The Bolsheviks also had to accept other circumstances not to their liking. Recognising the non-socialist government set up in Finland in 1918, they backed an unsuccessful Red Army uprising in the former tsarist territory, after which they had to bow to political realities. With Germany's patronage, the Baltic states ofLatvia, Estonia and Lithuania achieved their independence in a similar manner. Declaring their independence in 1918, the states floundered after Germany's defeat since coherent nationalist movements had not set them up. Yet with the assistance of the British navy and of units from the German army, they managed to prevail against the Red Army and local socialists.
In the Caucasus, Georgian Mensheviks, Armenian Dashnaks and Azeri Musavat established independent regimes in 1918. Because these states had developed so unevenly in the preceding decades, their nationalist movements remained distinct. Thus, when they attempted a short-lived experiment at federalism, irreconcilable differences and the territorial claims they had on each other forced them to turn to foreign protectors for self-defence. The Germans, followed by the British, came to the aid of the popular Georgian socialist republic set up by Mensheviks. Meanwhile, the Turks assisted their co-Muslim Azeris, while the Allies expressed support for the Armenians. The defeat ofthe Germans and the Turks, and the withdrawal ofthe British made it possible for ethnic strife to break out between Azeris and Armenians in Baku, especially since the Soviet government that held power briefly in the city in 1918 failed to rally the ethnically diverse region around the platform of Soviet power. The Red Army invaded Armenia and Azerbaijan in 1920, and Georgia the following year. Meeting with stiff resistance from religious leaders and guerrilla forces in mountain regions of the northern Caucasus, Soviet forces eventually overcame opposition there, too.
The situation in the Islamic regions of Russia proved to be particularly difficult to handle, since Islam, like Marxism, also espoused internationalist sentiments and there was always the fear that these feelings would find expression in support for the idea of a pan-Turkic state. By the late nineteenth century, elements within Russia's Muslim elite felt at home within a broader community of the world's Muslims. Some of Russia's Muslim intellectuals, the Jadids, advocated a complete reform of culture and society to meet the modern world's challenges. Embracing modernity and searching for what it meant to be Muslim, they encountered resistance from Muslim society's leaders, ever the more so because some would-be reformers had become socialists. To be sure, notions of statehood remained inchoate, but Jadids among the Crimean Tatar population did criticise tsarist policies, while war and revolution added impetus to anti-Russian feelings. Violent anti-European uprisings flared up in Central Asia in 1916, leaving embittered feelings on both sides. Moreover, the revolution emboldened the All-Russian Muslim Congress to press claims against the Provisional Government. Disintegration ofstate power further pitted reformers against traditional elites and Muslims against Russian settlers. For instance, angry clashes between Russian-controlled soviets and natives in Tashkent and Kazan' prompted some Muslims to side with the Whites. But this marriage of convenience was short-lived, since the Whites failed to dispel fears that they were little more than Russian oppressors.
Appreciating the need to win support within the Muslim world, the Bolsheviks granted autonomy to the Bashkirs in 1919 and to the Tatars in 1920. However, the party faced a diverse partisan movement deep in Central Asia that drew support from all classes but whose separate parts often fought for different reasons. Recapturing the khanates of Bukhara and Khiva in 1920, the Bolsheviks continued to face stubborn opposition elsewhere from armed bands of Islamic guerrillas, whom the Bolsheviks labelled brigands, or basmachi. They resisted the Red Army takeover until 1923. Given political realities, some Jadids joined the Communists in order to fulfil their vision of transforming Muslim society.
The Bolsheviks' victory in the civil war led to the founding of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in December 1922. Under the supervision of Narkomnats, the Soviet government set up a federation, granting statehood within the framework of the Soviet Russian state to those territories it had recaptured. Seeing the nationalist threat as a serious one - including that among Russians, which had the potential to provoke defensive nationalism among others - Lenin and Stalin supported the development of non-Russian territories and downplayed Russian institutions, hoping to create a centralised, multi-ethnic, anti-imperial, socialist state, an 'affirmative action empire'.18
The Bolshevik party-state
War, geopolitics and the prolonged crisis beginning in 1914 shaped the emerging Bolshevik party-state, which differed radically from the utopian views of
18 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001).
the commune state that Lenin had formulated in 1917 in his State and Revolution. True, political power devolved to the locales for much of the civil war, but this was not by design. In many localities, revolutionary leaders headed up their own councils of people's commissars (sovnarkomy), which frequently declared themselves independent republics or communes. Localism emerged because each local unit of administration had to rely on its own resources to establish state power. In these dire circumstances, the revolutionary soviets became transformed into pillars of the state bureaucracy as their plenums lost influence and their executive committees and presidiums came to govern Russia. These small bands of revolutionaries justified their actions by insisting that opposition to Soviet power had made them necessary.
From the Sovnarkom's perspective, localism made it difficult to prosecute the war effort. To combat separatist tendencies, the Commissariat of Internal Affairs purged soviet executive committees of those opposed to centralism and turned party organisations into overseers of local soviets. The gradual implementation of the Soviet constitution helped to transform the country's network of soviets into pillars of state power by more narrowly defining their functions, making them financially dependent upon the Centre, and obliging local soviets to execute the decrees ofhigher organs ofpower. As a result, some soviets no longer held elections. In others, the party ended secret balloting and organised Communist election victories or had to settle for majorities of 'unaffiliated' deputies forced to conceal their real party preferences.
The government's attempts to centralise the political system gained momentum at the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919, as a result of which a principle of dual subordination was introduced: all administrative departments formed by soviet executive committees became subordinate to them but also to the corresponding Moscow commissariats. The debate over how centralised the new state should be, however, was fuelled by the Democratic Centralists (DCs), who believed that the decline in elective offices and collective decision-making had caused a malaise within the party. The DCs supported the integrity of the soviets vis-a-vis local party organisations and the Centre, opposing Moscow's periodic redistribution of cadres. The DCs debated these issues before the 1919 party congress and later led a full-scale attack against 'bureaucratic centralism'. But true reform 'remained a dead letter'[152] because open debate threatened the party's tenuous hold on power.
152
Leonard Schapiro,