The effect of the struggle was first to marginalize Trotsky, who lost his position as head of the War Commissariat and other offices in 1925. In that same year Zinoviev and Kamenev switched their allegiance, coming out in opposition to Stalin and Bukharin. For Zinoviev and Kamenev the main issue before had been fear of Trotsky: now they feared Stalin more. The now united opposition failed to win much support in the party and in 1926 Stalin had Zinoviev removed from his position as head of the party in Leningrad (Petrograd had acquired another new name on Lenin’s death). Thus the opposition had no longer any substantial base in the organization of the party. Stalin and Bukharin triumphed at the end of 1927. The NEP policy triumphed, it seemed, if with an increased push toward industrialization. Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev were expelled from the party along with their followers. Zinoviev and Kamenev soon recanted their errors and were readmitted, but Trotsky went first into exile in Alma-ata, and then was expelled from the country in 1929. Stalin had utterly defeated the opposition, and it seemed that NEP might continue.
Stalin’s victory went along with increasing prohibitions on dissent in the party and particularly on the formation of factions and oppositional platforms. Before the principle of absolute ideological unity could triumph, one last major dispute shook up the party leadership. Starting early in 1928, Stalin and his supporters changed their plans entirely. The cause was a drop in grain procured by the state agencies to feed the cities at the end of 1927. Stalin believed that the peasantry, mainly the kulaks, were simply holding grain back in the hopes of better prices or even to harm the Soviet state. His response was to organize an expedition of party officials led by himself into the Urals and Siberia early in 1928 to seize the grain. His expedition returned with freight cars loaded with grain, and he proclaimed it a success. Stalin and his allies now moved toward a policy of rapid industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture, effectively the end of NEP. The new policy provoked opposition from Bukharin as well as from Mikhail Tomskii, the head of the trade unions, and Aleksei Rykov, the Soviet Prime Minister. Basically their platform was simply that NEP was working out well, in spite of occasional problems, and that there was no need to force the pace, either in industry or the countryside. The Right Opposition was less of a defined group than the Left and had much more support in the party than the small group of Trotskyists and followers of Zinoviev and Kamenev. Nevertheless, Stalin fought it to extinction, expelling the Rights from the leadership and from the party by the end of 1929. Their many followers, especially in the party organization in Moscow, followed them into defeat. Stalin now had complete control over the central leadership of the party.
NEP, for all the concessions to the peasantry, implied a centralized, state-owned, and managed industry, and that implied a new kind of state. The Soviet state did not just regulate industry, it also directly managed it at every level. The overall structure was a refined form of the one established in 1918, the Supreme Economic Council placed at the center over a series of units for each branch of industry, one for iron and steel, another for coal, yet another for machine-building, grouped along regional lines. These units made the decisions that in capitalist economies are made by businessmen, and the decisions were subject to a single overall plan. That plan was the work of the State Planning Committee, or Gosplan. For most of the time from its foundation in 1921 to 1930 Gosplan worked under the leadership of Gleb Krzhizhanovskii. An exception to the norm among Bolshevik leaders, he was both a trained electrical engineer (from the St. Petersburg Technological Institute) and an Old Bolshevik. The original Gosplan was primarily an advisory office for the Supreme Economic Council, but it soon worked out an electrification plan for the whole country. By 1925 it was compiling “control figures,” a sort of crude general economic plan, and by the late twenties it moved to writing the first five-year plan adopted in 1929.
