Ukraine, Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bukhara, Khorezm, and the Far East had begun to cement these states into a federation. C. Rakovsky, the Bulgarian head of the Ukrainian soviet government, and the Georgian Bolsheviks, P. G. Mdivani and ? F. I. Makharadze, favoured a loose arrangement whereby republics g would remain sovereign entities. By contrast, Stalin favoured e 'autonomization', which entailed incorporating the republics into the jg RSFSR. Lenin rejected this solution as redolent of the chauvinism of the
Nevertheless within the framework of a Russian-dominated Soviet Union, the 1920s witnessed an extraordinary process of nation-building, as the Bolsheviks entrenched nationality as the major principle of sociopolitical organization. Ethnographers set to work classifying ethnic groups, many of which had little understanding of themselves as
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nations, and programmes were devised to promote native political elites and intelligentsias together with minority languages and cultures. The process was designed, in Stalin's words, to produce republics and autonomous regions that were 'national in form, but socialist in content'. This was something of a paradox, since the Soviet Union claimed to represent the transcendence of the nation-state and, at various times, deployed a rhetoric of ultimate 'fusion' of nations into a single Soviet people. In practice, however, nationality, once seen as an impediment to socialism, came to be viewed positively - as the modality through which the economic, political, and cultural development of the non-Russian peoples would take place. Having eliminated traditional elites, the regime created a base for itself in the non-Russian republics by promoting members of the indigenous population - mainly young, politically active males from humble backgrounds - to positions of leadership. By institutionalizing the autonomies as political units and by creating national elites, Soviet rule helped to create quasi-nations, albeit at sub-state level. Broadly, this policy of indigenizing the party-state was vindicated. The proportion of Ukrainians in the Ukrainian Communist Party, for example, rose from 24% in 1922 to 52% in 1927, while Kazakh membership of that republic's party grew from 8% to 53% between 1924 and 1933. At the centre, however, Slavs continued to monopolize the key positions in the political, military, and security apparatuses. In other words, the limits of autonomy were firmly set by Moscow and those who dared to buck those limits risked the fate of the talented Sultangaliev, who was tried in June 1923 for being a'national communist'.
The cultural dimension of the programme of nation-building, which tooktheformof mass literacy and education and the promotion of print culture in native languages, was a brilliant success. Alphabets were devised for people who had no written language. By 1927, 82% of schools in Ukraine were teaching through the medium of Ukrainian. Native intelligentsias were offered preferential access to higher education and professional positions. Where there were minority
peoples within national autonomies they were given their own national Soviets. In the Far East, for example, Chinese and Korean peoples enjoyed an unprecedented degree of tolerance, taking part in local government, establishing their own schools and newspapers. This emphasis on cultural-national autonomy, however, did not preclude conflict. The Tatars favoured updating Arabic as the written medium of their language, whereas Muslims in Azerbaijan and the northern Caucasus pressed for a Latin script. By 1925 official opinion had lined up behind the latter. Moscow genuinely encouraged national diversity, but always on its terms. Firmly committed to an evolutionist view of social development, it did not consider all cultures equal and had little compunction in attacking aspects of cultures, such as those in Central Asia, which it deemed 'backward'. Indeed one's very recognition as a nation depended on Moscow: the Kurds, for example, were never so recognized; and the extent of one's political autonomy was also ? dependent on the whim of Moscow, Abkhazia, for example, had its full g republican status withdrawn in 1931. The 1920s, then, were a unique era e of nation-building, yet contradictions between the institutionalization jg of nationality within a federal structure and the centralization of
Crisis of NEP
Between 1926-7 and 1928-9 the terms of trade for agriculture improved, owing to a lowering of industrial prices; but though the total volume of food sold continued to rise, grain sales did not increase. Indeed a lowering of the procurement price of grain led to a serious shortage by the autumn of 1927, when only 16.9% of the harvest was marketed. By the summer of 1928 rationing had been reintroduced in the cities. Meanwhile, the government was committed to stepping up the rate of investment in heavy industry, a commitment hardened by the war scare of summer 1927, brought on by Britain's severance of diplomatic relations. The procurement crisis of 1928 thus threw into
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doubt whether the ambitious targets of the First Five-Year Plan, ratified in December 1927, could be realized. Many in the party were now convinced that kulaks were holding the country to ransom. Having trounced the right opposition, Stalin resolved to smash these 'bourgeois' forces.
In recent years NEP has been the subject of heated debate. During Gorbachev's perestroika from 1986 to 1991, many argued that NEP could have delivered balanced economic growth at a rate equal to that achieved by the crash industrialization of the First Five-Year Plan, once allowance is made for waste and destruction. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the consensus changed, historians arguing that NEP was doomed to collapse under the weight of its contradictions. The foregoing account has tried to show that whilst where is no absolute contradiction between plan and market, NEP was a deeply contradictory system. From the start it proved vulnerable to crises, and as it evolved the temptation to use command-administrative methods to alter the workings of the market proved irresistible. Yet in 1928 NEP was not in terminal crisis. Grain procurement was a serious problem, springing directly from the strategy of prioritizing investment in heavy industry in an economy where there was an acute shortage of consumer goods, but a change in the price of grain relative to other agricultural commodities could have improved grain sales. The key problem was that NEP could not generate the level of investment required to sustain the rate of industrialization to which Stalin and his epigones were now committed. Ludicrously ambitious though their targets for growth subsequently became, they were not necessarily wrong to think that growth had to be rapid. In particular, the tense international situation created by the Versailles peace settlement left the Soviet Union vulnerable to hostile powers, and dictated that she build her economic and military strength as rapidly as possible.
Nevertheless, in the final instance, the break with NEP was determined not by sober assessment of the international situation or by technical
discussion of rates of investment, but by ideology. One may doubt that kulaks were gaining ground on the proletariat, but Bolsheviks, like everyone else, acted not upon the basis of 'reality' but upon their perception of reality. The party's entire rationale was to bring about 'socialism'; now it looked as though the continuance of NEP would cause the state to drown in a sea of petty-bourgeois forces or succumb to international capital. However, if the deep structure of Bolshevik ideology - its calculus of class forces - made the break with NEP likely, it did not
