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.
The New Economic Policy and its Political Dilemmas
Even as the delegates to the Tenth Party Congress were voting for tight party discipline and the violent repression of the Kronstadt revolt, they also approved a radical change in economic policy, this time towards greater freedom. This was the abolition of grain requisitioning and its replacement by a tax in kind set at a much lower level than the compulsory deliveries. This measure was being tried out in Tambov and had been announced in Petrograd: it was conceived as a way of taking the sting out of popular discontent without making political concessions.
The