The Republics of Russia

The 16 Soviet Republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics are just the beginning. There are 189 races and peoples in the Soviet Union and they speak 150 languages, practice 40 religions, inhabit 74 assorted regions, territories, autonomous republics and Soviet Republics. Depending on locality, they wear reindeer fur, Moslem veils, ordinary coats and pants. They cover one-sixth of the world's land surface and they number 193 million men, women and children.

Roughly three-quarters of them are Slavs: Great Russians, Ukrainians (or Little Russians), White Russians. These peoples constituted three of the original four republics which joined to form the Soviet Union in 1922. The fourth was the Transcaucasian Republic, which later split into the Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijan.

From the lofty, windy plateau of Central Asia in the shadow of the high Pamirs came Turkmen, Tajiks and Uzbeks to establish three more border republics in 1925. Slope-eyed Kazakhs and Kirghiz were found ready to form republics, Soviet style, in 1936.

The five youngest republics grew out of the war. When Hitler attacked Poland, the Red Army moved westward, converting the three independent Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into Soviet Republics. There was a solemn plebiscite. Next, Russia took Bessarabia back from Rumania (she had lost it in World War I) and renamed it the Moldavian Republic. Finally the Russian part of the Karelian Isthmus, plus a slice of Finland conquered in 1940, was set up as the Karelo-Finnish Republic, and the pattern of border buffer republics was complete. The land of the Great Russians, the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic, touches foreign territory only in the Far East, where the Amur River divides the R.S.F.S.R. from Japanese-held Manchuria. Between Russia proper and China lies the Mongolian People's Republic, a some-man's land, neither completely in nor quite out of the Soviet Union, but a buffer state just the same.

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