Lost Kingdom

by Serhii Plokhy

  The official policy on the Ukrainian question formulated by Shulgin and sanctioned by Denikin was a major blow to the Ukrainian cultural program, especially in light of its positive treatment by the Central Rada and the subsequent Skoropadsky regime. Meanwhile, the leaders of the White movement were not willing or able to deliver to the Ukrainian public even the minimal freedom to use the Ukrainian language that was guaranteed by Denikin’s appeal. In Kyiv and other cities under its control, the Volunteer Army busied itself with closing Ukrainian-language newspapers, schools, and institutions. With the help of Shulgin’s longtime ally Anatolii Savenko, who was put in charge of the local government’s propaganda efforts, Ukrainian-language signs were peremptorily replaced with Russian-language ones, and owners of buildings who refused the change were threatened with fines.

  As Ukrainian complaints about the violation of their cultural rights reached the capitals of France and Britain, which supported Denikin’s efforts against the Bolsheviks, the Western powers tried to restrain the anti-Ukrainian zeal of Volunteer Army commanders. Their overriding goal was to promote a joint Ukrainian and White struggle against the Bolsheviks. They needed a united anti-Bolshevik front, as the Volunteer Army was in retreat after having failed to take Moscow from the Bolsheviks in November 1919. It eventually found refuge from the advancing Bolsheviks in the Crimea and adjacent regions of southern Ukraine. General Petr Wrangel, who succeeded General Denikin as commander in chief in March 1920, castigated his predecessor for trying to wage war simultaneously on various fronts against Bolshevik armies and Ukrainian detachments. Under Wrangel, the best that the beleaguered Whites would offer their potential allies territorial autonomy modeled on that which had been granted to the Don Cossacks—ethnic Russians who had a strong sense of historical and social identity distinct from that of the Russian mainstream. In the fall of 1920, Wrangel’s government, which by that time controlled little more than the Crimean Peninsula, would concede no more to the Ukrainians than its willingness to abide by the decision of the Ukrainian question rendered by the future Ukrainian Constitutional Assembly. That concession meant little in political and military terms.

  In November 1920, Bolshevik troops entered the Crimea, forcing Wrangel and 150,000 of his troops to seek refuge in Istanbul. Those who decided to stay, close to 50,000 officers and soldiers of the Volunteer Army, were massacred by the Bolsheviks. Those who left the Crimea took with them the idea of Russia, one and indivisible. The political, ideological, and ethnonational project launched by members of the Progressive Bloc in the Duma in March 1917 was now a dead letter. It was up to the victorious Bolsheviks to solve the Russian question on the diminished but still enormous territory of the multiethnic state under their control.

  V

  THE UNBREAKABLE UNION

  13

  LENIN’S VICTORY

  ON THE COLD WINTER DAY OF DECEMBER 30, 1922, MORE THAN 2,000 men and women from all over the former Russian Empire gathered in the main hall of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. That year, after lengthy discussion, the Bolshevik government of Vladimir Lenin had decided against shutting down the theater. The key argument was not the need to continue ballet and opera performances, branded as products of decadent bourgeois if not downright tsarist culture, but the need for large buildings to accommodate party and Soviet congresses. The congress that gathered at the Bolshoi in the last days of 1922 was by far the largest yet convened there. On its agenda was the truly historic task of creating a brand-new country, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

  Most of the participants were in their twenties—the generation shaped by World War I and the recent revolutionary upheavals. Almost 95 percent of them were communists—members or candidate members of the All-Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (Bolshevik). The delegates represented the four formally independent Soviet republics. Three of them—the Russian Federation and the Ukrainian and Belarusian republics—had belonged to the imperial Russian nation of prerevolutionary times. The Russian delegates, who accounted for 1,727 of the total of 2,215 delegates, constituted the overwhelming majority: the gathering, called the First All-Union Congress of Soviets, was in fact a Russian congress joined by delegations from the non-Russian republics. The delegates of the First All-Union Congress came to Moscow to rubber-stamp a decision already made by the Central Committee of the party: to declare the creation of a new federal state that claimed most of what had been the Russian Empire. They did as they were bidden, and December 30 became the birthday of the Soviet Union.

