FYI, there
was a
Galician SSR but it’s territory was absorbed by Poland. Have the Polish-Soviet War go different and the Gal. SSR might stick around.
An old post of mine:
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It is difficult for me to see the Galician SSR as lasting, though--even if the Soviets did a bit better in the Soviet-Polish war and retained control of Eastern Galicia. [1] ...The Galician Revolutionary Committee ("The chairman of the committee was V. Zatonsky and the secretary was I. Nemolovsky - both natives of eastern Ukraine, unfamiliar with conditions in Galicia" according to the admittedly biased--but who isn't?--*Encyclopedia of Ukraine*, Volume 2
http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages\G\A\GalicianRevolutionaryCommittee.htm) and Galician SSR look to me like a temporary arrangement, to get the peoples of Eastern Galicia (the majority of whom were Ukrainian--especially since the Galician SSR did not even go as far west as Lwow/L'viv--but with Polish and Jewish minorities) who had never been a part of any modern Russian state except for a not exactly happy period [2] during World War I, and who had briefly been part of the abortive *Western* Ukrainian Republic, to get used to Soviet rule and eventual incorporation into the Ukrainian SSR.
The two reasons I don't see it as lasting--at least not as a Union Republic--are that
(1) There was no pretense of there being a separate Galician language--and every Union Republic had its own titular language. There was no claim made, AFAIK, that the Galician dialects of Ukrainian were not really Ukrainian; rather, Ukrainian was recognized as the language of the republic, along with Polish and Yiddish.
(Incidentally, the claim that Galician is a "foreign" "Polonized" dialect of Ukrainian, maybe even not Ukrainian at all, has been made recently by Russians and pro-Russian Ukrainians, who argue that since 1991, this "alien" dialect--further corrupted by American and other western influences among the Galician diaspora--has been forced upon the people of the rest of Ukraine as standard Ukrainian! See Michael Moser, "Colonial Linguistic Reflexes in a Post-Soviet Setting: The Galician Variant of the Ukrainian Language and Anti-Ukrainian Discourse in Contemporary Internet Sources," chapter 20 of Larissa M. Zaleska Onyshkevych and Maria G. Rewakowicz, eds., *Contemporary Ukraine on the Cultural Map of Europe* (2009). But AFAIK the idea of Galician as a separate language was never put forward by the Bolsheviks in 1920.)
(2) In the 1920's the Soviets did try to appease Ukrainian national aspirations somewhat, and certainly most Ukrainians, Bolshevik or otherwise, regarded East Galicia as ethnically Ukrainian, even if for military reasons in OTL it had to be left with Poland. (Petliura's recognizing Poland's control of East Galicia in order to get Polish help against the Bolsheviks in 1920 was bitterly resented by many Ukrainian nationalists, despite the obvious necessity of Polish aid if the Bolsheviks were to be driven from Ukraine--though in the end even that wasn't enough.) I think the unification of the Galician SSR with the Ukrainian SSR would be a minimum demand of any Ukrainian Communists with even the slightest national consciousness (and even some without it)...
Now of course the fact that it is logically absurd to say that the Galician dialects aren't really Ukrainian, whereas, say, Volhynian ones are, need not in itself be decisive. Politics took precedence over logical consistency where Bolshevik nationalities policy was concerned. A "Galician" language and nationality could be invented if necessary. But I just don't see any significant *political* advantages to the Bolsheviks in keeping a Soviet East Galicia permanently separate from Soviet Ukraine, and I see a major disadvantage in alienating Ukrainians both in Soviet lands and in the Ukrainian western diaspora.
I suppose that if the Galician SSR went deeper into Polish territory--yet an anti-Soviet Poland survived--the more heavily Polish areas in it might form a Galician ASSR within the Ukrainian SSR, by analogy with the Moldavian ASSR. But it's hard for me to see the war ending with Poland undefeated, yet the Soviets controlling more than the easternmost part of Galicia.
[1] If the Soviets win a complete victory, I would expect to see western Galicia remain with now-Red Poland (whether Red Poland will be inside or at least nominally outside the future Soviet federation), and eastern Galicia go to the Ukrainiain SSR. The one thing I am not certain about is whether the
victorious Soviets will insist in 1920--as Stalin did in 1945--on the version of the Curzon Line which excludes Lwow/L'viv from Poland.
[2] Except for a Russophile minority.