The state’s management apparatus for the economy, however, did not match these ambitious goals. In the 1920s most of the state officials were not Communist Party members. Even in the Supreme Economic Council and Gosplan, most were economists or engineers who neither belonged to the party nor were particularly sympathetic to its goals. Many had been active as Mensheviks, SRs, or even liberals before 1917, but they did have the technical skills the Bolsheviks needed. Lenin had always maintained that they would grow to accept the new order, but it was far from clear that this was the case. The party’s instrument in all these offices was a small number of People’s Commissars and chairmen of committees appointed by the party from its own leadership ranks – men with political rather than technical experience. The same was true at the factory level: the director was usually a party official, but the engineers and clerical workers were not. Thus the party gave orders to the economic managers and factories, but did not have full control. Even so, the party’s Politburo and Central Committee spent long hours on the technicalities of economic administration, the timber industry or the acreage sown of sugar beets as well as arcane issues of monetary circulation and foreign trade. Some of these issues also had a political side and were involved in the factional battles of Trotsky, Stalin, and the “Rightists,” so that economic decisions were frequently decided on political grounds. Indeed Stalin and the other leaders thought that politics should go ahead of “narrowly” economic concerns.
The other side of the new state was its federal structure based on a hierarchy of national units. Soviet federalism was about ethnicity, not just territory, and it grew out of the experiences of 1917–1920. The Bolshevik party had always maintained that the Russian Empire was a “prison of peoples” that combined the worst of European colonialism with the old military despotism of the tsars. Therefore they advanced the slogan of self-determination for the non-Russian peoples (including full independent statehood if desired) well before the First World War. During the revolution most of the national groups of the empire formed nationalist parties, if they did not have them before (as in Finland and Poland), parties that advocated some sort of national autonomy. Before most of them had time to formulate a clear platform and build a base, the Bolsheviks had seized power in Petrograd. With most cities speaking Russian and following the Reds, more or less, the nationalists had as their constituency only the local intelligentsia and, potentially, the peasantry. As most of the periphery was occupied by the Whites or interventionist troops until 1920, the Reds dealt only with the Ukraine and Belorussia in the west and the Muslim peoples of the Volga, the North Caucasus, and Central Asia. In each case the situation differed.
Belorussia was a largely artificial creation mandated by the party authorities in 1919–20 to counter Polish designs on the area. Most of the population was indifferent to the issue and the local Communists were flatly opposed to a local ethnic republic. Lenin (and Stalin, as Commissar of Nationalities) overruled them. The Ukraine was quite different. Here the nationalist movement was quite well established among the minority of the intelligentsia that considered itself Ukrainian and was initially able to mobilize wide support among the peasantry. They faced, however an insurmountable obstacle in the cities, largely Russian and Jewish in population. The working class was absolutely uninterested in the Ukrainian cause and most intellectuals were Russian or identified with Russia (meaning the White cause). Jews followed one or another of the Russian or Jewish parties (Zionists, the Bund), not the Ukrainians. Nevertheless the Bolsheviks in Moscow realized that they had to provide some sort of Ukrainian framework if only to neutralize the nationalists and thus they forced local Communists to form a Ukrainian Communist Party and proclaim (in 1919) a Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Both the Belorussian and the Ukrainian republics were de jure independent of Moscow, but their Communist Parties were not. They were explicitly subject to the orders of the Central Committee in Moscow.
The Muslim peoples were a wholly different issue. In the North Caucasus nationalism was very weak and the predominant identity was Islamic and very local. Some groups had allied with the Cossacks against the Reds and supported the Wh
ite armies, but the hostility of the latter toward any sort of local autonomy made allies for the Reds, especially in Daghestan, and this led to a multi-sided struggle of extraordinary complexity. The outcome was decided by the victories of the Red Army, and in 1920 the Soviet government began to set up a series of local autonomous republics in the mountains. Each of the local peoples acquired its political unit (some of the smallest combined).
The other main Muslim groups with whom the Reds had to deal were the Tatars and Bashkirs of the Volga and Urals. These were substantial minorities, several million each, living in relatively prosperous areas and largely surrounded by Russians and in mainly Russian cities. Under the Provisional Government the Muslim Duma deputies and other political figures had formed local parties in favor of national culture and autonomy but supported the Provisional Government. In the course of the Civil War the nationalist groups had started out on the side of the Whites but some of them switched to the Reds, unable to stomach Admiral Kolchak’s nationalist orientation. In March 1919 the Bolsheviks set up a Bashkir Soviet republic as an autonomous unit within Russia and a year later a Tatar republic. Central Asia had provided yet another challenge, as fighting lasted until 1922, but the establishment of Soviet rule did bring a single Turkestan Soviet republic within Soviet Russia in 1918. Here nationality was an especially problematic issue that was not addressed until 1924.
