I'm Israeli and my history class used to have a copy of the newspaper announcing the 1947 partition plan. Back then I've noticed the newspaper pointed out that Ukraine and Belarus voted in the plan in the UN (more accurately the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR).

I later confirmed this when I checked on Wikipedia.

So that got me curious, why could the Soviet SSRs vote "independently" from the Soviet Union in the United Nations? Did other countries recognize them as somewhat separate entities from the USSR? And what other "freedoms" did they have from the Soviet Union itself? (Of course I'm assuming they had to vote with the Soviet Union on everything but still).