Читать книгу History of the Soviet Union - Geoffrey Hosking - Страница 13

The country which the Bolsheviks took over in 1917 was the largest territorial state on earth. It was also a great multinational empire, containing a bewildering variety of peoples: their formation as nations and their absorption into Russia had been going on ever since the Middle Ages.

The Tatar invasion began the process. We saw in the first chapter that the rule of the eastern hordes did much to develop Russians’ sense of their identity as a nation. But it also divided them. Those Russians in the north-west who remained outside the Tatar empire developed their language and culture (Bielorussian) separately: this later became the official language of a Lithuanian state, which in its turn amalgamated with Poland. Thereafter Bielorussian became largely a peasant language, which absorbed marked Polish elements, while agriculture and land tenure tended to follow Polish patterns. In the south and south-west another branch of the old Russian nation, the Ukrainians (which means ‘border folk’), also evolved separately, first under Tatar, then Polish rule. Like the Bielorussians, some of them became Catholics, while even some of those who remained Orthodox in their liturgy recognized the Pope as head of their church (the so-called Uniate Church). They absorbed many Cossacks, or ‘freemen’, fleeing from taxation, military service and serfdom in Muscovy. These became fiercely independent local communities of fighting men, living in a kind of no man’s land between Russia, Poland and Turkey. Their traditions were invoked when Ukrainian national feeling began to revive in the nineteenth century, even though by that time Cossack units had been reintegrated into the Russian army, and indeed were performing internal security duties for the tsar.

By the time the Bielorussians and most Ukrainians were reabsorbed into Russia during the partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth century, their languages and cultures were very distinct from that of Great or Muscovite Russia; but the nations themselves were largely peasant, while the urban and rural elites were composed of Russians, Poles or even Jews.

Over the centuries the course of Russian expansion brought under Russian rule many people who had no kinship with Russia at all. Already in the sixteenth century the Russians were beginning to reverse the Tatar invasion (though at a much slower pace), conquering territories in the Volga basin still inhabited by Tatars as well as by Bashkirs and other pagan or Islamic peoples. In the eighteenth century the Russians conquered the last independent Tatar Khanate, in the Crimea, and began the subjugation of the Islamic mountain peoples of the Caucasus–which, however, took them nearly a century. The Caucasians proved to be fierce fighters and under their leader, Shamil, waged a jihad or ‘holy war’ against the infidel invaders.

During the mid- and late nineteenth century Russian armies struck across the steppes and deserts of Central Asia, into the oasis regions beyond, in the foothills of the mountains, where a variety of Turkic peoples lived, again of Islamic faith. The aim of the advance was partly better to secure existing frontiers, partly to acquire Central Asian cotton, and partly the desire for sheer military glory. Once the armies had passed, the nomad Kazakh people of the steppes were gradually displaced from their best grazing land by Russian and Ukrainian peasant settlers, while in the oasis regions of Turkestan, colonies of Russian workers immigrated to the towns, including eventually large numbers of railwaymen, as the railway followed conquest and trade. The resentment aroused among the local population by this incursion culminated in a major anti-European rising in 1916: much blood was shed on both sides, and many Central Asian Muslims fled across the border into China.

Just beyond the Caucasus mountains, surrounded by Muslims on all sides (and with Turkey just across the border), were two of the oldest Christian peoples in the world, the Georgians and the Armenians. They both came under Russian rule in the early nineteenth century. Although they tended to regard the Russians as uncouth upstarts, both peoples acquiesced in Russian suzerainty, for it meant the protection of a strong Christian power against Islam. In other respects the Georgians and Armenians were very different from one another. The Georgians were a rural people, mostly nobles or peasants, though with a lively intelligentsia: they had a reputation for immense national pride, love of their homeland and lavish hospitality. The Armenians, on the other hand, were more urban and cosmopolitan, successful bankers and traders, often to be found outside their homeland, throughout the Caucasian region, and indeed the whole Middle East.

Along the coast of the Baltic Sea, Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century conquered regions which had been ruled since the Middle Ages by the Teutonic Knights and their German descendants. There German landowners and burghers of Lutheran faith ruled over a largely peasant population of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians. The Estonians spoke a language related to Finnish, but the other two nations were completely isolated in the European community of languages. During the nineteenth century they began to generate their own native intelligentsia, often centred on the church to begin with: by the early twentieth century, with the coming of industry to these relatively advanced regions, a native working class was beginning to develop. In fact the growing national consciousness led to especially violent clashes there in the 1905 revolution.

The annexations of Poland in the late eighteenth century brought several million Jews into the Russian Empire. Speaking Yiddish and practising their own faith, they ruled themselves in self-governing communities (the kahal) under the general protection of the crown. Most of them were traders, artisans, innkeepers and the like. They were usually prohibited from owning land, so that very few practised agriculture. The Imperial government decided to restrict them to the territories where they already lived, which became known as the Pale of Settlement. Only Jews with higher education or certain professional qualifications were permitted to live elsewhere. Official discrimination against them was aggravated by powerful popular prejudice, which sometimes flared up into violent pogroms, especially from the 1880s onwards. Jews began to seek a way out of their situation, some by setting up their own socialist party (the Bund), others by calling for the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine (the Zionists).

