Stalin’s ‘national’ character. Stalin’s Georgian and Russian personas and nationality policy, 1917-1946

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Stalin’s ‘national’ character

Stalin’s Georgian and Russian personas and nationality policy, 1917-1946

MA Thesis in Europese Studies Graduate School for Humanities Universiteit van Amsterdam

Author: Guido Bonzet Main Supervisor: Dr. E. van Ree Second Supervisor: Dr. C.U. Noack

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Introduction

With this thesis I aim to show that Stalin’s ideas on the national question in the Soviet Union changed throughout his political life. This was both due to general political

circumstances as well as to Stalin's Georgian and Russian personas. From his youth onwards, Stalin was influenced by both Georgian and Russian culture, which helped to develop his later ideas and politics regarding Soviet national minorities. Both pragmatism and personal feelings on the idea of nationality influenced Soviet national policy, as Stalin’s views on the national question changed throughout his political career. This thesis will cover the period from Stalin’s youth until the year of 1946, when Russocentrism had become the main focus of Soviet national policy once again, as it had be in the Russian Empire. I will discuss Stalin’s youth in Georgia and his beginnings as a Marxist at the end of the 19th_{century, his years as a} revolutionary Bolshevik until the year 1917 when the Bolsheviks seized power and

subsequently implemented the policy of ‘korenizatsiia’ (indigenization). Furthermore, I will discuss Stalin’s years in power from 1924 until 1946 which cover both Stalin’s support of korenizatsiia and his subsequent loss of faith in it, which paved the way for the return to Great Russian chauvinism. The Bolshevik ideal of the policy of korenizatsiia for non-Russians will play a central part in this thesis. Korenizatsiia was initially treated as a useful policy by Stalin, who recognized the policy’s significance in the effort of coming to terms with the

non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union. In the mid-1930’s this changed, because Stalin became more and more wary of the danger of local nationalism, in some cases fearing

disloyalty of minority nationalities to the Soviet Union. Also, Russian patriotism was seen by Stalin as the best mobilizing force for the Soviet Union, in particular when war broke out with Nazi Germany. In general, Stalin’s Georgian roots and his identification with the Russian nation allowed him to experiment with a wide variety of ‘national’ policies and each time to pick those policies that in his mind seemed best suited to the times, throughout his political

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career. The link between Stalin’s ethnic and cultural persona on the one hand, and his politics regarding the minority nations (all other than Russia) on the other will serve as a connecting thread in this thesis. Stalin’s national policy changes several times during the course of his political career, which is discussed in the different chapters which mark specific periods of time and political functions. My main conclusion is this: as a young man Stalin experienced both local, i.e. Georgian, nationalism and Russian patriotism. He took both experiences with him as a Soviet statesman, instinctively understanding as he did that a workable nationality policy must always take both elements, local and Russian, into account. That is why despite the major shifts from one policy to the other and back, there always remained an element of balance discernible in his policies.

This thesis sets out with an analysis of Stalin’s youth, education and his time as a revolutionary following Lenin’s political path. In this first chapter, I will try to make clear how Georgian romantic nationalism made an impact on the young Stalin, specifically through poetry and prose. Although Georgian nationalism took precedence in Stalin’s early life, and he had an aversion to Russia’s dominance over Georgia during this period, I will show how Russian language and culture also influenced him in this time. A swift mastering of the Russian language and a keen interest in Russian culture and writers were vital to Stalin’s early identification with Russia as a nation of importance. Furthermore, I will show that Stalin’s persona further Russifies during his time as a revolutionary, as he chooses to follow Lenin’s Bolsheviks, who represent an at heart Russian party.

Chapter two will focus on the Stalin as People’s Commissar for National Affairs under Lenin during the years 1917-1923. By this time Lenin and Stalin were already promoting ideas of indigenization for the non-Russian nations, in order to win their support for the Bolsheviks’ cause. Although Stalin was more wary of handing nations the degree of self-determination that Lenin favoured, they more or less agreed on the desirability to implement a

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policy that took the minorities seriously. One of the main reasons why Lenin appointed Stalin as Commissar was the fact that the Georgian Stalin was of a minority nationality himself. However, during his period as Commissar, Stalin at the same time showed a lot of disregard for the wishes of non-Russian nationalities with regard to expressions of national self-determination. I will show in this chapter that Lenin sometimes clashed with Stalin on the degree of self-determination to be granted to minority nationalities. By the time he was Commissar, Stalin had become thoroughly Russified and -apart from pragmatic objections to local nationalism- this heavily influenced his thinking and actions regarding national policy in this period.

Chapter three will discuss Stalin in power during the years 1924-1934. In his first years as leader of the Soviet Union, Stalin issued the policy of korenizatsiia or indigenization for all non-Russian Soviet nations. This policy was implemented from above, and entailed primarily the promotion of national elites, national schools promoting national history and teaching in a nation’s native language, and the mandatory use of local languages as opposed to Russian. Stalin’s commitment to korenizatsiia made for some extreme cases of national formation; several new nations and languages were created, virtually from scratch. However, Stalin’s commitment to korenizatsiia only went as far as it constituted a harmless means to help build socialism in the non-Russian nations. Any (re-)awakening of national sentiments in the non-Russians caused by the implementation of korenizatsiia was deemed unwanted and met with severe repression by Stalin. This way, Stalin kept korenizatsiia in check at any time during its implementation.

Chapter four focuses on the years 1934-1946, when korenizatsiia fell out of favour with Stalin, and which also marked the definitive return of Great Russian chauvinism. In this period, korenizatsiia was discontinued as Stalin became more aware of the dangers of local nationalism. In the case of several minority nationalities with ties to their titular countries,

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Stalin feared their disloyalty to the Soviet Union on a national basis. Stalin also felt that since the building of socialism had been completed, class as a mobilizing force for the Soviet citizens was no longer eligible. Because of this, nationality as the main mobilizing force re-emerged in the Soviet Union, and the Russian was propagated as the Union’s leading nation. The strong influence of WWII on the re-emergence of Great Russian chauvinism will also be emphasized in chapter four. At the same time, again a measure of balance was preserved. Stalin never resorted to a policy of Russification.

Finally, conclusions will be drawn from Stalin’s balance of Russianness and

Georgianness throughout his life, and the influence this balancing act had on Soviet national policy during Stalin’s political life until the year of 1946. It will show the influence of both Stalin’s personal feelings and his pragmatism on the idea of nationality and the question of Soviet national policy, and how Stalin’s views on the nationality question changed throughout his political career.

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Chapter 1: Influence of early youth and his time as a revolutionary in

Georgia on Stalin’s persona and his ideas on the national question in Russia

§ 1.1: Stalin’s Georgian youth

This chapter will list the most important and formative events of Stalin’s youth,

adolescence and subsequent period as a revolutionary before the Bolsheviks seized power. It will begin with his early years in Georgia, and end with Stalin’s revolutionary ideals and actions in the whole Russian Empire on the verge of the Russian Revolution of 1917. The chapter will present a picture of the influence this early period of Stalin’s life had on his Georgian and Russian persona, and how this period influenced his view on the national question in Russia.

