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THE BOLSHEVIKS AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION, 1917-23 STUDIES IN AND EAST EUROPE

This series includes books on general, political, historical, economic and cultural themes relating to Russia and East Europe written or edited by members of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in the University of London, or by authors working in association with the School.

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Marja Nissinen LATVIA'S TRANSITION TO A MARKET ECONOMY Political Determinants of Economic Reform Policy

Jeremy Smith THE BOLSHEVIKS AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION, 1917-23

Jeanne Sutherland SCHOOLING IN THE NEW RUSSIA Innovation and Change, 1984-95

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Studies in Russia and East Europe Series Standing Order ISBN 978-0-333-71018-0 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG2 l 6XS, England The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917-23

Jeremy Smith Researcher and Lecturer in Soviet History Ren val! Institute University of Helsinki

~ in association with ~ PALGRAVEMACMILLAN First published in Great Britain 1999 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndrnills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-40610-4 ISBN 978-0-230-37737-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230377370

First published in the United States of America 1999 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-22026-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith, Jeremy, 1964-- The Bolsheviks and the national question, 1917-23 I Jeremy Smith. p. cm. - (Studies in Russia and East Europe) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-22026-6 (cloth) 1. -Ethnic relations. 2. Soviet Union-Politics and government-1917-1945. I. Title. II. Series. DK33.S55 1999 323.1'47'09041----dc2l 98-41177 CIP © Jeremy Smith I 999 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1999 978-0-333-72759-1 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WlP 9HE.

Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 109876543 2 l 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 ()() 99 To Hanna

Contents

List of Tables ix Preface and Acknowledgements x List ofAbbreviations, Russian Terms and Organisations xv Note on Transliteration xvii

Introduction 1

2 Marxists, Bolsheviks and the National Question 7 From Marx to 7 The Bolsheviks before 1917 14 The Bolsheviks after 1917 19

3 The Case for National Autonomy - Causes and Processes 29 The People's Commissariat of Nationality Affairs (Narkomnats) 30 National Units in the Army 34 The National Commissariats and Departments of Narkomnats 39 The Muslim Commissariat 41 National Territorial Autonomy 43 The Turkestan Soviet Autonomous 45 Bashkir and Tatar Autonomy 47 The Spread of Autonomous and Regions 50 Autonomy in Transcaucasia 55

4 Building Nationhood - Borders and State Structures 66 Transcaucasia's Internal Borders 69 Belorussia's Borders 70 The Internal Borders of Central Asia 78 Migration and Resettlement 85 Problems of Autonomy 93 The Bashkir Crisis, 1919-20 94 Conflict in Turkestan, 1921 99 The People's Soviet Republics 101 The Independent Soviet Socialist Republics 103 Economic Development 104

Vil viii Contents 5 'Korenizatsiia' - National Communist Leaderships 108 The Jewish Socialist Parties 109 The Ukrainian Borotbists 116 Muslim National Communists 125 Communist Schools and Universities 136

6 'Cultural Autonomy' - Education, Language and Culture 144 Education of National Minorities 145 Language Planning 162 National Culture 168 Religion 170

7 The Georgian Crisis and the Formation of the Soviet Union 172 Competing Plans for the Organisation of Relations between the Soviet Republics 173 'Federalism', 'Confederalism' or 'Autonomy'? 175 Stalin's 'Autonomisation' Project 180 The Georgian Affair 189

8 The Twelfth Party Congress and the Sultan-Galiev Affair 213 The Twelfth Party Congress 213 The Sultan-Galiev Affair 228

