6. How Russian Was the Russian Revolution?

There is probably no more important, though convoluted and often confusing, term for understanding Russian history than “Russian Revolution.” The most confusing aspect of the term “Russian Revolution” is that it often obscures what actually took place in the multiethnic Russian Empire—a revolution of nations, of which the Russians were only one.

Nowhere were those revolutionary changes more dramatic than in the realm of imperial Russian national identity. From the mid-seventeenth century Russia was imagined by its elites as an entity composed of three Russias: Great, Little, and White. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Russian ethnographers and geographers had imagined the Russian nation itself as composed of three branches: Great Russian, Little Russian (Ukrainian), and White Russian (Belarusian). The emphasis was on unity, not di­versity, and the imperial authorities were doing their best to ban the development of separate literary languages in Ukraine and Belarus, as well as to promote the Russian literary language as all­Russian or pan-Russian. But the concept of the pan-Russian na­tion and culture suffered a hard landing in the Revolution of 1917.

While Russia lost only part of its empire, the all-Russian nation fell apart completely, splitting into three separate nations: Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. More than any other sin­gle event, the Russian Revolution set the Russians as a people on the path to modern nationhood, changing the geopolitics of the region for generations to come.

Vasilii Kliuchevsky treated the reunification of the Rus' land as one of the driving forces of Russian history. The Russian Em­pire was never closer to the goal of reunifying those lands and forming one Russian nation than in April 1915, when Nicholas II visited Lviv and Przemysl (Peremyshl).

A key role in that process was played by Ukraine. Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Central Rada unilaterally declared the terri­torial autonomy of Ukraine in June 1917. The genie of the federal restructuring of the Russian Empire and the concomitant parti­tioning of the big Russian nation was out of the bottle. The Pro­visional Government tried to put it back by sending its ministers to Kyiv, hoping to convince the Rada to withdraw its declaration of autonomy. Faced with the Rada’s refusal, which was backed by Ukraine’s minorities, including Jewish and Polish socialists, the ministers negotiated a deal in which they recognized the Rada and its government, the General Secretariat, as representatives of the Provisional Government in Ukraine. Thus Ukrainian autono­my, in curtailed form, survived its first encounter with the central government in Petrograd.

The Russian nationalists were outraged by what they inter­preted as a surrender of Russian national interests by the socialist ministers of the Provisional Government. Vasilii Shulgin led the charge. He regarded the Provisional Government’s recognition of curtailed Ukrainian autonomy as a betrayal of the Russian nation, of which Ukraine (Little Russia) and its inhabitants were an integral part. Shulgin insisted that Russians constituted the majority of the population in Ukraine. He defined Russianness on the basis of the written rather than the spoken language, and if one judged by the number of readers of the Kyivan press, it was the Ukrainians, not the Russians, who were in the minority. For Shulgin, the most important question was not the future structure of the Russian state but the “reclassification” of Little Russians as Ukrainians and Little Russia as Ukraine.

The Central Powers not only backed the Ukrainians but also promoted Belarusian statehood. After German forces took Minsk in late February 1918, two groups of Belarusian activists, one as­sembled in Vilnius under the German occupation, the other formed in Minsk under Russian control, got together and decid­ed, after heated debates, on the formation not of a Lithuanian- Belarusian but a separate Belarusian state independent of Russia. Their declaration of 25 March 1918 read as follows: “Today we, the Rada of the Belarusian National Republic, cast off our country the last chains of political servitude imposed by Russian tsarism upon our free and independent land.”¹ The decision to declare Belarusian independence was passed by a slim majority of the assembly, and its significance was more symbolic than practical. The Belarusians were no longer claiming national and cultural autonomy or federal status in a future Russian state but outright independence.

It was in this period that Belarus acquired its insignia of state­hood: a national flag with white stripes at the top and bottom and a red one in between, and a coat of arms featuring a mounted knight with a sword and shield—a symbol dating from the times of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The Rada established diplo­matic representations in Vilnius, Kyiv, Berlin and other European capitals, issued Belarusian postage stamps, and supported cul­tural and publishing projects. In the course ofjust one year, from March 1917 to March 1918, the Belarusian national movement, like the Ukrainian, made a huge leap from demands for cultural autonomy to full independence.

The Whites under General Anton Denikin tried to put the genie of East Slavic independence back into the imperial bottle. When Denikin took Kyiv in August 1919, Shulgin got an oppor­tunity to apply his solution of the Ukrainian question to the rest of Ukraine.

The Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin were much more flex­ible and opportunistic. Lenin’s thinking was rooted in his ideas on dominant and oppressed nationalities, first formulated on the eve and in the course of World War I, very much in response to Russian imperial mobilization under the banners of the Union of the Russian People and other nationalist organizations. Le­nin, never a believer in the all-Russian nation, was prepared to treat the Great Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians as separate nations. According to him, the Great Russians were dominant, while the Ukrainians and Belarusians, former members of the privileged big Russian nation, were among the oppressed. In the summer of 1917, Lenin raised his voice in support of the Central Rada against what he perceived as the great-power chauvinism of the Provisional Government. But Lenin’s stand on the nation­alities was nothing if not contradictory.

As Terry Martin has noted, Lenin’s nationality policies and pronouncements before October 1917 were designed with an eye to rallying support from the non-Russian nationalities for the overthrow of the existing regime, not for running the multiethnic country of which the Bolsheviks took control in the fall of 1917.

What to do with the three East Slavic nations and their pro forma independence not only in cultural but also in political terms was decided in the fall and winter of 1922. As far as Lenin was concerned, Joseph Stalin’s plan to include the republics in the Russian Federation, especially against the will of their lead­ers, put the Russians in the position of imperial masters, thereby undermining the idea of the voluntary union of nations. Lenin’s thinking about the future of the republics was influenced by his concern for world-wide unity of the working classes of all na­tionalities. The survival of Soviet rule was closely linked in his mind with the success of world revolution, which depended on risings of the workers of Germany, France, and Britain, and then on nationalist movements in China, India, and Western colonies in Asia. The desire of those peoples for self-rule would have to be satisfied if the revolution were to triumph on a global scale.

Instead of an enlarged Russian Federation, Lenin proposed the creation of a Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia. It was supposed to unite Russia and the existing formally inde­pendent republics as equals and establish all-Union government bodies. Stalin, recognizing that an enlarged Russian Federation would create a poor image for the multiethnic communist state as a community of equals, proposed simply to turn the Russian government bodies into all-Union ones.

Stalin was enforcing his control over the rebellious Geor­gian communists not only with party resolutions but also with fists. His point man in the Caucasus, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, had beaten up one of his Georgian opponents. When the Georgians complained, Stalin appointed a commission headed by his client Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the head of the secret police, which exon­erated Ordzhonikidze. After a long talk with Dzerzhinsky on 12 December 1922, the highly agitated Lenin suffered a stroke that led to his partial paralysis a few days later. He was now lying in bed, trying to explain to the party leadership what was wrong with Stalin’s policies and how they could be neutralized by reforming the Union that he had proposed, which had just been approved by the First All-Union Congress.

This was the leitmotif of the notes on the nationality question that the half-paralyzed Lenin dictated to his secretaries on 30 and 31 December. In Lenin’s view, the main threat to the unity of his state was coming not from local nationalists, whom he hoped to accommodate by creating a federal facade for the future Union, but from the Great Russian nationalism that threatened to derail his plans. Dictating his thoughts, he argued for positive discrim­ination in favor of the non-Russian republics: “Internationalism on the part of the oppressor or so-called ‘great’ nation (although it is great only in its coercion, great only in the sense of being a great bully) should consist not only in observing the formal equality of nations but also in the kind of inequality that would redress, on the part of the oppressor nation, the great nation, the inequality that develops in actual practice.”³

Lenin attacked the government apparatus, largely controlled by Stalin, claiming that it was mainly inherited from the old re­gime and permeated with Russian great-power chauvinism. The way to keep it in check was to take powers from the center and transfer them to the republics. Lenin was prepared to replace the Union he proposed and the model approved by the party congress with a looser union in which the powers of the center might be limited to defense and international relations alone. He felt that the republics’ right of secession, guaranteed by the Union treaty, might be an insufficient counterweight to Russian nationalism and proposed that at the next congress the Union be reformed to leave the center with the aforementioned functions alone. The Union just approved by the congress gave the central government control over the economy, finance, and communications on top of military and international affairs.

Lenin did not get his way on the issue of confederation, and it is not clear whether he really wanted that model or simply used it as an argument in his polemics with Stalin. Nevertheless, he prevailed on the issue of the structure of the Union—a victo­ry that had even larger consequences for the Russians than for the non-Russians of the former empire. Lenin’s victory created a separate republic within the Union for the Russians, endowing them with a territory, institutions, population, and identity dis­tinct from those of the Union as a whole. In the state planned by Stalin, the Russians would have continued to share all those features with the empire renamed as a union. In Lenin’s state, they had no choice but to start acquiring an identity separate from the imperial one. Almost by default, Lenin became the father of the modern Russian nation, while the Soviet Union became its first cradle. Lenin’s victory did much to fragment the prerevolutionary model of one big Russian nation. Thie result was a major shift in Russian self-perception and their perception by others, Ukraini­ans in particular.