The Soviet Union as an Empire: On the Issue of the Political and Legal Nature of the Territorial Structure of the USSR

Introduction: despite the fact that the modern Russian Federation is the legal successor of the USSR and historically has grown out of it, the necessary theoretical analysis of the Soviet statehood does not occur in modern social sciences. This also applies to the problem of the political and territorial structure of the Soviet Union, about the form of which there is a significant range of opinions in the literature, often diametrically opposed. The subject of the paper is to find the most accurate methods of studying the nature of the territorial organization of the Soviet state, and its purpose is to determine on this basis an adequate state form of the USSR. Methods: the methodological framework for the work is a set of methods of scientific cognition, among which the dialectical and historical-legal methods and the civilizational approach are of key importance in the systematic analysis of the basic conditions of education and trends in the evolution of the Soviet statehood. The results of the study show that when searching for the optimal model of the state form, especially in a revolutionary situation, it is impossible to dogmatically oppose democracy to dictatorship, unitarianism to federalism, centralization to autonomy, etc., which was well demonstrated by the leadership of the Bolshevik Party by creating an updated version of the giant Eurasian (Russian) continental empire of the socialist type. Conclusions: the Soviet Union possessed a sufficient set of political and legal features that allow it to be attributed to empires. Therefore, looking in many external parameters as a historical break with the St. Petersburg Empire, the Soviet state that replaced it, from the point of view of the logic of Russian history and its political and legal content, was a necessary link in the evolution of the Russian statehood, representing a completely natural phase of its development and having at its core an imperial geopolitical nature, genetically characteristic of the Russian civilization.