ARMENIA AND ARMENIANS; GEORGIA AND GEORGIANS; JEWS; KARAMZEN, NIKOLAI MIKHAILOVICH; LANGUAGE LAWS; NATIONALITIES POLICY, TSARIST; NATION AND NATIONALITY; OFFICIAL NATIONALITY; PANSLAVISM; POLES; POPULISM; RUSSI-FICATION; SLAVOPHILES; UKRAINE AND THE UKRAINIANS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chmielewski, Edward. (1970). The Polish Question in the Russian State Duma. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Frankel, Jonathan. (1981). Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pipes, Richard. (1954). The Formation of the Soviet Union. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Riasanovsky, Nicholas. (1959). Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825-1855. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rorlich, Azade-Ayse. (1986). The Volga Tatars. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. Suny, Ronald Grigor. (1988). The Making of the Georgian Nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Thaden, Edward. (1964). Conservative Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Russia. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Walicki, Andrzej. (1979). A History of Russian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Marxism. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Walicki, Andrzej (1982). Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Weeks, Theodore. (1996). Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863-1914. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
TIMOTHY SNYDER
The centerpiece of Bolshevik nationality policy before they came to power in 1917 was the right of
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nations to self-determination. As outlined by Vladimir I. Lenin in his 1916 work The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination, this constituted the “right to free political secession” for all nationalities without qualification. In the same work, Lenin distinguished between different types of national movement, characterizing the Russian Empire as one of the areas where “the twentieth century has especially developed bourgeois-democratic national movements and sharpened the national struggle”(Lenin, 1964, p.151). Therefore national movements could play an important role in the democratic movement to overthrow tsarism, but at the same time Lenin explicitly argued that the right to secede ought in itself to be sufficient to persuade national minorities of the security of their national rights in a democratic state. While supporting the right of nations to self- determination, the Bolsheviks would not necessarily argue in favor of the right of secession being exercised. In any case in a socialist state, the clear economic and political advantages of remaining part of a larger state combined with the guarantees provided by the right to secede and the natural international class unity of the proletariat would ensure that, in most cases, national minorities would choose to remain within the larger state. This argument has led many historians to conclude that the right of nations to self-determination was purely a slogan designed to attract the maximum support from national minorities for Lenin’s aim of socialist revolution, and was meaningless when it came to the practicalities of a multinational Soviet state.
SELF-DETERMINATION TO FEDERALISM, 1917-1923
The principle of self-determination was invoked by the Soviet government in recognizing the independence of Finland at the end of 1917, but was not applied in its literal form thereafter. Nevertheless, it continued to dominate debates on the national question at Bolshevik Party conferences and congresses up until 1921. These arguments were a continuation of long-standing objections to Lenin’s policy on the part of a significant group in the party leadership led by Yuri Pyatakov, Nikolai Bukharin, and Karl Radek. They argued that the internationalism of the working class meant that the continued existence of nations in a socialist society was inconceivable, that in the short term they were purely a distraction from the class struggle, and that recognition of national rights simply gave succor to divisive bourgeois nationalists. A particularly heated debate between this group and Lenin at the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919 led to a compromise resolution that introduced a new qualification to the right to self-determination: The question of who should represent the will of the nation on this matter would depend on the level of historical development of that nation. The implication was that for more developed nations, especially those already within the Soviet system, the national will would be expressed by the proletariat through their representative bodies, the Soviets themselves. Even in this qualified form, no nation was given the opportunity to exercise self-determination, and by 1920 the commissar (equivalent to minister) for nationality affairs, Josef Stalin, had declared self-determination a counterrevolutionary slogan.
Nevertheless, these debates were highly significant. The internationalist arguments of Bukharin and Pyatakov were deployed by substantial numbers of Russian communists working in non-Russian areas and enjoyed widespread support among both leading and rank-and-file Bolsheviks. In fact, it is doubtful whether Lenin ever enjoyed majority support for his policy within his own party. In the non-Russian regions, disputes between Russian and local national administrators and Party officials were frequent. Although these disputes more often than not centered on practical matters such as land distribution or the status of languages, the latter group frequently invoked the spirit of self-determination in support of their demands, while the former were often ready to dismiss their opponents as bourgeois nationalists. Underlying all the arguments about self-determination, then, was disagreement over whether separate national rights should be recognized in any form. Lenin’s aversion to Great Russian Chauvinism meant that when the center was called on to intervene in such disputes, as often happened, it was more often than not the local nationals who received the more favorable decision. The predominance of Russians in the regional Bolshevik Party structures, however, ensured that even these interventions could be ignored.
Lack of clarity as to the status of national minorities helped to perpetuate these divisions. Initially the Bolsheviks had no clear blueprint for the organization of their multinational Soviet state. The principles behind Lenin’s policy provided some sort of framework: national minorities who had been oppressed under the tsars must be assured that they would not continue to be treated in the same
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way; they should as far as possible run their own local institutions and be responsible for cultural matters, and they should enjoy the same linguistic and educational rights as Russians, assisted by the center where needed. Lenin also agreed with the need for some kind of national autonomy, various forms of which had been proposed by European Marxists since the beginning of the twentieth century. Within these broad parameters, policy was largely improvised in the key period between the end of the civil war in 1920 and the formation of the Soviet Union in 1924.
Shortly after the October 1917 revolution, a Commissariat for Nationality Affairs (or Narkom-nats) was formed under Stalin’s leadership. Narkomnats was responsible only for the smaller nationalities located within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR); until 1924, the larger nationalities of Ukraine, Belorussia and Transcaucasia had formally separate Soviet republics, linked to the RSFSR by treaties but in practice all dominated by the centralized Bolshevik Party. In a 1913 article, “Marxism and the National Question,” Stalin had argued for territorial national autonomy, opposing the nonterritorial cultural autonomy espoused by the Austrian Marxists Otto Bauer and Karl Renner. The first autonomous republic, the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Republic, was created in February 1919 and eventually provided the model for a series of autonomous republics and autonomous regions that proliferated across the RSFSR between 1920 and 1922. Their status was formally defined in separate treaties, but in general the republics and regions were responsible for matters of local government, education, culture, and agriculture, while the center retained authority over industry, the military, and foreign affairs.
In 1922, the unsatisfactory constitutional status of the Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Transcau-casian Soviet Republics was addressed. As Stalin argued, the formal separate status of these republics meant that they could pass their own laws, but if the leadership in Moscow objected, they could have these laws repealed by recourse to the disciplinary procedures of the Bolshevik Party, whose members controlled all the republics. The solution proposed by Stalin was to incorporate these republics into the system of autonomous republics of the RSFSR, which he himself had been instrumental in creating. In September 1922, Lenin objected that it was unacceptable to