  The congress elected Lenin as its honorary chairman and sent him greetings from the delegates, but Lenin himself was nowhere in sight. The fifty-two-year-old leader of the Bolsheviks, who in the previous months had fought tooth and nail for the creation of the Union, stayed put in his Kremlin apartment, a short walk from the Bolshoi. It was a walk that he was unable to make. Eight days earlier, on December 22, he had suffered a major stroke and lost control of his right hand and leg. Two days later, a commission composed of party officials, led by Joseph Stalin, had placed strict limitations on his activities, effectively isolating him. The restrictions were designed to prevent the worsening of Lenin’s health. But they also served a political purpose.

  Lenin had been taking an ever more aggressive stand against Stalin, general secretary of the party and people’s commissar (minister) of nationalities, who delivered two main reports to the congress, one on the creation of the Union, the other on the Union treaty. The reports followed Lenin’s guidelines, but Lenin still did not trust Stalin, suspecting him of being soft on what Lenin dubbed Russian “great-power chauvinism.” In the months leading up to the convocation of the congress, Stalin had wanted Ukraine, Belarus, and Transcaucasia—the federation of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia—to join the Russian Federation as autonomous republics like Bashkiria and the Crimea, which had already been incorporated with that status. They were to be subordinate to the Russian government in Moscow. Stalin had had to abandon his plan because of protests from the prospective republics and pressure from Lenin, who insisted on the creation of a federal union of equal republics, including Russia.

  Barred from attending the congress by his illness and distrusting Stalin to fully implement his line, the paralyzed Lenin resolved to dictate his thoughts on the nationality question in a document to be passed on to the party leadership. On December 30, the day the delegates voted to create the Soviet Union, Lenin began dictating his last work on the nationality question. Titled “On the Question of Nationalities or ‘Autonomization,’” it took the form of a letter and was completed the next day, December 31. It contained an attack on Stalin’s policies on the subject and criticized the rights provided to the republics by the Union treaty as inadequate to stop the rise of Great Russian nationalism. As far as Lenin was concerned, Russian imperial nationalism constituted the main threat to the future of the Union and the proletarian revolution. He wanted to establish a government structure that would divest Russia of its imperial role in form, if not in substance.

  LENIN’S THINKING ON THE UNION WAS ROOTED IN HIS IDEAS ON dominant and oppressed nationalities that he first formulated in the World War I era, and they were very much in response to Russian imperial mobilization under the banners of the Union of the Russian People and other nationalist organizations. Lenin, never a strong believer in the all-Russian nation, was prepared to treat the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians as distinct peoples. According to him, the Great Russians were dominant, while the Ukrainians and Belarusians, former members of the privileged big Russian nation, were among the oppressed.

  Lenin’s nationality policies and pronouncements before October 1917 were designed with an eye to rallying support from the non-Russian nationalities for the overthrow of the existing regime, not for running the multiethnic country of which the Bolsheviks took control in the fall of 1917. However, it was one thing to proclaim the right of non-Russians to self-determination while the Bolsheviks were in opposition, and another to keep the promise when they
seized power.

  Lenin’s stand on the Central Rada and its policies reflected the change that had taken place in his thinking on the nationality question over the course of 1917. In the summer of that year, with the Bolsheviks in opposition, he raised his voice in support of the Central Rada against what he perceived as the great-power chauvinism of the Provisional Government. In December, with the Bolsheviks in power, Lenin dismissed the Central Rada’s proclamation of its right to self-determination and separation from Russia, accusing it of relying on bourgeois policies and refusing to recognize it as a legitimate representative of the toiling masses.

