The state’s management apparatus for the economy, however, did not match these ambitious goals. In the 1920s most of the state officials were not Communist Party members. Even in the Supreme Economic Council and Gosplan, most were economists or engineers who neither belonged to the party nor were particularly sympathetic to its goals. Many had been active as Mensheviks, SRs, or even liberals before 1917, but they did have the technical skills the Bolsheviks needed. Lenin had always maintained that they would grow to accept the new order, but it was far from clear that this was the case. The party’s instrument in all these offices was a small number of People’s Commissars and chairmen of committees appointed by the party from its own leadership ranks – men with political rather than technical experience. The same was true at the factory leveclass="underline" the director was usually a party official, but the engineers and clerical workers were not. Thus the party gave orders to the economic managers and factories, but did not have full control. Even so, the party’s Politburo and Central Committee spent long hours on the technicalities of economic administration, the timber industry or the acreage sown of sugar beets as well as arcane issues of monetary circulation and foreign trade. Some of these issues also had a political side and were involved in the factional battles of Trotsky, Stalin, and the “Rightists,” so that economic decisions were frequently decided on political grounds. Indeed Stalin and the other leaders thought that politics should go ahead of “narrowly” economic concerns.
The other side of the new state was its federal structure based on a hierarchy of national units. Soviet federalism was about ethnicity, not just territory, and it grew out of the experiences of 1917–1920. The Bolshevik party had always maintained that the Russian Empire was a “prison of peoples” that combined the worst of European colonialism with the old military despotism of the tsars. Therefore they advanced the slogan of self-determination for the non-Russian peoples (including full independent statehood if desired) well before the First World War. During the revolution most of the national groups of the empire formed nationalist parties, if they did not have them before (as in Finland and Poland), parties that advocated some sort of national autonomy. Before most of them had time to formulate a clear platform and build a base, the Bolsheviks had seized power in Petrograd. With most cities speaking Russian and following the Reds, more or less, the nationalists had as their constituency only the local intelligentsia and, potentially, the peasantry. As most of the periphery was occupied by the Whites or interventionist troops until 1920, the Reds dealt only with the Ukraine and Belorussia in the west and the Muslim peoples of the Volga, the North Caucasus, and Central Asia. In each case the situation differed.
Belorussia was a largely artificial creation mandated by the party authorities in 1919–20 to counter Polish designs on the area. Most of the population was indifferent to the issue and the local Communists were flatly opposed to a local ethnic republic. Lenin (and Stalin, as Commissar of Nationalities) overruled them. The Ukraine was quite different. Here the nationalist movement was quite well established among the minority of the intelligentsia that considered itself Ukrainian and was initially able to mobilize wide support among the peasantry. They faced, however an insurmountable obstacle in the cities, largely Russian and Jewish in population. The working class was absolutely uninterested in the Ukrainian cause and most intellectuals were Russian or identified with Russia (meaning the White cause). Jews followed one or another of the Russian or Jewish parties (Zionists, the Bund), not the Ukrainians. Nevertheless the Bolsheviks in Moscow realized that they had to provide some sort of Ukrainian framework if only to neutralize the nationalists and thus they forced local Communists to form a Ukrainian Communist Party and proclaim (in 1919) a Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Both the Belorussian and the Ukrainian republics were de jure independent of Moscow, but their Communist Parties were not. They were explicitly subject to the orders of the Central Committee in Moscow.
The Muslim peoples were a wholly different issue. In the North Caucasus nationalism was very weak and the predominant identity was Islamic and very local. Some groups had allied with the Cossacks against the Reds and supported the White armies, but the hostility of the latter toward any sort of local autonomy made allies for the Reds, especially in Daghestan, and this led to a multi-sided struggle of extraordinary complexity. The outcome was decided by the victories of the Red Army, and in 1920 the Soviet government began to set up a series of local autonomous republics in the mountains. Each of the local peoples acquired its political unit (some of the smallest combined).
The other main Muslim groups with whom the Reds had to deal were the Tatars and Bashkirs of the Volga and Urals. These were substantial minorities, several million each, living in relatively prosperous areas and largely surrounded by Russians and in mainly Russian cities. Under the Provisional Government the Muslim Duma deputies and other political figures had formed local parties in favor of national culture and autonomy but supported the Provisional Government. In the course of the Civil War the nationalist groups had started out on the side of the Whites but some of them switched to the Reds, unable to stomach Admiral Kolchak’s nationalist orientation. In March 1919 the Bolsheviks set up a Bashkir Soviet republic as an autonomous unit within Russia and a year later a Tatar republic. Central Asia had provided yet another challenge, as fighting lasted until 1922, but the establishment of Soviet rule did bring a single Turkestan Soviet republic within Soviet Russia in 1918. Here nationality was an especially problematic issue that was not addressed until 1924.
In one way the most important of the Muslim peoples in 1920 was in the Caucasus. These were the Azeris, for the simple reason that their largest city, Baku, was also the principal center of oil production in the previous Russian Empire. The rapid conquest of the area led to the formation of a united Transcaucasian Federal Soviet Republic in 1921. The idea came at the insistence of Stalin and Ordzhonikidze over the objections of other Georgian Communists, for Stalin did not want to encourage the aspirations of the larger nationalities. The brief years of independence had seen Georgian Mensheviks refuse to grant national rights to Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia as well as repeated Azeri-Armenian clashes. The solution was a federation that gave some sort of autonomy to all of the many ethnic groups of Transcaucasia, and in that way provided an obstacle, it seemed, to nationalism among the larger groups.
By 1922 Moscow was the center of several Soviet republics, technically independent but ruled by Communist Parties subordinate to the Russian Central Committee. Stalin decided to change this clumsy arrangement. His plan was to simply incorporate the other republics into Russia as autonomous units rather like Bashkiria but with somewhat more autonomy. His plan met opposition from Lenin, who believed that the greatest danger to party rule was Russian chauvinism. He did not want to provoke nationalist resistance on the periphery, and of course Russian nationalism had been the ideology of the Whites. Lenin’s objections led to a new scheme, in which all the Soviet republics, including Russia, formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In this scheme the larger non-Russian units entered the union on an equal legal status with Russia. In the 1920s only some functions were formally centralized in Moscow. There was no Commissariat of Agriculture or Education for the whole union, only in the republics. At the same time the Communist Party was centralized in the Politburo and Central Committee and gave orders to all the republican party organizations. In addition, the management of most of the industrial economy from Moscow was a powerful centralizing element.