Ex-Soviet Federalism on paper the Soviet Union was a federation :Its 15 republics even had the right to secede. In practice, under the tight control of the Communist Party- although usually staffed by local talent(Georgians ran Georgia, Uzbeks ran Uzbekistan, and so on they obeyed Moscow. Beneath a centralized veneer, how -ever, lurked disunion Gorbachev underestimated local nationalism, and when he allowed glasnost in the late 1980s, many soviet republics went for independence led by the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which Stalin had brutally annexed in 1940. With the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, all publics proclaimed themselves independent. Now Russia aims to regain what it calls the by economic ties or by military means, as in Georgia
The bulk of the old Soviet Union continued as the Russian Federation, which is composed of 89 autonomous republics, districts, regions, and even cities, most which have signed a federation treaty with Moscow, Several areas, home to some of the hundred-plus ethnic groups within Russia, refused to sign and billed themselves as independent. The largely Muslim North Caucasus never liked be-ing ruled by Moscow, and some areas now try to break a Moscow, that Chechen independence would encourage such demands elsewhere, brutally Chechnya. Boston got a taste of Chechen terrorism in 2013. Putin rein- stituted central control over unruly governors by creating seven super-regions headed by former colleagues from the security police.
Could the three Communist federations--the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia-have devised a more genuine federalism that would not have fallen apart? Or were these federations of unlike components doomed from the start? The Communists, by pretending to have solved the "nationalities question” merely suppressed it until it came out late