Dear god , this is the most historically blind pile of Kremlin propaganda I ' ve read all week . First of all , most SSRs were illegally occupied sovereign nations , so there was nothing to agree to . Secondly , neither Imperial Russia , the Russian SSR , or the Russian Federation has no legitimate right to her internal republics which were the spoils of Russian imperialism prior to the Bolshevik revolution . largely because of a need for stability since having nuclear weapons divided at random across the postsoviet states would have been a nightmareThis is also nonsense , the Russian Army didn ' t withdraw from former SSRs until the mid 90 s . They had plenty of time and opportunity to relocate any arsenal outside their territory . Russia kept its territories in the Caucasus because it wants the natural resources from there . It has fuck all to do with stability , and everything with how much can we manage to keep in our weakened state . Your SSRs but not internal republics nonsense is exactly the kind of legalistic bullshit that let the Russians keep their plundered land . Differentiating the USSR from the Russian SSR is a semantic shell game . The USSR was a Russian supremacist empire , acquired by conquest , not the collective of sovereign nations it claimed to be . That this didn ' t happen was also a reason why Gorbachev got the Nobel Peace Price . Giving Gorbachev the Peace Prize is another notch in belt of this travesty of an award . You shouldn ' t give peace prizes to people who order the massacre of civilians in occupied countries demanding independence . And Gorbachev had nothing to do with the actual terms of the dissolution , he was deposed and signed whatever he was told to sign . The prize should have gone to Yeltsin , if anyone , because unlike the KGB psychopath who followed him , he wasn ' t actually an imperialist . The Chechens claimed they fitted the bill for secesion , but they didn ' t since the agreement only applied to the SSRs NOT to republics internal to SSRs . They fit the bill for secession because they are a nonRussian people living in their nonRussian homeland and were conquered by a Czar ' s armies . My entire point is that Russia gets to keep half of what it conquered , because it changed its name twice , and is pretending it only needs to give up what it took under name # 2 .