USSR Map: The 15 Soviet Republics and When Each Joined and Left

The Soviet Union (USSR) was made up of 15 union republics when it was dissolved on 26 December 1991, and each became an independent country: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. That list of 15 was not fixed for the whole life of the state. The union began with 4 founding republics in 1922, grew to 16 by 1940, and lost one in 1956, when Karelia was demoted. At its final size the USSR covered 22,402,200 km² (8,649,500 sq mi), about a sixth of the world's land, across 11 time zones, and its population was estimated at 293 million in 1991.

Four Founders and the Treaty of 30 December 1922

The Soviet map began as a merger of four Soviet republics that had emerged from the Russian Civil War. On 30 December 1922 a conference of delegations approved the Declaration and Treaty on the Creation of the USSR. The signatories were the Russian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR, the Byelorussian SSR and the Transcaucasian SFSR. The fourth was itself a federation: it had been formed in March 1922 to unite Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, which the Red Army had invaded and sovietised in 1920 and 1921.

The treaty was written so that new members could be added, and it also gave every republic a formal right to secede. Throughout the Cold War that right was widely seen as meaningless, because the Communist Party ran the republics from Moscow through its own parallel hierarchy. It became important only at the very end. From 1922 onward, though, the number of republics on the Soviet map changed every few years, and the changes followed political decisions made in Moscow rather than any free vote in the regions concerned.

Central Asia Redrawn, 1924–1929: the Uzbek, Turkmen and Tajik SSRs

The next additions came from the national delimitation of Soviet Central Asia, directed by Joseph Stalin as Commissar for Nationalities. In 1924 the Turkestan ASSR, the Bukharan People's Soviet Republic and the Khorezm People's Soviet Republic were abolished and their land was redrawn along ethnic lines. The Uzbek SSR was created on 27 October 1924, and the Turkmen SSR, first set up in 1921 as an oblast of Turkestan, became a separate union republic on 13 May 1925. That took the union to six members. Turkmenistan's borders were never changed again during the Soviet period.

The Tajiks were first given only an autonomous republic inside Uzbekistan, created on 14 October 1924. On 5 December 1929 it was raised to a full union republic, the Tajik SSR, making seven. At 143,100 km² it bordered Afghanistan, China and, across the narrow Wakhan Corridor, Pakistan. It was also the only republic separated from Russia by more than one other republic.

The 1936 Stalin Constitution and the End of Transcaucasia

The constitution adopted on 5 December 1936 changed the map more than any other single act. It dissolved the Transcaucasian SFSR and made Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan union republics in their own right. On the same day it raised two autonomous republics of the Russian SFSR to union status: the Kazakh SSR and the Kirghiz SSR. That turned one founding republic into three and added two more, bringing the total to 11.

The Kazakh SSR was huge. At 2,717,300 km² (1,049,200 sq mi) it was the second-largest republic after Russia, with its capital at Alma-Ata (now Almaty). The Kirghiz SSR, landlocked and mountainous, had its capital at Frunze, which is Bishkek today. From 1936 on, every Soviet map showed the Central Asian republics with the borders they still have.

1940: Annexations Take the Count to 16

The last expansion followed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939, whose secret protocol divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres. After the Winter War with Finland, Moscow merged the Karelian ASSR with land Finland ceded under the Moscow Peace Treaty, including the city of Viipuri, to form the Karelo-Finnish SSR on 31 March 1940. About 422,000 Karelians in the ceded areas were evacuated to Finland.

On 28 June 1940 the USSR annexed Bessarabia from Romania. On 2 August it joined most of that land with part of the Moldavian ASSR, until then inside Ukraine, to form the Moldavian SSR. In June 1940 the Red Army occupied Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Soviet-installed governments proclaimed them Soviet republics on 21 July, and they were admitted to the union in early August, Estonia last on 6 August. With five new members, the union reached its peak of 16 republics.

Germany occupied the Baltic states from 1941 until the Red Army returned in 1944, after which Soviet rule lasted for decades. Many Western countries never recognised the annexation de jure. They continued to accept pre-1940 Baltic diplomats, and today the European Parliament, the European Court of Human Rights and the United States treat the incorporation as illegal. Russia's government maintains that it was legitimate.

