The unexpected significance of the national question in the civil war proved to be yet another issue that empowered Stalin, and brought him into a close working relationship with Lenin. The two, often in the face of hostility from both hard-line Bolsheviks opposed to nationalism at all and national-minded Bolsheviks opposed to centralization, groped toward a workable federalism consonant with Marxist tenets, faits accomplis on the ground, and geopolitics.15
ACCIDENTAL FEDERALISTS
Four watchwords had accompanied the coup in 1917: peace, land, and bread, but also national self-determination, yet the latter notion had long vexed the left. “The nationality of the worker is neither French nor English nor German, it is labor,” Marx wrote in his early years. “His government is neither French nor English nor German it is capital. His native air is neither French nor German nor English it is factory air.”16 But as a result of the Irish Question, Marx later in life changed his position; a right to self-determination had been included in the program of the First International.17 Karl Kautsky’s essay “Modern Nationality” (1887) constituted the first major Marxist effort to elaborate the orthodox position that capitalist commodity relations had produced nations, which would presumably disappear with capitalism (the essay was translated into Russian in 1903). A hard-line Marxist position on nations had been outlined in 1908–9 by Rosa Luxemburg, who also argued that capitalism had generated nationalism, dividing the international proletariat by tying it to its ruling classes, but who denied self-determination except for the exploited working class, a position that attracted class-fixated leftists in polyglot Eastern Europe.18 Then a countervailing Marxist view emerged in Austria-Hungary, where Otto Bauer and others argued for an elaborate program of “national cultural autonomy” independent of territory to reconcile nation with class.19 Stalin’s essay “The National Question and Social Democracy” (1913) rejected what he saw as the Austro-Marxist attempt to substitute “bourgeois” nationality (culture) for class struggle (Luxemburgism), questioning, for example, who had appointed the Muslim beys and mullahs to speak for Muslim toilers, and noting that many “cultural” practices (religion, bride kidnapping, veiling) would have to be eradicated. Stalin especially targeted the Caucasus echoes of Austro-Marxist “national cultural autonomy” (Jordania and the Georgian Mensheviks), insisting that autonomy should only be territorial (i.e., not extended to nationals outside their homelands). Still, he concluded that nationalism could serve the worldwide proletariat’s emancipation by helping win over workers susceptible to nationalist appeals.20 Lenin—who has wrongly been credited with commissioning Stalin’s refutation of the Austro-Marxists—targeted Luxemburg’s dismissiveness of nationalism in an essay in a Russian emigre journal in Geneva in 1914.21 He distinguished between the nationalism of an oppressor nation and the nationalism of the oppressed (such as the Irish cause that had influenced Marx), and partially accepted a right to self-determination not merely for tactical reasons, à la Stalin, but also for moral political reasons: emancipation of the toilers of oppressed nations.22 In Lenin’s mind, one could not be both for socialism and for imperialism (national oppression by a big state).
Such, then, was the Marxisant corpus, polemics written for one another—orthodox Kautsky (a majoritarian citizen of Germany), hard-line Luxemburg (a Pole assimilated into Germany), and soft-line Bauer (an Austro-Hungarian multinationalist) versus Stalin (a Georgian assimilated into imperial Russia) versus Lenin (a majoritarian subject of Russia). These ideas became an even greater battleground in the real context of Russia’s civil war.
