Felix Schnell. Journal of Modern European History. Volume 13, Issue 2. May 2015.
The First World War is widely considered the twilight of imperial rule. It brought an end to the contiguous empires of the Romanovs, the Habsburgs and the Ottomans. The British and French oversea empires continued to exist, but showed first symptoms of disintegration. If nineteenth-century Europe was largely shaped by imperial reality and the idea of the nation state, then the twentieth century became dominated by the troublesome reality of the nation-state. Usually, imperial disintegration proved to be an irreversible process; however, one could argue that the Soviet Union was an exception to this rule. Not in the sense of restoration or resurrection but rather as a metamorphosis producing a body politic that differed from its predecessor in many ways, yet sharing an imperial structure. For obvious ideological reasons, however, the nature of this structure could neither be admitted nor acknowledged. It had to be concealed and given another name: a federation of national republics. Therefore, I suggest calling the Soviet Union an “empire in disguise”, which nevertheless exposed its hidden imperial nature in several ways. First of all, in 1940 the Bolsheviks had almost restored the former Romanov Empire in geographical terms. The plain fact is exceptional in itself compared to the fates of the Austro-Hungarian or Ottoman Empires. Consequently, the Soviet state—like its predecessor—was confronted with the conditions of multi-ethnicity and diversity that are typical for empires. Given the Bolsheviksʼ insistence on centralised control it is difficult to imagine how they should have exerted this control over an empirelike territory without applying at least some kind of imperial rule. There are indeed characteristics of this type of rule in the Bolshevik external and internal political practice: the Soviet Union was expansionist in a specific “imperial” way, not according to the irredentist logic of national states, but as a composite structure that tended to enlarge its sphere of domination as much as possible. The conquest of the Caucasus and the Baltic states, but also the implementation of satellite states in Eastern Europe after World War II may serve as examples. Characteristics of “imperial rule” are even more apparent in the internal relations of the Soviet Union. Despite the Bolsheviksʼ anti-imperial rhetoric, centre-periphery relations can be described in terms of inequality, subordination and exploitation. Furthermore, one can observe elements of “foreign” or “alien” domination or of “internal colonisation”. The term “empire” is notoriously difficult to determine. Hence, the question whether the Soviet Union can aptly be described as an empire is being debated. Rather than to operate with a well-defined term of “empire” I will focus on typical imperial practices. Consequently, I do not pursue the ontological question of whether the Soviet Union was an empire, but will elucidate to what extent imperial practices shaped the political reality of Bolshevik rule in certain periods of time. In this article I will focus on the early Soviet and Stalinist period during which either state-building was at stake or characteristics of Soviet imperial rule became most visible.
Tsarist Ashes: The Substrate of Imperial Metamorphosis
What caused the fall of the Romanov Empire, and more importantly: what did not, was crucial for the fact that imperial metamorphosis was possible. It is quite common to conceive the end of Imperial Russia as a logical consequence of failed modernisation. Russia, so the argument, had to modernise and to overcome its “backwardness” to preserve its power. However, modernisation is a double-edged sword: “modern” societiesʼ efficiency is usually accompanied by emancipation and political participation. Yet the Tsar and his bureaucracy wanted to profit from modernity and to preserve a pre-modern system of government and social organisation at the same time; they wanted to modernise and to activate society, but its members to remain humble subjects; they wanted to profit from new technical, educational and administrative elites and at the same time expected them to accept and reproduce their own powerlessness. Finally, the Tsarist government ignored national feelings and suppressed national movements; it reinforced Russification instead, and thus alienated great parts of the Non-Russian subjects, accounting for almost 50 per cent of the population. Imperial Russia was not the only European state where social and ethnic antagonisms concerning power and political participation existed, but it was definitely the most extreme case: there was hardly a state more repressive or with a more ruthless and forceful revolutionary movement. No wonder that at the beginning of the twentieth century the revolution took place only in Russia, and it is hardly surprising that this political system perished due to its own inflexibility. There is a lot of truth in this account, but it does not cover the whole story.
Imperial Russia was in disarray in 1905, mainly due to the reasons mentioned before, but at least by 1908 Tsarist authority was restored owing to a mixture of repressive measures and conciliatory offers. Restoration was successful to a degree that Prime Minister Stolypin could dare to launch a coup dʼétat by introducing a new electoral law that provided for a tame State Duma already in 1907, while Nicholas II bitterly regretted to have given way for any of Count Vitteʼs constitutional concessions. The de facto absence of censorship and the establishment of a free press did not degenerate in revolutionary pamphletism, but led to a journalistic culture even Tsarist administrators could make use of. “Society” was not so much in opposition to the state but striving for cooperation. The boundaries between state administration and private entrepreneurship became more permeable, experts were given the opportunity to voice their opinion. In economic terms there was considerable growth from 1908 until at least 1911/1912. Imperial Russia was a great debtor to the international financial markets, but profited from generous politically motivated loans, especially from France. Parts of the peasantry reacted in the affirmative to Stolypinʼs agrarian reforms. The revolutionary parties were demoralised and more efficiently infiltrated by the secret police than ever. Most of its leading figures where either exiled to Siberia or abroad. Terrorism virtually ebbed away. Finally, there was no serious problem with nationalism—or to put it more accurately: no more serious than one should expect in a multi-ethnic empire and no more serious than St. Petersburgʼs abilities to deal with. After all, 1905 had been much more a political than a national revolution and the government was able to end it by political, not by national compromise.