In one way the most important of the Muslim peoples in 1920 was in the Caucasus. These were the Azeris, for the simple reason that their largest city, Baku, was also the principal center of oil production in the previous Russian Empire. The rapid conquest of the area led to the formation of a united Transcaucasian Federal Soviet Republic in 1921. The idea came at the insistence of Stalin and Ordzhonikidze over the objections of other Georgian Communists, for Stalin did not want to encourage the aspirations of the larger nationalities. The brief years of independence had seen Georgian Mensheviks refuse to grant national rights to Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia as well as repeated Azeri-Armenian clashes. The solution was a federation that gave some sort of autonomy to all of the many ethnic groups of Transcaucasia, and in that way provided an obstacle, it seemed, to nationalism among the larger groups.
By 1922 Moscow was the center of several Soviet republics, technically independent but ruled by Communist Parties subordinate to the Russian Central Committee. Stalin decided to change this clumsy arrangement. His plan was to simply incorporate the other republics into Russia as autonomous units rather like Bashkiria but with somewhat more autonomy. His plan met opposition from Lenin, who believed that the greatest danger to party rule was Russian chauvinism. He did not want to provoke nationalist resistance on the periphery, and of course Russian nationalism had been the ideology of the Whites. Lenin’s objections led to a new scheme, in which all the Soviet republics, including Russia, formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In this scheme the larger non-Russian units entered the union on an equal legal status with Russia. In the 1920s only some functions were formally centralized in Moscow. There was no Commissariat of Agriculture or Education for the whole union, only in the republics. At the same time the Communist Party was centralized in the Politburo and Central Committee and gave orders to all the republican party organizations. In addition, the management of most of the industrial economy from Moscow was a powerful centralizing element.
The new union now had to face a series of unresolved issues throughout the country. The basic presumption of the Soviet leadership was that nationality was a matter of language. Though both Lenin and Stalin added common history and culture to this definition, in practice it meant language was the deciding factor. This criterion that worked fairly well in the European part of the country did not fit other areas so well. It committed the Soviets to forming autonomous units wherever there were language differences, and thus they began to set up autonomous units among small Siberian peoples without any political or national consciousness in the modern sense. Even among peoples of European Russia there were problems. The small Volga people who spoke a Finno-ugric language that Russian scholars called Mordovian had a common language but no common word for both of the two Mordovian subgroups. The Soviet authorities simply declared them all Mordovians and introduced the Russian word for their nationality into their language. In the Ukraine large cities with few Ukrainian speakers such as Odessa soon had no newspapers in Russian, only in Ukrainian. Multi-national cities like Baku were a particular problem.
The language issues in the western parts of the country paled compared to the situation in Central Asia. The Kazakh population of the northern steppes was a relatively coherent group and received the status of an autonomous republic within Russia in 1924 (and a union republic in 1936). Farther south, the population of the Syr-Darya and Amu-Darya river basins presented tremendous difficulties. Identity in these areas did not fall along linguistic lines. Most of the people thought of themselves first as Muslims, and then only as parts of one or another group. The urban and much of the settled village population fell under the category of Sarts, whether they spoke a Turkic or Iranian language. “Uzbek” usually meant Turkic-speaking nomads around and among the settled areas. The great cities, Bukhara, Khiva, and Samarkand had been the centers of Uzbek dynasties but their traditional culture was both Turkic and Persian. The area more or less compactly settled by Iranian speakers had no large urban center. The most prosperous agricultural area, the Ferghana valley, was also one of the most ethinically diverse. While the Turkmens, Kazakhs, and Kirgiz formed relatively coherent units, they were also divided along tribal lines. The Soviets took all of this as merely backwardness and feudalism and proceeded to create republics along linguistic lines, though in the Ferghana Valley this meant leaving large minorities on all sides of the new borders. The outcome was five republics: Kazakhstan, Kirgizia, Turkmenia, Uzbekistan (the most populous) and Tadjikistan (the Iranian-speaking area).