Altogether, the peoples of the Russian Empire were at very different stages of national integration by the early twentieth century: some were still primitive nomadic clans, while others had their own literate intelligentsia and working class. In all cases, however, the social changes of the time–urbanization, industrialization, the growth in commerce, the rise of primary education–tended to intensify and accentuate national feelings, both among Russians and non-Russians. More and more citizens of the empire were faced with the question: do I belong primarily to the Russian Empire or to my national homeland? On the answer depended language, culture, career, often religion.

The 1917 revolution posed the same question again, in even sharper form. Marxism had no ready formula for the national question. Marx himself had tended to underestimate the whole thing, assuming that the existing industrial nations of Europe had a natural right, at least for the time being, to speak for the proletariat everywhere, while ultimately national differences were less important than economic ones.

In the spectrum of European Marxism, Lenin occupied an intermediate position on the national question. Unlike the Austrian Marxists, Otto Bauer and Karl Renner, he did not regard nations as permanent historical entities: he held that they were conditioned, like all other social formations, by economic forces. On the other hand, he did not believe, like Rosa Luxemburg, that as soon as the socialist revolution took place they could all be merged forthwith in an international community. Like most Marxists, Lenin was inclined to underestimate the strength of national consciousness as a social force, but he was very well aware that in the circumstances of 1917, the desire of the subject nations of the former Russian Empire to enjoy greater independence was a powerful potential ally. His observations of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had made him conscious of the power of national feelings during what he called the ‘bourgeois’ revolution.

Besides, during the First World War, Lenin became increasingly impressed by the revolutionary potential of the colonized nations of the world, especially those in Asia. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) he developed the view that the class struggle was now taking place on an international scale, and that the colonized nations as a whole were being exploited by the advanced industrial nations of Europe and North America. It followed that, at the present stage of history, the slogan of national self-determination was a revolutionary one, and in particular that the subject nationalities of Russia, led if necessary by their ‘national bourgeoisie’, should be encouraged to over-throw their oppressors and decide their own future.

Lenin, then, viewed national aspirations as real and powerful. Nevertheless, he did believe that in the long run they were secondary. And since Lenin always tended to hope that ‘the long run’ might be speeded up, the result was considerable ambivalence on the national question, an ambivalence reflected in his policy after October. His intention was that nations of the old Russian Empire should be allowed either to declare their complete independence from Soviet Russia or to join the new state as a constituent part of it. He did not envisage any intermediary position. In fact, however, as it turned out, what most nations actually desired in 1917 was neither complete independence nor total assimilation, but some form of associate or autonomous status within a multinational federal state.

In this significant way, the Bolsheviks were out of tune with the aspirations of the nationalities. Furthermore, in the absence of world revolution, Lenin was in no position to offer them genuine internationalism: the most he could extend to them was membership in a multinational state dominated in numbers, language, culture and administrative power by Russians. Without the safeguards of a federal structure, this threatened to mean actual Russification, the very evil against which they had struggled, with Lenin’s support, under the tsars. This danger was intensified by the Bolsheviks’ explicit subordination, in theoretical terms, of national independence to ‘proletarian internationalism’: as Lenin frequently reiterated, the primary concern of the proletarian party was ‘the self-determination, not of peoples, but of the proletariat within each nation’.

In order to meet these dilemmas, the Bolsheviks in government had from the beginning to compromise, and to accept in practice what they denied in theory, a federal structure. The Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited People, of January 1918, explicitly called the new Soviet state ‘a federation of Soviet national republics’. At that stage, of course, even this was a mere aspiration, since the Bolsheviks did not control most of the outlying regions of the empire in which the intended national republics were situated: federation was accepted temporarily as preferable to disintegration. Nevertheless, the use of the word had long-term implications. It harmonized with the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia (2 November 1917), which recognized the equality and sovereignty of all peoples, abolished all national privileges and restrictions, and established the right to self-determination ‘up to and including secession and the formation of an independent state’.

To deal with the manifold and delicate problems of relations with the nationalities, Lenin set up a People’s Commissariat of Nationality Affairs (Narkomnats for short) under Stalin. It mediated in conflicts between national groups, and advised generally on the ways in which Bolshevik policies would affect the non-Russians. As more nationalities gradually passed under Soviet rule, Narkomnats also became a real instrument of political influence. At its head was a ‘collegium’, a kind of large committee on which elected representatives of the nationalities sat. Narkomnats thus collated and aggregated national opinion as well as providing a means by which orders could be passed down from above.

Whenever national self-determination clashed with ‘proletarian internationalism’, it was the latter which took precedence. This can be seen even in the case of Finland, which had been a Russian protectorate for only a century. It is true that when a non-socialist government led by Svinhufvud declared independence, the Soviet government in Petrograd recognized this. It also, however, simultaneously supported a Red rising inside Finland, designed to instal a pro-Soviet government in Helsinki. This rising was crushed after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, when the Germans intervened on the side of the Finnish Whites. Here for the first time a danger appeared which was to recur frequently: that of Red troops being regarded by the local population as Russifiers and being therefore resisted as foreign invaders.