Some scholars have observed that in the last years before World War I ethnicity was increasingly referred to by imperial authorities as a criterion of loyalty to state and dynasty. Moreover, the government tried to strengthen its control in the periphery. Finnish autonomy was curtailed; plans to extend the zemstvo (local selfgovernment) to the western provinces were put on ice; language policies, especially in the case of Polish and Ukrainian, was as relentless as ever. Given the fact that the mental maps of Russiaʼs ruling elites were embedded in European discourses about ethnicity and the national question, it is not surprising that they were influenced by these patterns in their perception of imperial reality. However, this is not to say that anxieties about national movements or separatism were well-founded and that the Empireʼs integrity was really threatened by ethnic centrifugality. Nationalism and separatism of intellectuals did not cause trouble in times of relative stability, but could serve as a mobilising force in times of crisis. Such times were about to come, but it is hardly possible to draw conclusions from the momentum of national aspirations in times of crisis to pre-war conditions. Judging from 1917, it may seem that “quasi-constitutional” Russia was to be doomed, but looking back from 1913 Imperial Russiaʼs combination of restoration and renovation was astonishing. The real crisis of Late Imperial Russia began in 1914/1915 when it became clear that the army could neither be mobilised due to military planning nor sufficiently be supplied even in the medium term, when Russian troops suffered severe defeats and large territories were lost—in a word: when it became visible that Russia was not able to wage an industrial war.
The suggestion that national questions were not fatal to Late Tsarist Russia is supported by the fact that only during World War I there was a great shift of “ethnicization” in Eastern Europe. Multi-ethnicity or ethnic indeterminacy became a problem at the “Eastern” front for military and political leadership. To put it in a nutshell: ethnic diversity was translated into reliable and unreliable populations with forced deportation and ethnic cleansing of the latter, fostering national “Slavic” identity of the former as a consequence. It was a time when peasants were forced to disclose their national allegiance and subsequently their political reliability. So, to a considerable degree the ethnicization of Eastern Europe was a product of state measures to reduce insecurity and ambivalence, to put it in the theoretical framework of Zygmunt Bauman. Nevertheless, these effects should not be overestimated, especially in their impact on the bulk of the population. There were significant differences in the preconditions and degree of nation-building in the empire. This may be illustrated by two extreme examples: The Finns enjoyed a special status in the Romanov Empire for almost a century, far reaching self-government, a territory, elites, and a more or less homogeneous population. In the case of the White Russian and Ukrainian peasant population, the nationalising effects of World War I were rather weak, uneven and ambivalent. That ethnicity appeared on the agenda in 1917 was rather due to national political activists, German imperial war policies and Bolshevik anti-imperial rhetoric than a result of national mass mobilisation or “awakening”.
In the course of World War I, due to military and organisational disaster, considerable parts of the Empireʼs elites increasingly lost confidence in the governing capability of the political leadership while the population lived in poor conditions and in a state of uprooting. In February 1917, Nicholas II had to abdicate. When Mikhail refused to step in, the Romanov dynasty and their empire came to an end. However, it was not the end of the imperial structure. After all, the Provisional Government replaced imperial authority. Provisional Russia continued the war on the side of the allied powers and, at least on the surface, survived as imperial body politic. Below the surface things looked rather different. There was a great variety of ideas about the political future and different preconditions and means for political action on the imperial periphery. Nevertheless, during 1917 for almost all political parties the constitutional assembly remained the legitimate institution to shape the future. And it is worth noting that, after all, this constitutional assembly was nothing else than an “All-Russian” or “imperial” pre-parliament. Consequently, political reference to this institution supported the imperial structure far beyond February 1917. Of course, this structure was not supported because it was imperial, but because of a complex interplay of different factors: the strive for legitimacy, the uncertainty of the situation, political and military weakness of potential separatist forces, hope for a general revolutionary solution, and, last but not least, because the war made defection a dangerous undertaking. However, the interplay of these factors resulted in an implicit preservation of the imperial structure, which—at least for some time—remained stronger than national-ethnic centrifugality. The weakness of several of the former empireʼs national movements and their respective inability to mobilise “their” populations was one important precondition for the successful gathering of the former lands of the Tsar by the Bolsheviks.
Bolshevik Take-Over and Imperial Disintegration
Only after the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd and subsequently disbanded the constitutional assembly in January 1918, imperial structure lost its binding force: the empire began to fall apart. At that time Poland, large parts of Belorussia and the Baltics were under German military control. While Poland had been resurrected as a satellite state of the Central Powers already in 1916, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia became independent with the resuming of German advance in February and the treaty of Brest Litovsk in March 1918.
In Provisional Russia the Finns were among the first to declare independence in early December 1917. Given the fact that the parliament in Helsinki was more or less in charge of affairs since February and taking into account the favourable institutional preconditions this step came as no surprise. The Bolsheviks did not officially oppose the declaration, but almost immediately tried to turn independent Finland into a red republic. In the subsequent military conflict the Finns, supported by German troops, had the upper hand until December 1918. International military support, official recognition and the fact that the Bolsheviks had more important battles to fight, made Finnish independence rather easy. Yet by far not all national projects at the time were so successful and their advocates so lucky.
In Kiev, the Ukrainian pendant of the Soviet in Petrograd (the Rada) constituted itself in the first days of the February Revolution and claimed authority over Ukrainian territory. From the outset, the Rada represented a mixture of revolutionary and national aims. Despite the fact that many of its members clearly had national independence in mind during 1917, the Rada confined its resolutions to demands of Ukrainian autonomy in a future federal state. Federalism had a long tradition in the Ukrainian national movement since the midst of the ninenteenth century. It was a project to transform the empire within the framework of imperial structure.
