubliki). All of them were socialist republics, and all of them, with the exception of Russia had their own Communist parties, part of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. They are all independent countries now; 12 of them (all except the Baltic states) are very loosely organized under the heading Commonwealth of Independent States. Constitutionally, the Soviet Union was a federation. In accordance with article 72 of the Soviet constitution adopted in 1977, each republic retained the right to secede from the USSR. Throughout the Cold War, this right was widely considered to be meaningless, however Article 72 was used in December 1991 to effectively dissolve the Soviet Union, when Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus seceded from the USSR.
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