In the fall of 1921 the Soviet authorities sent Enver to Central Asia. Their aim was to exploit his popularity among the Muslims to help suppress the Basmachi movement. After arriving in Bukhara, Enver decided to turn against the Communists, join the native rebels, and attempt to unite them under his leadership. After some initial successes in combat against Red Army units he sent an ultimatum to Moscow in May 1922 demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops from Turkestan and promising in return to support Communist activities in the Middle East. Enver's death in battle in August 1922, the rivalries among the various Basmachi groups, and the reforms carried out in 1922 by the Turkestan Bureau of the Central Committee (the return of waqf lands, lands held in usufruct, to the Muslim clergy, permission to reopen Muslim religious schools, and recognition of Islamic religious law, the sharia) were all instrumental in suppressing the Basmachi movement.
Once the civil war was over, nationalist movements in the Soviet republics took on the new form of Communist nationalism.
The organizational structure and centralist principles of the Communist party required a centralized state. When Skrypnik complained at the Eleventh Party Congress about the changing landmarks elements in the party who dreamed of restoring "Russia one and indivisible," one of the delegates shouted from the floor: 'The party, one and indivisible." Indeed, it could be said that the primary goal of the party's founder was exactly that: a party, one and indivisible. The party mission was, in Lenin's view, to express class interests, not national interests. But after the party came to power it unavoidably began to express the interests of the Russian state above all. Lenin assumed that Russia would be a torch to light the fire of world revolution. The larger and more powerful the torch, the hotter it would burn and the quicker the flames would spread.
The Russian Communist party was itself multinational, but its composition did not reflect exactly the country's ethnic diversity. In 1922 it had 375,901 members, of which 270,409 were Russian, that is, 72 percent. In addition there were 22,078 Ukrainians, 19,564 Jews, 9,512 Latvians, 7,378 Georgians, 6,534 Tatars, 5,649 Poles, 5,534 Byelorussians, 4,964 Kirghiz, 3,828 Armenians, 2,217 Germans, 2,043 Uzbeks, 1,964 Estonians, 1,699 Ossetians, and 12,528 of other nationalities.130 What is most striking about these figures is the overwhelming predominance of Russians in the party. Besides that, the substantial number of Jews is noteworthy. In February 1917 Jews were granted equal rights, and during the revolution and civil war they were active in large numbers on both the Red side and the White. All this resulted in a new explosion of anti-Semitism. Pogroms against Jews were a common feature of the civil war. No less than 100,000 Jews were killed in these pogroms.
On the nationality question the Jewish, Latvian, Polish, and Estonian Communists were usually the most extreme advocates of centralism and the most ardent defenders of a "Russia one and indivisible." Lenin remarked that "people of other nationalities who have become Russified" (a reference to the Georgians Stalin and Ordzhonikidze and the Pole Dzer- zhinsky) always "overdo it with respect to the 'truly Russian' frame of mind."131 The Communists of the smaller republics became the chief opponents of renascent "Great Russian chauvinism." The stronger the national Communist party, the greater its resistance to this reviving trend. Moreover, the Ukrainian and Georgian Communist parties were acting as Communist parties normally do, that is, demanding total power for themselves.
National Communist views were expressed most strongly by Nikolai Skrypnik. A Ukrainian, he had joined the Marxist movement in 1897 and after 1903 sided with Lenin. From 1900 on he had lived in St. Petersburg and Siberia. It was not until 1918 that he returned to the Ukraine, on Lenin's insistence: "We don't need just any Ukrainian; what we need is Skrypnik."132 Lenin was convinced that this veteran Bolshevik would defend Moscow's views against both the local nationalists and the "nihilists" who denied the importance of nationality. Skrypnik justified Lenin's confidence, working first with the Cheka and then, in 1920, assuming the post of Ukrainian commissar of internal affairs.
During 1922 and 1923 Skrypnik became one of the sharpest critics of the Russian party's nationalities policy. Particularly noteworthy was his criticism of Stalin's views on the national question in June 1923 at the Fourth Conference of the Central Committee with Responsible Officials of the National Republics and Regions. He spoke of the party's failure to carry out its nationalities program, citing in particular its inability or reluctance to combat the rise of Great Russian chauvinism within its own party apparatus as well as among government officials.
The June 1923 conference on nationality issues was held specifically to deal with the question of "Sultan-Galievism," the first "national deviation" to be suppressed by the party. A Tatar from the Volga region, Sultan-Galiev had joined the Bolsheviks before the revolution. In 1918 he became a member of the leading body (collegium) of the People's Commissariat of Nationalities, headed by Stalin. Sultan-Galiev dealt with matters concerning the Muslim peoples and was in charge of the Central Muslim Military Collegium. He played a major role in Bolshevik efforts to win over the Muslims of the former Russian empire, in particular helping to organize a "Muslim Socialist Army," to whose Red banners Lenin and Trotsky urged all Muslims rally.
Sultan-Galiev viewed the October revolution as an opportunity for the Tatars to realize their national aspirations. He dreamed of a Tatar-Bashkir Republic and the unification of all the Muslim peoples of the former tsarist empire into a new, powerful state of their own. In the fall of 1919 he published a series of articles in the magazine Zhizn natsionalnostei (The life of the nationalities), organ of the Commissariat of Nationalities, presenting his concept of world revolution. The weak link in the capitalist chain was not the West but the East, and the Communists should direct their efforts accordingly. But the Eastern peoples did not have an industrial proletariat; therefore different methods would have to be employed to arouse their revolutionary enthusiasm. Above all, Muslim activists should be utilized to spread communism in the East.
For Sultan-Galiev the transition to the NEP and the rise of the changing landmarks ideology were signs that his hopes had been misplaced. He came to the conclusion that the "German model" of Marxism could not meet the needs of the colonial peoples. He wrote a series of articles prefiguring the ideology of Islamic socialism. He advocated the formation of a "Colonial International" independent of the Comintern and based on an alliance of the workers and peasants in each colonial country with the native petit bourgeoisie and even progressive elements of the grand bourgeoisie.
Sultan-Galiev foresaw five stages in the realization of his ideas: (1) the formation of a Muslim Communist state in the central Volga region; (2) the incorporation into this state of all the Turkish peoples, followed by (3) all the other Muslim peoples of the former Russian empire; (4) the creation at first of an Asian International and then of an international embracing all the colonial peoples; and finally (5) the establishment of the political hegemony of the colonial and semicolonial countries over the industrialized metropolitan centers.