Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics

An Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR, Russian: автономная советская социалистическая республика, АССР, romanized: avtonomnaya sovetskaya sotsialisticheskaya respublika) was a type of administrative unit in the Soviet Union (USSR), created for certain ethnic groups to be the titular nations of. The ASSRs had a status lower than the constituent union republics of the USSR, but higher than the autonomous oblasts and the autonomous okrugs.

The level of political, administrative and cultural autonomy ASSRs enjoyed within the USSR varied with time—it was most substantial in the 1920s (Korenizatsiya), in the 1950s after the death of Joseph Stalin, and in the Brezhnev Era (1964-82). In the Russian SFSR, for example, the various chairmen of the governments of the ASSRs were officially members of the Government of the Russian SFSR.

Unlike the union republics, the autonomous republics only had the right to disaffiliate themselves from the USSR when the union republic containing them did so; there was thus a right also to choose to remain a part of the USSR notwithstanding the departure of the seceding republic. According to the constitution of the USSR, where a union republic was voting to leave the Soviet Union, autonomous republics, autonomous oblasts and autonomous okrugs had the right, by means of a referendum, to independently resolve whether they would stay in the USSR or leave with the seceding union republic, as well as broader rights to raise the issue of their state-legal status.