CHAPTER 1
Toward a Revolutionary Alliance
I know Russia so little. Simbirsk, Kazan, Petersburg, and thatâs about it.
âVladimir Lenin, 1907, quoted in Lenin: A Biography (2000)
When the Bolsheviks staged a successful coup in October 1917, they proclaimed the dawn of a new era. Vladimir Ilâich Ulâianov Lenin imagined that Russiaâs revolution would spark European socialist revolutions, creating a new international order. In the meantime, he and his comrades turned their attention to preserving and furthering the revolutionâs gains within the former Russian Empire. The Bolshevik Party engaged in agitation and propaganda, denouncing enemies and rallying mass support. It also turned to work at which the revolutionaries were unpracticed: the work of government.
As Russiaâs new rulers, the Bolsheviks claimed vast lands with a multilingual and multiethnic population. This posed an ideological as well as a practical challenge. Karl Marx had not imagined that the socialist revolution would happen in an empire like Russia. As an underground political party, the Bolsheviks had given much attention to the Russian Empireâs economic and nationality problems, writing polemics on both themes. But as the new government in power in 1917, they still had much to learn about the expanse in which they hoped to put theory into practice and build socialism. Many leading Bolsheviks had spent long years in European exile and were out of touch with actual conditions in much of Russia. They advocated economic transformation and promised national self-determination, but lacked detailed knowledge about the former empireâs lands and peoples.
In late 1917, an unlikely group came to the Bolsheviksâ aid. Sergei F. Olâ-denburg, permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences, offered the Bolsheviks the expertise of ethnographers, geographers, linguists, and other scholars, many of whom had loyally served the Tsar. These experts included in their ranks leading political figures from the recently deposed Provisional Government. Olâdenburg was a member of the Constitutional Democratic Party (the Kadets) and a self-described constitutional monarchist. He and his colleagues opposed the Bolsheviks as extremists and were aware that the Bolsheviks characterized them as class enemies. But instead of fleeing Russia or collaborating with anti-Bolshevik forces, they actively sought an alliance with the Bolsheviks. They saw in this alliance the opportunity to help Russia in the war, to preserve their scientific institutions, and to pursue their own revolutionary agendaâusing scientific knowledge to turn Russia into a modern state.1 The Bolsheviks, for their part, recognized Olâdenburg and his colleagues as valuable providers of direly needed information about the lands and peoples of the Russian Empire. Two Academy of Sciences commissions were already doing the types of ethnographic and economic inventories of Russia that Lenin himself deemed necessary.
This alliance between Bolsheviks and liberal experts was facilitated by the fact that Olâdenburg and Vladimir Ulâianov had a personal history. The two men met for the first time in 1891.2 Olâdenburg, who had recently returned from a two-year trip to Paris, London, and Cambridge, was completing his graduate work in Oriental Studies and teaching Indian languages and literatures at St. Petersburg University. At age twenty-nine, he was a published scholar with an international reputation.3 Ulâianov, a law student whose revolutionary activities had led to his expulsion from Kazan University, had recently been granted permission to take the jurisprudence exams as an external student at St. Petersburg University. In March 1891, the twenty-one-year-old Ulâianov went to St. Petersburg for the exams and while in the capital visited Olâdenburg.4 He hoped to learn more about his older brother Aleksandr, who had been executed in 1887 for his part in an unsuccessful conspiracy to assassinate Tsar Aleksandr III. Aleksandr Ulâianov had attended St. Petersburg University in the 1880s, where he and Olâdenburg had traveled in the same circles. Both had been members of the Student Scientific-Literary Association, a brotherhood and haven for liberal and radical idealists.5
Olâdenburg and Vladimir Ulâianov belonged to the same small world of educated society (obshchestvo) which was frustrated with what it saw as Russiaâs political, social, and economic âbackwardnessâ vis-a-vis the West. Both men were critics of the tsarist state, as well as advocates of rational government and science-based reform. Both shared a broad European orientation, a fascination with the French Revolution, a secular (materialistic) worldview, and a desire to see Russiaâs transformation. But Olâdenburg and Ulâianov imagined this transformation in different terms and chose different personal paths. Ulâianovâs path took him through the Russian and European revolutionary underground: to prison, forced Siberian exile, and eventually to Europe.6 From Europe, he published his strategies for revolution under the pseudonym Lenin. While Ulâianov dreamed of overthrowing the imperial government, Olâdenburg rapidly rose through the ranks of its scholarly institutions. He became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1901 and was chosen to serve as its permanent secretary in 1904.7 After 1905 he became increasingly active in the Imperial Russian Geographical Society (IRGO).
By 1905, Olâdenburg and Ulâianov had established their career paths and their politics; over the course of the next decade, each in his own way undertook a study of the Russian Empireâs ânationality question.â For most of the period between 1905 and 1917, Ulâianov lived in Western Europe and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, debating with other socialists and developing his own theory about the role of national movements in a socialist revolution. Olâ-denburg spent these years in Russia, organizing research expeditions and studying the lands and peoples of the empire. Upon becoming reacquainted in November 1917, the two men discovered that they had a similar appreciation for the potential of scientific government and a shared interest in the nationality question. They forged a working relationship between radical revolutionaries and liberal expertsâa relationship that shaped the very formation of the Soviet Union.