9 Conclusion 239

Notes 243 Bibliography 265 Index 271 List of Tables

4.1 Population of Autonomous Republics and Regions in 1923 by Nationality 91 4.2 Nationality of Workers in Each Republic and Autonomous Region of the USSR in 1926 105 5.1 Students at the Ten Main Communist Universities on 1 January 1924 138 5.2 Members and Candidate Members of the , Compared to the Size of Each Nationality as a Proportion of the Entire Population of the USSR in 1926/1927 140 5.3 Proportion of CPSU Members and Candidate Members of the Titular Nationality in the National Republics and Regions in 1927 141 5.4 Percentage of Nationals on Raion, Volost, Okrug and Uezd in 1927 142 6.1 Native Language Education For Non-Russian Children in the Republic of Their Own Titular Nationality in December 1927 157 6.2 National Language and Mixed Language Education for Children of the Titular Nationality in the Autonomous Regions in December 1927 157 6.3 Four-Year Schools in the Belorussian SSR in December 1927 158 6.4 Seven-Year Schools in the Belorussian SSR in December 1927 158 6.5 Language of Instruction for Children Belonging to National Minorities, December 1927 (%) 159 6.6 The Growth of Yiddish Schools in Belorussia, and the RSFSR in the 162 6.7 Proportion of Turko-Tatar Literates understanding the New Turkic Alphabet in 1928/29 167

ix Preface and Acknowledgements

In October 1991 I began work on the national policies of the early Bolshevik regime which culminated in the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Within a matter of days the USSR had started to disintegrate, and within months all of the Union Republics which had entered into the composition of the federal state in 1923 had declared independence and constituted themselves as separate states. While I was lucky in that the timing of these events contributed additional relevance to my research, it had been clear for several years that the national question was far from being solved in the Soviet Union, in spite of the claims of ex-President Mikhail Gorbachev to the contrary. Taking their lead from the three Baltic Republics which had remained independent until the War, the non• Russian republics had provided one of the most potent sources of opposition to Soviet Communist rule in the 1980s. At the time it was commonplace to describe the collapse of the Soviet Union as the inevitable fate of a state which had been put together by force after 1917, with little or no recognition of the aspira• tions of the smaller nationalities of what had formerly been the . This interpretation owes much to the ground• breaking work of , whose The Formation of the Soviet Union: and Nationalism, 1917-1923 (Cambridge, Mass., 1954) has remained the most influential treatment of this question to date. While the work of other scholars in this field, such as Helene Carrere d'Encausse and E.H. Carr is of no less value, it is Pipes' account which has left its mark on all the subsequent historiography. In Pipes' view, the Ukrainians, Belorussians, Georgians, Azeris, Armenians and Moslems of the Russian borderlands had expressed an unequivocal desire for independence by setting up their own states in the wake of the of 1917. It was only by armed conquest that the Bolsheviks were able to extend their rule beyond Central Russia to cover most of the area of the old empire. Any concessions made to the nationalities were purely tactical: 'Lenin looked upon national problems as something to exploit, and not as something to

