All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK), Decree on the Delimitation of the Boundaries of the Autonomous Turkestan Socialist Soviet Republic (ATSSR). October 14, 1924

Original Source: Postanovleniia II sessii VTsIK, XI sozyva (Moscow: Izdatel sto VTSIK, 1926), pp. 7-8.

The VTsIK decides to ratify the following decision of the central executive committee of the ATSSR. The October Revolution of workers and peasants has liberated all those who have been oppressed and enslaved by the feudals, the nobility, the landowners, and capitalists. The heavy chains of centuries of slavery of the laboring masses have been broken. The oppressed peoples of the former Tsarist Empire have obtained full freedom and have been given in the revolution their right of national self-determination including that of separation.

Seven years of gigantic revolutionary struggle and the construction of a new society of laboring masses have resulted in the greatest gains. The USSR is the greatest union of free, equal peoples of all soviet republics. The USSR is at present the sole country in the world, where all traces of national inequality and slavery have been annihilated at the roots.

The peoples of Turkestan, who, during tsarism, were in the position of colonial slaves with no rights, now being free and equal, are building their own state by the efforts of the laboring masses. The peoples of Turkestan, having attained national liberation, having firmly established the bases of the authority of the workers and dekkans, inflexibly developing and enlarging the cultural and economic building, have attained results which secure for them full possibility to reconstruct the ATSSR into a national homogeneous state.

The central executive committee of the ATSSR, deriving from the principles directing national relations and material development of the peoples of the Soviet Union, and desirous of fulfilling the general will of the masses of workers and dekkans of the ATSSR, decrees:

1. In order to carry out the general wish expressed by the masses of workers and dekkans of the Uzbek people, to grant to the Uzbek people the right to secede from the composition of the ATSSR and form an independent Uzbek Socialist Soviet Republic (UzSSR).

2. In order to carry out the general wish expressed by the masses of workers and dekkans of the Turkmen people, to grant to the Turkmen people the right to secede from the composition of the UzSSR and to form an independent Turkmen Socialist Soviet Republic (TurkSSR).

3. In order to carry out the general wish expressed by the masses of workers and dekkans of the Kirghiz people, to grant to the Kirghiz people the right to secede from the composition of the ATSSR for the purpose of uniting the Kirghiz regions of the ATSSR with the Kirghiz Socialist Soviet Republic.

4. In order to carry out the general wish expressed by the masses of workers and dekkans of the Kara-Kirghiz people, to grant to the Kara-Kirghiz people the right to secede from the composition of the ATSSR and to form the Kara-Kirghiz autonomous region within the composition of the RSFSR.

5. In order to carry out the general wish expressed by the masses of workers and dekkans of the Tadzhik people, to grant to the Tadzhik people the right to secede from the composition of the ATSSR and to form an autonomous Tadzhik region within the composition of the Union Uzbek Republic.

President of the VTsIK: M. Kalinin.
Secretary of the VTsIK: A. Kiselev

Source: Walter Russell Batsell, Soviet Rule in Russia (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1929), Chapter VI.