Ironically, the Bolsheviks should later put this programme into effect in a different version: federalism without autonomy. In 1917 resorting to the federalist idea was probably less based on conviction than on political prudence because the power of the Rada was severely limited. Its authority beyond the city of Kiev or even beyond the building of its gatherings was doubtful to say the least. The Radaʼs policy to postpone the agrarian question until the constituent assembly alienated it from the peasantry. It had neither control over the provinces nor did the Rada command considerable and reliable armed forces. Tensions with Petrograd grew because the Provisional Government rebuffed any federalist ideas. However, in autumn 1917 its days were numbered. When the Provisional Government had been overthrown in October 1917, the Rada hurried to declare independence and to proclaim the Ukrainian Peopleʼs Republic (UNR). Some days later the Bolsheviks responded with the proclamation of “Soviet Ukraine” in Kharʼkov and the advancement of Red Army units towards Kiev. Not only Bolshevik military superiority but also the lack of peasant support for the UNR forced the Rada to abandon Kiev and to move to Zhitomir. The Ukrainian nationalists failed for similar reasons as the Provisional Government: its reluctant and legalistic approach to the agrarian question. When in Brest-Litovsk Trotsky ridiculed the UNRʼs representatives as commanding only the territory of their hotel suites, he was not far from the truth. However, imperial German interest in having a legal basis for the occupation of Ukraine saved the UNR for some time. Pretending to support the legitimate Ukrainian government, German troops drove the Bolsheviks out of Ukraine and stopped their advance at the river of the Don in early May 1918. Unsatisfied with the Radaʼs reluctant cooperation in the economic exploitation of Ukraine, the alleged German and Austro-Hungarian preservers of Ukrainian independence allowed the former Tsarist General Pavlo Skoropadsky to overthrow the Rada in the last days of April and to install himself as “Hetman of Ukraine”. Until November 1918 the Ukraine remained under control of the Central Powers. The loss of Ukraine was probably the most serious blow to the Bolsheviks, mainly because of the industrial capacities of the Donbas, but also because this region had been a Bolshevik stronghold in 1917. “The Donbas is not just a region amongst others, but a region without which socialist construction would remain an idle dream” Lenin declared in 1922. For the Bolsheviks it was essential to get Ukraine (and especially the Donbas) back. Their experiences in this enterprise had a lasting impact on their dealings with multi-ethnicity and the national question.
The Caucasus easily got out of the Provisional Governmentʼs control after the February Revolution. Here, the imperial administration vanished faster than in other parts of the empire. The newly created “Transcaucasian Committee” could not fill this vacuum though. Therefore, the soviets had no effective counterpart in the Caucasus as they had in Petrograd. In Georgia the Mensheviks dominated, in Armenia the Dashnak party. If there was some kind of dual power in the Caucasus at all, it emerged mainly in Azerbaijan where the Muslims created their own soviets and challenged the power of the workersʼ and soldiersʼ soviets. From October 1917 the Bolsheviks tried in vain to gain control of the Caucasus, but only in Baku they were temporarily able to stand their ground. However, the Baku commune soon collapsed under British pressure in August 1918. The Bolsheviks had to give way to other socialist parties. Nevertheless, even in the Caucasus the framework of an “All-Russian” revolution supported the former imperial structure long into 1918. Only in the course of 1918 policies became more nationalistic and oriented to national independence. Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan declared independence in April and May 1918. Matters differed in the East. In Siberia the 40.000 soldiers of the Czechoslovak Legion, which was on its way to support the Allies on the Western front, mutinied and dominated huge Siberian territories by controlling the railways. They finally continued their way to the Western theatre of war leaving Siberia to US-American and Japanese forces. Here, at first the “Komuch” government, a coalition of socialist and bourgeois parties, and later the Whites under Admiral Kolchak took charge.
Only in 1918 the imperial structure of Tsarist Russia had definitely fallen apart. Finland and the Baltic States were independent, internationally acknowledged and supported by German troops. Poland gained full independence in November 1918. Ukraine was occupied and governed as a colony by German and Austro-Hungarian forces. In the Southern, Eastern and Northern peripheries the White movement gathered its forces partly in the slipstream of Allied intervention. In the Caucasus independent states with socialist governments had evolved. What was left were the central provinces of European Russia where the Bolsheviks controlled the so called “Sovdepia”—land of the soviet representatives (a blend word formed from “soviet” and “deputaty”). By mid-1918 it had become clear that the Bolshevik coup dʼétat had not just been another transitory episode of the Russian Revolution but a caesura. The Bolshevik regime did not collapse as many politicians in and out of Russia had expected, but increasingly consolidated. The Red Terror, which gained momentum especially in the second half of 1918, was one cornerstone of this process; party discipline, strength of leadership and organisational skills another one. For representatives of the other socialist parties and for former Tsarist elites alike it was now evident that the time of politics had gone. The scene was set for civil war.
The Soviet Reconquista
Civil War was the first great challenge for the Bolshevik regime: they had to struggle for political and physical survival. The Civil war drove the Bolsheviks to the brink of defeat. Therefore, it had a deep and lasting impact on the development of the Soviet socio-political system. At least in retrospective it also enabled the Bolsheviks to gain control over most of the territories of the former Romanov Empire. This was not the result of an explicit policy to reestablish the former empire, but rather a process driven by military necessity and the dynamics of war. Beating the enemy, spreading revolution and gaining control over the former lands of the Tsar were indivisible in Bolshevik warfare. In effect, however, this process can be called a “Soviet Reconquista”.
In general, the Bolsheviks had a good economic basis for civil war. They controlled the central provinces of European Russia with most of the former empireʼs industrial plants, railway networks and human resources. Furthermore, their political agenda seemed to be the lesser evil to large parts of the former empireʼs population. However, in 1918 they neither had a proper state organisation nor an efficient army. Workersʼ control of factories and democratic elections of superiors in the Red Guards were important symbolic revolutionary accomplishments of ordinary people, but they were an obstacle to military survival. The Bolsheviks quickly turned the workersʼ paradise into a great barrack. They introduced one-man-rule into the factories and stern discipline into the armed forces; Tsarist directors and officers were called back to organise production and build up the Red Army. The Bolsheviks used terror not only against counterrevolutionaries, but also against workers and peasants. This transformation of erratic revolutionary violence into systematic, even despotic terror did not guarantee victory in itself, but it provided for a sound basis that made it possible for the Bolsheviks to cope with temporary drawbacks and singular defeats. Apart from the favourable geographic and economic starting position, this structural strength of the Soviet system was crucial for victory. The Whites contributed to this result through political mistakes, faction and poor military performance. In purely military terms the Bolsheviks did scarcely better, but in the long run they simply had more endurance than their enemies.
