“Ah, Comrade Descendants, Socialism was Built on Trickery”

Abstract

This article contains a polemic with conclusions by B.N. Mironov. The author points out that the 1920s forced the authorities in the USSR to use the external signs of the federal structure to establish control over the national margins of the former Russian Empire. Federalism, in her opinion, was a lateral and induced branch of the party goal. During the 1920s, many national leaders who had previously collaborated with the Soviet government were replaced, killed, or exiled. A monopolistic organization of power, reliance on the administrative levers of control, a strict hierarchy of the political elite, and the ideologization of the political system as a whole were established in the country.

B.N. Mironov ends his article full of statistical calculations with the following question: “Can the Soviet national project be considered viable?” Opinions were divided on this. It seems to me that a viewpoint deserving of respect is that objectively the Soviet Union was not a “prison of peoples,” but a “cradle of nations,” an “affirmative action empire,” a “nursery for the cultivation and construction of nation-states.” Here, two questions are combined into one. The first one is an assessment of the viability of the Soviet national project. The second one addresses whether the Soviet Union was (an instrument of this project) such a nursery. Neither Armenians, Georgians, Jews, nor indeed many others would have liked the appraisal “cradle of nations.”

However, T. Martin “modernized” the assessment of the USSR, the first country where affirmative action programs were developed in the interests of national minorities. The author replaced the ideological content of internationalism—a policy position of equal chances—with Affirmative Action, basing it on the preferences of “positive action.” Martin considered the formation of the USSR a historical example: not a single country could compare with Soviet undertakings in terms of scale.¹ In the 1920s, it was possible to organizationally combine Soviet internationalism with ethnocultural interests in what Martin expressed by the formula of the “affirmative action empire.” The interesting experience of merging intellectual history and political practice cannot be discounted, nor the possibilities of comprehending in it the intricacies of ethnic and Soviet identities.

The Bolsheviks tried to give influence to national elites and sent loyal representatives “to their local places.” Mironov also supports this line, calculating in great detail the decline in the share of Russians in republican power structures. For analysis, the author uses, in his opinion, adequate sources: the All-Union population censuses of 1926, 1959, 1970, 1979, and 1989, containing information on the ethnic composition of administrators of different spheres and levels, as well as the All-Russian census of 1897, apparently for comparison with Soviet practice. The researcher, referring to demographers, considers these data satisfactory in his recently published work.² The fact that the number of ethnic groups living in the country is not fully represented in the censuses used by him (the censuses of 1920, 1937, and 1939 are absent) seems insignificant to the author.

It seems to me that the period 1920–1939, which is not included in the analysis, was crucial to determining the fate of ethnic elites in the USSR. It is worth focusing on it, given that the data of the 1926 census significantly “lose out” to later ones; however, let us not be distracted by source analysis: calculating quantitative data is Mironov’s forte.

Martin’s formula in the post-Soviet period was widely used by domestic historians, who saw no neocolonial meaning in it. However, N.A. Berdyaev hinted that “Bolshevism is much more traditional than commonly thought.”³ Outside of Mironov’s study of the problems of Soviet nation-building and the role of ethnic elites in it, there remain a large number of motifs.

For the Bolsheviks, nation-building (the right to self-determination) in an empire being rebuilt into a federation is an undesirable but inevitable way of appeasing the “national margins.” In the disintegrating cultural and historical space, they embodied their own dream of a world republic of Soviets. Lenin wanted to use the flask of Bolshevik dictatorship to grow industrial nations out of the backward peoples of the former Russian Empire. However, in order to merge them into a “common human cauldron” after the world proletarian revolution was victorious, concessions had to be made: adapt the imperial ethnic diversity to the federal structure. Lenin’s political talent, who managed to “tactically” escape harsh circumstances (Brest Peace Treaty, decisions of the Constituent Assembly, etc.), also played a role. The declaration of Russia’s federal structure brought him closer (not to say, sincerely) to the national elites, who demanded full participation in the federal power structures.

The approach to the ethnic elite as a whole generation of builders of the Soviet project (this is how Mironov’s use of statistical data should be perceived) makes it difficult to assess qualitatively. The easiest thing to say is that nearly all of them were supporters of a federal republic. However, in whose interpretation, their own, Soviet, or of the Constituent Assembly, was another matter.

