Russia broke
up in 1917, but the Bolsheviks intended to restore the empire – as a
springboard to create a "Global Soviet Republic"
Speaking to navy sailors in
December 1917, Lenin said, "We are told that Russia will disintegrate and
fall apart into separate republics, but we have nothing to be afraid of. No
matter how many independent republics there are, we will not fear. For us, the
location of the state border is not important, rather the preservation of the
alliance between the workers of all nations for the fight against the
bourgeoisie of any other nations."
Establishing Soviet power in the
national regions, the Bolshevik leaders were even prepared to give them the
status of independent states. Although this did not radically change the
situation, as every Soviet state was subordinated to the centre through the
Party. Lenin knew that his strategy was more effective than the White generals'
straightforward strong-arm tactics.
The Union, formal and informal
Immediately after the
Bolshevik victory in the civil war, the former Russian Empire that they had
seized was a country without a name. It consisted of nine formally independent
states: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Far Eastern Republic, Bukhara and Khorezm,
as well as Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, united as the Transcaucasian
Federation. This conglomeration was connected with Moscow in two ways: 1) by
the Party – through the committees of the rigidly centralised Bolshevik Party,
2) by the Soviet councils – security and economic structures on the periphery
were directly controlled by the Kremlin.
Richard Pipes wrote the
following about the tremendous possibilities of the Soviet political system's
dual structure in creating ostensibly independent nation states that were fully
dependent on the Kremlin: "Territories were reconquered and reintroduced
into a new Soviet empire. They were given the functions of statehood, provided
that their institutions were also controlled by the Communist Party. As for the
party, Lenin had absolutely no intention of splitting it up on a national
basis. The result was federalism with all the attributes of statehood,
supposedly capable of meeting the basic requirements of the non-Russian
population, but which concealed a rigidly centralised dictatorship with its
centre in Moscow."
Pipes concluded that it was a
"fiction of statehood", as he considered the soviet councils and
party committees to be two separate political forces. But in reality, these two
political forces did not exist. In Lenin's framework, the soviets were the part
of the Bolshevik Party that disposed of full executive powers. The dictatorship
was exercised by the Politburo of the Party's Central Committee, but the
Council of People's Commissars stood at the top of the Soviet power vertical.
Incidentally, it was headed by Lenin himself.
This meant that the soviets in
the national republics were not fictitious, but a source of real power,
controlled, of course, by the Central Committee. Nevertheless, life in the
republics was not easy for the leaders of the centralised and disciplined party:
they had to make sure they did not lose control of the national soviets and
that the local branches of the Party maintained their loyalty to the centre.
The party chiefs paid particular attention to Ukraine – the largest Soviet
Republic by human and material resources.
Moscow saw only one way of
turning a country without a name into a country with one: "absorbing"
the independent republics into the borders of the Russian Federation, i.e.
depriving them of national statehood. Such an attempt was made in autumn 1922,
in the absence of Lenin, who was then hit by the first bout of his terminal
sickness.
The author of the "autonomisation" plan is considered to be
the RSFSR People's Commissar for Nationalities and General Secretary of the
Party – Joseph Stalin. However, Lenin described it as a "fundamentally
wrong and untimely venture" in a letter on December 30, 1922. The
provincial leaders were against autonomisation too, but not because they wanted
to preserve the non-existent sovereignty of their independent Soviet republics.
No wonder Lenin ironically called them the "independents", since he
realised that they simply did not want their status to be lowered. He was
worried about the long-term implications of "the notorious issue of
autonomy, which, it appears, is officially called the issue of the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics". Since the question of establishing a single
centralised state had already arisen, he offered his own plan for solving the
problem and achieved its adoption. Analysing it today, we understand, first of
all, the ingenuity, flexibility and treachery of Leninist national policy and,
secondly, the mechanism of the Soviet Union's collapse in 1990-1991.
The conversion of independent
republics into autonomous republics of the RSFSR de facto revived a
"single and indivisible" Russia. The only difference was that some
provinces were autonomous republics.
However, there was a fundamental ambiguity
for Ukraine under these conditions: would it become part of Russia as a single
autonomous region not divided into provinces, or would the already announced
approach for administrative-territorial division be respected, the republic
vanishing from the map altogether. Soviet Russia found itself face to face with
the ghost of the liberation movement: peoples who had gone through the furnace
of national revolutions would sooner or later rise in defence of their gained
and then lost rights of statehood.