As all biographies of the Georgian dictator point out, little is known about Stalin’s early childhood. We do know that Iosif Vissarionovich Djugashvili was born on 6 December 1878 in the Georgian town of Gori. He was an only child of poor parents, who had been born as peasant serfs in the Russian Empire but were later emancipated. His father was Besarion Djugashvili, a shoemaker and later alcoholic, and his mother was Ketevan Geladze. Soso, as the young Stalin was called in his youth, enjoyed a relatively happy childhood. However, both ‘Beso’ and ‘Keke’ were not unknown to give their son a beating at times, born from alcoholic tempers and general strictness, respectively. Despite experiencing some physical difficulties in his youth (a pockmarked face and two injured legs among them) and his relatively meagre height of 170 he proved strong and energetic.1_{The young Stalin was also fierce and}

combative in nature, and was someone with whom his classmates were not eager to pick a fight. Aggression and a sense of struggle had a firm place in the pre-modern Georgian society of the late 19th_{and early 20}th_{century, and they were instilled in the young Stalin from his}

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early childhood.2_{Alfred Rieber notes that in this period, Stalin was immersed in Georgian} traditional culture. His mother gave him all sorts of Georgian toys, sang nursery rhymes and songs to him, and recited folk tales to him.3

Another thing which was instilled into Stalin from an early age was the Georgian disaffection with Russian dominance of their nation. This disaffection became more and more pronounced in the period in which Stalin grew up, and a strong nationalist movement arose in the 1890’s.4_{By this time, the nation of Georgia had already had a turbulent history during} which their existence had been threatened numerous times. From the 15th_{century AD until the} end of the 18th_{century the nation had been either dominated by the Persians or the Russians.} As a tiny Christian enclave still threatened by the Muslim Persians and Turks, the Georgian kings looked to Russia for protection at the end of the 18th_{century. During the course of the} 19th_{century, the Russian Empire ended the independence of the Western Georgia}

principalities one by one and by 1864 this process had been completed with the capture of Abkhazia.5_{Under the Tsars, Russia held rigid control over Georgia, suppressing its culture} and language and forcing the numerous ethnic minorities within Georgia to assimilate.6 Furthermore, serfdom in Georgia wasn’t officially abolished by Tsar Alexander II until the 1870’s. For the emancipated serfs such as Stalin’s parents it even took decades more of compensation payments to the Georgian nobility in order to actually own a piece of the land on which they worked.7

The young Stalin was a bright lad, with a knack for hard and diligent work. At nine years old, he started his learning at Gori Church School, where he proved a model student. He received top marks as well as excelling as a choir singer and a beginning poet. At this school,

2 Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007), 32-33.

3 Alfred Rieber, “Stalin. Man of the Borderlands”, The American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (2001): 1656. 4 Helen Rappaport, Joseph Stalin: A Biographical Companion (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1999), 97. 5 David Marshall Lang, A Modern History of Georgia (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962), 41. 6 Rappaport, Joseph Stalin: A Biographical Companion, 97.

7 Ronald Grigor Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 98-112

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Soso started to learn Russian. The use of Russian had been made compulsory by Tsar Alexander III, and most classes were taught in the language of the Empire. Soso quickly absorbed this new language - although he never lost his strong Georgian accent.8_{However, he} felt anger and bitterness at this form of ‘Russification’ which the teachers forced upon him and his classmates. At school there would be a fine or punishment for not speaking Russian, but at home, Soso continued to speak Georgian. His interest in the Georgian language

certainly didn’t suffer because of the Russian he used at school. Alfred Rieber emphasizes the fact that ‘the young Djugashvili did not discard the Georgian culture of his childhood when he began to learn Russian and to attend school’.9_{Stalin much valued his native language, reading} nationalist Georgian poetry and fiction from this young age. Robert McNeal writes: “(…) while Iosif was learning Russian in Gori he was reading poetry and fiction in his native Georgian, specifically the nationalist writing of Rustaveli, Eristavi, Chavchavadze and Kazbegi.”10_{The young Stalin managed to combine this interest in Georgian language and} culture with a fondness of the Russian language and his leading the school choir, which performed Russian folk songs by the likes of Tchaikovsky and Turchaninov. Alfred Rieber points out that while in this period Stalin ‘acquires the rudiments of a Russian identity’, he maintained a deep interest in Georgian culture even after he would enter the Tiflis seminary.11

The origin of the Georgian writings that the young Stalin read lay in the 1830’s, when Georgian literature became influenced by Romanticism. It focused mainly on the wild and mountainous landscape of the Georgian Caucasus and sang the praises of freedom represented by this unspoiled nature. From this Georgian Romanticism there arose a genuinely nationalist movement from the mid-1850’s onwards. The writer Ilia Chavchavadze was the most

important Georgian nationalist of the late 19th_{century, criticizing Russia’s suppression of}

8 Kevin McDermott, Stalin. Revolutionary in an Era of War (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2006), 18. 9 Alfred Rieber, “Stalin. Man of the Borderlands”, 1656.

10 Robert McNeal, Stalin. Man and Ruler (London: Macmillan, 1998), 7. 11 Alfred Rieber, “Stalin. Man of the Borderlands”, 1656.

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Georgian language and culture, and praising Georgian folklore and the preservation of rural society. Niko Nikoladze belonged to the so-called ‘Second Group’ of Georgian nationalism, and looked to Western Europe for liberal ideas. He stressed the need for Georgians to

compete economically with the Armenians and Russians living within Georgia, and favoured a Caucasian federation of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.12_{Ronald Suny stresses that for} the Georgian national self-image and for the revival of national history and literature it was fundamental that Georgia ‘had existed as a state (actually as a number of states) long before the Russian state had been formed’.13

Concludingly, we can say that Stalin’s early Georgianness expressed itself for the greatest part through the boy’s love for reading Georgian fiction and poetry outside of the church school dominated by Russian language and culture. However, it wasn’t only the Georgian writing that Soso showed an interest in. In general, Soso valued the Georgian nationhood, full of its folklore tales and heroic themes. Another example of his ‘Georgianness’ was his manner of dress. Despite his poor background, Soso would come to school immaculately dressed in traditional Georgian clothing, much to the fascination of his fellow pupils.14_{With regard to his} early interest in Georgian culture and folklore, Isaac Deutscher reckons Soso’s feelings towards the Georgian nation were far more important to him at this stage than his feelings towards social injustice. Although Deutscher does think that a sense of social injustice was already apparent in him from this early age, it remains unclear to what extent it had developed at that time.15_{Like Deutscher, Hiroaki Kuromiya holds this view of Georgian nationalism as a} main theme in Stalin’s youth.16_{It appears, then, that Stalin’s sense of injustice in these early} days was connected to national injustice. As we shall later see, this feeling of national

12 Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 125-131.

13 Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past. Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 58.

