Yet women enjoyed greater success in informal sectors of power and the cultural sphere. For the first time since 1917, autonomous organisations offered women the possibility of actively shaping social change. Everywhere, the end of the state's monopoly on media has meant the end of its monopoly on images of women, too. Women artists, film-makers, journalists, television personalities and writers have presented the public with a profusion ofimages ofwomen: 'in contrast to the unified "ideal mother and worker" of the Soviet period, there are now a myriad of masculine and feminine types'.66 These have complicated and enriched ideas about womanhood, and offer alternatives to the essentialist notions left over from the late Soviet era, still propounded by conservatives and some experts. Nevertheless, essentialist notions remain powerful. Not least among the ironies ofthe Soviet legacy is the intensely gendered nature of the backlash against it. Rejecting the 'emancipation' that Stalinism celebrated, many post-Soviet Russians have nevertheless embraced the domesticity that became its counterpart. A blend of Soviet and pre-revolutionary gender discourses, and linked to dreams of national revival, these ideas have assumed new life in the vacuum left by Communism.
66 Hillary Pilkington, Gender, Generation and Identity in Contemporary Russia (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 16.
i8
Non-Russians in the Soviet Union and after
JEREMY SMITH
The end of the First World War was followed by a total reorganisation of the political geography of Europe and parts of Asia, not so much as a direct result of the defeat of Germany and her allies, as through the break-up of the three great land-based empires of the region - the Russian, Austro- Hungarian and Ottoman. From the rubble of the latter two, new nation- states emerged. From the Russian Empire, some nations followed suit - Finland, Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania - but for the others the outcome was different. Although Lenin avowedly espoused a doctrine of national self-determination similar in many ways to US President Woodrow Wilson's on which the new East European order was based, after a few years all the remaining territories of the Russian Empire had been incorporated into the world's first socialist state, renamed in 1923 as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union. Instead of encouraging outright independence, Lenin and his successors implemented nation-building policies within a territorially defined federal structure. The constitutional structure of the Soviet Union and many elements of the early policies remained largely unchanged until i99i. In other respects, however, treatment of individual nationalities varied greatly while an increasingly overt elevation of the political and cultural dominance of the Russian nation contradicted earlier policies. The incorporation of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Moldova into the USSR after the Second World War further upset the balance of a system that collapsed in
1991.
The nineteenth century was the high-point of nation-building in Western Europe, and in Eastern Europe minorities also began to articulate national demands. In only a handful of cases, however, did national movements based on the intelligentsia manage to obtain anything like broad popular support. This was especially true of the Russian Empire, where from the 1880s onwards the tsars' policies of Russification initially succeeded in further radicalising the nationalist intelligentsia while in most cases limiting the spread of their influence.[240]
The general radicalisation which spread across all three empires as a result of the First World War greatly enhanced popular support for nationalist leaders. With central authority diminishing by the day, and the Western allies keen on promoting the development of nation-states across Europe and the Middle East,[241] national parties across the Russian Empire shifted their demands from support forbroad autonomy and rights to insistence on outright independence.
Ukraine led the way, with the formation of the Ukrainian Central Rada under the presidency of the popular historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky on 17 March 1917. The Rada's First Universal of 23 June declared the right of the Ukrainian people to order their own lives without breaking away from Russia. In Baku, Tiflis and elsewhere in Transcaucasia, effective power lay with socialist-dominated soviets, which sought to work with the Provisional Government. A series of all-Russian Muslim Congresses affirmed the right of Muslims to autonomy within Russia. The Provisional Government, however, dragged its feet over both the constitutional structure of the post-tsarist state and the question of land reform, which was crucial to the interests of the vast majority of non-Russians, and the demand for independence was raised with growing frequency. The Bolshevik revolution in October 1917 marked, for many national leaders, the end of any hope of autonomy or federalism within a democratic Russian state. The Rada declared Ukrainian independence on 25 January 1918, and a Transcaucasian Sejm made up of Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijani representatives followed suit on 22 April, only to split into three fully independent republics a month later. The fourth Muslim Congress held in Kokand in November-December declared autonomy for Turkestan, but soon became a focus for both Russian and non-Russian anti-Bolshevik forces in the region.
By this time, however, most of the non-Russian regions were engulfed by the civil war. As well as the Reds and Whites, the war was fought between independent peasant and nationalist armies fighting for local self-rule. No less than eight separate armies were active on Ukrainian soil at some point between 1918 and 1920.[242] The nationalist forces of Simon Petliura and Denikin's
White Army were finally defeated by November 1920, although the Ukrainian peasant bands under the anarchist Nestor Makhno continued to disrupt Soviet power until the following summer. In Central Asia resistance lasted longer in the form of the 'Basmachestvo' - a broad and disparate movement made up of a loose alliance of politically motivated opponents of Bolshevism and pan-Turkists together with local warlords. Although the movement was never united or organised enough to pose any serious threat to Soviet power, it continued to cause disruption until the end of the 1920s.[243] In Transcaucasia, following the withdrawal of Turkish forces in the summer of 1918, the three independent republics survived with little interference until Soviet power was established in Azerbaijan in April 1920, in Armenia in December and in Georgia the following February
Richard Pipes's account of the formation of the Soviet Union describes the establishment of Bolshevik rule in these areas essentially as a series of military campaigns in which the Red Army eventually overwhelmed weak national armies.[244] Only in Georgia, however, was the picture almost as straightforward as this. Elsewhere a number of complex factors undermined the independent governments. Outside Transcaucasia, workers and administrators in the cities were predominantly Russian, even where the surrounding countryside was populated by non-Russian peasants, providing an urban base for Bolshevism and opposition to separation from Russia. Bolshevik promises of land reform and the guarantee of national rights appealed to many non-Russians, among whom the idea of independence had weak roots in any case. In some areas, the Bolsheviks were able to exploit splits in the national movement and base Sovietisation on one or other sympathetic group or party, as with the Azerbaijani socialist Hummet Party. In Armenia, the Dashnaks reluctantly accepted Soviet power as the lesser evil when faced with the imminent possibility of invasion from Turkey. Finally, even where the national governments enjoyed broad popular support, they were led mostly by intellectuals with little or no experience of either government administration or military affairs and whose political programme was not coherent or developed enough to satisfy the aspirations of even their natural supporters.[245]
240
Andreas Kappeler,
241
Aviel Roshwald,
242
Arthur E. Adams,
243
Marie Broxup, 'The Basmachis',
244
Richard Pipes,
245
Orest Subtelny,