I recall from my school days reading in the USSR, the republics which made it up were designed so that they had to border, either another independent nation or the sea. I am referring to the SSRs that are now independent, not the internal divisions of each SSR.
In theory each republic had a large degree of autonomy, so it would make sense, and if you count the Caspian Sea as a “sea” it does work out.
But I can’t find that “fact” online anywhere.
Was this so? Or am I remembering wrong? Or was the information incorrect?
First time I’ve ever heard this. As far as I can find there was no rule like this. The Soviet Socialist Republics were established mostly on the basis of where various recognized ethnic groups lived so it’s apparently just a coincidence that they all border a sea or independent nation.
It does not seem particularly unlikely that it would have come out this way by chance. Although the USSR was very large, most of the constituent republics were too, and it had a long coastline, long borders, and two internal seas.
“It used to be said by Soviet authorities that a union republic possessed three distinguishing characteristics: it is not surrounded on all sides by other union republics; the nationality for whom the republic is named constitutes a “compact” majority” of the republic’s population; and it has a population of at least one million people. These characteristics would be necessary, it was suggested, should the republic choose to secede from the USSR. In recent years, however, Soviet sources have stopped mentioning these three ‘objective characteristics,’ perhaps because the Kazakh and Kirghiz peoples no longer constitute a majority of the populations of ‘their’ republics." - Barry, D. and Barner-Berry, C. (1991) Contemporary Soviet Politics, 4th Edition, page 112.
Apparently this “rule” did exist, though it seems to never have been formally adopted.
The original rule was that a nation was defined as “a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup manifested in a common culture” (Marxism and the National Question by Joseph Stalin). This is obviously a subjective standard but it does show there was no official mention of sea access or international borders.
The rule kurtisoc describes sounds like an ad hoc one composed for the purpose of denying status to ethnicities who would otherwise qualify on the terms Nemo mentions.
From the quotes, it seems to have been a political rule-of-thumb for discussing who was or wasn’t to be constituted as a Union Republic and how would the borders be designed, as opposed to an official policy or legal requirement adopted by either party or government.
That raises a good point. The Soviet government was under pressure by various ethnic groups to upgrade their native region to SSR status. It would have been convenient for Moscow to be able to say that there was a rule requiring access to an international border or a sea. That fact that the Soviets didn’t use this argument is strong evidence that no such rule existed.
While he quoted a source that repeated this “rule,” the source (Barry and Barner-Berry) worded it very vaguely. Could it be that they were just repeating an uncorroborated factoid that they had heard? The point might be true, but this falls pretty short of confirmation.
Yeah, I goofed. I was thinking in terms of it being one of the two doubly landlocked nations in the world (the other being Liechtenstein), and overlooked the border with Afghanistan, which I already knew about perfectly well, so my momentary blanking out on that is very unfortunate.