The end of World War I in Central Europe and the defeat of the Central Powers profoundly changed the situation in Eastern Europe. In Estonia and Latvia the Bolsheviks tried to do the same as in Finland. They unleashed a civil war and fought against Estonian and Latvian troops, but also against the German Freikorps. The final result resembled the Finnish example, but the war in the Baltics was undoubtedly one of the bloodiest and most brutal episodes of the Civil War, and it lasted until 1920 when the Bolsheviks had to give in and accept the independence of the Baltic States.
The retreat of German and Austro-Hungarian forces from Ukraine enabled the Bolsheviks to regain lost ground in the South-West. They hurried to fill the power vacuum the Central Powers had left, but soon had to learn that this vacuum was not as void as they had assumed. After all, the occupation of Ukraine had been a hothouse for regional and local power structures represented by warlords (atamans) who also tried to take advantage of the new situation. Ukrainian and Russian speaking peasants alike were appalled by the Bolshevik policies of “War Communism” and put up stiff resistance against forced grain procurement. What had seemed to be an easy prey turned out to be a jungle of violence, different armed groups and political actors. Amongst them were also Ukrainian nationalists led by Semen Petliura who gathered troops to fight for independence. Petliura tried to win over some of the regional warlords for his political aims and had some success in doing so. It is telling that the Bolshevik position in Ukraine was so weak that they had to resort to the same tactics. Temporarily, they made alliances with Nestor Makhno and Grigoriev to fight the first White offensive under Denikin in spring 1919. But the Volunteer Army drove the Bolsheviks out of Ukraine and got as far as Orel when illnesses, difficulties in supply and disagreement among the White generals forced them to withdraw southwards. In 1919 the Polish-Soviet War began. In May 1920 the Poles conquered Western Ukraine up to the Dnieper and occupied Kiev. They were, however, driven back to the Weichsel. Only here the Red Army under Tukhachevsky was stopped in August 1920 and forced to retreat. At first this Soviet campaign was nothing more than a counter-offensive, but with subsequent successes it turned into a military expedition to spread revolution westwards and to enforce world revolution. Tukhachevskyʼs campaign is very typical for the merging of operational, political and ideological aims in Soviet military activity that culminated in “implicit imperialism”.
The Polish-Soviet War ended in a stalemate that was transferred into the peace treaty of Riga in 1921, leaving large parts of Belorussia to the Polish state. Already in 1920 the Whites had started another campaign under Vrangel who was even less successful than Denikin. After some months of fighting the remains of Vrangelʼs army were constipated on the Crimean. The evacuation of the Crimean in October 1920 was the fatal blow to the Russian counterrevolution. Tens of thousands of unfortunate people who did not manage to get on the ships were executed by the Reds. During Civil War Ukraine remained a battlefield where different war parties had only temporary, but no permanent control. This situation changed after 1920 when the war with Poland virtually came to an end and the Whites were defeated. Nevertheless, it took the Bolsheviks until 1921 to annihilate the remaining warlord armies and smaller gangs and to get a firm grip of the Ukrainian countryside. In the Lower Volga Region this process even lasted until 1922.
Since 1918 Siberia had been the stronghold first of the Komuch government and then of the White government under Admiral Kolchak. His military campaigns failed as did the ones of Iudenich, Denikin and Vrangel. Matters went from bad to worse when single military commanders began to play their own political game. Warlords like Semenov or Ungern-Shternberg controlled large territories by terror and violence and weakened the White movement in Siberia considerably. When the Allied troops were withdrawn there was little to stop the advancing Red Army.
In Central Asia the February Revolution and fall of Tsarist power led to chaos, anarchy and the rule of regional strongmen (Basmachi). Like their Tsarist predecessors, the Bolsheviks established themselves in Tashkent, but without having much power beyond the boundaries of the city. Like in other places only resolute military efforts changed the situation in favour of the Bolsheviks in 1920. Despite the fact that Soviet power remained shaky and weak, the lack of stronger opponents secured Bolshevik prevalence.
With victory over the Whites in the South the way to the Caucasus was open again and the Bolsheviks did not hesitate to continue their Reconquista. Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan had been independent states since 1918, but their societies suffered from poverty, infrastructural deficits, internal and external conflicts. Armenia and Azerbaijan were more or less at war with each other and also with their “foreign” Muslim and Christian populations respectively; the Armenians additionally fought with Turkey over Anatolia. Georgia was luckier in this respect, but far from being strong enough to resist the Red Army. Azerbaijan was the first of the three to collapse under Soviet military pressure in April 1920, Armenia followed on 2 December and Georgia in March 1921. The Soviet government settled open questions with the Turkish and, with the exception of Batumi, the former borders between the Tsarist and the Ottoman Empires were reestablished in 1921.