The history of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania was somewhat similar. In Estonia and Latvia a National Council took advantage of the Soviet Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples and announced their independence from Russia, only to be arrested by Red Guards who installed a Soviet regime. These in their turn were swept aside by the German occupation troops following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Then, after November 1918, with the defeat of the Germans, all three national movements struggled to consolidate the existence of independent republics in a dual war against both the Red Army and local socialists (who were especially strong in Latvia). They succeeded in this, at least partly owing to armed support both from irregular German units and from the British navy, which was trying to clear the region of both Russian and German influence. In this way Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania became independent republics which lasted till 1940.

Poland’s independence from Russia was already a fait accompli when the Bolsheviks came to power, since the whole of the Congress Kingdom (the Russian sector of Poland) had been occupied by the Germans in 1915. Recognition of this was a pure formality. What reopened the question was the decision of Pilsudski, the Polish leader, in 1920, to invade the Ukraine and attempt to reincorporate territory which had been ruled over by the Poles before the partitions of the late eighteenth century. The Poles did very well at first, and in fact captured Kiev, but the Red Army then regrouped itself from its victories over Denikin and managed to drive the Poles back out of the Ukraine. The question then arose: should the Red Army profit by its impetus, pursue the enemy into Poland itself, and try to set up a Soviet republic in Warsaw? On this the Soviet leaders were themselves divided, and their divisions were significant. Trotsky took the immaculately internationalist line that socialist revolution in Poland should proceed from the efforts of the Polish workers themselves: for the Red Army to invade would merely persuade them that the Russians had returned, albeit under a new banner, to occupy and rule over their country as before. Lenin, on the other hand, took the view that circumstances were once again favourable for world revolution: encouraged by the heroism of the Red Army against their own bourgeoisie and landowners, the Polish workers would rise against their native oppressors and overthrow their government. Beyond that, too, the revolution might spread to Germany and even the rest of Europe. For a brief intoxicating moment the dreams of October 1917 returned: a Polish Provisional Revolutionary Committee, headed by the Social Democrat Marchlewski, waited in Moscow to take up the reins of power in Warsaw (a scene to become familiar in Europe in 1944–5), while Stalin began to elaborate plans for the creation of a super-confederation of Soviet republics, to include Poland, Hungary and Germany.

This Polish war brought the final stage in the reintegration of part of the old officer corps into the new Red Army. General Brusilov, perhaps the most distinguished of the former tsarist commanders, and a man who had hitherto held aloof from the Communists, published an appeal in Pravda: ‘Forget the wrongs you have suffered. It is now your duty to defend our beloved Russia with all your strength, and to give your lives to save her from irretrievable subjugation.’ Many fellow officers responded to his words. And in case anyone should worry about the revival of Russian nationalism in Communist guise, the internationalist Radek provided a ready justification: ‘Since Russia is the only country where the working class has taken power, the workers of the whole world ought now to become Russian patriots. …’ This was of course only an extension of the arguments Lenin had used to justify the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk: it marked a stage in the eventual emergence of the doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’.

In the end, the Red Army failed to capture Warsaw for reasons which have been the subject of controversy ever since (Trotsky ascribed the failure to Stalin’s military insubordination). Lenin, however, summed it up as follows: ‘The Poles thought and acted, not in a social, revolutionary manner, but as nationalists, as imperialists. The revolution in Poland which we counted on did not take place. The workers and peasants, deceived by Pilsudski, … defended their class enemy and let our brave Red soldiers starve, ambushed them and beat them to death.’

The war of 1920 showed, in fact, that Soviet Russia was prepared to act as a new kind of great power with a traditional army, and that its actions would be so interpreted by its neighbours, even where the ostensible aim was the promotion of international proletarian brotherhood. The ambiguity of Soviet ‘fraternal aid’ has remained to the days of the ‘Brezhnev doctrine’.

The immediate result was a frontier settlement relatively favourable to the Poles. By the Treaty of Riga, concluded in October 1920, Poland was awarded territories that included large numbers of Bielorussian and Ukrainian peasants, and until 1939 her eastern frontier ran only just west of the capital of the Soviet Bielorussian Republic, Minsk.

The Ukraine offers an example of a national movement which, though far from negligible in pre-revolutionary Russia, received considerable fresh impetus from the revolutions of 1917. Ukrainian nationalism had been slow to develop in nineteenth-century Russia, partly because of government repression (it was livelier across the border in Austria-Hungary, where the authorities were less opposed to it). Something of a flowering followed the revolution of 1905, with the easing of national restrictions, and a Ukrainian urban intelligentsia began to develop, particularly in Kiev and the western regions. It remained true, however, that the great majority of Ukrainian speakers were peasants, and that the towns were very strongly influenced by Russian, Jewish and Polish cultural life. Many of the industrial workers were Russian, especially in the modern industries of Kharkov (the largest city in the Ukraine), the Krivoi Rog region and the Donbass: generally the eastern Ukraine had a much higher proportion of Russians than the west.