1956: Karelia, the Only Republic Ever Demoted

On 16 July 1956 the Karelo-Finnish SSR was downgraded to the Karelian ASSR within the Russian SFSR. It is the only union republic ever to lose that status. Moscow made the decision without consulting the population. The official reasons were that about 80% of the inhabitants were Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians rather than Karelians or Finns, and that running a separate republic was costly; in 1955 its state apparatus cost 19.6 million rubles. From then until 1991 the union had 15 republics, listed in the constitution in an order that roughly reflected their population and economic weight when each joined.

Two of the 15 had an unusual international status. Constitutional amendments in 1944 let republics run their own foreign-affairs commissariats, and as a result the Ukrainian and Byelorussian SSRs joined the United Nations as founding members in 1945, alongside the USSR itself.

How the 15 Left, March 1990 to December 1991

The breakup ran in the opposite direction to the 1940 annexations: the Baltic republics, the last full members to join, were the first to leave. Estonia declared sovereignty within the union on 16 November 1988. On 23 August 1989, the 50th anniversary of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, about two million people formed the Baltic Way, a human chain stretching 675 km (419 mi) across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

On 11 March 1990 Lithuania became the first republic to declare independence, through the Act of the Re-Establishment of the State of Lithuania. Latvia followed on 4 May 1990 with a declaration that opened a transition period. The Russian SFSR, now led by Boris Yeltsin, declared state sovereignty on 12 June 1990, the date Russia still marks as Russia Day. In a union-wide referendum on 17 March 1991, nearly 80% of voters backed keeping a reformed union. Six republics boycotted the vote: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Armenia, Georgia and Moldova. Georgia declared independence on 9 April 1991 after a referendum in which 99.5% voted yes.

The failed August coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, which collapsed on 21 August 1991, set off the rest. Estonia restored its independence on 20 August and Latvia on 21 August. Ukraine declared independence on 24 August, Belarus on 25 August, Moldova on 27 August and Azerbaijan on 30 August. Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan followed on 31 August and Tajikistan on 9 September. Armenia confirmed independence in a referendum on 21 September, and Turkmenistan became independent on 27 October. On 1 December about 92% of Ukrainian voters backed independence.

On 8 December 1991, at the Viskuli hunting estate in Belarus, Yeltsin, Ukraine's Leonid Kravchuk and Belarus's Stanislav Shushkevich signed the Belovezha Accords. They declared that the USSR no longer existed and set up the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Kazakhstan was the last republic to declare independence, on 16 December. On 21 December 11 of the 12 remaining republics, all except Georgia, signed the Alma-Ata Protocol. Gorbachev resigned on 25 December, the Soviet flag came down over the Kremlin that evening, and on 26 December the Soviet of the Republics adopted Declaration No. 142-N, formally dissolving the union.

The 15 Post-Soviet States in 2026

The table lists the 15 republics in the order they declared or restored independence. Several capitals have been renamed or moved since 1991.

Russia never declared independence. The other post-Soviet states and the wider international community recognised it as the continuator of the USSR, so it took over the Soviet seat on the UN Security Council. The other 14 are successors only to their own republics. Russia remains the world's largest country, and Kazakhstan ranks among the ten largest by land area. Ukraine is the largest country lying entirely in Europe.

The 15 are usually grouped into five regions: Russia on its own; the Baltic states; Eastern Europe (Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine); the South Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia); and Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan). Since 1991 they have moved in different directions. The three Baltic states never joined the CIS and became members of both NATO and the European Union in 2004, which put the old Soviet border on the eastern edge of the EU, far east of the Cold War line described in our guide to the Iron Curtain. Georgia joined the CIS in 1993 and left in 2009, after the 2008 war with Russia. Turkmenistan became only an associate member in August 2005, Ukraine stopped taking part in 2018, and Moldova denounced the CIS founding documents on 8 April 2026.

Several territories inside the old republic borders are disputed. Transnistria in eastern Moldova is a breakaway region that no UN member recognises. Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia are recognised by Russia and a handful of other states. In Ukraine, Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and claimed the annexation of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions in 2022. Ukraine and most UN members reject these annexations. In practice, a map of the USSR's internal borders in 1991 is still the most accurate guide to the internationally recognised borders of these 15 countries in 2026, as the regional breakdown in our guide to the geography of the Soviet Union's dissolution shows.