The Caucasian campaign is more significant than other parts of the Soviet Reconquista because it revealed the Bolsheviksʼ implicit imperialism. The wars they fought in the West can be regarded as partly defensive in nature. After all, Finland and the Baltics were close to Petrograd and Estonia had been the basis of Iudenichʼs Anti-Bolshevik campaign in 1919. Poland proved to be an expansionist state whose policies in the early years of its existence were largely shaped by imperial dreams. The conquest of Ukraine can be seen as the result of successful defense in the context of the Polish-Soviet war and the fact that Ukraine was void of any efficient statehood on the one hand. On the other hand, it must be pointed out that the Bolsheviks never accepted the idea of an independent Ukraine. So, the implicit imperialist background of their policies in the South-West should not be underestimated. In the Caucasus, however, the imperial character of Soviet policies was obvious. Its conquest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been one of the most brutal and bloodiest episodes of Tsarist imperialism bringing various non-Christian populations under Russian rule. Tsarist administration remained a foreign body in the Caucasus and Bolshevik Anti-Tsarist rhetoric had always branded repressive Russian rule. The Reconquista of the Caucasus was not defensive in nature but aggressive and expansionist. After all, the three Transcaucasian states had had revolutionary governments since 1918. However, the Bolsheviks—pretending to bring “real revolution”—simply expanded their realm. They went as far as the Turks and the British allowed and secured the former Tsarist territories with the oil fields of Baku. So, in the Caucasus the Bolsheviks proved to be real heirs of the Romanov Empire.
The lack of international interest and support of the Great Powers also played an important role in the process of imperial metamorphosis. After all, the success of national movements in establishing or reestablishing independence after World War I was highly contingent on the compliance and backing of the Great Powers. Finland, the Baltic States and Poland enjoyed diplomatic acknowledgement, military support or their own armed forces as in the Polish case. Especially Poland was a cornerstone of Anglo-French “cordon sanitaire” policies in the East. Ukraine had a bad starting position because of its connection with Imperial Germany, but also because it lacked a tradition of statehood. No Western European statesman considered independent Ukraine to be worth of any kind of effort. Despite the initial diplomatic acknowledgement of Georgia, the same finally held true for the Transcaucasian states. The British left the Caucasus in 1920. Part of the story is that the Great Powers, if not de iure but de facto, began to accept the Soviet government as legitimate successor of the Tsarist state. Besides, there were limited possibilities to pursue an active policy in Transcaucasia or Asia with respect to a society tired of war and empty treasuries. Allied intervention and military engagement in the Russian Civil War had been under heavy pressure at home from the outset. As a consequence, the Bolsheviks were given free reign. Thus most of the vast lands of the former Tsarist Empire fell into the hands of the Bolsheviks because they were the least weak of the internal war parties and there was no external power ready, willing or able to stop them. They advanced until they reached the imperial borders—revolutionary in form, imperialistic in content.
Empire in Disguise
In 1920 the worst was over for the Bolsheviks: the war with Poland had come to an end, Allied troops had been withdrawn and the Western powers showed little inclination to mess with Russian affairs any longer. Last but not least, the last White crusade against Bolshevism led by Baron Vrangel had ended in a crushing defeat followed by a chaotic retreat from the Crimean. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks had no reason to pop the corks: Siberia remained under the control of war lords like Semenov or Ungern-Sternberg, to talk about Soviet control in the Caucasus would have been euphemistic, in Ukraine numerous Atamans and their armed units continued to operate and challenge Soviet power. Finally, the Bolsheviks faced great problems in enacting their “War Communism” and to extract enough grain from the villages to feed the army and the cities. In 1920 the war against the Bolsheviksʼ external enemies seemed to have been won for the time being—the war against internal enemies was still to be fought. This last stage of the Civil War lasted at least until 1921, when the uprisings in Kronstadt and Tambov had been drowned in blood. This was less a consequence of Soviet strength, but rather of their enemiesʼ failure and the result of complete exhaustion in large parts of the former Russian Empire. The Hunger at the Volga was only the most extreme consequence of Russiaʼs modern “smuta” (Time of Troubles) with seven years of war and chaos.
Lenin was well aware of this. The “New Economic Policy” he enforced despite considerable doubts and resistance on the Tenth Party Congress in 1921 was a nonideological compromise and, as it turned out to be, an armistice with the peasantry for the time being: two steps back to move one step forward. The supply of the cities was one problem, to govern the conquered territories and to construct something like a state another one.
During their Reconquista of the Tsarist lands the Bolsheviks met resistance not only by their political adversaries, but also by the different peoples of the former empire. Especially troubling were the problems in Ukraine. Large parts of the Ukrainian peasantry did not welcome the Red Army, some even fought against it. Terry Martin suggested that the Bolsheviks met strong nationalism during their conquest, especially in Ukraine, and that this experience shaped their subsequent policies to a great extent. While the latter is beyond question, the former is somewhat doubtful. Peasant resistance in Ukraine was a rather complex phenomenon. Nationalist feelings or the wish for an independent Ukraine may have played a role, but one should not forget that the Ukrainian nationalists under Petliura never managed to mobilise the peasantry for their aims on a large scale. Furthermore, a lot of nationalist atamans defected in the course of Civil War and went their own ways. The main reason for peasant resistance was the policy of “War Communism”. Forced grain procurement and collectivisation aroused fury on the Ukrainian countryside against the Bolshevik “liberators” because of the mere procedure and its economic consequences, but also because these “liberators” often were represented by “others”: Jews and Russians from the cities. Furthermore, in contrast to peasants in Central Russia Ukrainian peasants were used to powers coming and going, not knowing who would prevail in the end. Of course, the Bolsheviks also were resented because they were “foreigners” (moskali), but their resistance was probably much more caused by what they were doing rather than by what they were. Until the end of World War II there were always strong feelings against outsiders and intruders, but little evidence can be found of explicit manifestations in favour of something like the Ukrainian nation or independent statehood. Doubtful as the conclusion from peasant resistance to national mobilisation in Ukraine might have been—it was this conclusion that had been drawn by the Bolsheviks, especially by Lenin.