After the February revolution, a Ukrainian central Rada (Ukrainian for soviet) convened in Kiev, elected rather haphazardly (though no more so than the Russian soviets of the time) by those inhabitants, particularly in the towns, who felt themselves to be Ukrainian. In June, after abortive negotiations with the Provisional Government, this rada issued a ‘Universal’ (or decree, in old Cossack usage) proclaiming an ‘autonomous Ukrainian republic’. The rada was under pressure from a Ukrainian Military Congress, representing Ukrainian officers and soldiers from the Imperial Army: they had gathered in St Sophia’s Square in Kiev and vowed not to disperse until such a proclamation appeared.

During the summer of 1917 a great variety of congresses met, representing Ukrainians from all walks of life: from peasant communes and agricultural cooperatives, from zemstvos and municipalities, from universities and schools, from hospitals and army units. All of them took a pride in using the Ukrainian language and in stressing those traditions which distinguished them from the Russians. What was taking place was the explosive creation of a Ukrainian nation, discovering and confirming its identity in this multiplicity of organizations and meetings, rather as the Russian working class was doing at the same time. For most urban Ukrainians at this moment, however, national, not social, consciousness was paramount. It is not clear that the same was true of the peasants, many of whom shared the grievances and aspirations of their Russian counterparts, and wanted above all more land.

After the October revolution in Petrograd, the rada (in its Third Universal, of 7 November 1917), supported again by the Ukrainian Military Congress, confirmed the existence of a Ukrainian People’s Republic, and promised an early land reform and the convening of a Ukrainian Constituent Assembly. At this stage the rada did not insist on complete independence from Soviet Russia–Ukrainian intellectuals had always thought of themselves as part of Russia, but wanted to be a self-ruling part–yet, all the same, bitter disputes soon broke out between Kiev and Petrograd. With encouragement from the Bolsheviks in Petrograd, soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies, separate from the rada, were established in Kiev and other Ukrainian towns: because of the national composition of the population, these were normally dominated by Russians. Troops loyal to the rada closed some of these soviets down, rather as the Bolsheviks themselves were doing to their opponents in other parts of Russia; but in fact Ukrainian national feeling was so strong, even in the soviets, that when an all-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets opened in Kiev in December, it turned out to have a non-Bolshevik majority anyway. The Bolsheviks, dismayed by this result, withdrew from it and called an alternative congress in Kharkov, where they could be surer of working-class Russian support. So in the Ukraine too the Bolsheviks found themselves acting as agents of Russification.

In this way the scene was set for civil war on Ukrainian territory, with Red troops and Ukrainian military formations facing one another. The Reds succeeded in capturing Kiev before the fighting was halted by the German occupation of the Ukraine in March 1918.

During the following two and a half years at least eight different kinds of regime ruled in the Ukraine, and not one of them was able to consolidate itself, or even to claim the adherence of a majority of the population. This was not only because of the multiplicity of forces interested in the region, but also because of the divisions of interest in the population itself. It is scarcely surprising that the Germans, the Poles and the Whites under Denikin (who would have crushed Ukrainian autonomy) were unable to command mass support. But it is perhaps more surprising that the rada, or the later Ukrainian nationalist government under Petlyura, were not able to attract a more stable following. This may have been because, as Vinnichenko, leader of the rada government, later confessed, the rada had not done enough to win over the peasants by carrying through a thorough land reform. After all, the great majority of Ukrainian speakers were peasants, for whom the agrarian issue was at least as important as the national one: to ignore their interests was to deprive oneself of a vital source of support. This impression is strengthened by the enthusiastic support given by many Ukrainian peasants to Makhno, the Anarchist leader, who seems to have filled a much-felt need, without being able to lay the foundations of stable and lasting government because he had so little support outside the peasantry.

Lacking a convinced peasant following, the Ukrainian nationalists could expect little enthusiasm from the Russians, who preferred rule from Moscow to that from Kiev, and still less from the Jews, whom Petlyura alienated by his encouragement of vicious pogroms against them. The Ukrainian national movement was thus defeated in its hour of apparent victory, and the Reds were eventually able to establish themselves permanently in Kiev.

The Ukraine’s brief and turbulent independence did, however, leave a heritage. The victorious Ukrainian Bolsheviks were themselves affected by it. It is true that in October 1919 the Ukrainian Communist Party had its own Central Committee abolished and was directly subordinated to the Russian Communist Party in Moscow. But many Ukrainian Communists never really accepted this decision: indeed they protested to Moscow and succeeded in provoking from Lenin a ringing denunciation of Great (i.e. Muscovite) Russian chauvinism. He recommended that the Ukrainian Communist Party should rule in a coalition government with the Borotbisty (equivalents of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries), and that party members should ‘act by all means available against any obstacles to the free development of the Ukrainian language and culture’, for example by making it a condition that all administrative offices should have a kernel of Ukrainian speakers, and that no one should be officially employed who did not have some knowledge of Ukrainian.

Under a regime of this kind, the Ukraine did in fact in the 1920s experience an unprecedented flowering of its language, its culture and its education system. But it was to prove fragile, since all the elements of tight subordination to Moscow remained in place.

Rather similar developments took place in Bielorussia, where two imperfectly elected radas arose, one in Minsk and the other in Vilnius. They amalgamated for a time, and declared national independence under German protection (following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk). When the Germans withdrew in November 1918, the Bielorussian state collapsed, and the territory it claimed was subsequently divided between Poland and Soviet Russia at the Treaty of Riga. All the same, its brief, precarious independence served as the basis for later nationalist myths.