  It took a while for Lenin and his comrades to figure out what their nationalities policy would be. It was a difficult process for a party whose intellectual leadership was composed largely of non-Russians. Leon Trotsky, who had been born into a Jewish family in Ukraine, and Joseph Stalin, a Georgian who had begun his literary career writing in his mother tongue, were the most prominent Bolshevik leaders of non-Russian origin to embrace the internationalist Marxist project, choosing it over the nationalist alternatives offered by the local anti-imperial movements. But there were others as well, and for them to go back on their internationalist beliefs was a difficult task. Lenin, a practiced tactician, charted a new course for the party and its supporters.

  Responding to developments in Ukraine in 1919, he formulated a new approach to Bolshevik nationality policy. In the summer of that year, the Bolsheviks had been driven out of Ukraine by the combined forces of General Anton Denikin and the Ukrainian armies of the Directory, a successor to the Central Rada. The Ukrainian Bolsheviks called it “the cruel lesson of 1919,” blaming their military and political defeats on deficiencies in nationality policy. When the Bolsheviks returned to Ukraine at the end of 1919, they felt that they had to change their policies to keep it under control. The smoke screen of an independent Soviet Ukraine was brought back, but the “cruel lesson” suggested that something more should be done to pacify the restive Ukrainian countryside and gain its trust. The Bolsheviks had support among the Russian or Russified proletariat of the big cities, but the Ukrainian-speaking villages were traditionally hostile toward the proletarian revolution.

  The Ukrainian peasantry had undergone rapid ethnic mobilization during the first years of the revolution. The Central Rada and then the Directory—the government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic—managed to convert the Little Russian identity of the prerevolutionary peasantry into the Ukrainian identity of the revolutionary period. The same regions of Right-Bank Ukraine that had sent Russian nationalist deputies to the imperial Duma before the war were now sending their sons to fight in the Ukrainian army against the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks wanted them under their own banner. They found out that the peasants cared about Ukraine and wanted to be addressed in Ukrainian, but few Bolshevik commissars could speak the language. The Bolsheviks in Ukraine were mainly Russian or Jewish, with largely Russified Ukrainians constituting only a quarter of the party membership. As Lenin saw it, the party would have to involve Ukrainians and take a positive attitude toward their language and culture if it was to gain their support.

  The party that spoke Bolshevik now had to speak Ukrainian as well. Lenin spelled out the new policy in early December 1919 in a special resolution of the Central Committee on Soviet rule in Ukraine. He reminded his comrades that the Ukrainians had been persecuted and discriminated against under the tsarist regime and called on them to make it possible for the peasantry to speak Ukrainian in all governmental institutions. There was to be no further discrimination. “Measures should be taken immediately to ensure that there is a sufficient number of Ukrainian-speaking personnel in all Soviet institutions, and that in future all personnel are able to make themselves understood in Ukrainian,” wrote Lenin.

  Of course, that was easier said than done, given the ethnic composition of the party. To make things worse, the same resolution prohibited staffing government institutions with representatives of the Ukrainian urban middle class—whose devotion to communism was questioned—probably in an attempt to stop Ukrainian socialists from taking control of local government agencies. But in the countryside, Lenin welcomed the inclusion of the poorest peasants—the party’s traditional base of support—as well as the inclusion of owners of medium-sized plots—who accounted for most of the rural population—in the new government institutions. “Soviet institutions must have the closest possible bond with the indigenous peasant population of the country, and to that end it should be taken as a rule at the very beginning, when revolutionary committees and soviets are first introduced, that they enlist a majority of representatives of the toiling peasantry, ensuring a deciding influence for representatives of the poor peasantry,” wrote Lenin.

  Formal recognition of Soviet Ukraine as a separate republic, the staffing of local institutions with Ukrainian peasant cadres, and concessions on language and culture did not mean, however, that Lenin was prepared to yield on the key issue of Ukrainian independence. In his “Letter to the Workers and Peasants of Ukraine on the Occasion of the Victories over Denikin,” drafted in late December 1919 and published in the main Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda, in January 1920, Lenin did not attempt to conceal the fact that independence for Ukraine was not his preference: he supported the “voluntary union of peoples.” But for now, he was not going to quarrel over that issue with his new allies in Ukraine, the Borot’ba (Struggle) faction of the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party that had joined the Bolsheviks in their fight against Denikin. “Among Bolsheviks there are those who favor complete independence for Ukraine, or a more or less close federative bond, or a complete merger of Ukraine with Russia,” wrote Lenin. “Divergence over those questions is impermissible. Those questions will be decided by the All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets.”