Bolshevik ranks embodied the wildly multinational character of imperial Russia (as the names, given in this book in the original, demonstrate) but the Bolsheviks were thoroughly Russified, too (as shown by the more typical spellings of their names). Still, they were conscious of the difference between ethnic Russia and imperial Russia. Trotsky, a Russified Jew, painted Russia in profoundly negative cultural terms, demanding a “final break of the people with Asianism, with the seventeenth century, with holy Russia, with icons and cockroaches.”23 Lenin, vehemently excoriating Great Russian chauvinism as a special evil that “demoralizes, degrades, dishonors and prostitutes [the toiling masses] by teaching them to oppress other nations and to cover up this shame with hypocritical and quasi-patriotic phrases,” still allowed that a popular nationalism could emerge among ethnic Russians.24 Stalin had once been a passionate critic of Russification. “Groaning under the yoke are the oppressed nations and religious communities, including the Poles, who are being driven from their native land . . . and the Finns, whose rights and liberties, granted by history, the autocracy is arrogantly trampling,” he had written in Georgian, in the periodical Brdzola (November–December 1901). “Groaning under the yoke are the eternally persecuted and humiliated Jews who lack even the miserably few rights enjoyed by other subjects of Russia—the right to live in any part of the country they choose, the right to attend school, the right to be employed in government service, and so forth. Groaning are the Georgians, Armenians, and other nations who are deprived of the right to have their own schools and be employed in government offices, and are compelled to submit to the shameful and oppressive policy of Russification.”25 But Stalin had quickly shed this Georgian nationalism, denying in Proletariatis Brdzola in September 1904 that national characteristics or a national spirit existed.26 By 1906, still writing in Georgian language, he was arguing that national autonomy would sever “our country [Georgia] from Russia and link it to Asian barbarism.”27 Thus, whereas Lenin railed against Russian chauvinism, Stalin worried about non-Russian backwardness and came to see Russian tutelage as a lever to lift other nations up—an echo perhaps of his personal experience in Russian Orthodox schools.28 This difference would prove consequential.
As the recognized expert in the party’s innermost circle on the national question, by virtue of his Georgian heritage and 1913 essay, Stalin emerged as the most significant figure in determining the structure of the Soviet state. It was no accident that the first Bolshevik government included a commissariat of nationalities, headed by him.29 The Russian empire’s dissolution in war and revolution had created an extraordinary situation in which the revolution’s survival was suddenly inextricably linked to the circumstance that vast stretches of Russian Eurasia had little or no proletariat. In order to find allies against “world imperialism” and “counterrevolution,” the party found itself pursuing tactical alliances with “bourgeois” nationalists in some territories, especially those without industry, but even those where a proletariat did exist. The first efforts in this regard had involved Polish-speaking lands: already in November 1917 the nationalities commissariat set up a Polish suborgan to recruit Polish Communists and retain Poland as a part of the Soviet Russian space. Never mind that the regime controlled no Polish territory at this time, and that serial rhetorical promises made by the competing Great War belligerents had continually upped the ante for an independent Poland. Stalin’s ethnic Polish deputy commissar Stanisław Pestkowski oversaw the plans to Sovietize Poland, and his unreconstructed Luxemburgism did little more than intensify splits in the Polish left and generate friction between local soviets and local-branch ethnic Polish committees.30 Poland, events would show, was not just a nation but a geopolitical factor in its own right. Similar suborgans in the nationalities commissariat emerged for Lithuania, Armenia, Jews, Belorussia, and so on, but the commissariat, and Stalin’s attention, became especially absorbed by the Muslim territories of Russian Eurasia and the search for tractable Muslim collaborators. A Muslim suborgan was established, but its leaders pursued their own agenda: an “autonomous” Tataria encompassing nearly all Muslims in former tsarist Russia. Stalin had initially supported this Greater Tataria in May 1918 as a way to assert some political control, but very soon he undermined it as a dangerous vehicle at odds with Bolshevik monopoly and a threat to winning the allegiance of non-Tatar Muslims.31 Stalin, despite his greater familiarity with Eurasia, had a learning curve,
too.
Federalism, Stalin’s key instrument, had started out with little support among Bolsheviks. Whereas in the American Revolution the federalists were those who argued for a strong central government, in the French Revolution, against an absolutist state, federalists wanted to weaken central power. It was the French understanding that influenced Marx, who rejected federalism. (The anarchists were the ones who supported looseness, decentralization, federalism.)32 Lenin had written (1913) that “Marxists are of course hostile to federation and decentralization,” further explaining in a private letter the same year that he stood “against federation in principle” because “it weakens the economic link and is an unsuitable form for a single state.”33 Stalin in March 1917 had published “Against Federalism,” arguing that “federalism in Russia does not and cannot solve the national question, [but] merely confuses and complicates it with quixotic ambitions to turn back the wheel of history.”34 But the wheel had turned, and quickly. In 1918, in power, Stalin conceded federalism—not “forced unification” as under the tsars, but a “voluntary and fraternal union of the working masses of all nations and peoples of Russia”—as a necessary but temporary expedient, a “transitional” phase toward socialism.35 A constitutional commission for Soviet Russia was hastily thrown together on April 1, 1918, with Stalin as the only member also in the Council of People’s Commissars; he wrote the theses that served as the basis for the draft document published on July 3, when it was submitted for approval to the Central Committee. Formally, the constitution was adopted at the Congress of Soviets, which took place July 4–10—the one that occurred during the Left SR quasi-coup in Moscow.36 Soviet Russia, officially, became the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, or RSFSR.37 The term “federation” occurred in the constitution’s title and initial principles, but not in the body of the text specifying the governing machinery, that is, the federation in practice.38 Nonetheless, even as most of the “self-governing” entities that comprised the RSFSR quickly fell to White occupation armies and other anti-Bolshevik forces, Soviet Russia remained a federation.
