Vestnik Kavkaza, together with Vesti FM, is starting a new project – the program 'National Issue'. Associate Professor and Deputy Head of the department of Russian history of the 20th and 21st centuries of the History Faculty of MSU, Alexander Ostapenko, is the guest of the hosts Vladimir Averin and Gia Saralidze. The topic of conversation is the ethnic policy at the beginning of the Soviet state.
Saralidze: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, even before the Great October Revolution, spoke about the significance of the ethnic question. As soon as the Bolsheviks came to power, they began to implement the ideas of Lenin. What was that policy at the beginning?
Ostapenko: For the Bolsheviks, the ethnic question was never the most important one. The issue of the proletarian revolution was the main one. Accordingly, all the major problems were solved based on the interests of the proletariat.
It is known that Karl Marx was a supporter of the right of nations to self-determination. Lenin was a follower of Karl Marx, but Marx died in March 1883 at the age of 64, at that time Lenin was only 19 years old. Perhaps Lenin had not heard of Marx at this age. In any case, Marx lived mainly in the 19th century, and he created his theory of the proletarian revolution on the basis of those conditions of capitalism which existed in Europe in the 19th century. It was capitalism based on the competition of free enterprises. During the time of Lenin, capitalism changed. It grew into imperialism, and this capitalism was completely different.
The Bolsheviks, and Lenin as the leader of the Bolshevik Party, were always supporters of a unitary state, a united state.
Averin: The first thing that comes to mind about the early Leninist approaches: Finland – to freedom, Poland – to freedom ... This is the complete implementation of the right of nations to self-determination. And the Transcaucasian Republic appears, and the Central Asian ones...
Ostapenko: Lenin's position was changing. Lenin was a pragmatist. He did so on the basis of the situation which had developed. That is why before 1917 Lenin's position was that the separation of the working class into individual 'ethnic apartments' was not in the interests of the revolution, and not in the interests of the proletariat. After the February Revolution, the interim government did not control ethnic relations. The Russian Empire included Poland and Finland. Poland was included as a result of the Vienna Congress, and in 1815 Finland became part of Russia as an autonomous state as a result of the Russian-Swedish war, and as a result of the Treaty of Hamina of 1809. If Finland did not bring any major problems to the Russian government, Poland has always been a nerve in the body of the Russian state.
Saralidze: So the change of Lenin's position was caused by the fact that, at that time, they could not hold these territories? One way or another, they would still have been gone?
Ostapenko: Absolutely right. Lenin was a pragmatist, and to get the support of the multinational country, to fulfill his idea into reality, to remain in power, the Bolsheviks quickly became supporters of the slogan "the right of nations to self-determination."
Lenin's understanding of the right of nations to self-determination is different from the traditional understanding of the present day, when every nation has the right to separate in one way or another. Lenin looked at everything from the perspective of the working class – if the separation is carried out on a socialist basis, it is permissible, if the separation is carried out on a bourgeois basis, Lenin was against such a separation.
Saralidze: Lenin was a supporter of a unitary, united state – in practice, he is faced with the fact that it is somehow still necessary to solve the ethnic issue. There is Transcaucasia, there is Central Asia, and so on. What is he doing, when does he face this?
Ostapenko: in March, the interim government reinstated the autonomy of Finland. And in Finland there were also revolutionary processes. But the outcome of this revolutionary process was not clear. Lenin hoped that the socialist revolution in Finland would win, and Finland would enter into relations with Russia. In the civil war the Bolsheviks won, largely because they spoke in favor of the right of nations to self-determination. The first agreements were already signed with Estonia in 1920, when the civil war was still under way, with Latvia, Lithuania, Finland.
And the White movement was defeated because they firmly advocated a united, indivisible Russia. Wrangell, when he was in Crimea, spoke about the possibility of some kind of federation with Ukraine. Nevertheless, at an early stage the main leader of the White movement, Admiral Kolchak, believed that Russia could only grant independence to Poland. He did not even mention Finland.
Averin: And was anything said about the Caucasus, about the North Caucasus, about the Central Asian republics and then, about the great Russian Turkestan?
Ostapenko: Of course. I do not think that Lenin had absolutely full information about what was happening in these regions, because there was no TV or internet, and in general the information was transfered quite slowly. The interim government tried to influence the Caucasus, and Ukraine, but it did not work out. Diarchy also arose there. However, the so-called Kiev Central Rada gained the upper hand in Ukraine. Later, its representatives present at the negotiations in Brest-Litovsk would sign a separate agreement with Germany, according to which the territory of Ukraine would be occupied by the Germans, and for this Ukraine would have to supply foodstuffs to Germany. This agreement would backfire on the Russian Federation when the Russian Federation tried to extend the Treaty of Rapallo, signed at the Genoa Conference, to other Soviet republics.
