Not long after the Red Army conquered Georgia in February I92I, friction developed between Georgian Bolsheviks leading the new Georgian Soviet Republic and plenipotentiaries sent from Moscow to supervise government in the Caucasus. Regarding the formation of a union of soviet republics, for instance, the Georgians desired to preserve their republic's individual identity and enter on the same terms as, say, the Ukrainians rather than as part of a single Transcaucasian Republic that would also include Armenia and Azerbaijan. Moscow's representatives, led by Sergo Ordzhonikidze and backed by Stalin, insisted that all three join the Soviet Union together as one republic. The dispute grew bitter - Ordzhonikidze pinning the label of selfish nationalism on the Georgians who responded with charges of Great Russian chauvinism - and by 1922 it had alarmed Lenin. He had no particular objection to bringing Georgia into the Soviet Union as part of a Transcaucasian Republic, but he, more than Stalin or Ordzhonikidze, was troubled by cries of Great Russian chauvinism, which he described as much more reprehensible than local nationalism rising in defence of a small region menaced by large powers. Lenin also showed concern about propaganda consequences that might ensue in other soviet republics and abroad from heavy-handed treatment of the Georgian comrades. Nevertheless, his misgivings over the process under way in Georgia were not fundamental, and as his health deteriorated he watched Georgia pressed into a Transcaucasian Republic that signed a treaty with the RSFSR, Ukraine and Belorussia, joining them all in a new Soviet Union on 30 December I922.
In this larger venture, too, Lenin did not see eye to eye with Stalin, though here again the difference was more a matter of methods and appearances than ultimate goals. Lenin argued that each republic should participate in the Soviet Union as, ostensibly, an equal, independent member, while Stalin showed less patience for such language and favoured a more streamlined structure that left no doubt over the dominance of central authority. Lenin, in other words, demonstrated a lighter touch regarding the diverse national units of the Soviet Union, but he, like Stalin, intended to maintain control through the Communist Party, whose centralised apparatus extended through all of the republics and ethnic 'autonomous regions' that made up the state. As the process worked itself out - a constitution for the Soviet Union was drafted in the summer of 1923 and approved by the All-Union Congress of Soviets on 31 January 1924 - Stalin made more verbal concessions than Lenin. But in the Soviet state that emerged there could be no doubt that authority resided in Moscow rather than the constituent republics.[193]
That said, for the remainder of NEP party leaders indicated that they would not rely solely on military pacification and Politburo commands. The Soviet Union took shape as an assemblage of national or ethnic units, and the Kremlin advanced the line that national identity was an inevitable feature of incipient socialism as well as capitalism. Following Lenin, the party even stipulated that past Russian oppression had indeed given rise to valid complaints among numerous ethnic groups now inhabiting the Soviet Union. The proper policy, then, was to accept national sentiment and steer it in healthy directions, away from those who might fan such passions in opposition to socialism and the Soviet state. As long as national loyalties did not threaten Soviet unity, they might be permitted as a means of rendering Soviet rule more palatable. If power could be made to seem local rather than Russian, in other words, the leadership would take great strides in holding the Soviet Union together and gaining support for its policies. Such was the party's strategy during NEP, and it unfolded along two lines. The state declared its intent to support (or even help create) national languages and cultures, while also seeking local people to fill positions in the administrative organisations of their regions. If this could be done, the face of authority would appear less alien and incomprehensible.
The party's approach, known eventually as indigenisation (korenizatsiia), soon produced striking changes. Local candidates were heavily recruited for party membership in their republics and smaller regions, transforming party ranks filled mainly by Russians just a few years before. By 1927, for example, over half the members and candidate members of the Communist Party in a number of republics (Ukraine, Belorussia, Armenia and Georgia) belonged to the republic's titular nationality, while in Central Asia over 40 per cent of the party's cadre in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan came from the local, non-Russian population. As for administrative bodies, notably the executive committees of regional soviets, non-Russians accounted for two-thirds to four-fifths of the membership in Ukraine, Belorussia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
At the same time the party encouraged the use of indigenous languages and art forms as tools for promoting socialist practices. With this approach, 'national in form, socialist in content' as Stalin put it, the Kremlin's proprietors hoped not only to pacify but to guide their multi-ethnic domain to a new society where, eventually, a universal socialism would supplant the scores of national cultures whose narrower outlook the community had finally outgrown. It was a tolerant strategy, characteristic of NEP's concessions in other areas, but this also made it another of NEP's gambles. Just as no one could be certain about the consequences of permitting private trade on the road to socialism, it remained to be seen if national forms might eclipse or disfigure socialist content.[194]
In the meantime, though, NEP's largest gamble lay elsewhere, for whatever the nature of Moscow's policy towards the nation's far-flung ethnic groups, most Soviet citizens were Slavic peasants. This enduring aspect of Russian life the revolution could not change, at least during NEP, and peasant villages with their traditional communes continued to dominate the landscape as they had for centuries. But if the events initiated in 1917 left Soviet Russia a peasant society, they nevertheless transformed the countryside. Gone were the nobles' estates and even many of the most substantial peasant holdings. Over 100 million peasants had seized these properties and parcelled them out among themselves, yielding a rural panorama that consisted almost entirely of small plots. Roughly 85 per cent of the Russian Republic's peasant households worked fields of less than 11 acres in 1922 and did so with fewer than two draught animals per family. Although a more modern plough had largely replaced the archaic wooden scratch-plough by the end of the decade, most work was still performed manually by humans and horses. As late as 1928, hand labour accounted for three-quarters of the spring sowing, and it took place in fields where less than 1 per cent of the ploughing had been done by tractors.
193
Jeremy Smith,
194
George Liber,