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