In summer 1921 Stalin, who had been convalescing in Nalchik in the north Caucasus,24 paid a trip at last to the south Caucasus. Until then the affairs of the region had been handled by himself in the Kremlin and by the Party Caucasian Bureau based in Tbilisi. The Bureau’s leaders were his friends Sergo Ordzhonikidze and Sergei Kirov, and Ordzhonikidze insisted that Stalin’s presence was required if the many pressing problems were to be resolved.25 It was his first visit to Georgia since before the Great War. He had no illusions about the kind of welcome he would receive. Even many among Georgia’s Bolsheviks had always disliked him, and his identification with the ‘Russian’ armed forces of occupation — the Red Army — did little to improve his standing among Georgians in general. But Stalin was undeterred. If Ordzhonikidze and Kirov as the Kremlin’s representatives could not do this, Politburo member Stalin would force through the necessary decisions.
The Caucasian Bureau had been divided over various territorial matters. As well as the recurrent pressures from the Georgian communist leadership to incorporate Abkhazia in the Georgian Soviet Republic there was a demand from the Azerbaijani communist leadership in Baku for Karabagh, an Armenian-inhabited enclave butting into Azerbaijan, to be made part of Azerbaijan; and the Armenian communists fiercely opposed this on the ground that Karabagh should belong to Armenia. Ruling the Caucasus was never going to be easy after the wars fought between the Azeris and Armenians from 1918. But on balance it was Stalin’s judgement that the Azerbaijani authorities should be placated. Revolutionary pragmatism was his main motive. The Party Central Committee in Moscow gave a high priority to winning support for the Communist International across Asia. Bolshevik indulgence to ‘Moslem’ Azerbaijan would be noted with approval in the countries bordering the new Soviet republics. In any case, the Turkish government of Kemal Pasha was being courted by Moscow; armies of Turks had rampaged into Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in recent years and continued to pose a threat to Soviet security: the appeasement of Azerbaijan was thought an effective way of keeping Istanbul quiet.
This stored up trouble for the future. If the matter had been decidable without reference to the situation in the rest of Asia, Stalin would probably have left Karabagh inside Armenia despite Azerbaijani protests. He would also, if he had had his way at the same meeting of the Caucasian Bureau, have handed Abkhazia to Georgia with rights of internal autonomy.26 But Abkhazian Bolshevik leaders Yefrem Eshba and Nestor Lakoba, who had negotiated a treaty between the RSFSR and Kemal Pasha’s Turkey,27 had lobbied hard in Moscow and set up their Abkhazian Soviet Republic. Georgia’s Menshevik government had annexed Abkhazia and maltreated its people. Eshba and Lakoba insisted that their country’s reincorporation in Georgia would cast an odour of unpopularity on Bolshevism; and faced with this campaign, Stalin backed down and allowed them their Soviet republic. He could only do this, however, at the cost of annoying the Georgian Party Central Committee (which likewise argued that Bolshevism would incur popular hostility if he gave in to Eshba and Lakoba).
He was given proof of this when he addressed the Party City Organisation in Tbilisi on 6 July. This audience was already angry with him and his speech made everything worse. Stalin argued that the Georgian economy was incapable of post-war recovery without the specific assistance of Russia.28 This was both untrue and offensive; for Western investment and trade could have helped to regenerate industry and agriculture in the country. Intellectually he was on firmer ground when he asserted:29
Now, on arriving in Tiflis [Tbilisi], I’ve been struck by the absence of the old solidarity among the workers of the various nationalities of the Caucasus. Nationalism has developed among workers and peasants and distrust has been strengthened towards comrades of a different nationality; anti-Armenian, anti-Tatar, anti-Georgian, anti-Russian and any other nationalism you like to mention.
But this argument, too, failed to go down well. Essentially Stalin was warning the Georgian communist leaders and activists that they had to show themselves worthy of Moscow’s support. Abkhazians, Ossetians and Adzharians had indeed suffered under the Menshevik government, which had treated their lands as provinces of historical Georgia. They had insisted that the Abkhazians were a Georgian tribe despite the fact that their language is entirely unrelated. If harmony was to be attained, the Georgian communist leadership had to set an example.
Stalin ran into still worse trouble at a workers’ mass meeting he addressed in Tbilisi. Georgia’s returning son was heard in silence as he explained the case for Sovietisation. This contrasted with the attitude to Isidore Ramishvili, the deposed Menshevik Interior Minister and old personal enemy of Stalin, who was greeted with a lengthy ovation.30 Stalin’s temper had a fast fuse and, protected by his Cheka guards, he stormed out. His entire political career in Tbilisi had been full of rejections. This latest episode was one humiliation too many. As usual he sublimated his resentment by attacking others. He held Pilipe Makharadze, Chairman of the Georgian Revolutionary Committee, personally responsible for the fracas. Makharadze was sacked and replaced by Budu Mdivani.31 At the time Stalin felt he had promoted a more loyal and compliant Bolshevik to power in Georgia. And of course he misjudged his man. Mdivani turned out to be a far from pliable appointee; and it was he who had agitated Lenin into action from his sickbed against Stalin on the national question.
The tempestuous dispute between Lenin and Stalin in 1922–3 tended to hide the fact that Stalin stood by the general agreement they reached after he had made the concessions that Lenin demanded. The decision to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was ratified on 31 December 1922 and the new Constitution came formally came into force at the beginning of 1924. The federal system was a mere screen. The Politburo of the Russian Communist Party took the main decisions about each Soviet republic. Stalin had his own growing bias in favour of Russia and the Russians. Yet the grant of authority, prestige and enhancement to the other peoples remained intact. The Soviet republics were conserved and the autonomous republics proliferated. National and ethnic groups enjoyed the freedom to run presses and schools in their own languages — and Stalin and his associates gave resources for philologists to develop alphabets for the languages of several small peoples in the Caucasus and Siberia so that schooling might commence. The party also tried to attract indigenous young recruits to the party. Stalin spelled this out to a conference held by the Central Committee with ‘national’ republican and provincial communist leaders in June 1923.32
It was an extraordinary experiment. The Politburo, while setting its face against the possibility that any region of the USSR might secede, continued to try to demonstrate to everyone at home and abroad that the October Revolution had set the conditions for the final solution of the national problems. Stalin was not just following policy. He believed in it and was one of its most committed exponents. His Georgian origins and early Marxist activity had moored him to the idea that the peoples of the former Russian Empire needed to be schooled, indoctrinated and recruited if Marxism was to take root among them. He and Lenin had got together about this in 1912–13. Stalin was not just playing with such ideas. Since before 1917 he had understood the importance of national languages and national personnel for the advancement of communism. He had sloughed off some early ideas but continued to insist that Marxism had to incorporate a serious commitment to solving the national question. His altercations with Mdivani and the Georgian communist leadership derived not from ‘chauvinism’ (as Lenin had claimed at the time and Trotski repeated later) but from a specific set of objections to Mdivani’s reckless disregard for the wishes of Moscow and the interests of the non-Georgians in Georgia.33