Lenin quite clearly saw the problem that the Bolsheviks—a party that mainly consisted of urbanites of Russian and, to a lesser degree, Jewish origin—would be conceived as imperialists by the non-Russian populations. When, for the first time, the Bolsheviks had reason to discuss the future organisation of the Soviet state at the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919, the participants witnessed an interesting interplay of political positions. Piatakov took the original “Leninist” unitarian stance as Lenin himself abandoned his former points of view. While Piatakov argued that revolution would overcome nationalism and separatism, Lenin warned of “Great-Russian chauvinism” and the dangers for Bolshevik rule if the party would ignore national feelings of the people of the former Empire, especially in Ukraine. Lenin advocated federalism in consequence. The inherent dangers of this concept—which could weaken Soviet state and Bolshevik rule alike—were to be faced by strong Bolshevik leadership in the evolving national republics themselves. “It is all about cadres” Lenin had already said at the turn of the century. They would preserve the unity of the Soviet state. So, the Soviet Union took shape as a federal state, and later the famous phrase “national in form, socialist in content” was coined by Stalin. Still in 1922, he was among the Bolsheviks who put the need of the concept into question. Maybe he was even right with his optimistic assessment. After all, Soviet power had prevailed under difficult circumstances. Yet Lenin was less optimistic and more cautious: better an “empire in disguise” than a Unitarian revolutionary state troubled by multi-ethnicity, nationalism and separatism. Lenin, as usual, won the day.
Soviet national policies were primarily a tool to foster Bolshevik rule and to maintain the imperial prey. In practice, however, they were more than that. In the following years the Bolsheviks promoted national cultures and produced national cadres. Even more, they pursued active nation-building by constructing and creating peoples and their respective republics and autonomous districts. Subsequently, the Soviet Union was organised as a multi-ethnic state where each “people” lived in a distinct territory. Given the ethnic ambivalence and indeterminacy of the former Tsarist Empire, this was, of course, a difficult process asking for artificial and arbitrary solutions. In the end ethnic ambiguities always had to come to terms with the pencilʼs brushes.
The results of the policies of “in-rooting” (korenizatsiia) were ambivalent. National languages were taught at school, national cadres produced and promoted, and in the course of the 1920s administrative paperwork in the indigenous tongues increased. Once more, Ukraine is a case in point here. “Ukrainisation” definitely did not exist merely on paper. Alphabetisation of Ukrainian-speaking peasants increased as did the production of books in Ukrainian language. Politicians of Ukrainian origin like Mikola Skrypnyk reached the upper echelon of bureaucracy. Ukraine was the showcase of “korenizaciia”, but it also demonstrated its limits. After all the “Affirmative Action Empire” was a federation without real autonomy. Russian remained the lingua franca of party, state and higher education. Consequently, the Russian element dominated despite all successes and progresses of Ukrainisation. Most notably, in terms of power the last word was always spoken in Moscow. The Party as a whole and in its centre remained Russian-dominated. If the inherent centralism in this political system was not too palpable in the “golden”1920s, then it was due to the weakness of internal statehood, not because of the system.
Even in the European part of the Soviet Union state and party had no firm grip on the villages, and in the Caucasus or Central Asia Soviet power was more or less restricted to the urban centres, just nominal or purely negative in character. The Bolsheviks were able to punish the local population for unrest or misdemeanour, but apart from that they were unable to govern. Especially in Central Asia indigenisation (korenizatsiia) did not produce the necessary results. Either non-Russians were russified and no longer accepted as “of oneʼs own” or—more often—they cultivated their “otherness”, drifting away from the Bolshevik project. As a rule peasants or indigenous populations appropriated the institutions of the Soviet state on a lower level but preserved their traditional habits and procedures. In the European part the newly created village soviet usually was nothing else than the old peasant “obshchina” because the same people took charge of affairs. They were able to do this because there was nobody else who could have done it. In Kazakhstan for example, the new soviet corresponded to the old “aul”. Bolshevik “civilisation” existed only in an insular mode: Soviet power was a “Red Archipelago” in an ocean of tradition and pre-modernity. This resembled the Old Regime, with the important difference that Tsarist administrators accepted indigenous self-government and undertook little efforts to transform the non-Russian populations, while the Bolsheviks had an agenda of modernisation and direct rule. Yet in the 1920s the centre was only powerful enough to bind the periphery to its rule, but too weak to make it work according to its ambitious plans. The first Soviet metamorphosis of the Tsarist Empire resulted in a multi-national state that enabled nation-building at the periphery but that did not provide for federalist participation in terms of power. Consequently, Soviet governance in the centre represented imperial practices in disguise. Times were about to come when this disguise was torn down and the imperial character of Soviet power would become more apparent.
Stalinist Mutations—Becoming Russian in Form, Despotic in Content
When in 1923 it was obvious that the German proletariat would not follow the Russian example, Stalinʼs “Socialism in one country” replaced the concept of “World Revolution” in 1924. It became clear that the Soviet Union would have to stand on its own feet. There would be no support from Western proletariats. Even more, proletarian passivity or even approval of the Western powers in the case of an AntiSoviet War was to be expected. Modernisation and industrial development became imminent. Internal debates were not about the what, but about the how to achieve this aim: by evolution or by revolution? Bukharin took the former, Stalin the latter stance. Stalin prevailed and, at the same time, fostered his position in the party to finally become the dictatorial leader of the Soviet state. The collectivisation of agriculture was considered to be the precondition for industrial development and from 1927/1928 the party began to turn the countryside upside down. The Bolsheviks resumed Civil War on the “rural front” with well-known disastrous consequences. Collectivisation was a brutal form of “internal colonisation”. The village had to be made “Soviet” and peasants to be turned into agrarian labourers. Collectivisation aimed for agricultural productivity and civilisation in Bolshevik fashion, but above all for power and direct rule on the countryside. It was also a “cultural revolution” that intended to destroy the traditional peasant way of life. The Bolsheviks did indeed destroy the old “backward” village and many of its most capable members, but they did not manage to root out certain forms of silent resistance and mechanisms resulting in low productivity. However, they won more direct control over the countryside. For the peasants, the process of collectivisation in many respects exemplified “foreign domination”. In the European part they were harassed by party members and functionaries from the cities. In Central Asia cultural differences between Europeans and non-Europeans were even more significant. The greater the problems, misunderstandings and temporary drawbacks, the more brutal and violent Russian Bolsheviks pursued their “mission civilisatrice”. Yet terror and violence did not stop with the official end of collectivisation. In general, the 1930s can be described as a “mobilising dictatorship” that always enlarged its aims before reaching them. To be sure, large-scale terror and excessive violence are not specific to imperial rule in general. In the twentieth century, they have been more prominent in nation states or “nationalising” empires, as Michael Mann has demonstrated. While the Soviet Union can be conceived as a “nationalising” empire during Stalinʼs reign, it nevertheless does not fit perfectly into that category. Nationalisation or Russification took place as we will see below, yet the Bolsheviks did not strive for ethnic homogeneity but for power and transformation. And in this battle we see several characteristics of imperial rule outlined in the introductory remarks.