14 Montefiore, Young Stalin, p. 27.

15 Isaac Deutscher, Stalin. A Political Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 27. 16 Kuromiya, Stalin, 6.

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injustice which Stalin felt towards the Russians as a Georgian helped to develop a feeling of social injustice inside him, which then developed into his embracing of Marxism. According to Hiroaki Kuromiya, ‘a fanatic hatred of authority and the propertied classes’ played a great part on Stalin’s road to Marxism.17_{This hatred of authority was already apparent in this early} stage of his life, and would drive him in obtaining authority for himself rather than being subjected to it. With regard to Marxism, Stalin tried with great effort to emphasize his early affinity with it during his reign. Robert McNeal says of this:

It is impossible to determine exactly when the seminarian transferred his allegiance to Marxism. The official version that Stalin established in an interview in 1931 is that ‘I joined the revolutionary movement when 15 years old, when I became connected with underground groups of Russian Marxists then living in

Transcaucasia.’18

While McNeal finds Stalin’s early conversion to Marxism around 1894 or 1895 fairly plausible, more recent biographers such as Kevin McDermott and Simon Sebag Montefiore date Stalin’s first dealings with Marxism to 1896 at the earliest. Importantly, Hiroaki

Kuromiya points out that up until 1895 no Marxist groups or circles even existed.19_{Until the} age of 16, when the young Stalin entered the seminary to continue his education, he can be said to have no identifiable sense of social justice or affinity with socialism. His sense of Georgianness and of national injustice towards the Russians on the other, were clearly present. His affinity with Russianness on the other hand, was limited to the boy’s rapid learning of the Russian language without any clear signs of aversion to it.

17 Kuromiya, Stalin, 7.

18 McNeal, Stalin. Man and Ruler, 9. 19 Kuromiya, Stalin, 5.

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§ 1.2: Life at the seminary: nurturing the Georgian revolutionary spirit

At the age of 16, Soso was able to gain admission to the Georgian Orthodox seminary in Tiflis on a scholarship. Besarion, however, preferred him to follow in his footsteps by becoming a shoemaker. He strongly opposed his son’s further education and at some point even dragged his son along to train as a cobbler.20_{Meanwhile, Beso’s alcoholism had plunged} the family into marital and financial problems. He took up a new job in Tiflis to work in a shoe factory, leaving behind his wife and son. With his father gone, Soso moved to Tiflis to start his studies at the seminary on a scholarship. Keke, who was a deeply religious woman, had set her hopes on Soso becoming a priest. It needs to be said that the seminary did not merely train priests, but had a great attraction to all kinds of students since it was the most important place of higher learning in Georgia.21_{As far as religion was concerned, Soso had} always valued the Orthodoxy his mother had preached. The education at the seminary, however, did nothing to deepen his religious feelings. On the contrary, it made Soso rebel against the religious order, as well as against the Russian imperialist order. Since 1873, the seminary had had a history of chaos and violence with its often fanatically nationalistic and revolutionary-minded students. Now, at the end of the 19th_{century, it still proved a real} hotbed for Caucasian revolutionaries to be.22

When he started his studies at the seminary however, the gifted Soso was still the conformist, model student he had always been. He continued to get high grades, whilst also starting to write poetry in the style of his Georgian nationalist and romantic literary examples, which quality was recognized at the highest level. At age 17, he even met Ilia Chavchavadze who decided to publish five of Stalin’s poems, turning the young man into a minor Georgian celebrity before his revolutionary years started. ‘Soselo’, as the young Stalin signed his

20Kuromiya, Stalin, 1.

21 Deutscher, Stalin. A Political Biography, 32.

22 Edward Ellis Smith, The Young Stalin: The Early Years of an Elusive Revolutionary (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1967), 31-32.

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poems, showed echoes of his favourite Romantic Georgian poets in his work. Prince Giorgi Eristavi, Akaki Tsereteli and Ilia Chavchavadze himself were among Stalin’s favourites, all 19th_{century Romantic nationalist poets who exuded a spirit of a free and heroic Georgia in the} face of its adversaries. Apart from 19th_{century poetry, Stalin admired Shota Rustaveli, the 12}th century writer of the Georgian epic poem The Knight in the Panther’s Skin. Miklós Kun notes that Stalin in his later life made corrections to the Russian translation of this national epic, as he felt nostalgic towards his native Georgia and to writing poetry.23_{Besides Romantic} nationalism, the short-lived literary career of the young Stalin was similar to that of his literary examples in its themes the beauty of nature and sympathy for the oppressed Georgian peasantry. However, the adolescent’s poems also manifested what Donald Rayfield calls ‘convictions of human ingratitude’ and a reflection of ‘Machiavellian thinking’.24

Stalin’s Georgian nationalist side was still much manifest at this time, although he did start to take a keen interest in Russian culture and literature, reading outlawed writers such as Pushkin and Nekrasov. Among others, works of Victor Hugo, Ernest Renan and Nikolai Chernyshevsky were smuggled into the seminary.25_{In general, the young Stalin was an avid} reader, who read the great European and American classics as well as many historical works. It is possible that Soso became acquainted with Darwin’s The Origin of Species around this time, furthering his own ideas about the validity of religion. At the same time his atheist mind formed, he also developed strong ideas about social injustice. However, at this time Georgian nationalism still had a far more important factor to play than Marxism. Apart from broadening his mind to other literary and scientific works, Soso had kept his interest in Georgian

literature and poetry. A Georgian work that made a specific impact on him was the novel The

Patricide by Alexander Kazbegi, which had been forbidden by the Russians. Its protagonist

Koba fights the tsarist regime and struggles for the freedom of Caucasia. The book’s themes

23 Miklós Kun, Stalin. An Unknown Portrait (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2003), 5. 24 Donald Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia. A History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 206. 25 Robert Payne, The Rise and Fall of Stalin (London: W.H. Allen, 1966), 43.

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of freedom, loyalty, nationalism and romantic love inspired Soso to take up Koba as his first ‘nom de guerre’, a name he bore with visible pride.26_{The young Stalin revered the violent} Georgian national heroes who stood up to the Russians to protect their own language and culture against the oppressors. Honour and shame, sacrifice, the strong Caucasian longing for freedom and blunt violence were some of the (Georgian) themes which the young Stalin embraced. Up until his first few years at the seminary, Stalin focused his attention mainly on Georgian nationalism.27_{He would retain his pseudonym of Koba for some time to come, and} kept a great interest in Georgian nationalism. It is important to note that the Georgian

variation of socialism would come to incorporate some of the existing Georgian nationalism, making the two ‘-isms’ not mutually exclusive.

With regard to Stalin’s increasing interest in Marxism and social politics in general, Kevin McDermott gives a clear chronology. He lists that Stalin’s period of contact with political radicalism started around 1896-7 at the seminary. Then, around 1897-8, Stalin first came into contact with Marxist ideas and study circles but did not join any Marxist group until he became a member of the SD party in 1901, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.28_In 1899, Stalin was expelled from the seminary for something as trivial as missing his final exams. By that time though, he had lost his interest in finishing his studies, and was willing to get into life as a revolutionary.