x Preface and Acknowledgements XI solve' (page 49.) On this reading, nothing positive can be found in the Bolsheviks' approach to the national question. Such an interpretation is inadequate. It ignores, or greatly simplifies, the complexity of Bolshevik and Marxist debate on the national question. It provides no adequate explanation of the great deal of effort put into developing national education and culture, and into the promotion of non-Russian communist cadres. It implies that the federal structures of both the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and the Soviet Union were purely cosmetic, and existed only as a sop to the national movements (which Pipes admits were weak and ineffective). An examination of both the new materials recently released from the archives in Moscow, and of documentation previously available, reveals a quite different picture: while the Bolsheviks had no blueprint for dealing with the national question, and their policies evolved haphazardly and often fortuitously, numer• ous influences played their part in the development of a coherent set of policies which sought to promote, rather than deny, national distinctiveness. This work sets out to challenge many of Pipes' assumptions and conclusions, but does not seek to replace it. The subject matter, as well as the sources, of the two works are distinct. Whereas Pipes' emphasis is on the processes by which the borderlands were sovietised and brought under Bolshevik rule, the present book focuses on the policies which were implemented once soviet power was in place. It is this divergence in subject matter and sources, as much as the opposing views of the two authors, which makes these works distinct yet compli• mentary. I do not challenge the accuracy of Pipes' account, which is based on the most thorough research given the materials available at the time, but rather its interpretations. As a result I have provided a short summary of the sovietisation of the borderlands in my intro• duction, rather than making it a subject of original investigation. Another major difference is that, where Pipes focuses on the major nationalities which received the status of 'Union Republic' in 1923, I have examined more closely the practice within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, to a lesser extent, within the republics of Transcaucasia. This approach has contributed to the important conclusion that policy towards the union republics after 1922 was largely an extension of the tried and tested policies already administered with a fair degree of success to the smaller nationalities of Russia itself. xii Preface and Acknowledgements A word should be said about the choice of the years 1917-23 for investigation. It seemed natural at first to begin with the Russian and end with the formal promulgation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, just as Pipes had done. The latter event has been widely regarded as the point at which a loose regime and liberal national policy was formally abandoned for a centralised state and the straight-jacket of communist conformity. This was seen as the result of the political decline of Lenin and Trotsky and the ascendancy of the great centraliser, Iosif Stalin. In fact, my investigation has shown this to be a period of continuous development and consolidation in a process which carried its momentum through to the time of Stalin's revolution of the late 1920s and early 30s. Logically, there was a case for extending the account to 1927, the year in which was at its height. But on reflection it made more sense to end with the events which I regarded as marking the consolidation of an approach which had developed over the preceding years, and which set the tone for the subsequent period - the Twelfth Congress of the Russian Communist Party in April 1923 and the 'Sultan-Galiev affair' of the same year. The story of how, and why, Stalin later reversed many of the policies with which he himself had been closely associ• ated is a different subject altogether. This book is one of a number appearing at the present time which are based largely on archival material formerly inaccessible to western scholars. Contrary to what many people may have hoped, stunning revelations and completely new facts are few and far between in the archives. But what the opening of the archives has allowed us to achieve is to develop our understanding of the day-to-day workings of Soviet and Communist Party institutions at a number of levels, and to appreciate to a greater degree than ever before the nature and importance of the 'middle layer' - the large number of functionaries whose names are less well-known than those of the principal leaders of , but whose influence on policy developments cannot be underestimated. As more and more work of this type is completed, it will be possible to provide an overall estimation of the significance of this layer. Consequently a complete re-evaluation of the nature of the Soviet regime, at least in its early phases, is inevitable. This group of people is particularly interesting in the area of national policies, as their background tended to be neither that of the Old Bolsheviks, nor that of the new generation of careerist appa• ratchiks who flocked to the banner of communism after 1917. Rather, they were leading members of the political classes of the non-Russian Preface and Acknowledgements xiii peoples - nationalists of a sort. But here it is important to dismiss any presuppositions about what nationalists demand - not every national movement seeks after full independence, especially in the conditions of Russia in the early . What this book shows is that the aspirations of this group of individuals dovetailed neatly with certain objectives of Lenin and, in particular, Stalin, to produce a national policy which was innovative, bold and ambitious - to 'raise the cul• tural level' of the 'backward' non-Russian peoples, through the medium of national identity, to the point where they would be polit• ically and economically ready to embrace .

This book is based on my doctoral thesis which was researched and written at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, between 1991 and 1996, and the manuscript was completed during my time as a lecturer at Edge Hill University College. My thanks go to all the staff and postgraduate students of SSEES who helped me in various ways, but most of all to my PhD supervisor, Professor Robert Service. In addition to providing me with general guidance and the benefits of his own considerable knowledge, he showed the rare ability to get me back on track at those moments when all inspiration appeared to have deserted me. For their many valuable comments and suggestions at various stages of this work, especial thanks to Brian Pearce, Arfon Rees and Jonathan Smele, along with the many others who have contributed in smaller ways. Also to my father, Christopher Smith, for providing a 'layman's view' of the manuscript. Thanks for producing the fron• tispiece map to Ann Chapman of Edge Hill University College. The core research for this project was undertaken during a one-year stay in Moscow in 1993-94, and I extend my appreciation to the staff of the Russian Centre for the Preservation of Documents of Recent History and the State Archive of the Russian Federation for their help and co-operation. Most of all, thanks are due to Liudmilla Kolodnikova and her staff at the Institute of Russian History for arranging access to the above archives, and also for making sure my stay in Moscow was as trouble-free as possible. I would like to thank my friends Misha and Irina Trostnikov, Simon Cosgrove, Katya Shemelina, Nikolai Guentchev, David Pannell, David Crouch and many others, without whom my time in Moscow would have been a great deal less pleasant and certainly less productive. xiv Preface and Acknowledgements Last, but by no means least, my gratitude to my wife, Hanna, and daughter, Saga, whose marriage and birth respectively coincided with crucial stages in the production of this book, and whose love and support is deeply appreciated. List of Abbreviations, Russian Terms and Organisations

