THE CREATION OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE RSFSR IN THE CONTEXT OF THE CRISIS OF SOVIET FEDERALISM

The object of the research is the constitutional and legal relations that develop in the process of reforming the all-Union socio-political structures and above all the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The subject of the research are reports and speeches by the General Secretary of the party, Mikhail Gorbachev, regarding the creation of a republican structure within the framework of the all-Union party organization, the Communist Party of the RSFSR. The purpose of this study was to study the positions of the leadership of the CPSU regarding the creation of the Communist Party of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. To achieve this goal we used a combination of universal (dialectics), general scientific (synthesis, deduction, induction, structural-system method), private scientific (historical method, structural and semantic analysis of the text), special (formal-legal) methods. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that based on archival documents the author examines the autonomization of republican party organizations within the CPSU as a manifestation of the crisis of Soviet federalism. In addition, the mutual dependence between the separatism of the Union republics and the fragmentation of the unified party mechanism was proved: the latter was not only a consequence, but also the reason for the weakening of ties between the Union center and the republics. The author concludes that the proposals to change the structure of the CPSU, the center of the political system of Soviet society, went far beyond the framework of internal party life and suggested further changes in federal ties: the transition from federal to actually confederate ties or the complete sovereignty of the Union republics. A separate contribution of the author to the research of the topic is the introduction into scientific circulation of archival documents from the collections of the Russian State Archive of Modern History.