That is, after 1918, Lenin was reformed, and he became a supporter of the formation of states on a federal basis.
Saralidze: How did the plan that Lenin suggested differ from the one that Stalin carried out in the end?
Ostapenko: In our textbooks, the autonomisation plan is usually associated with the name of Stalin, though the idea of autonomisation was expressed before. For example, in mid-1919, when the tendency of a Bolshevik victory in the civil war only just appeared, the deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council, Sklyansky, advocated the establishment of relations with the existing Soviet republics. And that's when he first proposed the idea of the accession of the existing Soviet republics to the RSFSR as autonomous republics. It was the desire to establish some kind of relations, to restore some kind of order. After all, when there are events, especially events related to revolution, to civil war, all of them are accompanied by chaos.
Dozens of years passed, and historians are putting these events into a chain, the sense of chaos disappears at times, but in reality the chaos was pretty big. As for further developments, and events associated with the formation of the Soviet Union, the question was: "together and on an equal basis," as Lenin said, or on the basis of autonomisation? It was an ordinary party dispute. In the future, especially in Soviet historiography, Stalin's position was treated as completely wrong, as treacherous in relation to the communist ideology.
Averin: And how did it happen that there were separate republics – Transcaucasian, Ukrainian and Russia – in the Federation? Why did the Republic of Tatarstan did not appear immediately, and it was a part of the RSFSR? Why were the whole Volga region or the North Caucasus not separated?
Ostapenko: Soviet power triumphed in different regions at the same time. If we talk about the Caucasus, the Soviet power in Azerbaijan won in April 1920, with the consent of the Turkish side in the face of Mustafa Kemal. As for Armenia, it was October-November 1920, and Georgia was in February 1921. Until that time, the Transcaucasian republics had their own governments. The authorities in Georgia were the Mensheviks. There were the representatives of the party ‘Dashnaktsutyun’ in Armenia. And in Azerbaijan there were the Musavat party’s representatives
A rather complex situation. Armenia suffered defeat in the war with Turkey. The Alexandropol peace treaty with Turkey was signed. It was a very disadvantageous agreement for Armenia, according to which virtually the entire territory of Armenia was limited to the surroundings of Lake Sevan. Only through the intervention of Russia did Armenia receive the boundaries that it has today. Unfortunately, Moscow failed to uphold some part of Armenian territories, and they stayed on the territory of Turkey.
The Sovietization of Georgia was carried out in a violent way, by introducing the Red Army. In Ukraine the authorities changed several times due to the civil war. In short, the Soviet power prevailed at different times on different territories. Thus, Soviet power won in different ways on different territories. The territories of the independent Soviet republics emerged this way, which existed until the end of 1922.
During the Civil War a military and political agreement between the Soviet republics was achieved. In the future, separate economic agreements were made with all the republics. In addition, agreements on transport and so on were also concluded. That means certain economic and political ties were improving.
We should speak about the Genoa conference in April 1922. An invitation to the conference was received by the Bolsheviks in January 1922. And then the question arose of how to go to this conference, because only a delegation of the RSFSR received an invitation. Then in February there was the signing of a document that gave the RSFSR delegation the right to conclude and sign agreements with other countries on behalf of the other republics. The signing of the document was attended by eight Soviet republics. Moreover, the Soviet delegation included representatives of these republics.
By 1922 the question had ripened. The issue of how to solve ethnic problems emerged, whether to do it by autonomy or, as Lenin said, "together and on an equal basis." It was the usual party argument about the basis on which to build a new state. Paradoxically, two years before, in 1920, Lenin and Stalin stood on opposing positions. That means, Stalin stood for the formation of the republics on the basis of q confederation and Lenin advocated, on the contrary, for a unitary principle. But by 1922, in fact, these positions had changed.
Before the 1917 revolution, Lenin believed that the division of the working class into certain ethnic segments would harm the cause [of the revolution].
Saralidze: You said that Stalin's position was considered treacherous. But why?
Ostapenko: It was treated like this by Soviet historiography. To call it treacherous is too loud, and very wrong.
Saralidze: And on which side was the majority in this dispute? Whose position prevailed?
Ostapenko: When Lenin began to speak, the majority eventually appeared on the side of Lenin. And so, I think, about the same number of supporters was on the side of Lenin and on the side of Stalin
This is the end of 1922, when Lenin was starting to fall ill. This also, probably, had an affect.
