Lost Kingdom

by Serhii Plokhy

  The Ukrainian communist leaders protested. A commission was formed in Moscow to investigate the complaints and, finding them warranted, it issued resolutions attacking Chicherin’s commissariat. As part of a special arrangement, Ukraine and Belarus, which were formally independent states, along with Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, united in the Transcaucasian Federation, joined the Treaty of Rapallo in November 1922. The situation in which formally independent republics had control over their foreign relations but none over their own economies and financial affairs was confusing to outsiders and insiders alike. The head of the commission that looked into the Ukrainian complaints about Chicherin’s actions, the Soviet military commander Mikhail Frunze, later considered that incident the starting point of the process that eventually led to the formation of the Soviet Union.

  After the revolution and the Bolshevik victory in the civil war, the Ukrainian question replaced the Polish one as the most critical issue for the nationality policy of the central government. The Ukrainians, with more than 20 percent of the population of the Moscow-controlled space, were the largest ethnic group after the Russians and constituted almost half the non-Russian population of the Union, with the next-largest nationality, the Belarusians, accounting for slightly less than 3 percent of the entire Soviet population. The Ukrainians also showed a strong desire for independence, and there were pro-independence Ukrainian cadres even among members of the Moscow-led Bolshevik Party.

  In the summer of 1922, however, it was not only the Ukrainians who were in revolt against the policies that treated other republics as mere extensions of the Russian Federation. The Georgian communists were also insisting on their rights as the members of an independent republic, and it was this conflict that ultimately triggered the negotiations that resulted in the formation of the USSR. The Georgians protested their inclusion in the Transcaucasian Federation, which Lenin had initiated in order to link Baku oil production with the Georgian transportation system. In August 1920, Stalin and his right-hand man in the Caucasus, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, formed a special commission to recommend a new model of relations between Russia and the republics to the Central Committee. Stalin, who was both general secretary of the party and people’s commissar for nationalities, chaired the commission. As one would expect of a central government official who was dismayed by the lack of clarity in relations between the Russian and republican governments and deeply involved in the conflict between them, Stalin did his best to produce a model that would not only dispel the confusion but also strengthen the center.

  Stalin’s proposal for the “autonomization of the republics” was quite simple. The formally independent republics would be incorporated into the Russian Federation with rights of autonomy like those already possessed by the autonomous republics of the Crimea and Bashkiria. The government bodies of the Russian Federation would become the central institutions of Soviet rule, issuing orders directly to the republics. The republics rebelled. The charge against Stalin’s model was led by the Georgians, who claimed that the whole idea of unification was premature, and the Ukrainians, who preferred the status quo. The Belarusians said they would be satisfied with whatever model was developed for relations between the Russians and the Ukrainians.

  Stalin refused to budge and pushed ahead with his plan for autonomization only to be stopped by Lenin. Despite this clash, their treatment of the nationality question revealed more similarities than differences between them. Neither questioned the highly centralized structure of the Bolshevik Party, which remained the main governing institution, no matter what official policy was adopted. Both agreed that concessions had to be made to the rising nationalism of the non-Russians, allowing a merger of nationalism and communism within the ranks of the Bolshevik Party. They differed more on tactics than on strategy. Stalin insisted on the principle of autonomy for non-Russians within the Russian republic, which would give them a measure of self-rule—an option not very different from the one offered the Ukrainians, Don Cossacks, and others by the government of General Petr Wrangel. Lenin was prepared to go a step further and offer the nationalities a federal state with Russia as one of the autonomous republics, more or less along the lines advocated by Mykhailo Hrushevsky and Ukraine’s Central Rada in 1917.

  In the debates between communist officials in the summer of 1922 on the rights of the republics, Lenin decided to side with the Georgians and Ukrainians. As far as he was concerned, the inclusion of the republics into the Russian Federation, especially against the will of their leaders, put the Russians in the position of imperial masters, thereby undermining the idea of the voluntary union of nations. Lenin’s thinking about the future of the republics was influenced by his concern about the worldwide unity of the working classes of all nationalities. The survival of Soviet rule was closely linked in his mind with the success of world revolution, which depended on the rise of the working class in Germany, France, and Britain, and then on the nationalist movements in China, India, and Western colonies in Asia. The desire of those peoples for self-rule would have to be satisfied if the revolution was to triumph on a global scale.

  Instead of an enlarged Russian Federation, Lenin proposed the creation of a Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia. It was supposed to be a union establishing Russia and the existing formally independent republics as equals and creating all-Union government bodies. Stalin, recognizing that an enlarged Russian Federation would create a poor image for the multinational communist state as a community of equals, proposed simply to turn the Russian government bodies into all-Union ones. As he saw it, there was no need for another level of bureaucracy. But Lenin would not back down: for him, the Union was a matter of principle, not expediency. Some way had to be found to accommodate rising non-Russian nationalism, but Stalin’s model proposed a return to the ethnic inequality of the past, which had already brought down the Russian Empire and might topple the Soviet state as well.