ASSR Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic Bashrevkom Bashkir Committee Borotobists Party formed from Ukrainian Left-SRs Bund Jewish Socialist Party cc Central Committee Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle with Counterrevolution (the main Soviet security organ, 1918-1922) Comintern The Evkom Jewish Commissariat Evsektiia Jewish Section of the Russian Communist Party GOELRO State Commission for Electrifying Russia GPU State Political Administration Guberniia Province, the largest administrative unit m the Russian Empire Gubrevkom Provincial Revolutionary Committee Hummet Azerbaijani socialist party Jadidists Tatar political and cultural movement Kombund Communist Bund Korenizatsiia Lit. indigenisation - the process of creating political leadership in the national republics based on members of the local non-Russian population Litbel The Lithuanian-Belorussian Republic of 1919 Kavbiuro Caucasian Bureau of the Russian Communist Party KP(b)U Communist Party (bolshevik) of Ukraine KhPSR Khorezm People's Kirrevkom Kirghiz Revolutionary Committee Rich peasant Left SRs Left Socialist Russian Marxist party opposed to the Bolsheviks Muskom Muslim Commissariat Narkomnats People's Commissariat for Nationality Affairs

xv xvi List ofAbbreviations, Russian Terms and Organisations Narkomindel People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs Narkompros People's Commissariat for Enlightenment (education) Narkomzem People's Commissariat for Land NEP Oblast Province, largest soviet administrative unit, or equiv• alent to guberniia in Central Asia in the Russian Empire Okrug Region (smaller than uezd) Politburo Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party POW Prisoner of War Proletarian Culture - early Soviet cultural organisation Raion Region (soviet administrative unit equivalent to uezd) Revkom Revolutionary Committee Rewoensoviet Revolutionary Military Council RKP(b) Russian Communist Party (bolsheviks) RSFSR Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic Shariat Islamic legal system Sibrevkom Siberian Revolutionary Committee Sovnarkom Council of People's (the highest body in the soviet government) SR Socialist Revolutionary Party SSR Soviet Socialist Republic Turkbiuro Turkestan Bureau of the Russian Communist Party Turkkomissiia Turkestan Commission of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR Uezd Region (smaller administrative unit than guberniia) USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Volost District, the smallest administrative unit in the Russian Empire VSNKh Supreme Council of the People's Economy VTsIK All-Russian Central Executive Committee Zakkraikom Transcaucasian Regional Committee Elected district council in the late Russian Empire Note on Transliteration

Most Russian terms and names have been transliterated according to the Library of Congress system. Exceptions are when there are widely used and accepted versions of proper names (Trotsky), place names () or national titles (Kirghiz). Where there is more than one version of a place name, I have generally used the version most commonly used in the in the period under dis• cussion, in order to be consistent with usage in source documents (Belorussia, not ).

XVll TheU~n;·~~;:::-;::::::=~--.:--~~~~~~~ 30 December ~~ ion of Soviet1922 Soc1allst · . Republics

Borders:

=:.-=USSR Union Republic Autonomous Republ' utonom 1c ACity ous Region

RSFSR Russian Sov Socialist Re~~~~~derative

SSR Soviet Socialist Repubhc .

ASSR Autonomous S . Soclallsl Repu~Iy~et

AR Autonomous Region

400 800 1200 km

9.10. Karacha'.C Kabard1. herkess AR 14.13. Buriat-MonSouth o go! AR (Far East) 11. Chech ino-Balkar AR 15. Toilers' ~et1a AR ermans 12 . enAR 16. Kalmyk A~mmune of the Vo!ga G . Bunat-Mongol AR (Eastern Siberia)