26 Kun, Stalin. An Unknown Portrait, 43. 27 Service, Stalin. A Biography, 48.

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§ 1.3: Fulltime revolutionary: trading Georgian nationalism for Russian socialism

Near the turn of the century, Marxism was steadily gaining ground in the city of Tiflis, and together with Ioseb Iremashvili, a friend from the seminary, Stalin started to mingle in Tiflis socialist circles. Socialism had developed in Georgia around 1870, where Tbilisi and Batumi were newly-industrialized cities with a potential for the radical socialist movement of Marxism to gain a foothold. By the end of the 19th_{century, socialism had become a real factor} of importance in Georgia as it replaced nationalism as the dominant socio-political force. Noe Jordania was the most important figure among the Georgian Marxists who called themselves the ‘Third Group’ in late 1892. This Third Group, or Mesame Dasi in Georgian, would later grow into the Georgian Social Democratic Party, which Stalin joined in 1898.29_{An aspiring} Marxist revolutionary around this time, Stalin sought contact with Jordania to write for Jordania’s newspaper Kvali (which had already published some of Stalin’s romantic

nationalist poems), only to be turned down with the advice that the young seminarist ‘should study more’.30_{Kvali had existed prior to Jordania’s editorship, but in January 1898 it came out} for the first time as a means of propaganda for the Social Democrats. According to Stephen F. Jones, it opposed nationalists such as Nikoladze and Ilia Chavchavadze, and ‘Kvali was pro-urban, pro-European, and pro-working class’.31

The fact that the Okhrana, the secret police force of the Russian Empire, put Stalin down as a potential threat and decided to follow him on a permanent basis, made the Georgian realize that he could not go back to a normal life -whether it be going back to the seminary or getting a regular working life- and in 1899 he decided to become a fulltime Marxist

revolutionary, funded by the party. Around this time he also discovered the writings of Vladimir Lenin, which formed a great deal of inspiration for Stalin as a beginning

29 Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879-1929, 125. 30 Montefiore, Young Stalin, 55.

31 Stephen F. Jones, Socialism in Georgian Colors. The European Road to Social Democracy, 1883-1917, (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 66-67.

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revolutionary. In his later life, Stalin said of Lenin’s influence on him: “If there’d been no Lenin, I’d have stayed a choirboy and seminarian.”32_{He started writing articles for Brdzola} (Struggle), which was printed illegally in Baku. Close to being caught by the Okhrana, Stalin was sent to Batumi on the Georgian coast where he led riots and strikes of the workers of an oil refinery which was owned by the famous Rothschild bankers family. Developing himself as a Bolshevik praktik, Stalin was arrested in Batumi in April 1902, and after almost one and a half years spent in Caucasian prisons he was exiled to Siberia for three years in 1903.33 Early in 1904, Stalin managed to escape Siberia with false papers and he arrived in Tiflis once again.

Stalin then joined Lenin’s Bolshevik faction of the Social Democrats.34_{Robert Tucker} writes that Stalin by this time was firmly pro-Lenin, and took the time and effort to criticize those who disagreed with Lenin’s views.35_{The main idea which set Lenin (and later the} Bolsheviks) apart from his political rivals in the Party was his vanguardism, which entailed that a professional elite should lead the Party and eventually the workers’ revolution. Regarding the matter of nations and nationalism, Lenin did not show a clear interest until 1912, and only then out of political necessity, as Erik van Ree notes.36_{The Social Democratic} Party advocated a centralized state, a limited use of national languages, a small degree of cultural autonomy and a (largely theoretical) right to self-determination, which Lenin interpreted as a right to secession. These matters were all laid down in the Party program adopted at the Second Party Congress in 1903.37_{Within the Party there were debates about the} degree of support which should be given to national minorities, if any. This debate was largely divided in the ‘left-wing’ of internationalists and the ‘right-wing’ who supported some

32 Montefiore, Young Stalin, 63.

33 Deutscher, Stalin. A Political Biography, 68. 34 Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879-1929, 99. 35 Ibid.

36 Erik van Ree, “Stalin and the National Question”, Revolutionary Russia 7, no. 2 (December 1994): 217. 37 Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union. Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923 (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1954), 32-33.

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degree of self-determination for nations. The pure internationalists wished to render all nations obsolete and believed that nationalism should not receive much positive attention. The main Bolsheviks internationalists were Georgy Pyatakov and Nikolai Bukharin, the latter only switching to an internationalist position after 1912. Lenin, Stalin and others were more considerate of national grievances.

From 1904, the Mensheviks proved the Bolsheviks’ rival faction. At this time, Stalin favoured an autonomous Georgian Social Democratic party. This caused friction with the majority of orthodox Bolsheviks who refused to allow a party along clear national lines. He was threatened to be expelled from the Bolsheviks, after which he wrote the self-criticizing

Credo, a paper which renounced his views on the matter.38_{This was the first time the}

persistent question of nationality would turn up for Stalin. However, as he emphasized in his 1904 article ‘The Social-Democratic View on the National Question’, Stalin firmly stood for a centralized party which favoured ‘breaking down the national barriers’ instead of reinforcing them, as he understood the Federalists in the Social Democratic Party to want.39_{He travelled} across Georgia to gain support for the Bolshevik party, and at the same time worked to undermine the Mensheviks, which gained him Lenin's attention.40

Despite the generally internationalist outlook of Jordania’s Georgian Social Democrats and their willingness to work together with their Russian counterparts, the Georgian Social Democratic Party had retained a clear nationalist component, insofar as they demanded autonomous rights for the Transcaucasian territory. Also, as Ronald Suny points out, Georgian Marxist intellectuals saw both the Armenian bourgeoisie as well as the Russian autocracy within Georgia as their enemies.41_{From 1903 onwards, the Mensheviks would win}

38 Robert Service, Stalin. A Biography (London: Pan Macmillan, 2004), 54.

39 Joseph Stalin, “The Social-Democratic View on the National Question”, Foreign Languages Publishing

House (1954), http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1904/09/01.htm.

40 Adam Ulam, Stalin. The Man and His Era (London: Allen Lane, 1974), 57.

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massive support in Georgia, contrary to the Bolsheviks, which as a party were much more Russian in nature and internationalist in their outlook. Jordania stood for a more moderate form of socialism than Lenin’s Bolsheviks, without resorting to terror in order to reach goals. Stalin certainly thought Jordania much too moderate in his Marxism, and chose the path of the Bolsheviks. This choice also put Stalin on the road to Russification, since the Bolsheviks were a thoroughly centralized party which was Russian at heart. According to Robert Tucker, Stalin was hugely attracted to ‘Lenin’s theory of the party as an all-Russian league of skilled and dedicated fighters against tsarism’.42

At this time, Stalin was going through a process of thorough Russification. This process was very much intensified by his clear choice for the Russian Bolshevik Party and its leader Lenin shortly before 1905. Robert Tucker names the importance of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party in Stalin’s Russification. The Party played a unifying, Great Russian role, despite having a great number of national minorities as members, such as Stalin himself. However, Tucker attaches most value to the role Lenin played in the process of Stalin’s Russification. The ‘hero-identification’ with Lenin was crucial according to Tucker, who notes that for Stalin ‘to become like him (i.e. Lenin) was to become, among other things, a Russian’.43_{Since Stalin was by birth a citizen of the Russian Empire, and since Russian was} a language in which he could easily and naturally express himself, he was able to make the choice to become a Russian. With his newfound Russianness came ‘a harsh condemnation of Georgian nationalism in all its forms’, attacking nationalistic Georgian radicals who favoured Georgian national autonomy both within the Empire and within the Party.44_Furthermore, Stalin’s choice for the ‘Russian’ Bolsheviks would increase his criticism and animosity towards the ‘Georgian’ Mensheviks.