That is why Lenin proposed to
create a second-level federation, which would include "together and on an equal
footing" the Russian and Transcaucasian Federations, as well as Ukraine
and Belarus. This meant that the constitutional sovereignty enjoyed by the
independent republics would remain in the newly minted Soviet Republics.
Obviously, there could be no real sovereignty with the party dictatorship in
place – it does not matter if a republic was independent or became Soviet.
When the Soviet Union was
formed, a separate article in national constitutions declared the right to
freely leave the union state. The Kremlin saw no danger in this, and it
remained a part of all Soviet constitutions, including the 1977 Constitution of
the USSR. However, this article took on real meaning in the late 1980s, when
confrontation began between the Union and republican centres.
The formation of the USSR put
the question of finding a centre for the union on the agenda. No new state
arose in December 1922 – it was merely a ceremonial event, described in advance
by the rules of the Central Committee's Organising Bureau. New power centres
were not formed, rather the names of existing ones were changed: the Central
Committee of the Russian Communist Party became the Central Committee of the
All-Union Communist Party, the RSFSR Council of People's Commissars turned into
the USSR Council of People's Commissars.
It is clear that the Bolshevik leaders
did not want to create yet another seat of power in Soviet Russia, so they
rejected the idea of uniting Russian party committees into a republican party
organisation and simply placed them directly under the union centre. An RSFSR
Council of People's Commissars nevertheless emerged, but it only had control
over minor matters. Therefore, the formal status of Russia as a union republic
was lower than the other republics.
The principle of
"democratic centralism" on which the existing organisations were
built ensured reliable control for the centre over daily life across the huge
country, including the national republics. However, it was necessary to
convince non-Russian residents, who felt like second-class citizens in
pre-revolutionary Russia, that the Soviet regime would promote the development
of their culture and language.
In December 1919, Lenin prepared a resolution
entitled "On Soviet Power in Ukraine", which was adopted by the 8th All-Russian
Party Conference resolution. It stated that "Members of the Russian
Communist Party in Ukraine should ensure the right of the working masses to
study and speak in their native language in all Soviet institutions, strongly
opposing attempts to artificially push the Ukrainian language into the
background by trying, on the contrary, to make the Ukrainian language an
instrument of communist education for the working masses.
Measures should be
taken immediately to make sure there is a sufficient number of employees who
speak Ukrainian in all Soviet institutions, and that all employees are able to
continue speaking the Ukrainian language".
In October 1920, Stalin
developed this thesis in his article "The Policy of the Soviet Government
Regarding the National Question in Russia". In order to strengthen Soviet
power in the national regions, he considered it necessary for all party and
government institutions, educational and cultural establishments, and media to
function in the language of the local people.
Combining the national republics
and Central Russia "in one state body" would be, in his opinion,
"impossible without the widespread organisation of local schools, as well
as the creation of courts, administrations, government authorities and so on
with people who know the language and way of life of the population".
The policy articulated by
party leaders in 1919-1920 did not yet have a name. One first appeared at the
first Bolshevik Party Conference after the formation of the Soviet Union:
korenizatsiya.
Korenizatsiya
The goal of this policy was to
involve the non-Russian population of the USSR in the building of communism.
Meaning "nativisation" or "indigenisation", its literal
translation – "putting down roots" – betrays the true intent: to
embed the Communist Party in the republics as a carrier of dictatorial power,
constructing a power structure of interrelated verticals: Party, State
Security, soviets. Alongside korenizatsiya, other terms were derived from the
name of the titular nation in each national republic or region (e.g.
"Ukrainisation").
In the Soviet Union, the
opposition between"titular nation” and “national minority" took on a
qualitatively different meaning. Leninist national policy, as already stated,
used the dual structure of Soviet power to transform the national liberation
movements of oppressed peoples from an enemy to an ally of the Bolsheviks. For
this purpose, Communist leaders renounced provincial divisions and adopted the
principle of politicising ethnicity as the basis of their administrative
division.
National administrative units were created in all non-Russian
provinces. They were given, apart from the district level, the name of the
nationality that was in the majority there. Wanting to look like supporters of
the most radical solution to the national question, Bolshevik leaders declared
all such majority ethnic groups to be titular nations.