The nations of the Transcaucasus broke away from Russia not so much from determination to do so, as because circumstances detached them from the empire. The three main nations of the region, the Georgians, Armenians and Azerbaidjanis, had little in common with one another. The Azerbaidjanis were Muslims, the other two Christians: but whereas the Georgians were a settled people of peasants and nobles (some 5 per cent of the population belonged to the nobility), among the Armenians was a fair number of active and thrusting merchants, many of whom lived outside their homeland, and were resented as successful foreign businessmen usually are. There were substantial Russian minorities, administrators, professional men and workers, in most of the main cities of the region.

All three local nations had territorial claims on each other, and the Armenians and Azerbaidjanis, in particular, had got into the habit of inflicting violence on one another. The numerous nationalist and socialist parties of the region wanted an easing of Russian dominance, but, with the exception of the Muslim movements, they did not seek secession from Russia: their fear and dislike of each other was too great for that, and the Armenians still welcomed Russian protection as an insurance against a repetition of the horrifying Turkish massacre among their countrymen in the 1890s and in 1915.

It is scarcely surprising, in view of all this, that an attempt at a Transcaucasian federation in 1917–18 swiftly broke down, and that each nation tried to go its own way, seeking armed support from abroad. The Georgians received it first from the Germans, then from the British; the Azerbaidjanis from their fellow Muslims, the Turks; and the Armenians from the Whites under Denikin, who, though insensitive to national aspirations, at least offered protection from the hated Turks.

The Germans, the Turks and Denikin were, however, all in turn defeated, while the British withdrew. This left the three republics open to Soviet Russia. During 1920 Armenia and Azerbaidjan, weakened by internal conflicts and border disputes, were reintegrated into Russia by the technique which the Bolsheviks had tried in Finland and the Baltic: military invasion coordinated with an internal coup by the local Reds. Azerbaidjan, with its large colony of Russian oil workers in Baku, was especially vulnerable to such means, while Armenia was weakened by a Turkish attack.

The Georgian Republic was a somewhat more formidable adversary. Alone of the three it had established a stable government, under the Menshevik, Noi Zhordania, and it was carrying out a land reform which brought it solid peasant support. Nevertheless, in February 1921 the Red Army invaded, and was able to conquer the country after a month or so of stubborn fighting. Lenin was doubtful about the timing of this invasion, and he insisted afterwards that a gentler occupation policy should be pursued than in Armenia and Azerbaidjan. He was on the eve of announcing the New Economic Policy in Russia proper, and he was aware of the resentment that brutal Communist policies had aroused elsewhere. ‘It is imperative’, he exhorted, ‘to enforce a special policy of concessions towards Georgian intellectuals and small traders.’ He even talked of a compromise with Zhordania and the Mensheviks. Nothing came of this, not entirely through Lenin’s fault. Stalin was anxious to establish a tightly controlled regime in his own homeland, and, as we shall see, came into direct conflict with Lenin over this.

The relationship between Islam and Bolshevism was an ambivalent one. There was, of course, a basic incompatibility between the atheism of the Marxists and the staunch monotheism of Islam. All the same, many politically active Muslims had become socialists of one kind or another in the decade or so before the revolution. This was partly for instrumental reasons: they had seen socialism in 1905 as a form of politics able to organize an underground party, mobilize the masses and threaten an oppressive government. They saw in it too the means of attracting international support for their own movements. But the adoption of socialism by Muslim intellectuals sprang from reasons of substance too: as a doctrine, socialism offered them, in theory, the brother-hood and equality of all nations, and solidarity in the struggle against Western imperialism. As Hanafi Muzaffar, a Volga Tatar radical intellectual, predicted, ‘Muslim people will unite themselves to communism: like communism, Islam rejects narrow nationalism.’

Significantly, however, he continued: ‘Islam is international and recognizes only the brotherhood and the unity of all nations under the banner of Islam.’ That sentence sums up both what was to attract Muslims to communism, and what was to alienate them from it. The ideal of the Umma, the worldwide Muslim community, was still very different from ‘proletarian internationalism’. It was not a vision to which Lenin could accommodate himself save for passing expediency, especially when combined, as it often was, with the idea of a ‘pan-Turkic’ state–a federation joining all the peoples, both inside and outside Russia, of Turkic language and ethnic origin.

All the same, in the late months of 1917, there was much on which Muslims and Bolsheviks could agree. Muslims had been infuriated by the temporization of the Provisional Government, which had declined to concede the separate educational, religious and military institutions demanded by the All-Russian Muslim Congress in May 1917. As against this, the Bolsheviks opened their eastern policy with a declaration of 20 November 1917 ‘To all Toiling Muslims of Russia and the East’, which expressed abhorrence of religious and national oppression under the tsars, and promised: ‘Henceforth your beliefs and customs, your national and cultural institutions are declared to be free and inviolate. … Know that your rights, like the rights of all the peoples of Russia, are protected by the whole might of the revolution and its organs, the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies.’