From the beginning, the Soviet Union had been a politically centralised state, but centralism increased considerably during Stalinʼs dictatorship. In the 1920s there had been some room for discussions, debates and bargaining inside the party, and the leaders of the national republics and their parties were at least able to raise their voice. The campaign for collectivisation was the first time the leaders of the republics were forced into a contest for rapid and encompassing realisation of the kolkhoz system. Horizontal communication virtually began to cease. Increasingly, the party leaders of the republics only reported to the centre and the centre in turn issued orders. By the second half of the 1930s this system of exclusive vertical communication was more or less established. Now, horizontal communication was considered to be treacherous conspiracy in statu nascendi. During the Great Terror no republican party leader knew exactly whether he was vigorous enough in his fight against enemies compared to his peers. From high ranking party members taking part in party discourses and having at least a potential influence on party policies, they were reduced to mere satraps being completely dependent on Stalinʼs mercy. This despotic form of governance was reproduced on lower levels of the system and contributed to the dynamics and lethal dimensions of the Great Terror. The Bolshevik party had never been democratic, but Stalin created a rule that was despotic in character and remind of “sultanistic” forms of power Max Weber once described. Lenin ruled by charismatic authority, Stalin by extremely asymmetrical personal relations. If one could say that the Soviet state exemplified several features of an empire, then the same could be said about its leader. In the course of the 1930s Stalin represented evermore a kind of “imperator” who even had a “court”, where a tiny group of followers tried to win the favour of the “Red Tsar”. The emergence of a political system that apparently reproduced ancient forms of rule seems somehow contradictory to “authoritarian high-modernism” Soviet policies represented in the 1930s.
There was another common feature of empires that gained momentum during the 1930s: inequality and exploitation. The kolkhoz was a means of direct rule but also of peasantryʼs exploitation. Five-Year plans represented the needs of the centre that had to be met by the periphery at any cost. Since the 1930s centre-periphery relations had become increasingly “colonial” in appearance and consequence. If Lenin had warned of “Great-Russian chauvinism” and korenizatsija policies intended to enlarge the non-Russian element in party and functional elites, the subsequent influx of non-Russians came to a halt and even decreased during the 1930s. In 1933 the policies of korenizatsija were virtually abandoned and replaced de facto by russification. This change is clearly noticeable in higher government institutions, and particularly at the heart of Stalinʼs dictatorship: the Ministry of Interior Affairs (NKVD). In the early days of the Cheka and the GPU Russians were even underrepresented, while Jews and Latvians constituted a disproportionally major part of its personnel. Towards the end of the 1930s Russians became the dominant national contingent in the security apparatus while non-Russians represented only a minority. However, there were similar tendencies outside the governmental structure. While in Late Stalinism Jews became a prosecuted minority once again, Russians increasingly were to take over their “mercurian” functions. Apart from the population of Jewish origin, educational levels were the highest among Russians, and Soviet modernisation needed engineers, technicians and scientists. Russians became “colonisers” whose share among the populations outside the RSFSR increased substantially during the 1930s, especially among the elites of the non-Russian republics. Towards the end of the decade Stalin increasingly spoke of Russians as the “first among equals” of Soviet nations and de facto made them the “titular nation” of the Soviet Union. Apart from their qualitative “mercurian” function Russians also served as an instrument to change the quantitative ethnic balance in certain regions of the Soviet Union. Since the Kremlin had started the “national operations” in 1938, the deportation of alleged “unreliable peoples” became a common feature in Stalinʼs Soviet Union. The victims were mainly replaced by Russians, as was the case with the Baltics. Substantial Russian ethnic presence was considered to be a guarantee of Soviet Power. Once more, for nonRussian peoples “foreign domination” was visible and palpable.
Last but not least, the Soviet Union was more expansionistic than ever under Stalin. When in 1939 Stalin got the opportunity to profit from a further partition of Poland and got a free hand in the Baltics he did not hesitate. Soviet forces occupied the Eastern part of Poland in 1939. One year later the Baltic States were incorporated into the Soviet “empire”. In the winter of 1939/1940 the Red Army attacked Finland without much avail and the price for peace were territorial concessions by the Finns. Soldiersʼ letters reveal that Soviet propaganda represented the Soviet assault as continuation of the Civil War. According to the Red Army menʼs own words they were fighting the Finnish “white bandits” and bringing freedom to the peasants repressed by Polish pany (noblemen). In essence, this second attempt to export the revolution by bayonets was just an exemplification of imperial geopolitics: expansion as an aim in itself. The conquest of Eastern Europe at the end of World War II and the creation of a Soviet dominated sphere with obedient and dependent satellite states fits perfectly into this picture.