42 Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879-1929, 133. 43 Ibid., 138.

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In January 1905, Stalin was in Baku when Cossacks attacked a mass demonstration of workers, killing 200. This was part of a series of events which sparked off the Russian

Revolution of 1905. After these events, he went on to campaign against the Mensheviks, who were very popular in Georgia. On 7 January 1906, Stalin met Lenin in person for the first time at a Bolshevik conference in Tampere, Finland. By this time, as Stalin was starting to make his name within Bolshevik circles and regularly attended Bolshevik congresses, Lenin at least superficially knew of his existence. Back in Tiflis, Stalin continued his life as a ‘praktik’, where he was directly or indirectly involved with expropriations. One of these expropriations yielded a large amount of money, which caught him Lenin’s attention again as the money was delivered to the Bolshevik leader in Finland. In the following years Stalin would be

permanently chased by the Okhrana, and he between 1908 and 1912 he spent most of his time either in jail or in exile. Early 1912, Lenin made Stalin a member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik faction of the Social Democratic Party. Upon this decision, Stalin settled in St. Petersburg in April 1912 and took charge of the weekly newspaper Pravda (Truth) and turned it into a daily newspaper. This was a crucial change in Stalin’s political career, since he moved from working in the Transcaucasian territory to Russia. He published articles in

Pravda which tried to bring the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks closer together again.45_{At the} end of 1912 Stalin left Pravda to become leader of the Russian Bureau of the Bolshevik Party. Lenin asked Stalin to write an essay formulating the Bolshevik ideas on the national question. Lenin put Stalin forward as the Bolshevik spokesperson on national minorities, later

appointing him People’s Commissar for National Affairs of the newly founded Soviet Union. Stalin met with future leading Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin in Vienna, the two discussing the national question extensively. There, Stalin completed his essay ‘Marxism and the National Question’, which was published in March 1913. By then, he signed his article as K. Stalin. As he dropped the name Koba for Stalin (he had started to use the name Stalin in 1912), a further

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transformation from Georgian nationalism towards a Russified political persona took place.46 As Hiroaki Kuromiya notes about Marxism and the National Question: “this treatise elevated Stalin to a leading position in the party on the national question.”47_{The article emphasized} Stalin’s idea of the nation as a valid entity with four indispensable characteristics, namely a ‘common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture’.48_{Stalin clearly outlines how nations in principle are entitled to} self-determination, and he notes how any nation should have the right to ‘determine its own destiny’ in the sense of the use of their own language and customs, and that no one should have the right to deny these nations this cultural destiny.49_{However, with regard to the} question of what freedoms the Social Democratic Party should allow to these nations, Stalin takes a firm centralist approach. He advocates assimilation of ‘backward’ local cultures in Russian modernity. Thus, on the one hand, we see a centralist preference which Stalin propagated his preference for a strong, Russian-led centre which would serve to rid other nations -which were not yet as civilized as Russia- of their backwardness. On the other hand, Stalin accepted the reality of nations and national cultures which cannot be erased. A delicate balance of his newfound Russianness and the remains of his ‘old Georgianness’ can be in this famous 1913 article.

In 1912 Stalin was again exiled for four years and returned to St. Petersburg (renamed Petrograd in 1914) just in time for the Russian Revolution of February 1917.50_Kevin McDermott notes that Stalin was to play a significant, but by no means glorious, role in the Bolshevik seizure of power’.51_{Although Stalin had no direct role in the October 1917 coup,}

46 Robert Himmer, “On the Origin and Significance of the Name Stalin”, Russian Review 45, No. 3 (1986): 269-286.

48 Joseph Stalin, “Marxism and the National Question”, Prosveshcheniye (March-May 1913), http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1913/03a.htm.

49 Ibid.

50 Ulam, Stalin. The Man and His Era, 137.

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he emerged a leading party figure throughout this crucial year. Whilst Stalin lacked Lenin’s and Trotsky’s oratorical and intellectual skills and he adapted poorly to the quickly-changing political events which the Revolution had brought about, he became a respected Bolshevik leader because of his active role in the Bolshevik Central Committee. The undying loyalty to Lenin also helped Stalin’s position. He supported Lenin’s unpopular position on the national question (including the right to secession) whilst a majority of the Bolsheviks were in favour of proletarian internationalism.52

The concepts of Georgian and Russian nationalism both played an important part in Stalin’s youth and in his revolutionary years. Although Georgian nationalism was a far more important force in his years leading up to his time at the seminary, the years at the seminary meant a gentler balancing of the young Stalin’s Georgianness and Russianness. The

subsequent years as a revolutionary marked a notable change in favour of Russianness however, which went together with Stalin’s immersion in Marxism. It can be assumed that Stalin came to the logical conclusion that the most important movement of his day and certainly of the near-future was socialism, not nationalism. However, he did not lose sight of the significance of local nationalism. Stalin decided upon joining the Bolshevik faction of the Social Democratic Party both because he thought it was more radical and more Russian in nature. As he idealized Lenin, Stalin seems also to have idealized himself. He saw himself as a special person for whom history had an important role in mind; therefore he must have believed joining a party which had the ability to make a difference on a larger (i.e. Russian) scale made more sense. Furthermore, by moving from his main identification with Georgia to an identification with Russia, he moved ‘from a losing to a winning side in history’, as Robert Tucker notes.53_{Thus, Stalin’s choice for Bolshevism meant he had to be Russified to a very} large degree, something he did without reservations.

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Chapter 2: Stalin as People’s Commissar for National Affairs under Lenin:

1917-1923. Promoting ideas of indigenization

§ 2.1: Lenin puts Stalin forward

By 1917, Stalin had acquired several different functions within the Bolshevik party. He was Party commissar and secretary, as well as an important military leader. But with the Bolsheviks obtaining power, Lenin had yet another position in mind for Stalin. Years earlier, in 1913, Lenin had assigned the ‘wonderful Georgian’ to write an essay that conveyed the party line on the national question, due to Stalin’s affinity with the subject.54_{For Lenin it was} a logical state of affairs, then, for Stalin to be put forward as People’s Commissar for National Affairs when the Bolsheviks set up their Soviet government. From 1918 until shortly after the USSR officially came into being at the very end of 1922, Stalin was -at least in name- in charge of both the theory as well as the implementation of Soviet nationality politics. The Commissariat was occupied with all Soviet nations, with the exclusion of the formally independent Soviet republics of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Transcaucasia.

Right from the start, the Commissariat lacked an own space, personnel and finances. Stalin’s personal assistant Fëdor Alliluev helped him to set up an office in the Smolny Institute in St. Petersburg, although they moved soon after the start up when the Soviet government moved to Moscow.55_{Much as the official nationalities policy in general, the goal} of the Commissariat was quite vague. Neither did it help its authority that Stalin was hardly known to the general public yet. According to Adam Ulam, the fact that Lenin and Trotsky received all the praise for the relatively easy shift of power in favour of the Bolsheviks didn’t sit well with Stalin. Stalin believed that this ‘spectacular success was due not only to the ‘theorists’ Lenin and Trotsky, but also to the unspectacular yet vital hard labor of

54 Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879-1929, 152. 55 Service, Stalin. A Biography, 150-151.