This promise was to be belied by events soon enough, but for the first two or three months the Bolsheviks were actually in no position to prevent the emergence of Islamic governing institutions, since this usually happened in areas where soviet power was insecure. As a result, soviets and Muslim committees often existed side by side. It soon became clear, however, that the divide between them was a national as well as a religious one. The soviets were usually entirely composed of Russians, and their attitude to the Muslim committees was often suspicious and hostile, especially in Central Asia, where the memory of the 1916 massacres was still vivid. There were also ideological reasons why no indigenous delegates were admitted to the soviets or to responsible party posts in Islamic regions. As Kolesov, chairman of the Tashkent Congress of Soviets, explained, ‘It is impossible to admit Muslims to the supreme organs of the Communist Party, because they do not possess any proletarian organization.’ And indeed, the working class of Tashkent (mostly either railway or textile workers) were largely Russian. The Tashkent Soviet, consequently, was 100 per cent Russian, and the local native population tended to regard it as the bearer of a relabelled but familiar Russian colonialist oppression. Soviet moves to expropriate waqf (religious endowment) lands, and to close mosques, Koranic schools and sharia (Islamic law) courts, vividly exemplified this oppression: indeed the tsarist regime had never attempted religious discrimination on this scale.

The tension between the two communities burst into the open in February 1918, when units of the Tashkent Soviet stormed and destroyed the city of Kokand, where a Muslim People’s Council had proclaimed the autonomy of Turkestan. Similarly in Kazan, the capital of the Volga Tatars, the soviet decreed martial law, arrested the leaders of the Harbi Shuro, the Muslim military council, and stormed the suburb in which its surving members took refuge.

As a result of these ferocious attacks, some Muslims allied themselves with the Whites. But they did not usually stay with them for long, for the Whites were no less ruthless with those who opposed them–they shot the prominent Tatar leader, Mulla-Nur Vakhitov, for example, in August 1919–and they did not even have any theoretical commitment to national or religious freedom: on the contrary, they proclaimed their intention of restoring Russian supremacy over other nations within the empire. This may explain the fact that most Muslims continued to try to work with the Communists, despite the frequent brutality of their policy in the localities.

For their part, the Communist government in Moscow did come half way to meet them, at least as long as they needed their support in the civil war. As part of Narkomnats, Stalin set up a Central Muslim Commissariat, headed by Vakhitov (until his death), to coordinate Muslim affairs, and to articulate the views of the Muslim population. They were even allowed for a time to run a Muslim Military College, directed by the Tatar, Mir-Said Sultan Galiev: at one stage nearly half the Red troops on the eastern front facing Kolchak were Muslim, so that the Bolsheviks had an overwhelming interest in their morale and training, in spite of the obvious dangers, from their point of view, of authorizing separate Islamic fighting units.

Stalin even held out the hope that the Soviet government would create a large Tatar-Bashkir Republic, to act as an arena for the development of Islamic socialism: though less than a pan-Turkic republic, it could be seen as the first step towards such a state. The Russian Communist Party also recognized at this stage the existence of an independent Muslim Communist Party, not directly subordinated to Moscow.

At the height of their fortunes, in the summer of 1918, the Muslim socialists had succeeded in creating the embryos from which an Islamic socialist state could grow: a state apparatus, a party, an army. The potential ideology of such a state was adumbrated by Sultan Galiev in Zhizn natsionalnostei (The Life of the Nationalities), the organ of Narkomnats. He extended Lenin’s view, expounded in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, that the class struggle was now taking place on an international scale: Sultan Galiev actually claimed that European nations as a whole objectively exploited the colonized nations as a whole.

All Muslim colonized peoples are proletarian peoples and as almost all classes in Muslim society have been oppressed by the colonialists, all classes have the right to be called ‘proletarians’.... Therefore it is legitimate to say that the national liberation movement in Muslim countries has the character of a socialist revolution.

This was the first statement of a thesis which has become enormously influential in the twentieth century, as developed by Mao Tsetung, Ho Chiminh, and other Asian, African and Latin American Marxists. Like them, Sultan Galiev increasingly suspected that only the colonized peoples were really revolutionary in spirit. He feared that the Russian people, having achieved supremacy in a revived empire, albeit now socialist in name, would resume their oppression of other peoples. He could not give vent to such fears in Zhizn natsionalnostei, but he did express the conviction, unwelcome to most Bolsheviks at the time, that revolution was to be expected, not from Western Europe, where the workers were already, from an international viewpoint, ‘bourgeois’, but from the East, where colonized and oppressed peoples could be united by the joint Islamic and Communist battle cry of anti-imperialism. Like Mao, he saw the army–in his case the Muslim units of the Red Army–as a nucleus and training ground for a revolutionary movement, and ultimately for a legitimate and popular socialist government. In Tashkent a similar line was taken by the Kazakh Tarar Ryskulov, who hoped to establish an autonomous Turkic Republic and Turkic Communist Party.

As soon as the Bolsheviks had a little more confidence in their military position, they moved to inhibit any developments which might impart substance to Sultan Galiev’s vision. Already in November 1918 they merged the Muslim Communist Party with the Russian Communist Party, as a subordinate unit. The scheme for a Tatar-Bashkir Republic was dropped and instead two smaller republics, Tatarstan and Bashkiria, were set up within the Russian Republic: in this way hopes of a homeland for Islamic socialism were dashed.

