HOW THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE CRUMBLED

RIA Novosti
16:31 | 05/ 11/ 2007

MOSCOW. (Gennady Bordyugov for RIA Novosti) – Anyone who has been
following the stormy debate brought on by the 90th anniversary of
the Great October Revolution may well wonder why its national aspects
have been forgotten.

Were they not intertwined with the social aspects?

The events that shook the world took place in the Russian Empire,
which had a very complex social-ethnic structure. And it is hard to
say whether the social or the ethnic factors played a bigger role in
those sinister events.

Take land, one of the Revolution’s key issues: Russia being a country
of peasants, the poorest social stratum of one ethnic group often
sought to seize the landed estates owned by representatives of another
ethnic group.

And in the cities, too, the youth that had migrated from the
countryside seeking to climb the social ladder often met with
resistance from other ethnic groups.

Contrary to what some politicians thought, the abdication of the Tsar
in February 1917 could not automatically solve the ethnic problem
in Russia.

There was an incredible upsurge of the national movements in Russia’s
borderlands, and they could not accept the Provisional Government’s
call for a "single and indivisible Russia". Even so, discrimination
of non-Russians was abolished, and the autonomy of Finland and the
Polish Kingdom was restored. The remaining ethnic groups were not
granted any territorial rights.

The democratic government would, of course, pay a dear price for
its failure to appreciate the magnitude of the ethnic problem. True,
in June 1917, faced with a mass movement of peasants and soldiers in
the Ukraine, the Provisional Government would delegate some of its
powers to the Central Rada and recognize the national principle as
the basis for the country’s administrative division.

The Congress of the Peoples of Russia held in Kiev in September
1917 was attended by 93 delegations representing practically all
the major ethnic and national groups with the exception of Finns and
Poles. Although the Congress pronounced itself in favor of creating
a democratic federative republic in Russia, it was clear that the
national interests were prevailing over the idea of universal unity.

Radical sentiments – what today would be called "aggressive
nationalism" – were quickly spreading within the national movements. In
the elections to the Constitutional Assembly in November 1917 the
majority of non-Russians voted for their national parties. Faced with
a choice between the Provisional Government’s commitment to the united
and indivisible Russia and the Bolsheviks’ calls for self-determination
of the peoples, along with land and peace, the non-Russian population
(about 57 percent of the total) preferred the latter. The Declaration
of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia issued on November 2(15)
1917 offered the peoples the right to self-determination, up to
secession. At the time there was no clear awareness that the Bolsheviks
put the principle of class struggle above national self-determination.

After the dissolution of the Constitutional Assembly on
January 5-6, 1918 centrifugal trends manifested themselves
with a vengeance. Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine and the
Moldavian Republic (Bessarabia) had proclaimed independence by
February, Byelorussia in March and the Transcaucasian Federation in
April. Turkestan, Kazakhstan, Bashkiria and the North Caucasus had
proclaimed their territorial autonomy in late 1917. The disintegration
of the Empire was precipitated by an external factor. In the summer
of 1918, after the Peace of Brest and with the Civil War flaring up,
Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine acted as independent states under German
protectorate, Estonia, Latvia and most of Byelorussia were occupied by
the Germans, Finland was under German protection, Bessarabia reunited
with Romania, and Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan became independent
states after the collapse of the Transcaucasian Federation. In
the North Caucasus, Central Asia and Siberia the situation was in a
state of flux with movements for autonomy, the Bolsheviks and Russian
counter-revolutionary forces fighting it out.

Compounding the situation was the Intervention by foreign countries.

However, the break-up of the Empire was not the end of the
multinational Russian state. Suffering defeats, making concessions
and retreating, by the end of the Civil War the Bolshevik government
had nevertheless regained the lost borderlands (two decades later
the Baltic countries, Western Byelorussia and Bessarabia, though not
Poland and Finland, became parts of the U.S.S.R.).

Historians attribute the successful reintegration of the Tsarist
empire to a series of factors: the Russian nationalist and reactionary
programs of the White armies and the Interventionists; the support of
the majority of the predominantly Russian industrial proletariat and
the peasantry; the ebbing of national movements; the use of the "divide
and rule" principle capitalizing on social and ethnic hostilities,
etc. It is important to stress that "national revolutions" were not
really revolutions in their own right, most of them being variants
of peasant uprisings. In 1917 the nations and ethnic groups did not
"betray" but "fled" from the crumbling imperial centre. As soon as
the imperial centre started regaining strength, centrifugal forces
manifested themselves again.

The 90th anniversary of the October Revolution provides another
occasion to wonder whether socialism was capable of removing
national antagonisms and paving the way to a supranational world
community. Obviously, in the beginning the Bolsheviks wanted
to replace the pre-national structure of the Tsarist Empire with
proletarian internationalism. But as early as 1918 they reverted to
the Social-Revolutionaries’ principle of federalism based on the
identification of territories according to ethnic and linguistic
characteristics, which, of course, was at odds with the Communist
ideology.

The principle of self-determination of nations was superseded by the
principle of equality within the union federative state. Non-Russian
elites were involved in government, the policy of "indigenization",
i.e. increasing the share of local indigenous population in
the governing bodies, was pursued, "small" local languages were
promoted and national schools were established. All that created a
groundswell of support for the Bolsheviks on the part of the majority
of non-Russian peoples.

However, the objective processes of consolidation of nations and a
growing sense of national identity gradually came to challenge the
official policy of dismantling the national elements and strengthening
the united Soviet state. There came the purges of the late 1920s and
the "nationalities operations" of the NKVD in the late 1930s. The 1940s
saw mass deportations and the emergence of anti-Semitic trends. All
this brought brewing national conflicts to a head and radicalized
the demands of the national movements, which were emerging from the
underground. Like after the October Revolution, there began a "parade
of sovereignties’. In late 1991 the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

What lies in store for post-Soviet space? What culture of reminiscences
prevails today? Is there nostalgia for a supranational system of
political, social and cultural communications? The jubilee of the
October Revolution is a good occasion to look back on the past in
order to better understand the present.

Gennady Bordyugov is head of research projects, Russian Social Research
Association (AIRO-XXI), Member of RIA Novosti Expert Council

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not
necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.