This chapter treats Soviet nationality policy as the product of a collaborative effort between Bolsheviks and imperial expertsâtwo groups whose ideas took shape within a broader pan-European framework and crystallized in the wake of the First World War. Unlike many studies of Soviet nationality policy, which begin in 1917 or 1923 and treat Lenin and Joseph Stalin as the sole architects of Soviet policies and practices, this chapter takes as its focus the years between 1905 and 1917 and weaves together two separate but related stories.8 The first of these stories traces how Bolshevik theories about nationalism and national movements evolved in response to the intense politicization of the ânational ideaâ in Europe. The second investigates how European ideas about Volk and ânationâ and about the scientific management of empire crossed into Russia via a group of ethnographers and other experts. The two stories converge after October 1917, when the Bolsheviks and the experts came together and began to formulate a unique âSovietâ approach to the peoples of the Russian Empireâby drawing on a range of European and Russian practices and ideas (including the theories of Marx and Friedrich Engels) as well as responding to certain âfacts on the groundâ such as the appearance of new national separatist movements, which themselves drew inspiration from the European context. The Bolsheviks and the experts were driven by conflicting long-term goals. But in 1917 both groups put their differences aside and began the work of transforming the former Russian Empire into a new type of multinational state based not on âGodâ and âTsar,â but on a secular vision of progress.
The Nationality Question and the Bolsheviks
The Russian Empireâs nationality question became the focus of increasing official attention after the failed revolution of 1905. Newspapers reported that demonstrations that year had taken on a ânational characterâ in the western borderlands, Transcaucasia, and even Siberia. Tsar Nicholas II attempted to appease the empireâs non-Russian population by guaranteeing its participation in the new constitutional assembly, the State Duma.9 But nationality-based political parties, which gained visibility in 1905, had more ambitious goals: they demanded that the Tsar grant the empireâs nationalities cultural and (some form of) political autonomy. These parties were relatively small and did not represent mass movements, but after 1905 they attained a disproportionately important role in the empireâs civic life. Some sought and achieved representation in the Duma. Others did not participate directly in imperial politics, but instead worked out their programs in European exile; the socialists among them fraternized with Russian Social Democrats.10
Most of the empireâs nationality-based political parties drew on proposals that had been advanced over the previous ten years for the nationalities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Some appropriated the argument made by the Austrian Social Democrats at the 1899 Bruenn Congress that nationalities were entitled to national-territorial autonomyâto administrative regions established on the basis of ethnographic criteria.11 Others adopted the argument advanced by the South Slavs at the Bruenn Congress that every nationality was entitled to extraterritorial (cultural) autonomy or âself-rule in linguistic and cultural mattersâ regardless of territorial divisions. The South Slav proposal (later adopted and further developed by the Austrian Social Democrats Otto Bauer and Karl Renner) became a critical part of the national program of the Jewish Socialist Party, the Bund; the Bund then introduced it to other nationality-based parties in the Russian Empire.12
By 1905 Lenin and the Russian Social Democrats had started to formulate their own position on the nationality question. They too developed their ideas in dialogue with the Austrian Social Democrats and with the Bund. At this time, Lenin dismissed the importance of the nationality question in the Russian Empire, arguing that there was nothing particularly ânationalistâ about the demonstrations of 1905: that these local populations were expressing the universal desire for equal rights. He was, however, concerned about the threat that nationalism posed to the international unity of the Social Democrats; this threat seemed especially acute as Jewish, Georgian, and other groups of socialists advocated the reorganization of the Social Democratic Party into national divisions.13 Lenin critiqued the Bruenn Congress proposals that had become popular among these socialists, maintaining that they would delay the socialist revolution. Extraterritorial autonomy would erect barriers between workers of different nationalities; federalism would decentralize the state and impede economic development.14 Yet Lenin also dismissed the argument of Polish Social Democrat Rosa Luxemburg that socialists, as committed internationalists, should not support national movements at all. According to Lenin, to not uphold the right of an oppressed nation to secede from an oppressive state would be to support despotism.15
By all accounts, Lenin began to take a greater interest in Russiaâs nationality question in 1912, when he took up residence in Krakow, a hotbed of national tension in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In Krakow, Lenin became better acquainted with the national struggles among Austria-Hungaryâs multinational population.16 These struggles seemed all the more serious against the backdrop of the Balkan wars, which were being fought by Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Bosnians in the name of ânational liberation.â17 It was an episode in St. Petersburg, however, that most strongly impressed on Lenin the importance of clarifying the Bolshevik position. In a December 1912 speech before the Fourth State Duma, the Georgian Social Democrat Akaki Chkhenkeli, a Menshevik, demanded extraterritorial autonomy for the nationalities of the Russian Empire. Lenin was irate that the Georgian Mensheviks had adopted the âSouth Slav solutionâ (by this time espoused enthusiastically by Austrian Social Democrats) and had introduced it before the Duma as part of the Russian Social Democratic program.18
The following month at a party meeting in Krakow, Lenin condemned the Georgian Menshevik position and asked a young Georgian Bolshevik to write an...