The elimination of the "Marxist historical school" untied Stalin's hands. Pokrovsky's schematism had certain fixed points of reference, such as classes, the role of the proletariat. In keeping with orthodox Marxism, Pokrovsky argued that semifeudal Russia could not have been more progressive than capitalist England. Stalin swept aside all these 'Talmudic subtleties," while retaining Marxist phraseology and Marxism's unlimited possibilities for "dialectical" self-refutation. Stalin himself would decide what Marxism was. He made clear that it was unnecessary for others to read Marx; he had done the reading for them.
This "turn on the historical front" had important practical consequences, especially in relation to the non-Russian nationalities.
The first period in the history of the national republics, from the adoption of the 1922 constitution to the beginning of the First Five-Year Plan, passed under the aegis of the slogan "indigenization" (korenizatsiya), meaning the training and development of "indigenous cadres" and reliance on the native population, rather than Russian or Russified elements. The term first appeared in party resolutions at the Tenth Congress, in 1921. The Soviet authorities could not get by in that early period without the help of the native intelligentsia and was forced to try to win them over. The national republics at that time enjoyed fairly broad powers in domestic political, economic, and especially cultural affairs. Each republic was not only allowed but obliged to have its own language. Every national group, even the smallest, acquired its own alphabet. There was another aspect, however, to the imposition of an obligatory national language in areas where several languages were spoken, as in Byelorussia and especially Transcaucasia. It prevented the unification of several nationalities around one major non- Russian language. Administrative fragmentation, especially in Central Asia, served the same purpose.
The policy of encouraging indigenous populations bore some fruit, especially on the cultural level. In the Ukraine, for example, a real cultural renaissance took place. There was a negative side, however. Native "cadres" were inclined toward independence from the center, toward cultural autonomy and "national communism." An attempt to combine communist ideas with national traditions emerged in the non-Russian republics as well as at the center of power. These national communist trends contained an element of discontent over the centralizing habits of "Soviet colonialism." Stalin sent up a danger signal about this as early as 1926 in a letter to Kaganovich and other members of the Ukrainian Politburo.72
From the late 1920s to the mid-1930s, as a Soviet historian admits, "fundamental changes occurred in relations between the central government and the republics. The powers of the central institutions were considerably expanded, and the centralization of the unified state was intensified."73 In this second period of relations between the republics and the center, Moscow stripped the national republics of all their rights. "The economic autonomy of the republics was narrowed down more and more." In addition, "centralization was carried out in a number of cases with violations of Leninist principles, expressed in the form of a downgrading or diminution of the sovereign rights of the union republics."74
Arrests took place in all the national republics. Purges began in 1929 and continued without interruption for ten years, hitting the native cadres particularly hard. In 1933 Pavel Postyshev was sent to the Ukraine by Moscow with a special assignment to "knock some people in the head as a lesson to others."75 His main target was Nikolai Skrypnik, the Old Bolshevik and Ukrainian commissar of education, who was an ardent supporter of Ukrainization. In 1928 he had approved a new Ukrainian orthography. In 1933 he was accused, among other things, of attempting to "separate the Ukrainian language from Russian" and "sell it" to Polish, German, and other Western languages.76 On July 7, 1933, Skrypnik committed suicide. Half a year later Stalin spoke of Skrypnik's "falling into sin."77
In Tadzhikistan the premier, Khodzhibaev, was expelled from the party, along with the president of the republic's Central Soviet Executive Committee, Maksum, and other leaders.78 The leaderships of Byelorussia, Kirghizia, and other republics were also purged. A 1932 Central Committee resolution calling for the dissolution of all literary tendencies, groupings, and associations made national cultures all the more dependent on Moscow.
The Stalinist interpretation of history furnished the central government with a new and powerful weapon in its struggle against all forms of national independence. Stalin's "comments" called for a history not just of Russia but of the Soviet Union as a whole, and sure enough, when a history textbook appeared in 1937, A Short Course in the History of the USSR, under the editorship of one Professor Shestakov, it began with the history of the kingdom of Urartu. Thus the history of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics began on the shores of Lake Van, nine centuries before Christ. The ruling of the jury in the contest for the best textbook on the history of the Soviet Union went even further. Reconsidering the main thesis of the Pokrovsky school, that annexation of other nations by the Russian empire had been an absolute evil, the jury recommended that such annexation be viewed as "a lesser evil." A few years later historians were advised to regard unification with Russia as an absolute good. To this day, Soviet historians invariably refer to the incorporation of the Ukraine (under Bogdan Khmelnitsky) into Russia as the "unification of two great sister peoples." Earlier, in 1931, the Small Soviet Encyclopedia had criticized Khmelnitsky for betraying the Ukrainian "peasants' revolution to the Moscow serf owners." In 1940 the same historical event was described as "a lesser evil than annexation by the Poland of the landed gentry or the sultan's Turkey. "79
The new conception of history, which was completely ahistorical and allowed facts, dates, events, individuals to be juggled freely in accordance with the latest resolutions of the Central Committee, opened up tremendous practical possibilities. For example, in 1940, when Molotov explained the reasons for the annexation of the Baltic republics (in the post-Stalin era this was always called "the victory of the socialist revolution in the Baltic states,"80 he indicated that these nations had been "part of the USSR" in the past.81
Until 1930 it was commonly said that the revolution had opened the way to friendship among the peoples of the Soviet Union. After the 1934—1936 period this friendship was said to be "eternal," these nations had always been friends, from the time of Kievan Rus and the grand dukes of Moscow, and their friendship would live forever. It became a crime to question this idea. Under the slogan of eternal friendship a brutal, massive repression was carried out in the union republics—during the Great Terror. The totalitarian state, which had achieved unification in all spheres of life, wished to fuse the varied Soviet peoples into a single socialist people, with a common past but no memory.
ORDINARY TERROR
The Kirov assassination inaugurated an era that is often called the Great Terror. This period is particularly interesting because of the prominence of the victims: leaders of the party, the government, the military, and the economy. In fact, the party seemed to be bent on its own destruction. Nevertheless, the breadth of repression in 1936-1938 was not on a par with the genocide against the peasants in 1930—1934. The Great Terror, if we are to use the term, was unique in its universality. Preceding waves of repression had targeted specific social groups, but the terror that began in 1935 was directed against society as a whole.