Averin: By this time, the boundaries that were depicted were determined by the structure of the old Russian empire and the Soviet power’s stages of victory on certain territories. Were these borders recognized by everyone? Did anyone protest?
Ostapenko: The issue of borders is an extremely complex issue. There are always conflicts about borders. In Russia, the solution to the ethnic question was facilitated to some extent by the fact that there was a provincial division. This division does not take the ethnic composition of certain regions into account, since the border provinces were held in the Baltic States, since they were held in Georgia and many other areas. Therefore, the question of holding the borders has always arisen in the Caucasus, in the well-known Zagatala District, and later between Ukraine, Belarus and Poland, and in relations with Finland.
That is, if we talk about the borders between Belarus and Ukraine, on the one hand, and Poland on the other hand, according to the Riga Peace Treaty signed in March 1921 by the Bolsheviks with Poland, large areas of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus were joined to Poland. But the Bolsheviks accepted this quite calmly, because they believed that, in the future, world revolution would win, the problem of the borders would be swept away, then the issue would be easily resolved. The agreement signed with Finland also left to it a substantial part of Russia's Pskov province.
Averin: The was a hope that in Finland the proletariat would eventually crush the hydra, and there would also be a Soviet regime.
Ostapenko: There was a hope that the further world revolution would correct these problems.
Saralidze: A vast country which has just emerged from a terrible civil war. In different ways and at different times, the republic flowed there, with a colorful national composition of the population. The Bolsheviks managed to resolve this issue quickly. But now many, remembering Stalin’s decision to solve the ethnic issue, say that he laid some ethnic bombs that subsequently led to what we got in the 1990s ...
Ostapenko: At the end of 1920 the civil war ended. The country was devastated. It became obvious that the world revolution, which was the basis of everything, had been delayed at least. Some ideological crisis was connected with this, and Lenin’s as well. What they hoped for, what was considered the main thing, never happened. As a result of the victory of the Bolsheviks in the civil war, the forces that were in favor of the independence of certain areas, especially the bourgeois forces, were defeated, weakened. The Communist Party was in power in all the republics. This, to some extent, facilitated the unification processes. Somewhere it was easier to do, somewhere it was difficult to do. Somewhere there was an external threat. I have already spoken about the example of Armenia, which was defeated by Turkey as a result of the Armenian-Turkish War, the attempt at which was made by the ruling party ‘Dashnaktsutyun’. All these factors facilitated the unification process.
Saralidze: Does that means that the ideological basis was helping?
Ostapenko: The ideological helped, but for example, in Georgia, the representatives of the Communist Party of Georgia were against a merger on the basis of autonomy. Armenia and Azerbaijan supported the Stalinist idea of autonomy. There were serious fluctuations in Ukraine. There was a completely different position. Stalin even offered to convey this decision as a directive to the republican level.
Averin: To require that every Republic enter as an autonomy?
Ostapenko: Everyone had to enter, according to Stalin's plan, with the rights of an autonomy. The bodies of power and administration of the RSFSR were to become the supreme bodies of power and administration to the autonomous regions, which were to become part of the RSFSR. But in this situation everyone turned to be on the same level, and what happened as a result? The greater level of the statehood was achieved by the territories where the civil war had been especially fierce. These areas received the level of the Union republics.
In late December, the Bolshoi Theater hosted the first Congress formed by the Soviet Union, where a declaration and agreement were signed. It was indicated that each Soviet republic had the right freely to secede from the Union. However, the mechanism of this output was never developed. Mikhail Gorbachev, trying to preserve the Soviet Union, said "let's work out some kind of civilized conditions of divorce." But these conditions have not been elaborated
Averin: Without any civilized conditions, everyone simply fled.
Ostapenko: Yes. Everything was decided, probably, in the worst way.
Saralidze: Such delayed-action bombs are called autonomous regions or a republic in other republics, an ethnic education within an ethnic education, but with fewer rights. Was a certain potency of the explosion laid down?
Ostapenko: Probably it is wrong to say that all the autonomous communities within the republics were potential sources of an explosion. Suppose, then, Nakhichevan, which according to the Moscow agreement of March 16th 1921 between the RSFSR and Turkey became an autonomy within Azerbaijan without the right to transfer the territory to a third state. As for Karabakh, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, the problems become apparent mainly in the final stage of reconstruction, after the weakening of the central government.
Averin: That is, the weaker the central government, the more problems there are in your autonomies. This is not the only conclusion that is drawn from our conversation. We'll have to continue.
