themselves. In those instances where his supply of patience had been exhausted as the result of our interminable arguments at our gatherings he would suddenly vanish. He used to do this extraordinarily deftly. He would say: ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’ Then he would disappear from the room and go off and hide in one of the cubby holes of the Smolny [Institute] or the Kremlin.
The time had not arrived when anticipation of Stalin’s displeasure caused all to shiver in their boots. Stalin was but one Bolshevik leader among others. Only Lenin with his greater personal prestige could get away with rebuking miscreants.
When Stalin got very fed up he crept out of Sovnarkom itself. (So much for the myth of the grand bureaucrat with inexhaustible patience.) Pestkowski, who knew Stalin’s habits better than most, would receive instructions to flush him out of his lair: ‘I caught him a couple of times in comrade-sailor Vorontsov’s apartment where Stalin, stretched out on a divan, was smoking his pipe and thinking over his theses.’3 There were times when Stalin longed to be reassigned to the fronts of the Civil War and get away from the palaver in his Commissariat.
The cardinal decisions on the national question had anyway been taken by the central party leadership. As the Red Army reimposed central authority over the outlying regions of the former Russian Empire, the Kremlin leadership needed to clarify and disseminate policy in order to maximise its appeal to non-Russians. This was a difficult task. In 1917 it had been the workers and soldiers of Russia who had voted most strongly for the Bolsheviks. The Red Army on the rampage failed to allay suspicions about Russian imperialism, and the stream of decrees from the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs took time to have a positive impact. A further problem was caused by the international situation. Although the Western Allies pulled out of the former Russian Empire at the end of 1919, regional powers in eastern Europe and western Asia continued to pose a military threat, and the Politburo was concerned that Britain and France might use such powers to overthrow Soviet communism. Turkey, Finland and Poland were feared as potential invaders. In these circumstances the Central Committee and Politburo in 1919 set up independent Soviet states in Ukraine, Lithuania and Belorussia — and in 1920–1 in Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia. Communist leaders in Moscow hoped by such means to prove that their commitment to national self-determination was genuine.
The division of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia into separate states had occurred because of inter-national enmities in the anti-Bolshevik Transcaucasian Federation established after the October Revolution. Before the pan- Turkic Musavatist party came to power in Baku in 1918 there had formally been no such place as Azerbaijan.4 The frontiers of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia remained contentious under the early Soviet administration. Yet rudiments of statehood had been acquired. The invading Bolsheviks intended to build on them.
It had been Stalin who drew up the decrees recognising the Soviet republics in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in December 1918.5 He accepted them as a temporary expedient; later he referred to this as a policy of ‘national liberalism’.6 Practical implementation was tricky. There was a shortage of local Bolshevik leaders and activists, and often those Bolsheviks who came from the locality were Jewish rather than of the titular nationality. Stalin was brought into the discussion even when he could not attend sessions in the capital. He was given the right of personal veto over whether to designate the Hummet organisation as the new Communist Party of Azerbaijan. Only Stalin was thought to know whether the Hummetists could be trusted as the territorial power.7 As the Civil War drew to an end, the question arose of the permanent constitutional future. Stalin had no doubt. Until then there had been bilateral treaties between the RSFSR and the Soviet republics. These had been tilted in favour of the RSFSR’s hegemony; and in any case the Party Central Committee controlled the communist parties in those other republics.8 A centralised state run from Moscow was already a reality. Stalin wished to bring the governmental structures into line with those of the party by incorporating the Soviet republics in the RSFSR.
Initially he got his way. The ‘union treaty’ negotiated between the RSFSR and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic after the Civil War unified their People’s Commissariats in military, economic and transport affairs — and the RSFSR People’s Commissariats were given authority over the Ukrainian ones. Yet the Central Committee stopped short of approving his fundamental objective of comprehensive incorporation.9 Kamenev was his chief opponent on that occasion. But Lenin too became a critic. A fault-line in their long-lasting collaboration was being disclosed. Lenin had drawn the conclusion from the history of the Civil War that the formal constitutional concessions to the borderlands had to be maintained. Soviet republics in Ukraine and elsewhere had to be preserved. What Stalin desired was to expand the RSFSR and turn Ukraine into one of its internal ‘autonomous republics’. An immense dispute was in the making.
The establishment of autonomous republics had begun in the Civil War, and the policy was widely implemented from 1920 as the nationalterritorial principle of local government was extended to the Bashkirs, the Tatars, the Kirgiz, the Chuvash, the Mari, the Kalmyks, the Vots and the Karelian Finns.10 This was not achieved without controversy. The granting of authority to indigenous national and ethnic groups annoyed the Russian inhabitants of autonomous regions and provinces who felt they were being reduced to second-class status as citizens of the RSFSR. Yet the Politburo bent over backwards to be seen to enhance conditions for non-Russians. Not a few towns with a mainly Russian population were included in an autonomous republic specifically so that the republic might become economically and administratively self-standing.11 All this made for complex discussions in Moscow, and easy answers were seldom on offer. The Bolsheviks were trying to de-imperialise an old empire without allowing its disintegration into separate nation-states. There were no models to copy. They were setting the precedent, and Stalin was the Politburo’s acknowledged specialist in this matter.
His involvement was often a troubled one. The Tatar–Bashkir Republic, installed in the RSFSR in 1919, had quickly come to grief. The Tatars and the Bashkirs were not the best of friends, and the local Russian residents disliked feeling excluded from influence. Inter-ethnic violence scarred the entire region. The Red Army had to be deployed to restore order and Stalin reasonably decided that the Tatars and Bashkirs should have separate national-territorial units. The basic orientation of policy was maintained. Stalin went on establishing autonomous republics even if this meant offending the local Russians.12
No region presented him with trickier problems than did his native Caucasus. The ethnic intermingling — on both the north and south sides of the mountain range — was intense and the chronic rivalries were acute. Stalin could not deal with this exclusively from the Kremlin and on 14 September the Politburo assigned him a mission to the north Caucasus. After the disappointments of the Soviet–Polish War, he was given much scope for initiative.13 This was the kind of mission he liked. Reaching the region, he gave approval to the existing Mountain Republic: he liked its capacity to unite Chechens, Ossetians, Kabardians and others. But he did not include the Cossacks.14 Much of the trouble in the north Caucasus derived from the Imperial practice of settling Cossacks, descendants of Russian peasant refugees, in villages as a means of controlling the indigenous nations. A Mountain Republic with their participation would scarcely be effective. Stalin boasted to Lenin in October 1920 that that he had meted out ‘exemplary punishment to several Cossack settlements’ for their rebellious activity.15 Despite his later reputation, Stalin had no special fondness for Russians and his continuation of the ethnic cleansing of the Cossacks reflected this.16
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
