Attending the Congress of Peoples of the Terek in November 1920, Stalin considered future constitutional arrangements:17
What type of autonomy is going to be given to the Mountain Republic?… Autonomy can be diverse: there’s administrative autonomy such as is possessed by the Karelians, Cheremis, Chuvash and Volga Germans; there’s also political autonomy such as the Bashkirs, Kirgiz and Tatars have. The Mountain Republic’s autonomy is political.
He clearly meant that the peoples of the north Caucasus would be allowed not only to manage their own territorial units but also to pursue their national and ethnic interests within them.
Stalin explained his policy to the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921 when introducing the debate on the national question. His speech contrasted western Europe where nation-states were the norm and eastern Europe where the Romanovs, Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns had ruled vast multinational states. Stalin exaggerated the national homogeneity of states in the West but he was right that the mixture of nations was denser to the East. At any rate he declared that the anti-imperial struggle had intensified after the Great War as Turkey in particular supported movements for national liberation in the colonies of the European powers. But supposedly only Soviet Russia could do anything practical. Stalin declared:18
The essence of the national question in the RSFSR consists in eliminating the backwardness (economic, political, cultural) of nationalities which has been inherited from the past in order to give an opportunity to backward peoples to catch up with central Russia in relation to statehood, culture and economy.
He identified two dangers. The first was obvious to anyone like himself from the borderlands of the Russian Empire. This was ‘Russian great-power chauvinism’. The other was the nationalism of non-Russians outside Russia, and Stalin stressed that it was a nationalism widely shared by local communists. Both dangers had to be confronted by the Russian Communist Party.
‘Under the Soviet federative state,’ Stalin declared, ‘there are no longer either oppressed nationalities or ruling ones: national oppression has been liquidated.’19 The speech was uncharacteristically vague in content. Stalin may have been too busy to prepare it properly while organising the Leninist faction in the trade union controversy. He was also suffering from agonising stomach pains.20 Then again, he had a huge capacity for work and had always summoned up the strength for a big speech. The probability is that, knowing how quickly passions were ignited by the national question, he sought to damp things down.
If this was his intention, it was unsuccessful. Critics lined up to attack. They assailed Stalin for making an abstract report ‘outside time and space’ and for yielding too much to ‘petit-bourgeois’ nationalist demands while not struggling hard enough against Russocentrism.21 In fact Stalin had problems regardless of what he said. Some delegates wanted decentralisation and greater room for national self-expression. Others, wanting firmer centralisation in Moscow, attacked the alleged indulgence shown to nationalism since the October Revolution. Stalin himself was accused of ‘artificially implanting Belorussian nationhood’. This comment roused him to fury. His reply went:22
This is untrue because Belorussian nationhood does exist; it has its own language which is different from Russian, in view of which it’s possible to raise higher the culture of the Belorussian people only in its own language. Such speeches were given five years ago about Ukraine, about Ukrainian nationhood. And it’s not so long ago that people used to say that the Ukrainian republic and Ukrainian nationhood were a German invention. Meanwhile it’s clear that Ukrainian nationhood exists and that the development of its culture constitutes a duty for communists.
Stalin was not going to allow the entire policy developed by himself and Lenin to be derided, defamed or ditched.
His arguments were demographic and political. The towns of Ukraine, he predicted, would soon cease to be Russian when flooded with Ukrainian newcomers, just as Riga had once been predominantly a German city and had gradually been Latvianised. Secondly, he maintained that if ever the message of Marxism was to be accepted in the borderlands of the former Russian Empire, it had to be conveyed in languages which were comprehensible and congenial to the recipients. The idea that Stalin was a ‘Great Russian chauvinist’ in the 1920s is nonsense. More than any other Bolshevik leader, including Lenin, he fought for the principle that each people in the Soviet state should have scope for national and ethnic self-expression.
Yet it was fiendishly difficult to turn principle into practice. The Caucasus continued to worry the Politburo; and whatever general scheme was applied to it would have consequences for the entire constitutional structure of the Soviet state (or states). When Georgia fell to the Red Army in March 1921, the Bolsheviks had reclaimed as much of the former Russian Empire as they would possess until the annexations of 1939–40. Poland had thrown back the Reds at the battle of the Vistula. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had abolished their Soviet republics and grasped their independence. The Politburo was determined that this should not happen in the Caucasus. Soviet republics in Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia had been established and Moscow steadily increased its control over the region. All the old problems, however, were replicated there. Veteran Bolsheviks were few and popular support for the communist regimes was frail. Religious traditions were strong. Customary social hierarchies were tenacious. What is more, the Red Army had marched into a region which had been tearing itself apart with vicious armed conflict since 1918. There had been wars across borders. There had also been persecution of national and ethnic minorities within each state. Ethnic cleansing had been perpetrated.23 The Politburo had yet to bring about a final settlement.
There were several possibilities. Each little area could have been transformed into a province of the RSFSR. This would have the advantage of administrative neatness and centralist control. Another option would be to establish several Soviet republics on the model of Ukraine in the Civil War. Not only Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan but also Abkhazia, Dagestan, Chechnya and other parts of the north Caucasus could have been handled in this fashion. Yet another possibility was to resurrect the short-lived anti-Bolshevik Transcaucasian Federation of 1918 as a pro-Soviet entity — and, perhaps, to add the north Caucasus to its composition. No plan existed before or after the October Revolution. Stalin in 1920–1, though, came to advocate placing the north Caucasus inside the RSFSR; he also aimed to maintain the Soviet republics of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan while compelling them to enter a Transcaucasian Federation (which itself would become a subordinate part of the RSFSR). He never spelled out why he excluded the north Caucasus from his scheme for the rest of the Caucasus. But probably he wanted a defensible border for the RSFSR against a potential invasion by the Turks or the Allies. The reason why he inclined towards a Transcaucasian Federation is easier to understand: it was a device to ensure an end to the inter-state and inter-ethnic conflicts in the region. Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan were not to be trusted as separate Soviet republics.