  In September 1922, alarmed by the growing conflict between Stalin and the republics, Lenin met with a number of officials, including Stalin and the leader of the Georgian communists, Polikarp Mdivani, to discuss plans for normalizing relations. He managed to convince Stalin to go along with his Union plan. In a letter to one of the Bolshevik leaders, Lev Kamenev, Lenin described his motivation: “It is important that we not give sustenance to the ‘independentists,’ that we do not destroy their independence but create yet another level, a federation of republics with equal rights.” In early October 1922, he sent Kamenev another note: “Comrade Kamenev, I declare a struggle against Great Russian chauvinism not for life, but to the death.… There must be absolute insistence that the all-Union Central Executive Committee be chaired in turn by a Russian, a Ukrainian, a Georgian, and so on.” Stalin, Kamenev, and others agreed to adopt Lenin’s ideas as the basis for the creation of the Union, which was officially declared at the First All-Union Congress of Soviets on December 30, 1922.

  ALTHOUGH THE APPROVAL OF LENIN’S VISION OF THE UNION BY the delegates to the congress was a major victory for the Soviet leader, he was in no position to celebrate. On December 30, 1922, confined to his bed, he feverishly dictated his notes on the subject of nationality, questioning whether the Union would manage to keep the republics together. The reason was simple: despite Stalin’s apparent compliance with his wishes, Lenin detected in the party secretary’s actions a threat not only to the basic principles of the Union but also to his own power.

  Stalin was enforcing his control over the rebellious Georgian communists not only with party resolutions but also with fists. His point man in the Caucasus, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, had beaten up one of his Georgian opponents. When the Georgians complained, Stalin appointed a commission headed by his client Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the head of the secret police, which exonerated Ordzhonikidze. After a long talk with Dzerzhinsky on December 12, 1922, the highly agitated Lenin suffered a stroke that led to his partial paralysis a few days later. He was now lying in bed, trying to explain to the party leadership what was wrong w
ith Stalin’s policies and how they could be neutralized by reforming the Union that he had proposed and that had just been approved by the congress.

  This was the theme of the notes on the nationality question that the half-paralyzed Lenin dictated to his secretaries on December 30 and 31. For Lenin, the main threat to the unity of his state was coming not from the local nationalists, whom he hoped to accommodate by creating a federal framework for the future Union, but from the Great Russian nationalism that threatened to derail his plans. He referred to it as great-power chauvinism, arguing that Russified non-Russians such as Ordzhonikidze (this was also a dig at Stalin) could be much more ardent promoters of such chauvinism than the Russians themselves. “The Georgian who takes a careless attitude toward that aspect of the matter,” dictated Lenin with reference to the national question, “who carelessly throws around accusations of ‘social nationalism’ (when he himself is not only a true-blue ‘social nationalist’ but a crude Great Russian bully), that Georgian is in fact harming the interests of proletarian class solidarity,” dictated Lenin. The fact that Ordzhonikidze and Stalin, both Georgians, were assaulting the national feelings and limiting the national rights of other Georgians did not seem to matter to Lenin. For him, both represented the center and could thus be guilty of Russian chauvinism.

  Given the danger that the Russian bureaucracy, which dominated the party and state apparatus, might use its powers to oppress the non-Russian nationalities, Lenin regarded Russian chauvinism as the main threat to the unity of the country. Dictating his thoughts, he argued for positive discrimination in favor of the non-Russian republics: “Internationalism on the part of the oppressor or so-called ‘great’ nation (although it is great only in its coercion, great only in the sense of being a great bully) should consist not only in observing the formal equality of nations but also in the kind of inequality that would redress, on the part of the oppressor nation, the great nation, the inequality that develops in actual practice.”

  Lenin attacked the government apparatus, which was largely controlled by Stalin, claiming that it was mainly inherited from the old regime and permeated with Russian great-power chauvinism. The way to keep it in check was to take powers from the center and transfer them to the republics. Lenin was prepared to replace the Union he proposed and the model approved by the First All-Union Congress with a looser union, one in which the powers of the center might be limited to defense and international relations alone. He felt that the republics’ right of secession, which was guaranteed by the Union treaty, might be an insufficient counterweight to Russian nationalism, and proposed that at the next congress the Union could be reformed to leave the center only with the aforementioned functions. The Union just approved by the congress gave the central government control over the economy, finance, and communications on top of military and international affairs.

  “On the Question of Nationalities or ‘Autonomization’” turned out to be not only Lenin’s last work on the nationality issue but also one of his last letters to members of the party leadership. The “letters” were not made public until March 1923. Stalin did his best to isolate Lenin from the rest of the leadership, coming into conflict even with Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, whom he accused of passing political news on to Lenin, and thereby threatening Lenin’s peace of mind, and ultimately his health. Stalin insulted Krupskaia at one point by telling her, “We shall see what sort of wife of Lenin you are,” apparently hinting at Lenin’s past extramarital ties. When Lenin heard of it, he became furious and demanded an apology. Stalin wrote back saying he apologized but did not know what Lenin wanted of him—he had just been protecting the leader from unnecessary stress. Lenin’s stress level clearly increased when he learned that Stalin was stuffing the Chamber of Nationalities of the newly created Council of the Union with his Russian supporters. Enraged, Lenin tried to enlist Leon Trotsky’s support in his struggle against Stalin, but his call for help went unanswered. Lenin’s note of encouragement to Georgian Bolsheviks, dictated on March 6, 1923, turned out to be his last text ever. The next day, he suffered his third stroke, which left him paralyzed.