As a result, a hierarchy arose
that was defined by the political and territorial administrative division. The
Russians were at the top by default. To hide the key role of Russians in the
creation of the multinational Soviet state, the name of this state was devoid
of any indications of ethnicity (as was the name of the state party that served
as its supporting structure).
Second level titular nations created Soviet
republics, the third – autonomous republics, the fourth – national regions and
the fifth – national districts. Ukrainians were the titular nation within the
borders of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, whereas Moldovans held this
position in the Moldavian Autonomous Republic that was part of the UkSSR.
People of one nationality were considered representatives of the titular nation
within the borders of their administrative units, but representatives of
national minorities outside them. The status of Russians in Ukraine was
ambiguous. Officially, they were considered a national minority in the republic
and the titular nation within the borders of their national districts.
Unofficially, Bolshevik leaders positioned Russians as the titular nation of
the entire Union.
As a result, Russians had a specific view of their own
national status: they did not consider themselves a minority in any of the
national republics. Party leaders encouraged this belief, in so far as it
reduced the danger of liberation movements springing up in the national
republics by lowering the proportion of the titular nation in the population
and increasing the share of Russians.
When Russians were treated as
a national minority in the national republics, this was unusual for them and
unpleasant for many. Many Russians asked themselves a question that was first
formulated before the revolution: does the nation that considers itself titular
in Ukraine exist at all? Is there a separate Ukrainian language? Here is a
letter, dated May 7, 1926, from Maxim Gorky to Oleksa Slisarenko, director of
the Ukrainian State Publishing House, with a protest against the abridgement of
his novel The Mother in its Ukrainian language edition. The writer and democrat
expressed himself so frankly that it is worth quoting his arguments in full:
"I think that a translation of this story into the Ukrainian dialect is
not necessary either.
I am very surprised by the fact that people with the same
goal ahead of them do not only claim there is a difference between the dialects
– trying to make a dialect into a 'language' – but also oppress the Great
Russians who have found themselves a minority in the area of this
dialect."
Recognition of titular rights
for all ethnicities and the korenizatsiya campaign were not popular among the
Russian intelligentsia. With great persistence, which, however, did not develop
into political opposition, the Russian intellectual elite protested against the
recognition of Ukrainians and Belarusians as individual nations. The presence
of Ukrainian national statehood, no matter how ephemeral, returned to
Ukrainians their own history, which had been usurped by the imperial nation.
But the Bolshevik leaders
emphasised their internationalism and in the 1920s called Great Russian
chauvinism the main danger for Party and state. In 1921, the five-person
Politburo, in which all political power was concentrated, included only one
Russian – Lenin. Does this mean that the Russian, and from 1923 Union, centre
implemented its national policy from a non-national platform? It is appropriate
to take a close look at the debate on national issues in the post-Soviet
Russian Federation, which inherited its ethno-territorial division from the
Soviet Union, but was freed of Communist Party dictatorship.
After the collapse of the
USSR, the autonomous republics of Russia essentially obtained a national and
state status that they had never had before. Pointing out the official status
of national minorities and the lack of something similar for Russians, some
politicians and political scientists proposed equalising their status. This
could have been achieved either by leaving the autonomous republics responsible
for nothing but cultural and language issues, or by creating a Russian republic
within the federation. As is well known, Vladimir Putin's government chose the
path of cutting the autonomous republics' powers.
The leaders of the Soviet
Communist Party in its various guises were not faced with this dilemma, as
their power structures were derived from the dictatorship of the party.
Therefore, the Bolsheviks could claim to be internationalists. They branded the
nationalism of oppressed nations "bourgeois" and even publicly talked
about the danger of the Great Russian chauvinism that former bourgeois
professionals, now Soviet officials, were imbued with. Nevertheless, Communist
Party leaders in fact limited the powers of union and autonomous republics to
matters of language and culture from the very beginning. Whenever functionaries
or the national intelligentsia went beyond what was permitted, the
"competent authorities" resorted to repression. Imperial ideology was
implanted into all the chains of command that controlled non-sovereign
populations.
The Russian people was also
deprived of sovereignty, but was seen by the Kremlin to be the titular nation
of the entire union, i.e. the social base for the communist state.