Stalin was the one who developed the Bolshevik rationale for federalism, which, in his description, entailed a way to bind the many peoples into a single integrated state. “Soviet power has not yet succeeded in becoming a people’s power to the same extent in the border regions inhabited by culturally backward elements,” he wrote in Pravda (April 9, 1918). He saw the Bolshevik task as splitting the masses from “bourgeois” nationalists by promoting “schools, courts, administrations, organs of power and social, political, and cultural institutions in which the laboring masses . . . use their own language.”39 In other words, Stalin’s understanding went beyond mentorship: even if Great Russia as a higher culture extended a helping hand to the various peoples, the latter still needed education and propaganda in their native tongues and participation in managing their own affairs. Here was the Communist version of a discovery that had been made by Russian Orthodox missionaries in remote areas of the empire: namely, that the Bible had to be taught in the empire’s vernacular languages, in order to get non-Christians to read it and convert. So it would be with Communism. This was not a question of a direct Orthodox missionary influence on Bolshevism, but of structurally similar circumstances leading to similar approaches.40 Stalin showed himself to be a missionary de facto.
The first major party discussion of the national question occurred at the 8th Party Congress in March 1919. This was also the congress that reaffirmed the use of tsarist officers, whose presence necessitated political commissars, which solidified the basic structure of a dualist party-state. On the national question, Bukharin, Pyatakov, and other leftist Communists at the congress demanded a hard-line Luxemburgist position (an end to the slogan of self-determination for nations).41 After all, federalism was the stance of the Mensheviks, the Jewish Bund, the Armenian Dashnaks, and non-socialist Ukrainian nationalists. Lenin responded that nations existed “objectively” and that “not to recognize something that is out there is impossible.”42 He prevailed in the vote, which acknowledged nationalism as a “necessary evil.” The congress even wrote the principle of self-determination into the Communist party program, albeit only after rejecting Stalin’s formulation (“self-determination for the working masses”) in favor of what was called self-determination from the “historical class viewpoint.” In fact, Stalin could live with this formulation, which meant that if a nation was moving from bourgeois democracy to soviet democracy, then the proletariat was the class deserving of self-determination, but if from feudalism to bourgeois democracy, then “bourgeois” nationalists could be engaged in political coalition.43 But what was most consequential about the 8th Congress was a resolution establishing the strictly non-federal nature of the party. “All decisions of the Russian Communist Party are unconditionally binding on all branches of the party, regardless of their national composition,” the resolution stated. “The Central Committee of the Ukrainian, Latvian, Lithuanian Communist parties enjoy the rights of regional committees of the party and are wholly subordinated to the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party.”44 Thus, the 8th Congress, while retaining a federal state, confirmed a non-federal party. Federalism, in other words, had to be kept subordinate to “the proletariat.”
