Many of the 15 republics of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republic (USSR), had been forced to merge with the Soviet state when it was made in 1922. When the country was in an economic crisis at the end of the 1980s and states like the Czech Republic and Poland were opening themselves up to the West, a few Soviet republics, which were separate states before 1922, declared themselves independent in 1991. By the end of 1991 the erstwhile USSR had split up completely.