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‘practitioners’ like himself’.56_{In reality, Stalin was not the only Bolshevik authority on the} matter of nationality affairs, since Lenin’s status as an expert on the topic remained without question. Lenin had written the highly influential article “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination” in 1914, which had determined that nations in theory should have the right to secede and form their own state. However, by this Lenin did by no means intend to encourage secession of nations in practice. The Bolsheviks meant to be ideologically sound as they wanted to avoid any hint of colonialism and Great Russian oppression of minority nations within the former Russian imperial territory. What they did not intend to do, was to set out on a too lenient course towards the minority nations, and open the door for them all to break the bonds with the Russian centre.

From the Bolsheviks’ point of view, it was vital to gain popular support within the whole territory of the former Russian Empire. Since the revolution had only taken place in Moscow and Petrograd, the Bolsheviks needed to win over the rest of Russia and its adjacent territories to their cause. That’s why Lenin, with Stalin among his fiercest supporters, was convinced that this could only be done by means of a national policy which allowed some concessions to the minority nations. These concessions were to come in three forms, namely a degree of cultural autonomy, the right to secession, and a federalist structure for the new socialist state. Whilst the right to secession would prove to be only a paper one, Lenin did seriously consider how to allow the minority nations some cultural autonomy. The biggest change in policy however, would be the shift from the staunch centralism which the

Bolsheviks had always advocated, to the federalism which would be at the heart of the later Soviet state. Lenin had set out a national policy for the Bolsheviks which differed both from Rosa Luxemburg’s proletarian internationalism which envisioned virtually no cultural autonomy for nations, and with Austro-Marxists Otto Bauer and Karl Renner who favoured

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national-cultural autonomy for nationalities on a personal basis, regardless of the territory they inhabited.57_{Lenin thought nations were a political reality and a phenomenon which,} although a by-product of capitalism which was to disappear after the complete, world-wide victory of socialism, was to exist for many years to come and should be realistically dealt with by granting nations some autonomy. He found two matters in the theory of the

Austro-Marxists to be fully undesirable though. Firstly, Lenin disagreed with the notion of Bauer and Renner that ‘national differences and separate cultural identities were permanent and would persist under socialism’.58_{Rather, Lenin, like most Marxists, envisioned national differences} to disappear in a future which based on socialism, and saw this as something positive. Secondly, and more importantly, Lenin had always disagreed with the Austro-Marxists’ national-cultural autonomy for nationalities. In Lenin’s eyes, autonomy could only be granted on a territorial basis, to nations that were culturally and linguistically heterogeneous in nature. Stalin’s 1913 article had also indicated that the two Bolshevik leaders were largely on the same page. In the article Stalin attacked the Austro-Marxists as did Lenin before him,

emphasizing in particular the need for autonomy of fully-fledged nations on a territorial basis instead of allowing the ‘national-cultural autonomy’ Bauer and Renner favoured, which would increase unwanted national differences according to Stalin.59

One reason why Stalin was handed this new position of Commissar for National Affairs was because he had roughly the same ideas as Lenin on how to deal with the multitude of nationalities within the former Russian Empire. It was obvious from the start, that Lenin’s ideas on the national question were central to the policies that Stalin would have to set out. But more importantly than simply sharing Lenin’s ideas on the matter, Stalin would have greater leverage to carry out these policies being of a minority nationality himself.60_Robert

57 Smith, The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917-1923, 11-14. 58 Ibid., 10.

59 Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union. Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923, 38. 60 Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879-1929, 150-151.

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Service and Stephen Blank also see Stalin’s national origins as being vital to his appointment as Commissar, since as a Georgian, Stalin was thought by Lenin to understand the delicacy of the matter. Compared to Stalin, the leading Bolsheviks Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky all showed contempt for minorities, although they did officially adhere to the party line on the matter. Furthermore, they also pondered the (undoubtedly negative) influence of their

Jewishness in this topic.61_{Bukharin in 1917 also followed a purely internationalist line, which} later changed as he shifted to the opinion of Lenin and Stalin in the years before the USSR came into being. As Stephen Blank concludes: “Perhaps Stalin showed the greater internal awareness of the force of attraction of national consciousness and, correspondingly, the significance of national identification and its deep-rootedness among the minorities.

Presumably his own origins and experience of revolutionary apprenticeship in a multinational environment influenced his evolution.”62_{Helen Rappaport agrees with this view, and notes} that Stalin ‘seemed well equipped with what historian Isaac Deutscher has described as “Russia’s vast, inert, oriental fringe.”’63_{It holds no doubt that Stalin seemed more equipped to} deal with the national question because of his Georgian background. As Lenin later

experienced however, it was this sharp understanding of the mechanics of nationalism which influenced Stalin to favour a much stricter and more centralist approach towards minority nations than Lenin had in mind. Leonard Schapiro summarizes Lenin’s view on the direction the Bolsheviks were heading with Stalin at the head of national affairs, something which would later lead the two men to clash on the national question.

From 1919 onwards Lenin became increasingly critical of the way in which policy towards the national minorities was being implemented by his party. But he failed to make his criticism effective. This was in part

61 Service, Stalin. A Biography, 207.

62 Stephen Blank, The Sorcerer as Apprentice: Stalin as Commissar of Nationalities, 1917-1924 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994), 217.

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due to the fact that Stalin, who was already building up his own power complex within the party with the aid of his close supporters, was able to ignore Lenin’s views.64

The balance between Stalin’s Georgian and Russian personas which dates back to his youth is still very much present in the years following the October Revolution. Stalin had become Russified to a large degree, something which cemented his general view on the importance of centralism within the Bolshevik Party as well as in a Russian-led future state. However, he remained open to the ideas of some degree of autonomy for minority nations, in the form of schooling, the use of local languages and forms of cultural expression based on national grounds. His definition of nations, which were identified as based on the four factors of a shared cultural make-up, a shared economy, a common language and an own territory, came in handy. He was also in favour of the federalist structure of the Soviet state, and of the paper right to secession.

§ 2.2: Beginnings and goals of Narkomnats

In the beginning of Narkomnats, it was mainly Lenin who was occupied with the theoretical discussion about national self-determination, leaving Stalin with the task of dealing with the day to day practice of introducing the non-Russians to socialism. However, one of Stalin’s first tasks was to formalize Finland’s independence. Not much later, Poland would follow suit. Isaac Deutscher stresses that Lenin’s Right to Self-Determination was put to the test after the October Revolution by the secession of Finland and by the will of other countries to secede, such as Ukraine. With regard to the Right to Self-Determination, ‘Lenin and Stalin were taken at their word’.65_{Both Lenin and Stalin reluctantly accepted the}

secession of the two nations and Stalin began to focus on his main task, which was ‘(…) to find ways of securing the territorial integrity of a centralized socialist Soviet state while

64 Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York: Random House, 1960), 228. 65 Deutscher, Stalin. A Political Biography, 183.