  Under pressure from Lenin and facing a revolt of the republics, Stalin abandoned his idea of autonomization and embraced the Union option, but he drew the line on the question of confederation. At the Twelfth Party Congress, convened in April 1923, he and his supporters successfully crushed the opposition mounted by the Georgians and Ukrainians. Khristian Rakovsky, the Bulgarian-born head of the Ukrainian government, speaking on behalf of the latter, made reference to Lenin’s last notes on the nationality question in order to attack the party and government apparatus as agents of great-power chauvinism. He proposed to strip the central government of nine-tenths of its powers, transferring the rest to the republics.

  Rakovsky said that solving the nationality question was the key to the success of the socialist revolution. “It is a question of the bond of the revolutionary Russian proletariat with the 60 million non-Russian peasants,” he claimed. Stalin was not impressed. He responded that placing “the Great Russian proletariat in a position of inferiority with regard to the formerly oppressed nations is an absurdity.… If we lean too far in the direction of the peasant borderlands at the expense of the proletarian region, then a crack may develop in the system of proletarian dictatorship.” Stalin and his supporters had won the battle. Rakovsky, the outspoken Ukrainian leader, would soon be removed from Ukraine and sent into honorary exile as Soviet ambassador in London.

  The Twelfth Congress adopted a policy of support for local non-Russian cultures in the national republics—a sop for taking away the prerogatives of the republican governments and violating the principles of federalism. The party’s position on the cultural front was formulated by Grigorii Zinoviev, who said: “We cannot take the viewpoint of neutrality, the viewpoint that, let us say, in Ukraine or elsewhere two cultures are in conflict, and we shall wait and see what becomes of that. That is not our viewpoint, especially now, when our party is in power. We should play an active role in that process, acting in such a way as to make the Azerbaijani peasant see that if a school in his native language appears in his land, then that is thanks to the communists, and thanks particularly to the Russian Communist Party.”

  At the Twelfth Congress, Stalin also accepted Lenin’s view of Russian chauvinism as the main threat to the unity of the country, but he refused to let non-Russian nationalism off the hook. In his concluding remarks, Stalin asserted: “It is only on condition of a struggle on two fronts—against Great Russian chauvinism on the one hand, which is the fundamental danger in our work of construction, and local chauvinism on the other hand—that success can be achieved, for without that two-sided struggle there can be no union of workers and peasants of the Russians and the other nationalities. Otherwise there may be encouragement of local chauvinism, a policy of rewarding local chauvinism that we cannot permit.”

  Lenin did not attend the Twelfth Congress of his party. He never recovered from the stroke that he suffered in March 1923 and would die in January of the following year. The Second All-Union Congress of Soviets, which convened in Moscow on January 26, 1924, five days after Lenin’s death, failed to limit the role of the Union center as he had suggested in December 1922. Instead, it approved the new constitution of the Union and listened to Stalin’s oath of loyalty to Lenin and Leninism. “In departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to strengthen and expand the Union of Republics,” declared Stalin. “We swear to you, Comrade Lenin, that we shall fulfill that commandment of yours with honor!” Lenin’s vision of Great Russian chauvinism as the main threat in domestic politics, countered by the affirmative action for non-Russians, would characterize Stalin’s nationality policy for the rest of the decade. Stalin was loyal to some of Lenin’s ideas but not to others.

  Stalin adopted Lenin’s model of the Union but adapted it to his needs. His policy of “autonomization” of the republics was now dressed up as a federal union. Even the First All-Union Congress
, which had declared the creation of the Soviet Union, was in fact a Russian Congress of Soviets joined by representatives of the soviets of the other republics. Two-thirds of the Chamber of Nationalities in the Soviet parliament consisted of Russian deputies. The change in the façade under Stalin was nowhere more apparent than in the structure of the true backbone of Soviet rule, the Bolshevik Party. It was still called all-Russian and controlled from Moscow, and the republican parties had no more rights than regional party organizations in Russia. The Ukrainian communists had as much autonomy as their counterparts in the Crimea or Bashkiria.

  Lenin did not get his way on the issue of confederation, and it remains unclear whether he really wanted that model or simply used it as an argument in his polemics with Stalin. But he won on the issue of the structure of the Union—a victory that would ultimately have even greater consequences for the Russians than for the non-Russians of the former empire. Lenin’s victory created a separate republic within the Union for the Russians, endowing them with a territory, institutions, population, and identity distinct from those of the Union as a whole. In the state envisioned by Stalin, the Russians would have continued to share all those features with the empire, now renamed a Union. In Lenin’s state, they had no choice but to start acquiring an identity separate from the imperial one. Almost by default, Lenin became the father of the modern Russian nation, while the Soviet Union became its cradle. Lenin’s victory did much to fragment the prerevolutionary model of one big Russian nation. The result was a major shift in how Russians perceived themselves and in how others perceived them.