National Diversity and the Tsarist Legacy

Of the 140 million people living under Bolshevik control in 1921, 75 million identified themselves as Russians and 65 million as non-Russians. Of the latter, nearly 30 million designated themselves as Ukrainians and 30 million as those with a Turkic heritage.¹¹ If the Russians constituted 44.3 per cent of the total population of the Russian Empire in 1897, they comprised 53 per cent of the Soviet Union’s total population thirty years later - due primarily to the war, revolutions, Civil War, famine, disease, and the independence of Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland.

Although many of the non-Russian territories possessed rich natural re­sources, most remained economically underdeveloped. Capitalism barely penetrated most of these areas prior to the outbreak of the First World War. As a result, the majority of the non-Russian groups did not possess a native middle class or even their own working class. In terms of cultural develop­ment, they varied widely. Some national groups - such as the Poles, Finns, and Latvians remaining in the Soviet state - possessed highly developed languages, cultures, and literatures. Others, such as the Belarusans and Tatars, started the process of developing their own distinct languages and literatures in the late nineteenth century. The Ukrainians stood between these two groups. Finally, a last group - which included the Mordvinians, the majority of the mountain tribes of the Caucasus, and the Votiaks - did not even have their own alphabets.¹³ Literacy rates differed enormously across the Soviet Union.

In recognizing these problems, the communist leadership concluded that the social, economic, and cultural legacy of the tsarist order generated a greater hostility between the cities and the countryside in the non­Russian areas than in the central Russian provinces.

This should not be surprising. Although Russians constituted only 53 per cent of the total Soviet population in 1926, they represented 72 per cent of the total membership of the Russian Communist Party (RKP[b]) in 1922.¹⁵ Ukrainians, Belarusans, minority peoples of the RSFSR, and Central Asians remained under-represented in the party’s ranks. In contrast, party mem­bers who identified themselves as Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Jews, Armenians, and Georgians were over-represented.¹⁶ After experienc­ing tsarist discrimination of one form or another, they felt more comfortable in an internationalist political party than in their own national parties.¹⁷

Local Russian or Russified Bolshevik cadres often alienated the indige­nous populations and destabilized the political environment. Bolshevik lead­ers realized that the high percentage of Russians in the party organizations in non-Russian areas often transformed the class struggle into a national con­flict and hampered the Sovietization of these areas.¹⁸ Local populations often viewed these party members as beneficiaries of the old order as well as the new one.

Non-Russians joined the Communist Party, but their percentage in re­gional party organizations varied widely from one area to another.

Between March 1919 and June 1923, the Russian Communist Party intro­duced a set of responses to the structural and political problems confronting the non-Russian areas. By developing cultural institutions operating in the native languages and by industrializing the non-Russian areas, the party hoped to bridge the vast gap between the Russian and Russified city and the non-Russian countryside. In time, the party would also augment its ranks by enrolling more non-Russians into the party and soviet organs. The cen­tral party, in short, aspired to reduce, if not eliminate, the inequalities pro­duced by four centuries of tsarism. Equalization would incubate the political integration of the diverse peoples of the newly formed USSR. These Soviet policies represented a complete reversal of those Ukrainians had experi­enced under the last tsars.

Of all of the territories the Bolsheviks won between 1917 and 1921, the Ukrainian provinces - in terms of their geopolitical location, size, and enormous agricultural and industrial potential - represented the greatest prize. But this victory came at a great cost. In order to neutralize the Ukrainian nationalism generated by the war, revolutions, Civil War, and chaos, the Bolshevik Party initiated policies to placate Ukrainian national feelings, but limit their true political content. These policies developed slowly, largely in response to the shifting political fortunes and misfor­tunes the Bolsheviks experienced as they consolidated power. The cre­ation of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Communist Party of Ukraine, and the indigenization (or nativization) policy represented three of their most important innovations. They haphazardly designed the first two institutions during the civil and national wars of 1918-21; they inau­gurated the third in the 1920s.