Abstract
The events of 1917 caused Lenin, Stalin and the Bolsheviks to move from the realm of theory to the very real daily concerns of fighting the civil war and governing the country. Peace, the agrarian revolution and freedom for the nationalities had rallied peoples of diverse economic and ethnic backgrounds behind the Bolshevik cause. In particular, the October Revolution proved that advocating self-determination was an effective way of combining national discontent with social discontent. As E. H. Carr remarks in The Bolshevik Revolution,
unqualified recognition of the right of secession not only enabled the Soviet regime - as nothing else could have done - to ride the torrent of a disruptive nationalism, but raised its prestige high above the ‘white’ generals [and, one could add, the Provisional government] who, bred in the pan-Russian tradition of the Tsars, refused any concession to the subject nationalities; in the borderlands where other than Russian, or other than Great Russian, elements predominated, and where the decisive campaigns of the civil war were fought, this factor told heavily in favour of the Soviet cause.1
Having overthrown the old order, however, the Bolsheviks faced a daunting task - living up to the expectations that they had created.
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Notes
See Alastair McAuley (ed.), Soviet Federalism, Nationalism and Economic Decentralisation (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1991), p. 15.
As cited in Branko Lazitch and Milorad M. Drachkovitch, Lenin and the Comintern (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1972), p. 369.
See Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, The Great Challenge: Nationalities and the Bolshevik State 1917–1930 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1991), pp. 94–7.
‘Resolution on the national question’. Adopted by the Seventh All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP, April 1917, in Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question (hereafter MNCQ) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1936), p. 270.
For Lenin’s justification for signing the Brest—Litovsk Treaty, see ‘Theses by Lenin on the question of the immediate conclusion of a separate and annexationist peace (20 January 1918)’, in Jane Degras (ed.), Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, vol. 1: 1917–1924 (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), pp. 34–9, and ‘Extracts from Lenin’s speech to the Seventh Congress of the Russian Communist Party on the Brest—Litovsk peace’ (7 March 1918), in Ibid. pp. 57–61.
One notable exception were the Latvian riflemen. As Andre Ezergailis points out in The Latvian Impact on the Bolshevik Revolution, the First Phase: September 1917 to April 1918 (Boulder, Colo.: East European Monographs, 1983), the Latvian riflemen helped to stabilize the situation in Petrograd and Moscow, assured the safety of the Council of Peoples’ Commissars, eliminated the ‘threat’ from the Constituent Assembly, gave muscle to the fledgling Cheka and played a significant role in the organization and early victories of the Red Army.
Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism 1917–1923 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 52.
Alexander J. Motyl, Sovietology, Rationality, Nationality: Coming to Grips with Nationalism in the USSR (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 117.
Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 79. For Suny’s useful grouping of states into five categories see p. 30.
Ibid. p. 80. Support for the Communist Party among the peasants remained negligible into the early 1930s and, although participation in Party activity increased at that time, it was due to more effective means of coercion rather than increased popular support. For a detailed look at this phenomenon see Graeme J. Gill, The Origins of the Stalinist Political System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Samed Shaheen, The Communist (Bolshevik) Theory of National Self-Determination (The Hague: W. Van Hoeve, 1956), p. 76.
V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 48.
Aryeh L. Unger, Constitutional Development in the USSR: A Guide to the Soviet Constitutions (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 27.
Walker Connor, The National Question in Marxist—Leninist Theory and Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 61.
Robert A. Jones, The Soviet Concept of ‘Limited Sovereignty’ from Lenin to Gorbachev: The Brezhnev Doctrine (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), p. 8.
Joseph Stalin, ‘Theses on the immediate tasks of the Party in connection with the national problem’ (1921), in MNCQ, pp. 92–3.
See Nahaylo Bohdan and Victor Svoboda, Soviet Disunion: A History of the Nationality Problem in the USSR (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1990), PP. 44–9.
Alexandre A. Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush, Muslim Nationalism in the Soviet Union: A Revolutionary Strategy for the Colonial World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 46.
Samuel Bloembergen, ‘The Union Republics: how much autonomy?’, Problems of Communism 16/5 (September–October 1967), pp. 27–35.