During Stalinʼs dictatorship, Bolshevik rule exemplified several features of imperial practices: the centre subordinated and exploited the periphery, and in some parts of the Soviet Union these relations can be characterised as “colonial” in content or as “foreign domination”. Political centralism and control had always been at the core of Bolshevik ideology, but during Stalinism it was enforced by terror and violence on a hitherto unknown scale. Under conditions of diversity and multi-ethnicity this resulted in outright warfare against the own population. As much as Soviet internal governance partly resembled imperialistic colonial wars and despotism, its external policies largely exemplified practices of imperialistic expansionism.
After Stalin—from Imperial Practices to Hybrid Multinational Federalism
Stalin was the system—when Stalin died the system changed. Imperial practices continued, but their rules, conditions and frames shifted because both centre and periphery underwent changes that altered their mutual relations. This was a slow but powerful process rooting in Khrushchevʼs de-Stalinisation. After Stalinʼs death the terror came to an end. Of course, national party leaders could lose their position if they did not comply with the central regimeʼs policies, but they had not to face lethal consequences anymore. The Ukrainian party leader Pedro Shelest was promoted in the late 1960s as a member of the Politburo and shortly after he was pensioned off. But Ukraine was more the exception than the rule. As a matter of fact, in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union it became possible to pursue regional interests. And since the Soviet Union was structured along the lines of national republics these regional interests happened to be “national”, even if they were mainly about economics and the distribution of resources. As often, the national party leaders, who usually were non-Russians, took their chances. The result was the development of a national-communist hybridity that reversed the rationale of Soviet nationality policies from “national in form, socialist in content” into “socialist in form, national in content”. Armenia, Armenian society and party, to put an example, had become more Armenian than socialist since the 1960s. And this was not the exception but rather the rule. Why did the centre not act against this development? There seem to be different reasons. The first is the increasing complexity of Soviet economics since the 1950s. If central planning and organisation should work, Moscow was dependent on cooperation with the Soviet periphery to some degree. The second reason was Khrushchev himself, who seemed to be a true believer in communism and its superiority over Western capitalism. For him nations were something of the past. He thought about the future in economic and technocratic terms and systematically underestimated the issue of nationality. However, Khrushchevʼs Thaw was a time when narratives about national suffering were also possible and put on the agenda. When Khrushchev was brought down in 1964 it simply was too late to put these narratives back onto the shelves. Brezhnevʼs philosophy was to maintain the status quo and to rule according to the motto “live and let live” as long as his position remained unchallenged. Network politics were at the peak in his time and it seems that he conceived the interests of the national republics not in terms of nationality, but in terms of networks and economic distribution that could easily be handled by giving everyone his share of the cake. But when the cake got smaller and smaller this “distributive empire” increasingly lost its cohesive force.
On the one hand, the Soviet Union had never exposed less imperial characteristics than in Late Socialism. Actually, a multinational federal state with considerable autonomy of the national republics had emerged. Of course, in this composite structure pressure for unity from the centre was high, but as long as plans were more or less fulfilled and people officially paid tribute to the idea of the Soviet state, the party leaders and their networks were quite free to follow their own way. Nation-building could take place as long it was framed by the “friendship of Soviet peoples”. This was a cheap lip service every national party organisation could spare. In the 1980s, on the other hand, Soviet citizens increasingly referred to the Soviet Union as an empire in the negative sense of the term. But this had more to do with economic crises and changing expectations than with Soviet imperial reality. Nationalism and separatism existed, but they had not been a serious threat to the Soviet order. However, they seemed to offer a solution when the economic disaster of the Union became imminent. And this is more than a mere coincidental similarity with the Tsarist case. It is also more than a coincidence that the collapse of the Soviet Union began in those regions where the Bolsheviks acted most imperialistically in Civil War and on the eve of World War II: in the Caucasus and the Baltics.
Conclusion
Empires have displayed a great variety of specific appearances and ways of political performance in the course of world history. Nevertheless, there are certain similarities of these body politics that provide for an applicable concept of “Empire”. It has been the aim of this article to demonstrate that the Soviet Union throughout its existence and despite the great changes this body politic underwent from the 1920s to the 1980s always met the core criteria of imperial rule and practices. The Soviet Union displayed not only typical conditions of empires as diversity, multi-ethnicity and composite structure, but also quite typical “imperial” ways of dealing with these conditions after the successful Reconquista during Civil War. Officially, the Soviet Union was a federation of national republics and a “modern” multi-national state. This self-description claimed that the Tsarist “peopleʼs prison” had been replaced by a new revolutionary statehood that provided for national freedom and self-determination. It, however, did conceal the fact that apart from differences in style and ruthlessness the Bolshevik heirs of the Romanovs conducted a policy that was by no means less imperialistic than that of their predecessors. The main difference was that Bolshevik national policies did affirm nations and even fostered nation-building, sometimes artificial and regardless of local conditions. In terms of power, however, the Soviet system relied on centralism and inequality between centre and periphery, while the Russian dominated communist party can aptly be described as an imperial elite guaranteeing the political status quo. This power structure became even more visible and stronger under Stalin when the centre-periphery relations were very similar to that of a despot and his satraps. Furthermore, under Stalin the Soviet Union developed an expansionist urge that found its limits only on the power of others and conducted policies of “internal colonisation” resulting in forms of foreign domination. These practices are very similar to political practices of many other empires in history and the Soviet Union was not a marginal case among them. For ideological reasons, however, it had to be an “empire in disguise” that could not expose its imperial nature. This was nothing exceptional for Soviet civilisation where pulling the wool over everyoneʼs eyes was of vital importance for things to go on. However, when things could not go on any longer, parts of the Soviet Unionʼs imperial nature were revealed by the fact that it fell into pieces along the lines of its constituent elements, which were not willing to accept the imperial centreʼs leadership anymore.