While recognizing the right of national self-determination, we take care to explain to the masses its limited historic significance and we never put it above the interests of the proletarian revolution.
Leon Trotsky, 19221
The theory of the merging of all nations of, say, the USSR, into one common Great Russian language is a national-chauvinist, anti-Leninist theory, which contradicts the basic tenets of Leninism that national differences cannot disappear in the near future, that they are bound to remain for a long time even after the victory of the proletarian revolution on a world scale.
Joseph Stalin, 2 July 19302
Between 1917 and 1921, the Bolsheviks (renamed the Russian Communist Party in 1919) toppled the Provisional Government and dismantled most of the vestiges of the old tsarist order. In the process of doing so, they fervently believed that they would spark a worldwide revolution and establish a classless society. But by 1921, this possibility faded. The revolutionary party now had to secure its power within its own borders and build the world’s first Marxist state without Western help or a clear blueprint. Despite their military setbacks and ideological compromises, party leaders still aspired to create a new Soviet man in the image and likeness of their revolutionary enthusiasms. Starting in the early 1920s, under Lenin’s leadership they introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP) and innovative policies to accommodate their large non-Russian populations. In the late 1920s, Stalin ignited rapid industrialization and mass collectivization drives as well as mass purges of the party and society. The First World War, the revolutionary period, and the subsequent civil and national wars helped consolidate a powerful one-party state, which launched these ambitious social engineering projects.
After October 1917, during the long, brutal struggle which claimed nearly ten million lives, the Bolsheviks radically expanded the power of the revolutionary Soviet Russian state over society and the economy.3 By 1921, Lenin and his inner circle “created a centralized, one ideology dictatorship of a single party which permitted no challenge to its power.”4 The leadership of the Bolshevik Party, which experienced a radical spurt in growth from 24,000 members in February 1917 to 732,000 by 1921, reshaped the organization along more centralized and hierarchical lines. The secret police (best known by the evolution of its acronyms - the Cheka, the OGPU, the GPU, NKVD, MGB, and finally the KGB) gained unprecedented powers to persecute all real and imagined enemies.
Although the Soviet Russian constitution of 1919 guaranteed civil rights to all of its citizens, the ruling party refused to implement them when dealing with its political enemies. The new regime also repudiated the tsarist debt, expropriated important sectors of the economy, such as large industries, banking, transport, and foreign trade, and subordinated agriculture and domestic trade to heavy state regulation.5Fuelled by revolutionary impatience and mass violence, these policies brought catastrophic results. The transportation system and agricultural production broke down, increasing food shortages and widespread rationing in the cities. The Soviet government then sent detachments of workers to confiscate “surplus” grain and to ignite class war in the countryside. The peasants, in turn, deployed one of the most damaging weapons in their limited arsenals: they reduced their sowings.
Agricultural production fell even further and major social cataclysms loomed on the horizon. Soviet Russia and its allied republics “faced almost total economic collapse: gross industrial output had fallen to less than one- fifth of the level before the First World War... Matters were hardly less catastrophic in agriculture: when the 1921 harvest produced significantly less than one half the pre-war average, famine and epidemics ensued, claiming millions of lives.”6 Wide-scale peasant revolts broke out in Tambov province, the Volga region, Siberia, the North Caucasus, and Ukraine, not to mention the revolt of the workers and sailors at Kronstadt, one of Petrograd’s most prominent strongholds of support. By banning private manufacturing and private trade, nationalizing most industries, seizing peasant grain, and by eliminating money as a means of exchange, radical Bolshevik policies (dubbed “war communism” between June 1918 and March 1921) became unsustainable.7 If the Bolsheviks continued these policies under these circumstances, the Soviet experiment would soon collapse.