Once the civil war was safely over, and Sultan Galiev’s doubts became even more irksome to the Bolsheviks, in 1923 he was arrested on Stalin’s orders, charged with collaborating with the Basmachi (see below), and expelled from the Communist Party. He was released for a time, but finally rearrested in 1928, and sent to the concentration camp of Solovki. Once the Bolsheviks were securely in power, they unambiguously disavowed the temporary alliance with Muslim ‘national communism’.

This way having been closed, there remained to Muslims only meek submission or outright armed resistance. The latter began with the Soviets’ overthrow of the Kokand government, whose chief of militia escaped and began to organize raids against Russian settlements and Red Army detachments. Gradually more and more partisan bands came into existence, contesting Soviet control over the whole of Turkestan, at a time when the region was cut off from European Russia by White armies.

To begin with, the partisans came from all social classes. The various bands were not always in agreement with one another: they fought under different leaders and for different aims. Some continued the anti-Russian tradition of 1916; some wanted to reverse the Bolsheviks’ anti-Islamic legislation; yet others actually fought alongside Russian peasants in anti-Bolshevik movements. Nearly all of them, however, believed that they were fulfilling a religious duty in resisting Russian and infidel domination. In Fergana they called themselves an ‘army of Islam’, and proclaimed a jihad, or ‘holy war … in the name of our founder and prophet, Muhammad’. Traditionalist and reformist Muslims were at one in their estimation that Bolshevik policy posed a grave threat to Islam. The term basmachi (brigands) was fastened on these various partisan groups by their opponents: they referred to themselves, however, as ‘freemen’.

The fall of the Central Asian Khanates of Khiva and Bukhara during 1920 brought more recruits to these irregular armies, and a new element of political organization and coordination was injected the following year by the arrival of Enver Pasha, former leader of the Young Turk government in Istanbul. Ironically, he had come determined to convert the Muslims of Turkestan to the cause of communism: what he saw there changed his mind completely, and he began planning the overthrow of Bolshevism and the establishment of Turkestan as a base for an international pan-Turkic state. He made considerable progress towards the formation of a unified army with its own, partly Turkish, officer corps. He regularized communications with the Afghans who, long accustomed to anti-Russian resistance from tsarist days, were supplying the Basmachi with arms and affording them asylum.

By 1921 the Communist government had realized that the Basmachi posed a serious threat to their control of Central Asia. They began to send in European Red Army troops, with aerial support, and they devoted an all-out effort to the capture of Enver Pasha. In this they succeeded, capturing and killing him in August 1922.

As in their treatment of the Tambov peasant revolt, the Communists combined repression with a degree of appeasement. In May 1922 they restored waqf land to the mosques, reinstated the sharia courts and relegalized the Koranic schools. At least for a time they were prepared to compromise with Islam in its traditional forms (while turning against Islamic reformism and socialism).

This combination was quite successful. Popular support for the partisans dwindled sharply from 1922, and was largely confined to the mountainous regions thereafter, at least until it revived with compulsory collectivization of agriculture (see below), which once again entailed a direct assault on Islamic values and institutions.

By the beginning of 1921 the territorial and national composition of the new Soviet Russia was becoming clearer. Lenin had hoped, of course, for a worldwide union of Soviet republics, but with the collapse of the short-lived Bavarian and Hungarian Soviet regimes, and the defeat of the Red Army in Poland, this vision had receded.

The Communists found themselves the masters of ethnic Russia–now called the RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic)–surrounded by a network of theoretically independent Soviet republics, whose territory covered approximately the same area as the former tsarist empire, with the significant exceptions of Finland, Poland and the Baltic area.

The Soviet republics now within the Russian sphere of influence were of two types. There were those on the borders (later to be known as ‘union republics’), which had known at least a period of genuine independence during the turmoil of 1917–21, and had established diplomatic relations with foreign powers: these were the republics already mentioned in this chapter. Then there were the republics surrounded by Russian territory, known as ‘autonomous republics’, the largest of which were Tatarstan and Bashkiria, which had never been in a position to exercise any real sovereignty. The situation of these ‘autonomous republics’ was fairly straightforward from Moscow’s point of view: they were permitted their own governmental bodies (people’s commissariats), but subordinate to those in Moscow, while their local Communist Party organizations were equivalent to those of the Russian provinces. The border republics, however, posed greater problems. They had been led to believe that they would be able to exercise genuine self-determination, and all of them had done so, at least briefly, during 1917–21, notably Georgia, whose new Communist rulers proved almost as anxious to assert the nation’s self-government as their Menshevik predecessors.

With these republics–Ukraine, Bielorussia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaidjan, Bukhara, Khoresm (formerly Khiva) and the Far Eastern Republic–Soviet Russia concluded bilateral treaties which varied somewhat from one another, and were highly ambiguous in form. In some respects they were worded like treaties with separate sovereign states, yet in others they were more like articles of federation: they reflected, in fact, the ambiguities of ‘proletarian internationalism’. They began as military treaties, offering guarantees in case of external attack; but the military clauses were supplemented by economic ones, which placed decisive authority in most economic matters in the hands of organizations in Moscow. Anomalously, some of the republics actually retained a separate diplomatic service, and foreign representation, for a year or two, but this was lost when the RSFSR claimed and secured the right, in 1922, to negotiate for all the republics at the European conference of Genoa.

