Russians at the expense of the other national and ethnic groups.16 Matters came to a head in 1923 when Sultan-Galiev advocated the desirability of a pan-Turkic socialist state uniting the Muslim peoples of the former Russian and Ottoman Empires. Sultan-Galiev was arrested for promoting a scheme that would have broken up the Soviet state. This first arrest of a senior communist leader by the communist authorities was a sign of the acute importance they attached to the ‘national question’.
Yet Politburo members remained worried about the potential appeal of pan-Turkism, and sought to accentuate the differences among Muslims by marking out separate administrative regions for the Uzbeks, Tajiks and Kazakhs. Stimulation was given for their paths of cultural development to diverge. This was not the sole method whereby the Bolsheviks tried to divide and rule: they also bought the acquiescence of majority nationalities in each Soviet republic at the expense of the local minorities. Romanians, Greeks, Poles and Jews in Ukraine did not receive as much favourable attention as Ukrainians. And if the attempt to rule the nations by dividing them among themselves ever became ineffectual, the Cheka — which was known from 1923 as the United Main Political Administration (or by its Russian acronym OGPU) — arrested troublesome groups and individuals. In the last resort the Red Army, too, was used. A Georgian insurrection against the Soviet regime in 1924 was ferociously suppressed.17
Nations picked up whatever scraps the Bolshevik leadership was willing to toss from its table. These scraps were far from insubstantial. Native-language schooling flourished as never before in Russian history (and the Soviet authorities provided the Laz people, which numbered only 635 persons, with not only a school building but even an alphabet).18 Ukraine had not been an administrative-territorial unit before 1917; in formal terms it had been only a collection of provinces subject to the tsar. In the 1920s the Politburo sanctioned the return to Kiev from abroad of the nationalist historian Mihaylo Hrushevskyi, who made no secret of his nationalism.
At the same time the Bolshevik central leadership wanted to give stiff ideological competition to Hrushevskyi and his counterparts in other Soviet republics. The difficulty was that the party’s rank-and-file membership even in the non-Russian regions consisted overwhelmingly of Russians. Steps were taken to train and promote cadres of the local nationality. This was the policy known as
Confidential discussions to settle the state’s constitutional structure proceeded. In September 1922 Lenin, despite still convalescing from a major stroke, won his struggle against Stalin’s proposal for the RSFSR to engorge the other Soviet republics. Instead all these republics, including the RSFSR, were to join a federation to be called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (or USSR). This meant that Russia — in the form of the RSFSR — was for the first time given its own boundaries within the larger state it belonged to. At the time this hardly mattered in any practical way to most Russians; it was only in the late 1980s, when Boris Yeltsin campaigned for the Russian presidency before the USSR’s disintegration, that the possible implications of delineating ‘Russia’ as a cartographic entity became evident. Under the NEP, however, the Bolsheviks anticipated not disintegration but, if anything, expansion. And so the decision on the USSR Constitution was ratified in principle by the First All-Union Congress of Soviets on 31 December 1922, and the central government newspaper
In the communist party across the country only the Georgian leadership made strong objection. They had lobbied Lenin for several months, claiming that Stalin had ridden roughshod over Georgian national sensitivities. They particularly resented the plan to insert Georgia into the USSR not as a Soviet republic but as a part of a Transcaucasian Federation. In their estimation, this was a trick whereby Stalin could emasculate Lenin’s somewhat gentler attitude to Georgians as a people. They demanded that Georgia should enter the USSR on the same terms as Ukraine. But Lenin and the Politburo accepted Stalin’s advice in this specific matter. The formation of a Transcaucasian Federation would enable the curtailment of unpleasantries meted out to their respective ethnic minorities by the Armenian, Azerbaijani and Georgian Soviet republics: there was abundant evidence that the Georgians, sinned against by Stalin, were not blameless in their treatment of non-Georgians.20
The Transcaucasian Federation would also diminish Turkey’s temptation to interfere in Muslim-inhabited areas on the side of Azerbaijan against Armenia. Continuing nervousness about the Turks induced central party leaders to award Nagorny Karabakh to ‘Muslim’ Azerbaijan despite the fact that the local population were Armenian Christians.21
Azeri-inhabited Nakhichevan, too, was given to Azerbaijan even though Nakhichevan lay enclosed within Armenia and did not abutt upon Azerbaijani territory. The central party leadership’s measures were therefore not untainted by considerations of expediency, and Armenians had little cause to celebrate the territorial settlement. Cossack farmers in the North Caucasus were even less contented. The Politburo took the decision to secure the acquiescence of the non-Russian peoples of that region by returning land to them that had been taken from them in the previous century by the tsarist authorities. Thousands of Cossack settlers were rounded up and deported to other regions held by the Soviet authorities in April 1921.22 National deportations were to become a basic aspect of governmental policy in the 1930s and 1940s, but the precedent had been set under Lenin.
