Lenin and Stalin, as they continued to deliberate on this, recognized that their ‘Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia’, issued on 3 November 1917, had gone unnoticed by most of the non-Russian population.7 Over the ensuing weeks they altered their public commitment to the goal of a unitary state, and Lenin on 5 December published a Manifesto to the Ukrainian People which expressed the idea that the future government of Russia and Ukraine should be based on federal principles. In his subsequent Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited People, which he wrote for presentation to the Constituent Assembly, he generalized this expectation by calling for a ‘free union of nations as a federation of Soviet republics’.8 After dispersing the Constituent Assembly, he came to the Third Congress of Soviets in late January and proclaimed the formation of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic (RSFSR).9
The ‘Russian’ in the title was not Russkaya but Rossiiskaya. This was deliberate. The former had an ethnic dimension; the latter connoted the country which was inhabited by many nations of which the Russians were merely one, albeit the largest one. Lenin wanted to emphasize that all the peoples and territories of the former Russian Empire were being welcomed into the RSFSR on equal terms in a federal system. He was also indicating his acceptance — in marked contrast with Nicholas II — that there were areas of the old empire that were not ‘Russia’. Russians were not to enjoy any privileges under Soviet rule.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 foreclosed the possibility to test this policy in the borderlands on Russia’s south-west, west and north-west. The Ukrainian, Belorussian, Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian provinces of the former Russian Empire joined Poland under German military control. A puppet government of ‘Hetman’ Pavlo Skoropadskyi was installed in Kiev. Communist party leaders, some of whom attempted to organize a partisan movement, were chased out of Ukraine. In each of the lands occupied by the Germans a balance was struck between the enforcement of Berlin’s wishes and the encouragement of local national sentiment. Political, administrative and economic ties were broken with Moscow and Petrograd, and the Russian Communist Party’s task of reincorporating the lost territory was made the harder. There were problems even in areas where neither the Central Powers nor the Allies were active. The Muslim peoples of central Asia, most of whom dwelt outside cities, had little communication with Russia; and within Russia, by the river Volga and in the southern Urals, the Tatars and Bashkirs had yet to be persuaded that Sovnarkom would not rule the country primarily for the benefit of the Russians.
By the middle of 1918 the triple effect of the October Revolution, the Constituent Assembly’s dispersal and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had been to trap the Bolsheviks in a Russian enclave. This was infuriating for them. Apart from Bukharin, Russians were not the leading figures in the Central Committee: Trotski, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Sverdlov were Jews; Stalin was a Georgian, Dzierżyński a Pole; Lenin was only partly an ethnic Russian. They had seized power in Petrograd so as to remake the politics of all Europe, and at home they had intended to transform the Russian Empire into a multi-national socialist state of free and equal nations. This remained their dream. But until the Red Army could impose itself on the borderlands the dream would not come near to reality. The Bolsheviks’ efforts in the meantime would perforce be concentrated in an area inhabited predominantly by Russians.
But how would these efforts be organized? Like his communist leaders, Lenin asserted that socialism should be built not only through a strongly centralized state but also by dint of the initiative and enthusiasm of the ‘masses’. He liked to quote Goethe’s dictum: ‘Theory is grey but life is green.’ Yakov Sverdlov, the Central Committee Secretary, had two other reasons for encouraging local initiative: the lack of sufficient personnel and the paucity of information about conditions in the provinces. To a party activist he wrote: ‘You understand, comrade, that it is difficult to give you instructions any more concrete than “All Power to the Soviets!” ’ Sovnarkom decrees did not lay down a detailed legal framework. Law meant infinitely less to Lenin, a former lawyer, than the cause of the Revolution. Sovnarkom was offering only broad guidelines for action to workers, soldiers and peasants. The aim was to inform, energize, excite and activate ‘the masses’. It did not matter if mistakes were made. The only way to avoid a blunder was to avoid doing anything.
The effect of the Decree on Land was particularly cheering for the Bolshevik party. Many peasants had been diffident about seizing whole estates before the October Revolution. They wanted to have at least a semblance of governmental permission before so precipitate a step. Lenin’s words released them from their fears. The gentry’s houses and agricultural equipment were grabbed in a rising number of incidents and peasants shared them among themselves.10
Not every region experienced this commotion. In central Asia the old social structure was preserved and property was left with its owners. In Ukraine the proximity of the Eastern front had discouraged peasants from a hasty movement against landowners in case the Central Powers broke through and restored the old social order — and this fear was realized with the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. But elsewhere the peasantry sensed that their historic opportunity had arrived. There was solidarity among established households of each village. Where the peasant land commune existed, as in most parts of Russia and Ukraine, its practices were reinforced. In thirty-nine Russian provinces only four per cent of households stayed outside the communal framework. Kulaks were pulled back into it; many of them needed little persuasion since they, too, wanted a share of the land of the dispossessed gentry. The peasants in Russia’s central agricultural region gained control over an area a quarter larger than before 1917; and in Ukraine the area was bigger by three quarters.11
Many a household divided itself into several households so as to increase its members’ claim to land. The unintended consequence was that sons had a say in communal affairs whereas previously the father would have spoken on their behalf. As young men were conscripted, furthermore, women began to thrust themselves forward when decisions were taken: gradually the revolutions in the villages were affecting rural relationships.12 But the main feature was the peasantry’s wish to arrange its life without outside interference. Liberated from indebtedness to the landlord and from oppression by the land captains, peasants savoured their chance to realize their ancient aspirations.
Among the other beneficiaries of this transformation were the soldiers and sailors of Russian armed forces. Sovnarkom had authorized their demobilization in the winter of 1917–18. This gave post factum sanction to a mass flight from the trenches and garrisons that had been occurring since midsummer. Most of the conscripts were peasants who, with rifles slung over their shoulders, jumped on trains and horse-carts and returned to their native villages. Their arrival gave urgency to the process of land reform, especially in places where little had hitherto been known about the Bolsheviks and their Land Decree. Those military units which were not demobilized had much internal democracy. Election of officers was commonplace and soldiers’ committees supervised the activities of the structure of higher command. Many such units were supporters of the Bolsheviks in the Constituent Assembly elections and fought in the early campaigns to consolidate the October Revolution in Moscow and Ukraine.