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satisfying the legitimate goals of oppressed minorities.’66_{However, during his years as} Commissar for National Affairs, Stalin rejected in practice what was the theoretical Right to Self-Determination of the minority nations. Afraid of losing power to the periphery, Stalin emphasized the importance of a strong center and rejected ideas of secession by those minority nations. Thus, the right to secession was not recognized in practice, although in theory the Bolsheviks kept it in place. Here, Stalin and Lenin were on the same page. Both had no intention of losing even more of the nations on their territory, so in practice these nations’ right to secede was not taken seriously. In their eyes, the socialist state was meant to be one integrated whole with a strong center. For the peripheral areas, this strong center would be the solution to rid them of their ‘backwardness’ through developmental

programmes.67_{The theoretical right to secession was also a core policy. Actually handing} political power to peripheral nations to secede, however, was not. Throughout the period of Stalin as Commissar, the federalism that was granted to minority nations was kept in check by the Party, which Leonard Schapiro describes as consisting of around 80% of Russians or assimilated Russians such as Stalin himself.68_{Schapiro further notes that Stalin put ‘a close} band of faithful agents’ (Kaganovich, Molotov, Ordzhonikidze, Kirov) in place at the head of the various national parties, as the Commissariat was used as ‘the main instrument first for suppressing all competing national councils or organizations which grew up in the RSFSR during the civil war; and thereafter for reinforcing central direction over the parties in the reconquered national territories’.69

In battling the so-called backwardness, the Bolsheviks were presented with some problems. It was obvious that the only way to get rid of backwardness and thus raise the bar of ‘civilization’ in (predominantly) the Eastern nations, the civilizing influence would have to

66 McDermott, Stalin. Revolutionary in an Era of War, 33-34.

67 Jeremy Smith, “Stalin as Commissar for Nationality Affairs”, in Stalin: A New History, ed. Sarah Davies and James Harris (Cambridge: University Press, 2005), 48-49.

68 Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 228. 69 Ibid., 227-228.

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come from Russia. But exerting this influence without angering the Eastern nations was going to be difficult, since a large influence of Russia (and the ‘arrogance’ of Great Russian

chauvinism which accompanied it) was at odds with the idea of national self-determination. According to Jeremy Smith, already in this period ‘(Stalin’s) belief in Russian superiority (was) never far from the surface’.70_{This leads Smith to believe that Stalin’s attitude towards} the minority nations at that moment already pointed towards the change in policy of the 1930’s, in which Russia emerged as the leading nation in the Soviet Union. The other problem which the Soviets faced was the fact that most of the ‘backward nations’ lacked literacy and workers (most people were peasants), which made a nationality policy which emphasized and even promoted national languages and cultures, and trained national cadres, difficult to develop. In his attempt to solve the problem of backwardness we find another example of Stalin’s balance of Russianness and Georgianness. As mentioned, the civilizing influence which was to solve this backwardness was Russia, which acted as the leading nation for the minority nations to follow. This paternalistic, leading role of Russia contrasted with the idea that all minority nations would be allowed certain linguistic and cultural freedoms along their own national lines.

These were the beginnings of the policy which from 1923 would be named

korenizatsiia (indigenization) and would be actively pursued by Stalin. The ‘backward

nations’ were given certain freedoms with regard to the use of their own language and the expression of their culture while they embraced socialism. This meant that nationalism of minority nations was conditionally condoned by Lenin and Stalin. In the long run however, the true character of socialism would render most forms of nationalism (language was a notable exception for Stalin) unnecessary and therefore obsolete. Importantly though, Lenin and Stalin took nationalism and its political powers very seriously, whilst supranational

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socialist integration was viewed by the two Bolsheviks as a phase of Marxism which could take many generations to actually come about. Jeremy Smith emphasizes this (theoretical) temporality of the Bolsheviks nationalities policy, but more importantly notes that Stalin’s commitment to the outlined policy of cultural autonomy was very serious indeed, especially regarding the nations whose population consisted mainly of peasants. As Smith states: “It was clearly his (Stalin’s) hope that by promoting national statehood, culture and language, the peasantry would move closer to socialism.”71_{Robert Service agrees with this, and emphasizes} that although Stalin during this period ‘had his own growing bias in favour of Russia and the Russians’, he believed in this lenient nationalities policy and ‘was one of its most committed exponents’.72_{Service further points out what lay at the heart of Stalin’s belief in the outlined} nationalities policy: “His Georgian origins and early Marxist activity had moored him to the idea that the peoples of the former Russian Empire needed to be schooled, indoctrinated and recruited if Marxism was to take root among them.”73

§ 2.3: National communists and the Sultangaliev affair

In the non-Russian areas, the Bolsheviks were willing to work together with the existing elites who were not or not explicitly socialist. Francine Hirsch notes that Narkomnats played an important role in this collaboration. “It (i.e. Narkomnats) reached out to local populations and helped the Bolsheviks broker alliances with new self-identified national leaders; it also helped facilitate local-level coups, installing local leaders who were either sympathetic to the Bolsheviks or prepared to trade their allegiance for Bolshevik backing.”74 The leaders of these non-Russian nations were so-called ‘national communists’. Stalin entrusted these national communists with a great amount of responsibility due to the great

71 Jeremy Smith, The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917-1923 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 27. 72 Service, Stalin. A Biography, 206.

73 Ibid.

74 Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations. Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 68.

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level of self-determination Lenin’s theory gave them in combination with the Georgian’s pragmatist approach to the issue. The national communist leaders subsequently used (or misused in Stalin’s eyes) this trust to further their own nationalist causes in the years of Narkomnats. Stalin, bound to the party line, created Tatar and Bashkir autonomous republics in 1920. He worked together with the Bashkir leader Zeki Validov and Tatar leader Mirza Sultangaliev.75

The Sultangaliev affair was a good example of how Stalin’s outlook on the nationality question changed for the first time after he felt ‘betrayed’ by one of the national communist leaders. Mirza Sultangaliev was a Tatar Muslim who grew up in Bashkiria at the end of the 19th_{century, then a part of the Russian Empire. He later became a leader who strived to help} his people nationalist cause by joining the Bolsheviks in 1917 and was asked to join

Narkomnats in the same year. After 1919 he was asked to help to resolve the national question among the Tatars, first on a local level and later on a national level by Lenin himself. As a Marxist Muslim, his task set by the Bolsheviks was to unite his people and convince them they were a lot better off with the socialists than with their former Tsarist oppressors.

Although Stalin had stood by Sultangaliev in his support for korenizatsiia and throughout his struggle against the Bolshevik internationalists, he was caught by surprise in mid-1923 when documents were intercepted which suggested that Sultangaliev conspired against the Soviet state. It was suspected he ‘engaged in conspiratorial activity among communists and non-communists both within the RSFSR and abroad, possibly with an aim of overthrowing Soviet power and realizing the dream of a pan-Turanian republic’.76_{This obviously meant the end of} Stalin’s support for Sultangaliev, accusing him of nationalism and pan-Islamism. Sultangaliev was freed by Lenin but after Lenin’s death in 1924 he was more or less outlawed, and in 1928 he was sentenced to death for his ‘deviations’. This sentence was changed to imprisonment

75 Smith, The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917-1923, 47-49. 76 Smith, “Stalin as Commissar for Nationality Affairs”, 59.