In the 1920s the conditions of NEP meant that there were few grand plans to transform the new republics. Starting in 1924–25 the party pursued a policy of “nativization” of the party and state apparatus outside the Russian republic. The main thrust was the promotion of non-Russian cadre at all levels, though the key positions were usually exempt from this policy, being reserved by Moscow for its most trusted workers. These party leaders were not necessarily Russians, however: Georgians, Armenians, Latvians (especially in the political police), and Jews were prominent in the leadership of the non-Russian republics, far from their presumed home territories. Both culture and the peasantry were to a large extent left to the republics during the 1920s, not surprisingly as in Bolshevik ideology the peasants were the reserve of nationalism and the intelligentsia were the carriers of the local national cultures. In the NEP years, both were to be conciliated and indeed local cultures could not be advanced or created without the native intelligentsia.
The cultural autonomy of the new republics went along with a largely centralized political and economic system. While the republican Communist parties managed their own day-to-day affairs, the guidelines and top personnel were firmly in the hands of the leadership in Moscow. Economic management was split between the Supreme Economic Council of the USSR in Moscow and analogous offices in the republics. The most important centers of production, such the Donbass and the huge metal industry of the Ukrainian republic, were under the authority of the center. This situation led to complaints from all the republican governments, including even the Russian republic.
The Soviet Union came into existence at the end of years of war and during upheaval around the world. Lenin and the Bolsheviks believed that their revolution was only the first of a series that would soon come, and not even the most important. The whole Bolshevik leadership believed that a revolution was imminent in Germany, and the overthrow of the Kaiser in 1918 seemed to be the beginning, the German version of Russia’s February Revolution. For the next few years it seemed that the German October was just around the corner. The brief establishment of a Hungarian Commu
nist government in 1919 and upheavals around the rest of Europe seemed to confirm the prognosis, but the anticipated revolution never came. In 1923 the German Communists made a last failed attempt, and Lenin and the Soviet leadership recognized that the revolutionary wave had ebbed.
The Soviet Union was now isolated in a world of hostile capitalist powers. It needed to survive, and its leaders, including Stalin, also believed that the world revolution would come sooner or later. This was the basic contradiction of Soviet foreign policy, and it remained until the final end of the Soviet state. The revolutionary side of Soviet relations with the world in the 1920s was the province of the Communist International (the Comintern). Founded in 1919 as the Communist answer to the Socialist International of moderate (and mostly formerly pro-war) socialists, it aimed to organize and promote revolution throughout the world. It boasted an international leadership and staff, but its headquarters in Moscow was firmly under Soviet control, in the person of Grigorii Zinoviev until 1925. It brought together under its leadership all the many groups of socialists who had opposed the First World War and then had gone on to espouse revolution in its aftermath, forming Communist Parties in nearly every country in the world. These were fractious parties, most of them with tactics far more militant than Moscow approved, but the Soviet leadership soon brought them into line.
The Soviet government also realized that it needed to break out of its isolation. Early in 1921 Britain had made a trade agreement, the first breach in the economic blockade imposed by Western powers in 1918. Then in 1922 the Soviets made an agreement with Weimar Germany, an agreement that included recognition, mutual trade, and a secret military protocol that allowed German military officers to train on Soviet territory and other forms of military cooperation. Weimar Germany, as the main victim of the peace settlement of Versailles, wanted maneuver room, and Lenin accommodated them. For the next decade relations with Germany warmed and then cooled, but the military agreement remained intact and trade expanded. In contrast, relations with Britain took a sharp downward turn, in large part the result of Soviet and Comintern policies in the East.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 39