Since 1956 the enormous territory of the Soviet Union consisted of fifteen union republics — the large administrative and political units — officially known as Soviet republics. By far the largest and most important of the union republics was the Russian Republic, containing about 51 percent of the population. Primarily because it encompassed Siberia, the Russian Republic alone accounts for 75 percent of the Soviet territory and formed the heartland of both the European and the Asian portions of the Soviet Union. Although in 1989 the Russians made up over 51 percent of the Soviet population and were in many ways the dominant nationality, they were just one of more than 100 nationality groups that made up the Soviet society.
Fourteen other major nationalities also had their own republics: in the European part there were the Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Belorussian, Ukrainian, and Moldavian republics; the Georgian, Azerbaydzhan, and Armenian republics occupied the Caucasus; and Soviet Central Asia was home to the Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen, Kirgiz, and Tadzhik republics.
The Soviet system also provided for the territorial and administrative subdivisions called autonomous republics, autonomous oblasts, autonomous okruga, kraia, or most often oblasts. These subdivisions allowed the government to manage the country easier and, arguably, more efficiently. In terms of political and administrative authority, more than 130 oblasts and autonomous oblasts resembled the counties of the United States, to some degree. Many oblasts, however, were about the size of the American states. For example, Tyumenskaya Oblast, the storehouse of Soviet fuels, was only slightly smaller than Alaska. A more appropriate comparison with counties, in terms of numbers and area, can be made with the more than 3,200 of raion, the Soviet Union’s smallest administrative and political subdivision.
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Map of USSR, 1989