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and hard labour, of which he was released in 1934. In 1937 Sultangaliev was arrested again and sentenced to be executed for being an independent Muslim leader, a sentence which was carried out in January 1940.

Stephen Blank emphasizes the fact that Sultangaliev ‘fought for issues of overall nationality policy’, and that this case represents the general crisis of the Soviet system which had the need to create ideological opponents and victims who needed to be purged. In this way, Blank sees the purging of Sultangaliev as a logical consequence of that system, and as a forebode of the Stalinist terror to come.77_{He also makes note of Stalin’s distrust and fear of} pan-Islamism and his ‘identification with the Russian imperial tradition’.78_{Stalin’s fear of} Muslim unity was certainly present in this period, as were his tactics for preventing such unity were to divide them. Stalin wished to put those minorities in place of leadership who were willing to purge their own people in the near future.

Stalin sought to work out a mix of Marxism and nationalism, seeking a careful balance between allowing cultural autonomy and taming it again. His set rules for nationalist

‘deviations’ were unclear, certainly for the national communists and their peoples. Probably these rules were up to a certain point also unclear for Stalin himself, in the sense that they changed with any slight indication of loss of power he had over Narkomnats. The institution that he had created with Narkomnats was Stalin’s tool, and not that of the national

communists, who merely functioned as puppets whose task it was to gain the national support of their respective peoples. The Sultangaliev affair was a humiliation for Stalin, but it did not prevent him from sticking with the basics of the Bolsheviks nationalities policy. He even launched a greater attack on the internationalists in the party, claiming nationalist deviations like the Sultangaliev case were the by-product of their ideas of internationalism which denied the existence of nations and nationalism and therefore continued the Great Russian

77 Blank, The Sorcerer as Apprentice: Stalin as Commissar of Nationalities, 1917-1924, 162. 78 Ibid., 220.

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chauvinism of the Tsars. It is likely that on a personal level the Sultangaliev affair felt as a betrayal to Stalin, which made him more wary of leaders of minority nations in future.

According to Jeremy Smith, Stalin’s ‘betrayal’ by Sultangaliev both ended any illusions Stalin had of making Narkomnats a power base to increase his power against that of Lenin, as it was a forebode to the Great Terror, in which indeed all of the old national communists were purged. Furthermore, certain nationalities which had had strong national communist ‘deviations’ would be punished more severely than other nationalities during the Great Terror.79

§ 2.4: Formation of the USSR, quarreling with Lenin, and the Georgian Affair

In the Bolshevik debate about the areas that would comprise the new socialist state, it can be said that Stalin in principle did not want to lose any nations which had also been a part of the Russian Empire. Whether this means that there was an imperial idea to the Soviet Union to begin with can be debated, but the main thing is that both Lenin nor Stalin were keen for the new socialist state to comprise as much territory as possible. As Gerhard Simon notes: “for the most part, the Empire’s territorial confines (…) remained intact. Finland and Poland were the only territories the Soviets lost and could not reintegrate into the USSR.”80_There were even some parts to the west of Russia (Galicia, Northern Bukovina) and some parts of Asia which were annexed to enlarge USSR ‘empire’. Stephen Blank emphasizes the

consequences of what he sees as a continuum of empire: “the determination to retain the imperial legacy necessarily bent Soviet history in an authoritarian and totalitarian direction.”81

79 Smith, “Stalin as Commissar for Nationality Affairs”, 60.

80 Gerhard Simon, Nationalism and Policy toward the Nationalities in the Soviet Union. From Totalitarian

Dictatorship to Post-Stalinist Society (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), 1.

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Here we can see the slight differences between Lenin and Stalin on the national question, regarding the formation of the new socialist state. In general, both leaders were at heart firm centralists and in practice did not recognize the right of nations to secede. However, there were nuance differences in the degree of rights of the federal republics that they wished to grant and the role that Russia would play, as the centre of the socialist state to be formed. Lenin favoured more autonomy for the republics than Stalin and saw a less prominent leading position for Russia within the proposed socialist state. Stalin especially clashed with Lenin on the second subject. As a ‘converted’ Georgian he favoured a centralistic state with fewer rights for non-Russian republics than Lenin found acceptable. Lenin viewed this as a form of subjugation of nations. Stalin, as said, favoured a state of which the Russia would be the clear centre. Stalin’s pragmatism had less sympathy for the non-Russian nations than had Lenin and no sympathy for the fact that Russian control over these nations might seem ‘imperial’. Lenin in his turn viewed Stalin as highly insensitive to feelings of the non-Russian nations and also accused Stalin of holding a grudge against the national communists.

Although Stalin had favoured national communism from the start of Narkomnats, Lenin could already observe a shift in him towards a more Russo-centric policy. In particular, Stalin did not fully share Lenin’s ‘Greatest Danger Principle’, which entailed that Great Russian chauvinism was a far greater danger than local nationalisms.82_{Indeed, Stalin became} more wary of non-Russian nationalism. Jeremy Smith names another difference between Lenin and Stalin. He notes that although both Soviet leaders viewed the non-Russian (and especially the Eastern) nations as inferior to Russia, but with the subtle difference that Lenin never made this visible in his politics. Stalin was less worried about this, and took a hard line in condemning national communists, a line he also took concerning his native country of Georgia.83_{In May 1920 Russia signed a treaty with a newly-formed Georgian state led by the}

82 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 2001), 6-7.

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Mensheviks and recognized by most Western powers. However, “in February 1921, violating the treaty, the Russian Red Army advanced into Georgia and crushed the resistance of the Georgians. The coup, directed by Stalin in Moscow and G.K. Ordzhonikidze on the spot, dismantled the Menshevik regime and set up a Georgian Soviet Republic.”84_Stalin’s

aggression was much to the dismay of Lenin, but Stalin nonetheless took control of Georgia with Lenin’s permission, without showing any interest in the sensitivities of the national feelings of the Georgians themselves.

Regarding the formation of the new socialist state, Erik van Ree shows that Stalin and Lenin were very similar in the degree of federalism or autonomy they wished to grant to minority nations. Indeed, Van Ree notes that the terms ‘federalism’ and ‘autonomy’ had become intertwined in their use by both Lenin and Stalin in the debate about what was to become the Soviet Union.85_{Therefore, it was not a great leap for Stalin to agree to Lenin’s} idea of a federated Soviet Union. In this federation of socialist states, the Russian state was merely one autonomous republic of the many, at least it was so in name. Since the two Bolshevik leaders were both centralists at heart, the fact that the new state eventually came in the form of a federation which found a very strong centre in Moscow and in the Party in general, was more than acceptable for both of them. The only thing Stalin would have preferred at the time was a greater role for Russia within the federation. However, Stalin had to be pragmatic in this case, and accepted this version of the new socialist state, which was more egalitarian from the viewpoint of the non-Russian nations. As Hélène Carrère

d’Encausse puts it: “Even if Stalin’s political philosophy was basically centralist, he had to act in the context of an egalitarian ideology and adopt a series of provisions intended to prove

Stalin’s ‘national’ character. Stalin’s Georgian and Russian personas and nationality policy, 1917-1946