These anomalies and ambiguities could not last for long. Already during the civil war, the population of the border republics had mostly become accustomed to accepting the authority of certain centralized institutions controlled from Moscow: Sovnarkom, the Red Army, the Council of Labour and Defence (which since November 1918 had coordinated the civilian war effort) and the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic (the political branch of the army). Except in the special case of Georgia, it did not stretch custom and expectation too much to extend and formalize these arrangements and establish a unitary Soviet Russian Republic containing all these disparate political entities.

That was precisely what Stalin, as people’s commissar for nationalities, had in mind. He wanted to see a political framework which would give expression to the dominance Russia had assumed in the world revolutionary movement. As one delegate at the Tenth Party Congress proudly declared: ‘The fact that Russia had first entered on the road of revolution, that Russia had transformed itself from a colony–an actual colony of Western Europe–into the centre of the world revolutionary movement, this fact has filled with pride the hearts of those who have been connected with the Russian revolution, and has engendered a peculiar Red Russian patriotism.’

This process might have been accomplished unproblematically had it not been that Lenin himself became concerned by the Russian nationalist implications of Stalin’s project, as exemplified in such speeches. His fears were deepened when Stalin and his local lieutenant, Sergei Ordjonikidze, came into conflict with the Georgian Bolshevik leaders, Budu Mdivani and Filip Makharadze, over the place of Georgia in the new state. Stalin wanted Georgia to enter the proposed new republic merely as part of a ‘Transcaucasian federation, which would also include Armenia and Azerbaidjan. Mdivani and Makharadze objected vehemently to this downgrading of their homeland. Lenin eventually gave his blessing to Stalin’s scheme, but during an argument on the subject, Ordjonikidze became very heated and actually struck one of Mdivani’s followers. Lenin was incensed at this uncouth behaviour, which confirmed his worst fears about Stalin, and he ordered an investigation into the incident; but he suffered his third and most serious stroke before it could be completed, and was never able to intervene effectively and ensure that the lessons of the incident were absorbed.

He did, however, prepare a memorandum on the national question for the forthcoming Twelfth Party Congress: it was suppressed by Stalin (with the scarcely explicable connivance of Trotsky), and did not come to light until 1956. In it Lenin recognized that ‘self-determination’, embodied in the theoretical right to secede from the Soviet state, had been reduced in practice to ‘a scrap of paper’, and that as a result the minority nationalities were in danger of being delivered up to ‘this 100 per cent Russian phenomenon, Great Russian chauvinism, which is characteristic of the Russian bureaucracy’. He demanded ‘exemplary punishment’ for Ordjonikidze, to demonstrate that this would not be tolerated, and recommended that the Soviet constitution should guarantee real governmental power to the minority nationalities, in the form of people’s commissariats for all except diplomatic and military matters, as well as enshrining in an explicit code the right to use local language.

Although Lenin’s memorandum was not publicly discussed, some of its spirit did find its way into the formal provisions of the Soviet constitution of 1923. For one thing the new state did not bear the appellation ‘Russia’: it was called the ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ (USSR), and was formally a federal union between its various constituent republics, in which none of them was supreme. Also Narkomnats as a forum for national opinion survived as a second chamber of the All-Union Executive Committee of the Soviets (VTsIK): called the Council of Nationalities, it gave equal representation to each union and autonomous republic, regardless of population. Significantly, though, Lenin did not recommend any change in the highly centralized functioning of the party: his conversion to the cause of the nationalities was never more than partial.

In most respects the new constitution embodied Stalin’s conceptions rather than Lenin’s. The distribution of governmental powers between the republics and the Union as a whole left the latter with all real authority not only in diplomatic and military matters, but also in the running of the economy, while the Union also secured the right to lay down general principles in the fields of justice, labour, education and public health. With the notable exception of culture and linguistic policy, this left most power in internal affairs, as well as external, in the hands of the Union.

Another strong centralizing factor, in practice, was the disparity between the Russian Republic and all the others. The RSFSR contained 90 per cent of the land-area and 72 per cent of the population of the Soviet Union, so that its constitutional status as just one republic among seven was a fiction. Add to this the fact that 72 per cent of members of the Communist Party were Russian, and it will be clear that only ironclad constitutional guarantees could have restrained Russia from dominating the Union. In the words of E. H. Carr, the Soviet Union was ‘the RSFSR writ large’. Or, to put it another way, the Soviet constitution of 1923 was Leninist in form, but Stalinist in content.

All the same, just a few residuary ambiguities remained in practice. The revolution and civil war had given most of the nationalities of the former tsarist empire at least a brief experience of real independence, such as they had not known for centuries, or in some cases had never known. This gave a tremendous impetus to feelings of national identity, and, taken together with the policies of cultural and linguistic autonomy pursued for some years yet, rendered non-Russian national identity far stronger than it had ever been under the tsars. This fact built permanent tensions into the working of the Soviet system.