SUPREMACY IN EASTERN EUROPE
Poland did not exist between 1795 and 1918. Józef Piłsudski (b. 1867), a descendant of nobility, a graduate of the same Wilno gymnasium as Felix Dzierzynski, and a former political terrorist against tsarism on behalf of Polish independence, had fought in the Great War on the side of the Central Powers but refused to swear an oath to Germany, which got him imprisoned. On November 8, 1918, three days before the armistice, the Germans released him; he returned on a train to Warsaw, not unlike Lenin’s return to Petrograd the year before. As Poland returned to the map 123 years after the partitions, its borders remained undetermined. Six worthless currencies, not to mention bureaucrats of three defunct empires (Austria, Germany, Russia), remained in circulation; crime, hunger, and typhus spread.45 Piłsudski, the new head of state, negotiated the evacuation of the German garrison from Warsaw as well as other German troops from Ludendorff’s kingdom of Ober Ost (many left their weapons to the Poles). He also set up an espionage-sabotage unit called the Polish Military Organization, and with French assistance, began improvising an army. “Literally everything needs to be rebuilt, from the bottom to the top,” wrote one French trainer, Charles de Gaulle, fresh from a German POW camp.46 Beginning in early 1919, against expansionist-minded Bolsheviks as well as local nationalists, the makeshift Polish legions under Piłsudski conquered parts of tsarist Belorussia, Lithuania, and Ukraine, including the Galician oil fields.47 By fall 1919, the Poles offered to take Moscow for Britain, with an army of 500,000, at a proposed cost of anywhere from 600,000 to 1 million per day; no one proved willing to pay (the British were still backing Denikin).48 In December 1919, Piłsudski put out feelers to Paris for support of a major Polish offensive against Bolshevism; France saw in Poland the eastern bastion of the Versailles Order, but offered only an ambiguous reply.49 The Soviets also appealed to France, and fantasized about obtaining German military help against Poland from the circle around Ludendorff.50 In the end, Poland and Soviet Russia would fight a war largely on their own.
The Polish-Soviet War of 1919–20 mirrored neighboring armed border skirmishes—Romania with Hungary over Transylvania, Italy with Yugoslavia over Rijeka/Fiume, and Poland with Germany over Poznan/Pomerania and with Czechoslovakia over Silesia. Greater Romania especially, with its monarchy intact, emerged as a new power on the southwestern Soviet frontier. But the Warsaw-Moscow conflict was larger, a full-scale battle for supremacy in Eastern Europe that would profoundly shape the interwar period.51 It would also shape Bolshevik internal politics.
Lenin and Piłsudski had lived in Habsburg Krakow on the same street and at the same time as exiles from tsarist Russia. Piłsudski had even been arrested in the same plot to assassin
ate Alexander III that had led to the execution of Lenin’s brother. But overlapping maps of the Polish-Lithuania Commonwealth (1569–1795), once the largest state in Europe and of the Russian empire, the largest state in world history, gave inspiration to two competing imperialisms.52 In power, Lenin and Piłsudski issued mostly bad-faith peace proposals to the other and claimed they were undertaking military actions defensively, even as they harbored grandiose ambitions. Lenin viewed “bourgeois” Poland as the key battleground for the revolution against the Versailles Order: either an Entente springboard for intervention in socialist Russia—which had to be prevented—or a potential corridor for Bolshevik fomenting of revolution in Germany.53 Piłsudski, a Social Democrat and Polish nationalist who now added the title of marshal, sought a truncated Russia and a Greater Poland in the form of a Polish-dominated “federation” with Belorussia and Lithuania, allied with a small independent Ukraine.54
Historic Ukraine—at different times and in different ways part of both Poland-Lithuania and imperial Russia—had seen its own opening from the dissolution of the three major land empires in 1918, yet unlike the case of Poland, the decision makers at Versailles had refused to recognize Ukraine’s independence. Puppet governments of Germany, Bolshevik Russia, and Poland, not to mention General Denikin, rose and fell, but amid the competing claims, the countryside remained ungovernable to any would-be rulers. In April 1920, the deposed Ukrainian nationalist leader Symon Petliura, whose so-called Directory controlled very little Ukrainian territory and who was in asylum in Warsaw, signed a military alliance with Piłsudski, known as the Treaty of Warsaw. In exchange for Polish assistance in battling for an independent Ukraine against the Bolsheviks, Petliura relinquished claims to eastern Galicia (centered on Lwów/Lviv), for which the Ukrainian-speaking majority there roundly denounced him. Piłsudski faced uproar from Polish nationalists opposed to Ukraine’s existence at all, but he argued that Polish forces could not garrison all of a huge Ukraine and that given the history of Russian imperialism, “there can be no independent Poland without an independent Ukraine.” At the same time, he claimed territories for Poland with large western Ukrainian-speaking populations.55 The latter included his native Wilno/Vilna/Vilnius, which was also sought by Lithuania and Belorussia. The Poles, additionally, had captured Minsk, also claimed by Belorussia and even by some Lithuanians. (Belorussia, in its greatest form, encompassed the imperial Russian provinces of Grodno, Vilna, Minsk, Mogilyov, and Vitebsk; Brest-Litovsk was in Grodno province.)
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