  Lenin was prepared to leave the question of Ukrainian independence open so as to avoid creating conflicts within the anti-Denikin front in Ukraine. But once the situation became more stable, he used the first available opportunity to crush the pro-independence movement among his allies. In early February 1920, Lenin drafted a Central Committee resolution that ordered the allegedly independent government (Revolutionary Committee, or Revcom) of Soviet Ukraine to prepare for the liquidation of the Borotbist faction, which was now branded as a nationalist political organization. The resolution said the Borotbists were to be regarded “as a party that violates the fundamental principles of communism with its propaganda of dividing military forces and supporting banditry, that plays directly into the hands of the Whites and international imperialism.” Moreover, it declared, “their struggle against the slogan of close and closer union with the RSFSR [Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic] is also contrary to the interests of the proletariat. All policy must be directed systematically and unwaveringly toward the forthcoming liquidation of the Borotbists in the near future.”

  The order for liquidation was given the following month, in March 1920, when the Borotbist faction was dissolved and 4,000 of its members, roughly a quarter of the original membership, joined the Ukrainian Bolsheviks, not as a group but as individuals completely subordinate to Moscow. Behind the façade of an independent Ukrainian republic and the federal structure of Russo-Ukrainian relations was the highly centralized Bolshevik Party, whose members took orders from Moscow. Although the republican communist parties had central committees of their own, they had little more say in matters of general party policy than regional organizations in the Russian provinces. Lenin was prepared to maintain the trappings of Ukrainian statehood and grant the locals, especially peasants, linguistic and cultural rights in order to integrate them into Bolshevik institutions. The Bolsheviks would “go native” if that was what it took to turn the actual natives into Bolsheviks, but they would not allow differences in their ranks concerning the integrity of the state. The principles Lenin formulated in his writings of late 1919 and early 1920 would become the cornerstones of Bolshevik policy on the nationality question, and they would inf
orm both Lenin’s and Stalin’s thinking on the formation of the Soviet Union.

  THE ROAD TO THE FORMATION OF THE SOVIET UNION BEGAN IN April 1922 in Rapallo, an Italian resort town half an hour’s drive from Genoa. Rapallo was home to the Soviet delegation to an international conference in Genoa at which representatives of thirty-four countries agreed that their banks would make a partial return to the gold standard in an attempt to curb postwar inflation and promote the rebuilding of their war-torn economies. The conference began on April 10. Six days later, on the night of April 16, the telephone rang in the residence of the German delegation. On the line was a Soviet diplomat who suggested that the Germans and Soviets sign a treaty renouncing financial claims on each other and opening the way to trade and economic cooperation. The Germans spent a sleepless night discussing the proposal, and the next day they came to the Soviet headquarters in Rapallo and signed the deal. It was a major coup for the Bolshevik government, which had now been recognized for the first time as the legitimate successor to what remained of the Russian Empire. Diplomatic recognition would follow, starting with Britain and France in 1924; the United States didn’t follow suit until 1933.

  The Rapallo agreement was a personal success for Georgii Chicherin, the Soviet Russian commissar for foreign relations. The obstacles he had to overcome were not only international but also domestic. Chicherin signed the deal on behalf of Russia, but he also attempted to sign on behalf of other formally independent republics. This strategy backfired, causing a conflict between the Soviet Ukrainian government in Kharkiv and the Russian government in Moscow. According to their agreement on military union, the Russian authorities had no right to give orders to Ukrainian institutions without the approval of the Ukrainian government. Nevertheless, they did so constantly, not only in the spheres of defense, economy, transportation, and finance, which were prerogatives of the center, but also in other areas, including trade, agriculture, justice, and, last but not least, international affairs.