Joseph Stalin, ‘The policy of the Soviet government on the national question in Russia’ (1920), in MNCQ, p. 80.
Joseph Stalin, ‘Reply to the discussion on the Report on national factors in Party and state development’ (1923), in MNCQ, p. 168.
Joseph Stalin, ‘The amalgamation of the Soviet Republics’ (1922), in MNCQ, p. 123.
The Tadzhik Soviet Socialist Republic was created in June 1929.
Soloman M. Schwarz, ‘Self-determination under the Communist regime’, Problems of Communism, 2/5 (1953), p. 34.
Shirin Akiner, The Formation of Kazakh Identity: From Tribe to NationState (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1995).
Henry R. Huttenbach (ed.), Soviet Nationality Policies: Ruling Ethnic Groups in the USSR (London: Mansell, 1990), p. 20.
See Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (New York: Charles Scribner’s & Sons, 1936). On the whole the Webbs were quite impressed by how the Communists dealt with the minorities; and with the Soviet system in general. In one section they write: ‘Nowhere in the world do habit and custom and public opinion approach nearer to a like equality in fact.’
Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, ‘Determinants and parameters of Soviet nationality’, in Jeremy R. Azrael (ed.), Soviet Nationality Policies and Practices (New York: Praeger, 1978), pp. 42–3.
Galiev was in a no-win situation. His idea of a united Central Asian republic of Turan (in keeping with the Marxist idea of the viability of large economic units) was officially frowned upon, and yet at the same time he was accused of being a national deviationist.
See Geoffrey Stern, The Rise and Decline of International Communism (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1990), pp. 49–51.
Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1931), p. xiv.
Richard Stites, ‘Stalinism and the restructuring of revolutionary utopianism’, in Hans Gunther (ed.), The Culture of the Stalin Period (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 82.
The term was actually first coined by Karl Marx, in ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’ (1875), in Marx and Engels Selected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1991), p. 309, when he wrote ‘It is altogether self-evident that, to be able to fight at all, the working class must organise itself at home as a class and that its own country is the immediate arena of its struggle. In so far its class struggle is national, not in substance, but, as the Communist Manifesto says, “in form”’.
Joseph Stalin, ‘The political tasks of the university of the peoples of the East’ (18 May 1925), in MNCQ, pp. 209–10.
Joseph Stalin, The National Question and Leninism (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1950), p. 16.
Joseph Stalin, ‘Deviations on the national question’ (27 June 1930), in MNCQ, p. 261.
Isaac Deutscher, Stalin (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 239.
Such a cyclical pattern has been implied by a number of authors but has never been clearly laid out nor characterized as a cycle whose stages are determined by nationalism. For one of the better evaluations of cause and effect relating to the cyclical pattern, see Sarah Meiklejohn Terry, ‘Theories of socialist development in Soviet-East European relations’, in Sarah Meiklejohn Terry (ed.), Soviet Policy in Eastern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 221–53.
See Ernst Kux, ‘Contradictions in Soviet socialism’, Problems of Communism, 33/6 (November-December 1984), pp. 1–27.
Frederick C. Barghoorn, Soviet Russian Nationalism (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1956), p. 70.
Jones 1990, p. 133. See also Archie Brown and Jack Gray, Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 259.
Trotsky 1931, p. x.
Ibid. p. xxxv.
Barbara Ward, Nationalism and Ideology (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1967), p. 94.
Joseph Stalin, ‘The national question in Yugoslavia’ (30 March 1925), in MNCQ, p. 202.
Gerhard Simon, Nationalism and Policy Toward the Nationalities in the Soviet Union: From Totalitarian Dictatorship to Post-Stalinist Society (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991), p. 141.
See Borys Levytsky, The Stalinist Terror in the Thirties: Documentation from the Soviet Press (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1974).
The Karelo—Finnish union republic reverted to the status of Autonomous Republic in 1956.
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© 1999 Walter A. Kemp
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Kemp, W.A. (1999). From Socialist Theory to Communist Realpolitik. In: Nationalism and Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230375253_3
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