By the middle of 1921, then, Soviet power extended across most of the former territory of the Russian Empire. The Bolsheviks then faced the problem of how to administer the non-Russian areas and to build a socialist society there. On the one hand, they needed to ensure at least the passive support of the local population, and Lenin in particular was concerned to avoid any impression that the new Soviet state was a continuation of the old Russian-dominated one, and to hold up Soviet rule as a shining example to anti-colonial movements elsewhere in the world. On the other hand, the non-Russian nationalities were overwhelmingly peasant in composition, had even lower levels of literacy than Russians, and were less receptive to the demands of socialism than were Russian workers, leaving them vulnerable to the propaganda efforts of nationalists and religious leaders. From early 1918 onwards, the numerous smaller nationalities of Soviet Russia itself were granted limited self-rule in the form of autonomous republics and regions, whose purpose was both to satisfy the national aspirations of the population and sections of their elites, and to provide an avenue for the introduction of socialism together with cultural and economic development. In the summer of 1922 Joseph Stalin, as commissar for nationality affairs, drew up a plan which would have extended this system to Ukraine, Belorussia and Transcaucasia, by incorporating them directly into the existing Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Lenin opposed this on the basis that the overt subordination of the major nationalities to a Russian state would alienate their populations and send out the wrong message internationally. The alternative scheme he proposed was a formal federation of equals into what eventually became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics at the end of 1923.
The constitutional structure was only one part of early Soviet policies towards the non-Russians. Equally important was the process of korenizatsiia - roughly translated as 'indigenisation' - a set of policies aimed at developing and promoting national identity: the recruitment and promotion of members of the local nationality in the Communist Party and Soviet system; positive discrimination in other areas of employment; the creation or standardisation of national languages and scripts, together with national cultures based on earlier writers and folk traditions; the extension of local self-rule for national minorities outside the republics through a system of national soviets; and building up a network of national schools with instruction in the mother tongue for all non-Russians.[246] Some historians have interpreted these measures as a product of the weakness of Bolshevik appeal to the non-Russians, as a series of temporary concessions to national feeling.[247] Terry Martin, however, emphasises that the policies of korenizatsiia went far beyond what might have been needed to ensure loyalty from the non-Russians. Rather than representing a concession, the policies were aimed at undermining anti-Soviet nationalism through promoting national identity in a Soviet form.[248]
Korenizatsiia had a profound impact in the non-Russian republics. By 1927 local nationality representation in Soviet executive committees in the republics ranged from 68.3 per cent (Turkmen SSR) to 80.5 per cent (Armenian SSR).[249]By the end ofthe 1920s, the Communists were claiming that almost all children were receiving education in their mother tongue.[250] Opportunities in higher education also opened up for non-Russians with the nativisation ofuniversities in Tashkent, Belorussia and Ukraine, and the operation of a quota system across the country.
This strategy was not without problems. From the beginning, it aroused opposition among local Russians who felt not only a loss of their previous privileges, but actual negative discrimination, while Communist leaders in the republics were frequently seen to be pushing the policies to the extent that they were denounced as nationalists. The result was a series oflocal crises and clashes between different wings of the republican Communist parties, which reached their most acute in Ukraine.12
The first signs of a change of direction in policy came in 1928-9 with a series of high-profile show trials of intellectuals and less public purges of leading republican figures in Ukraine, Belorussia, the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Republic, Crimea and Kazakhstan. A more general assault on the nation- building approaches of the i920s was signalled at the turn of the decade over the question ofthe interpretation of Russian history. In the 1920s a new school of history (the 'Pokrovsky School'), supported by the regime, interpreted the Russian Empire as an exploitative, brutal colonial regime. But in the 1930s the Russian people, history and culture were advanced as being superior to those of non-Russians, and the Russian Empire was now portrayed as having brought enlightenment and other benefits to the territories it had conquered. This revival of the Russians was symbolised by a law of 1938 which made
Russian, already the effective lingua franca of the Soviet Union, a compulsory subject of study in all schools.
These changes did not amount to a policy of Russification. Religion and other practises, such as nomadism, did come under attack, threatening the traditional way of life for minorities,[251] as well as for Russians, as a consequence of the ideological assault and the drive to industrialise the country. But throughout the 1930s, a renewed emphasis on non-Russian folk cultures was exemplified by a series of festivals held in Moscow, and language rights and the territorial structure were not threatened. The tone, however, had shifted from one of promoting entirely separate national cultures to emphasising a 'Brotherhood of Peoples' in which different cultures could share a common space within the Soviet framework, and in which the leading place went to the Russians. By the end of the decade, those national leaders who had risen to the most senior positions in the republics in the 1920s had been eliminated, without exception, before or during the Great Terror, opening the way for a new generation of leaders who perhaps did not share their commitment to nation-building.
The shifts in policy and tone of the 1930s are open to a variety of interpretations. For those historians such as Pipes and Blank who viewed the approach of the 1920s as a purely temporary concession, the turn against national leaders and cultures was merely a recognition of the fact that Soviet power was securely established and an 'internationalist' programme of national assimilation could now be implemented without fear. For some, most notably the historian Robert Conquest, the turn against non-Russian nationalities went much further, amounting in some cases to a policy ofvirtual genocide. In particular, controversy has raged over the devastating famines of 1932-3, which hit the Ukrainian (and Kazakh) countryside to a far greater extent than it did in Russia. Conquest has argued that the famine was deliberately engineered by Stalin in an effort to break the back of the Ukrainian nation through the purposeful starvation of a large part of its population.[252] Others have challenged both his figures and interpretation, concluding that the famine was a natural disaster, albeit one which the leadership did little to alleviate, and which also devastated Russian areas. [253]
More recently scholars have predominantly accepted the picture of the 1920s as an era of nation-building, and have offered various interpretations of the new direction in the 1930s. The persistence of the federal form and the emphasis on national cultures has led Yuri Slezkine to underplay the extent of changes in the 1930s.[254] Other interpretations invariably see the change in national policies against the background of the dramatic political, social, economic and international developments of the decade. Geoffrey Hosking has noted that the destruction of traditional ways of life associated with collectivisation and industrialisation was an inevitable consequence of economic modernisation which applied to Russians and non-Russians alike.[255] But in itself this is not enough to explain the more positive attitude to Russians vis-a-vis other nationalities in the 1930s. A direct consequence of the combined impact of collectivisation and industrialisation was a massive mobility of population across the Soviet Union as peasants flocked to the cities, and workers and administrators moved from the more industrialised regions to those embarking on the rapid building of industry. In particular, this meant a movement of Russians into the non-Russian republics. The proportion of Russians in the overall population increased between 1926 and 1939 from 21.2 per cent to 40.3 per cent in Kazakhstan and from 52.7 per cent to 72 per cent in the Buriat ASR, for example.[256] Given that a high proportion of these new migrants were engineers and skilled workers, maintaining the earlier anti-Russian stance in the republics was no longer tenable.
246
Helene Carrere d'Encausse,
247
E.g. Stephen Blank,
249
251
Alexandre Bennigsen and Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay,
253
R. W. Davies, M. B. Tauger and S. G. Wheatcroft, 'Stalin, Grain Stocks, and the Famine of 1932-1933',
254
Yuri Slezkine, 'The Soviet Union as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism',
256
Robert J. Kaiser,