Petliuran vs Communist
Ukrainisation
As Soviet power took root in
the national republics and regions, the campaign of korenizatsiya was scaled
back, as it was starting to threaten the government. From the start, the
Bolsheviks knew that this policy did not only have a positive side (embedding
Soviet power), but also a negative one (the rise of national consciousness,
which threatened an increase in separatist sentiment). At the beginning of June
1923, so almost immediately after the focus on korenizatsiya was proclaimed at
the 12th Bolshevik Party Congress, secretary of the Ukrainian
Central Committee Emanuel Kviring bluntly referred to the danger of communist
Ukrainisation growing into its Petliuran equivalent.
However, only 10 years
later Ukrainisation was officially divided into Bolshevik and Petliuran
variants in the Communist Party resolution "On grain requisitions in
Ukraine, North Caucasus and the Western Region" dated December 14, 1932.
The Ukrainian Bolshevik Party and Council of People's Commissars were obliged
by this resolution to ensure "systematic party management and supervision
of the Ukrainisation process". This required, according to the authors of
the resolution – Stalin and Kaganovich – "the removal of Petliuran and
other bourgeois nationalist elements from party and soviet organisations".
A campaign was launched to combat the work of Education Commissar and leader of
the Ukrainisation effort Mykola Skrypnyk, which in 1933 drew tens of thousands
of representatives of the Ukrainian national intelligentsia into its maelstrom.
A remark was made to the North Caucasian Regional Committee and Regional
Executive Committee that the "frivolous and un-Bolshevik 'Ukrainisation',
not resulting from the cultural interests of the population, of almost half of
the districts in the North Caucasus, due to a complete lack of control over
Ukrainisation of schools and the press on behalf of regional authorities has
given a legal form for enemies of Soviet power to organise resistance to the
activities of the Soviet government with kulaks, officers and re-emigrants –
Cossacks, participants in the Kuban People's Republic and so on".
It was required to
"immediately switch the paperwork of Soviet and cooperative authorities in
'Ukrainised' districts of the North Caucasus, as well as all published
newspapers and magazines, from Ukrainian into the Russian language, as it is
more understandable for people in the Kuban region, and prepare for
Russian-language instruction in schools by the autumn".
At the time of Lenin, Great
Russian chauvinism was seen as the main threat to the national question.
However, during the acute crisis of 1932-1933, party leaders started to see
nationalism as the main danger, providing it with a class-based definition –
"bourgeois". At a ceremonial meeting of senior party and state
leaders at the Kremlin on May 2, 1933, Stalin stood on his chair (there were no
microphones then) and pronounced a toast that included the following sentence:
"The Russians are the main nationality in the world, the first to raise
the banner of the Soviets against the whole world".
The third component of the
politicisation of ethnicity (alongside the concept of the "titular nation"
and the korenizatsiya campaign) was the legal recording of a person's
nationality by the state (the "fifth box" on Soviet forms). In
passports, which were introduced from 1933 for the population of cities and new
buildings, this information was moved to fourth place, right after the surname,
name and patronymic.
To keep society under tight control, the state had to know
two basic characteristics of each citizen: social background and nationality.
Distinguishing citizens on grounds of nationality was not important in itself,
but in order to establish their belonging to a titular nation. Ukrainians
persecuted in Ukraine for "bourgeois nationalism" frequently fled to
Russia, where they stopped being representatives of the titular nation, thus
losing their political status.
The communist state was able
to eliminate the horizontal links between people, deeply penetrate three
verticals of power into society and prevent the emergence of any uncontrolled
organisations. With millions of eyes and ears in the community, it knew about
the real attitudes of citizens and responded to them by creating fictitious
organisations with dissidents who were repressed. Ukrainians, however,
perceived themselves as a nation even without organisational ties and
demonstrated a particular hostility to socio-economic transformations of a
communist nature.
The social explosion in the first half of 1930, which forced
Stalin to put collectivisation on hold for six months, was spontaneous, but in
Ukraine it was constantly accompanied by the slogans of the 1917-20 national
revolution. A new social explosion in the republic, which was brewing in
1931-1932 against the backdrop of famine across the Soviet Union, was
neutralised by the creation of a state of absolute starvation – the Holodomor.
The central government tried
to mask its repressive actions against the Ukrainian people with pronounced
Ukrainophilia. A demonstration of this was the transfer of republican
authorities from Kharkiv to the national capital – Kyiv – following the
Holodomor.
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