Allied propaganda circulated about national self-determination as an Allied war aim. Nationalism, however, was extremely unevenly developed across the empire. Among the 18 million Muslims, for example, it was a weak force. Only the Tatars of the middle Volga, Urals, and Crimea, a scattered population interspersed with Russians, showed much political consciousness and they tended to support a pan-Islamic solution - i.e. extra-territorial, cultural autonomy for all Muslims within a unitary Russian state- rather than a nationalist solution based on each ethnic group having its own national territory. Among the biggest concentration of Muslims in Turkestan - a vast region, which ranged from the northern desert steppe (modern Kazakhstan) east to the khanates of Khiva and Kokand and the emirate of Bukhara, each based on oases and river agriculture - there was barely any ethnic awareness, identities being defined in terms of clans, villages, and oases or, at the macro-level, in terms of the commonwealth of Islam. By contrast, in the Baltic region, the dominance of Germans, together with periodic campaigns of Russification by the tsarist state, had stimulated rather strong nationalist movements, in spite of the fact that neither Latvia nor Estonia had any history of independent statehood.
The Provisional Government seriously underestimated the destabilizing power of nationalism in 1917, fondly imagining that the abrogation of discriminatory legislation would 'solve' the national question. After February, the most common nationalist demands were not for outright
secession but for rights of cultural self-expression and for a measure of political autonomy within the framework of a federal Russian state. Typical was the slogan of the liberal and socialist politicians of the Ukrainian Rada, or National Council: 'Long Live Autonomous Ukraine in a Federated Russia'. Only in the untypical cases of Poland and Finland -where existing states had retained some autonomy after incorporation into the empire - did nationalists demand complete separation. By contrast, in the equally untypical cases of Armenia and Georgia, where nationalism was also strong - both countries having long histories as political entities and their own Christian churches - politicians tended to support the Provisional Government. In the case of the Armenians, who were dispersed between Russia, Turkey, and Persia, the genocide unleashed against them by Turks during the war led the moderate socialist party, known as Dashnaktsutiun, to support the Provisional Government out of fear of Turkey. In Georgia the nationalist movement was dominated by Mensheviks, who had forged a mass movement based on the working class and, unusually, on the peasantry. Naturally, they were close to the Provisional Government.
Among the non-Russian masses demands for radical social and economic policies generally eclipsed purely nationalist demands. In general, peasants preferred parties that spoke to them in their own tongue and defended local interests, but they would only support nationalists when they backed their own struggles against the landed gentry. In Ukraine, the nationalist movement was politically divided, weakened by pronounced regional divisions, and limited by the fact that nearly a quarter of the population, concentrated in the towns, was Russian, Jewish, or Polish. Nevertheless the socio-economic grievances of the peasantry had an ethnic dimension since most landowners were Russians or Poles. The middle-class politicians of the Rada were forced to take an increasingly radical stance on the land question in order to maintain peasant support. As this suggests, nationalism was strongest where it was underpinned by powerful class sentiment. In Latvia, for example, a large working class and lower middle class faced a
commercial and industrial bourgeoisie that was Jewish, Russian, or Polish. In 1917 nationalist politicians of a liberal or moderate socialist hue rapidly lost ground to Latvian Social Democracy which had a base among workers and landless peasants, the latter hating the 'grey barons', or Latvian farmers, almost as much as the German nobility. Generally, workers in the non-Russian areas were more likely to respond to class politics than to nationalism. In the Donbas and the cities of eastern Ukraine, for example, there was a strong working class, but it comprised Russians and Russianized Ukrainians who supported the pan-Russian struggle for soviet power rather than a strictly nationalist agenda.
As 1917 wore on, nationalist politicians steadily stepped up their demands for autonomy, partly in the face of obduracy by the Provisional Government, partly as politics in general radicalized. In Estonia the ? government redrew administrative boundaries along ethnic lines after g February but the elected assembly, known as Maapaev, was dissatisfied e with the extent of autonomy on offer. Challenged from the left by jg Russian-dominated Soviets, it steadily moved towards demanding
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Social polarization
At the root of the crisis that overtook the Provisional Government after July lay a serious deterioration of the economy. In the first half of 1917 production of fuel and raw materials fell by at least a third, with the result that many enterprises closed temporarily or permanently. By October, nearly half a million workers had been laid off. The crisis was aggravated by mounting chaos in the transport system, which led to a shortage of bread in the cities. Between July and October prices rose fourfold and the real value of wages plummeted. Between February and October 2.5 million workers went on strike mainly for higher wages, but though strikes increased in scale during the autumn, especially in the Central Industrial Region close to Moscow, they became ever harder to win outright.
We demand that the Ministry of Labour speedily order the factory owners and industrialists to stop their game of 'cat and mouse' and immediately undertake the increased extraction of coal and ore and also the production of agricultural tools and equipment, so as to reduce the number of unemployed and halt the closure of factories. If Messrs Capitalists will not pay attention to our demand, then we, the workers of the iron-rolling shop, demand complete control of all branches of industry by the toiling people. Of you capitalists, weeping your crocodile tears, we demand that you stop crying about devastation that you yourselves have created. Your cards are on the table. Your game is up.
Resolution of the general meeting of the iron-rolling shop of the Putilov
The factory committees responded to the crisis by implementing workers' control of production. Being the labour organizations closest
to the rank-and-file, the committees were the first to register the shift in working-class sentiment away from the moderate socialists towards the Bolsheviks. The first conference of Petrograd factory committees at the end of May overwhelmingly passed a Bolshevik resolution on control of the economy. As the economy began to collapse, the factory committees mobilized to prevent what they saw as widespread 'sabotage' by the employers. Workers' control signified the close monitoring of the activities of management; it was not intended to displace management but to ensure that management did not lay off workers in order to maintain profits. Employers, however, resented any infringement of their 'right to manage' and class conflict flared up on a dramatic scale. In the Donbas and Urals
