The debate on the place of nationalities in the nascent USSR, which was conducted in the seats and corridors of power, reveals the depth of the disagreements about the future state and the shape it should take. These differences of opinion elicited some extremely sharp reactions from Lenin who, although seriously ill, managed, astonishingly enough, to formulate his own ideas with the utmost clarity.
Stalin’s conception of the future Soviet state was largely shaped by his experience immediately following the revolution, when he was in charge of nationalities. His first government position after 1917 was Commissar for Nationalities, and the first book he published, written before the revolution at Lenin’s request and with Bukharin’s editorial aid, dealt with the ‘national question’. Dabbling in such endlessly complicated and conflict-ridden problems may have convinced him that all those highly diverse, unruly and combative nationalities might at any moment throw a spanner in the works of central government.
Lenin’s last stand on this subject was a manifesto containing the most powerful and clearest analysis he had produced in the entire post-Civil War period. According to him, Stalin wished to give the non-Russian nationalities ‘autonomy’ – meaning that they would become part of Russia (at the time named the RSFSR or Russian Federation) or, in other words, administrative units subordinate to Russia. The debate over this approach, but also about other proposals for the shape of the future state, was fierce; and the clash between Lenin and Stalin on precisely these points was at its epicentre, with far-reaching consequences for the system’s future. This is why it is a story well worth telling.
2
‘AUTONOMIZATION VERSUS FEDERATION’ (1922–3)
The Russian editors of the collection that constitutes our main source on this subject[1] write in their introduction that Lenin’s ideas on the place and role of nationalities in the state underwent a major transformation. He moved from a firm belief in the virtues of centralism to a ‘recognition of the inevitability of federalism’. At the outset, he believed that national specificities should be accommodated inside a unitary state, but then he proceeded to defend the creation of states on an ethnic basis which would enter into contractual relations with one another. He switched from outright rejection of cultural autonomy to acknowledging the territorial and extraterritorial aspects of such autonomy. The opinions of Trotsky, Rakovsky, Mdivani, Skrypnik, Makharadze, Sultan-Galiev and other people close to Lenin developed in a similar direction, usually independently of each other (with the exception of Lenin, none of them would die of natural causes).
Stalin was a consistent supporter of what his opponents called ‘unitarism’. His report on problems of federalism, delivered as early as January 1918 to the All-Russian Soviet Congress, was an ardent plea for this doctrine. Later, in a note to Lenin dated 12 June 1920 which does not feature in his Collected Works, he wrote: ‘Our soviet form of federation suits the nations of Tsarist Russia as their road to internationalism… These nationalities either never possessed states of their own in the past or, if they did, long ago lost them. That is why the soviet (centralized) form of federation is accepted by them without any particular friction.’ On numerous occasions during 1918–20 Stalin stressed the centralized character of the Soviet Federation, which was manifestly the direct heir of the Tsarist federation ‘one and indivisible’. It included such ‘autonomies’ as Poland, Finland, the Ukraine, Crimea, Turkestan, Kirgizia, Siberia and the Transcaucasus, which might one day tend to become separate entities. But Stalin firmly underlined that ‘autonomy does not mean independence and does not involve separation’. The central power should retain all key functions firmly in its own hands. According to the editors of the collection we are using, for Stalin granting autonomy was mainly an administrative device en route to a ‘socialist unitarism’. Stalin’s argument was nothing but an expression of the Russian notion of a ‘super-state’ (derzhava, a term we shall often have to employ) – the product of an expansion based on Russia’s messianic role. In this conception, incorporating other nations served the cause of progress. The Russian editors, we might interject, may not have realized that other imperialisms suffered from comparable messianism. What was new was Stalin’s emphasis on the ‘supra-Russian’ (sverkhrusskost’) dimension of his own imperial policy when contesting Lenin’s conceptions, which were now presented by Stalin as a nationalist deviation harmful to the interests of the Soviet state.
On 10 August 1922, the Politburo decided to create a commission to examine the relations between the Russian Federation and the other republics, which for now enjoyed the status of independent states. Stalin, the nationalities expert since before the revolution, who became party general-secretary in the same year, declared himself ready to present his plan the very next day. The five independent Soviet states, linked by a form of contractual agreement, were the Ukraine, Belorussia and the three Transcaucasian states: Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaidzhan. What Stalin proposed for them was ‘autonomization’, which simply meant that the republics would formally become part of the Russian Federation. The status of the remaining areas – Bukhara, Khorezm, the Far Eastern Republic – was to be left open for the time being. Treaties should be signed with them on customs, foreign trade, foreign and military affairs, and so on. The governing bodies of the Russian Federation – the Central Executive Committee, the Council of Commissars, the Council of Labour and Defence – should formally encompass the central soviet institutions of the republics being incorporated. Their own commissariats of foreign affairs, foreign trade, defence, railways, finance and communications should merge with those of Russia. The remainder – justice, education, internal affairs, agriculture, state inspection – would remain under their jurisdiction. And, not surprisingly, the local political police were to be merged with Russia’s own GPU.
Stalin explained that these proposals should not be published yet; they should be debated by the party’s national central committees and later translated into formal legislation by the soviets of the republics – their executive committees or congresses of soviets. In the most straightforward manner imaginable, the principle of ‘independence’, which was in any case nothing more than ‘verbiage’ as far as Stalin was concerned, would be eliminated, with these republics becoming mere administrative units of a centralized Russian state.
Waves of protest soon mounted against this policy. On 15 September 1922 the Georgian Central Committee rejected ‘autonomization’ as ‘premature’. Ordzhonikidze, Kirov, Kakhiani and Gogoberidze voted against this decision. They were all of them Stalin’s men from the ‘Transcaucasian Party Committee’ – a body imposed by Moscow to oversee the three republics that was a source of endless friction with national party leaderships. On 1 September 1922, Makharadze, a leading Georgian communist, complained to Lenin: ‘We are living in confusion and chaos.’ In the name of party discipline, the Transcaucasian Committee was imposing all sorts of decisions on the Georgian party that undermined the country’s independence. ‘Georgia’, he stressed, is ‘neither an Azerbaidzhan nor a Turkestan.’
In a letter addressed to Lenin on 22 September 1922, Stalin likewise complained about the ‘total chaos’ in relations between the centre and the periphery, with its train of conflicts and grievances. But all fault now lay with the other side. Stalin railed against the small republics ‘playing the game of independence’. According to him, ‘the unified federal national economy is becoming a fiction’. The alternatives were as follows. Either full independence, in which case the centre would withdraw and not meddle in the affairs of the republics, leaving them to run their own railways, trade, and foreign affairs. Common problems would require constant negotiations between equals and the decisions of the Russian Federation’s supreme bodies would not be binding on other republics. Or they should opt for genuine unification in a single economic unit, with the other republics submitting to the decisions of the Russian Federation’s higher instances. In other words, an imaginary independence would be replaced by an authentic internal autonomy for the republics in the spheres of language, culture, justice, internal affairs and agriculture. And Stalin lectured his colleagues:
1
See A. P. Nenarokov, V. A. Gornyi, V. N. Dobrokhotov, A. I. Kozhokina, A. D. Kotykhov and A. I. Ushakov,