The new union now had to face a series of unresolved issues throughout the country. The basic presumption of the Soviet leadership was that nationality was a matter of language. Though both Lenin and Stalin added common history and culture to this definition, in practice it meant language was the deciding factor. This criterion that worked fairly well in the European part of the country did not fit other areas so well. It committed the Soviets to forming autonomous units wherever there were language differences, and thus they began to set up autonomous units among small Siberian peoples without any political or national consciousness in the modern sense. Even among peoples of European Russia there were problems. The small Volga people who spoke a Finno-ugric language that Russian scholars called Mordovian had a common language but no common word for both of the two Mordovian subgroups. The Soviet authorities simply declared them all Mordovians and introduced the Russian word for their nationality into their language. In the Ukraine large cities with few Ukrainian speakers such as Odessa soon had no newspapers in Russian, only in Ukrainian. Multi-national cities like Baku were a particular problem.
The language issues in the western parts of the country paled compared to the situation in Central Asia. The Kazakh population of the northern steppes was a relatively coherent group and received the status of an autonomous republic within Russia in 1924 (and a union republic in 1936). Farther south, the population of the Syr-Darya and Amu-Darya river basins presented tremendous difficulties. Identity in these areas did not fall along linguistic lines. Most of the people thought of themselves first as Muslims, and then only as parts of one or another group. The urban and much of the settled village population fell under the category of Sarts, whether they spoke a Turkic or Iranian language. “Uzbek” usually meant Turkic-speaking nomads around and among the settled areas. The great cities, Bukhara, Khiva, and Samarkand had been the centers of Uzbek dynasties but their traditional culture was both Turkic and Persian. The area more or less compactly settled by Iranian speakers had no large urban center. The most prosperous agricultural area, the Ferghana valley, was also one of the most ethinically diverse. While the Turkmens, Kazakhs, and Kirgiz formed relatively coherent units, they were also divided along tribal lines. The Soviets took all of this as merely backwardness and feudalism and proceeded to create republics along linguistic lines, though in the Ferghana Valley this meant leaving large minorities on all sides of the new borders. The outcome was five republics: Kazakhstan, Kirgizia, Turkmenia, Uzbekistan (the most populous) and Tadjikistan (the Iranian-speaking area).
In the 1920s the conditions of NEP meant that there were few grand plans to transform the new republics. Starting in 1924–25 the party pursued a policy of “nativization” of the party and state apparatus outside the Russian republic. The main thrust was the promotion of non-Russian cadre at all levels, though the key positions were usually exempt from this policy, being reserved by Moscow for its most trusted workers. These party leaders were not necessarily Russians, however: Georgians, Armenians, Latvians (especially in the political police), and Jews were prominent in the leadership of the non-Russian republics, far from their presumed home territories. Both culture and the peasantry were to a large extent left to the republics during the 1920s, not surprisingly as in Bolshevik ideology the peasants were the reserve of nationalism and the intelligentsia were the carriers of the local national cultures. In the NEP years, both were to be conciliated and indeed local cultures could not be advanced or created without the native intelligentsia.
The cultural autonomy of the new republics went along with a largely centralized political and economic system. While the republican Communist parties managed their own day-to-day affairs, the guidelines and top personnel were firmly in the hands of the leadership in Moscow. Economic management was split between the Supreme Economic Council of the USSR in Moscow and analogous offices in the republics. The most important centers of production, such the Donbass and the huge metal industry of the Ukrainian republic, were under the authority of the center. This situation led to complaints from all the republican governments, including even the Russian republic.
The Soviet Union came into existence at the end of years of war and during upheaval around the world. Lenin and the Bolsheviks believed that their revolution was only the first of a series that would soon come, and not even the most important. The whole Bolshevik leadership believed that a revolution was imminent in Germany, and the overthrow of the Kaiser in 1918 seemed to be the beginning, the German version of Russia’s February Revolution. For the next few years it seemed that the German October was just around the corner. The brief establishment of a Hungarian Communist government in 1919 and upheavals around the rest of Europe seemed to confirm the prognosis, but the anticipated revolution never came. In 1923 the German Communists made a last failed attempt, and Lenin and the Soviet leadership recognized that the revolutionary wave had ebbed.
The Soviet Union was now isolated in a world of hostile capitalist powers. It needed to survive, and its leaders, including Stalin, also believed that the world revolution would come sooner or later. This was the basic contradiction of Soviet foreign policy, and it remained until the final end of the Soviet state. The revolutionary side of Soviet relations with the world in the 1920s was the province of the Communist International (the Comintern). Founded in 1919 as the Communist answer to the Socialist International of moderate (and mostly formerly pro-war) socialists, it aimed to organize and promote revolution throughout the world. It boasted an international leadership and staff, but its headquarters in Moscow was firmly under Soviet control, in the person of Grigorii Zinoviev until 1925. It brought together under its leadership all the many groups of socialists who had opposed the First World War and then had gone on to espouse revolution in its aftermath, forming Communist Parties in nearly every country in the world. These were fractious parties, most of them with tactics far more militant than Moscow approved, but the Soviet leadership soon brought them into line.
The Soviet government also realized that it needed to break out of its isolation. Early in 1921 Britain had made a trade agreement, the first breach in the economic blockade imposed by Western powers in 1918. Then in 1922 the Soviets made an agreement with Weimar Germany, an agreement that included recognition, mutual trade, and a secret military protocol that allowed German military officers to train on Soviet territory and other forms of military cooperation. Weimar Germany, as the main victim of the peace settlement of Versailles, wanted maneuver room, and Lenin accommodated them. For the next decade relations with Germany warmed and then cooled, but the military agreement remained intact and trade expanded. In contrast, relations with Britain took a sharp downward turn, in large part the result of Soviet and Comintern policies in the East.
The policies of the Soviet leadership in Asia formed a historic turning point, both in Russian history and in world history, generally. Their impact has far outlasted the particular goals of Lenin and the Comintern in 1919–20. Lenin’s conception of imperialism implied that the European colonial empires provided crucial resources for the dominance of capitalism in the world and over the European working classes in particular. The oppressed people of the colonies were therefore crucial allies of the proletariat in the battle for socialism. The first meetings of the Comintern proclaimed this principle loud and clear, and its agents and supporters around the world spread the news. In Paris a young Vietnamese working at painting pseudo-asian pottery in a French factory read that the Comintern wanted to support the colonized peoples, and he decided to join the Communists. His name was Ho Chi Minh. At the time, however, it was the events in China that took most of the attention of the Comintern’s Asian sections and the Soviet government. In 1911 nationalists led by Sun Yat-sen had overthrown the Ching dynasty and established a republic, but the struggle raged to make the republic work and to expel, or at least radically weaken, the treaty regime that held China in bondage to the Western powers and Japan. The Comintern and the infant Chinese Communist Party supported the Nationalists, only to have Chiang-kai Shek turn on them and virtually exterminate the Communists in 1927. The Chinese Communists would recover, but for the time being Soviet policy in China was one of the major reasons Britain broke off diplomatic relations with the USSR in 1927, provoking a war scare in Moscow that lasted for several months. The small groups of Communists in the various Asian colonies continued to exist, largely ignored by all but the colonial administrations, but their actions would eventually have enormous consequences that the modest growth of Communism in Europe could not match.