Yet there was a degree of justification in the party’s claim that its treatment of the national and ethnic minorities put many European governments to shame; and prominent Bolshevik C. G. Rakovsky argued that many peoples in eastern and central Europe would relish the degree of autonomy accorded in the USSR.23 Nevertheless several leading party figures were fearful of the long-term risks involved. The administrative demarcation of territory according to national and ethnic demography laid down internal boundaries that could become guidelines for nationalism. The opportunities for linguistic and cultural self-expression, too, allowed the different peoples to develop their respective national identities. Only ruthless interventions from Moscow stopped these chickens of official policy coming home to roost before the late 1980s. Lenin thought he was helping to resolve the national question; in fact he inadvertently aggravated it.
The nation with the greatest potential to upset Bolshevik policy were the Russians themselves. According to the census published in 1927 they amounted to nearly three fifths of the population,24 and it could not be discounted that one day they might prove susceptible to nationalist ideas. Under the NEP they were therefore the nationality most tightly restricted in their cultural self-expression. Classic Russian nineteenth-century writers who had disseminated anti-socialist notions lost official approval; and Fedor Dostoevski, who had inspired thinkers as diverse as Nietzsche and Freud, was no longer published. Russian military heroes such as Mikhail Kutuzov, the victor over Napoleon, were depicted as crude imperialists. Allegedly no emperor, patriarch or army general had ever done a good deed in his life. Non-Bolshevik variants of Russian socialist thought were equally subjected to denigration, and Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary policies were denounced as hostile to the requirements of working people. Traditions of Russian thought which were uncongenial to Bolshevism were systematically ridiculed.
The Russian Orthodox Church especially alarmed the Bolsheviks. A survey of Russian peasants in the mid- 1920s suggested that fifty-five per cent were active Christian worshippers. This was almost certainly a large underestimate; and there can be no denying that the Russian Orthodox Church constituted part and parcel of the Russian identity in the minds of most ethnic Russians. In 1922 Lenin arranged for the execution of several bishops on the pretext that they refused to sell their treasures to help famine relief in the Volga region. Anti-religious persecution did not cease with the introduction of the NEP, and Lenin’s language in Politburo discussions of Christianity was vicious, intemperate and cynical.25
Yet generally the Bolsheviks became more restrained in the mid-1920s. The OGPU was instructed to concentrate its efforts on demoralizing and splitting the Church by indirect methods rather than by physical assault. This policy took the form of suborning priests, spreading disinformation and infiltrating agents; and when Patriarch Tikhon died in 1925, the Church was prevented by the Soviet authorities from electing a successor to him. Metropolitan Sergei, who was transferred from Nizhni Novgorod to Moscow, was allowed to style himself only as Acting Patriarch. Meanwhile Trotski had observed the rise of a ‘Living Church’ reform movement in the Church that despised the official ecclesiastical hierarchy and preached that socialism was Christianity in its modern form. The adherents of this movement were reconcilable to Soviet rule so long as they could practise their faith. Trotski urged that favourable conditions should be afforded to ‘Living Church’ congregations in order that a wedge could be driven down the middle of the Russian Orthodox Church.26