Were Bolshevik ideas—that the potential for generating elites did not correspond to the level of problems to be solved—correct? To answer this, let us consider the careers were that were offered to envoys to the center with the mandates of their national congresses. Here we have to rely on our own calculations of the data of the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities (Narkomnats). Moreover, its leader headed those processes that Mironov (and not only Mironov) calls “nation-building” (“cradle”). Let us try to arrange a “career-oriented” crossword puzzle of the employees of the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities on the Soviet ethnopolitical field, taking into account the revolutionary challenges and complex processes caused by both global trends and Russia’s particular circumstances.

The Russian Empire shuddered from the roar of international conflicts and internal revolutions. The sociopolitical movement reached a significant scale. Universities and institutes became hotbeds of student freedom. They dangerously brought young people closer to leftist extremists, with their contempt for wealth, disregard for human life, and justification of violence for the sake of a higher goal. The Russo–Japanese War, the First Russian Revolution, the First World War, and the February Revolution were in the past. Isolationism and provincial Russian messianism did not disappear either. However, in the revolutionary era, everything fell apart. Restless people who had changed their place of study, service, work, residence, and even lifestyles (the cadets would call them outcasts) rushed to the first organs of executive power in revolutionary Russia. Each one of them is an example of the integration of sociality and individuality.

In the political mainstream of the first decades of Soviet power, three dominant groups of ethnic elites stood out. The first group, most educated, in regional historiography is covered by serious publications, but its contribution to the emergence of Soviet federal power structures is overlooked. Ya.Ya. Anvelt, S.Ya. Bobinsky, M.M. Vakhitov, Yu.M. Leshchinsky, Sh.A. Manatov, G.G. Pegelman, M.N. Polozov, M.E. Rasulzade, F.A. Rozin, V.Sh. Tanachev, G.Kh. Teregulov, I.S. Unshlikht and, of course, I.V. Stalin came from the Constituent Assembly to the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities.⁴ Most of the Constituent Assembly went into the anti-Soviet camp and emigrated, continuing to enviously follow the victories and defeats of their comrades who remained in the USSR. The second group—activists of different parties (national and all-Russian)—became liberal and lost support in their communities. Its representatives were forced to join both the first and third groups; and the latter was intensively replenished by activists from local councils and soldiers’ committees.

The leading positions in the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities were occupied by representatives of about 50 nationalities. The largest groups of responsible employees were Jews (48), Poles (31), Tatars (25), Latvians (19), Ossetians (18), Lithuanians (16), Maris (14), Armenians (13), Germans (11), Belarusians (11), Komis (10), Kirghiz (9), Bashkirs (8), Estonians (7), Ukrainians (7), Mordovians (7), Kalmyks (7), Udmurts (6), Chuvashis (6), Azerbaijanis (6), and Yakuts (6). The number of responsible employees of the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities with higher education (64) accepted at Russian and foreign universities is impressive. Nine employees were graduates of the faculties of oriental languages of the Lazarev Institute, the Eastern Branch of the Military Academy, and the Academy of the General Staff. In addition, many studied at the historical and philological faculties, which opened the way to public service and science. Members of the Council of People’s Commissars had more modest educational backgrounds: only four of its members had received higher education (mostly incomplete). However, the upper layer of the Bolshevik elite was more closely connected with the city, familiar with modern tools, and mechanisms for making and implementing decisions. Until 1917, non-Russian students still had the real option to get a job in a classical school, as an assistant to a State Duma deputy, and in party structures. This experience proved very useful when it came to the struggle for the political rights of “their” people. It is logical that the Bolsheviks brought the first attacks on higher education in the historical-philological and legal faculties of universities.

It seemed that knowledge would confer equal status, the right to form political goals, and to nominate political leaders from among “their own” people. In the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities, 104 people had a pedagogical education or teaching experience, 31 were journalists, 21 were lawyers, 20 were historians and philologists, 5 were professors at St. Petersburg and Kazan universities, and 4 were ethnographers. They knew European and Russian culture, foreign languages, had experience in creating and working in national periodicals, participated in legal sociopolitical activities of liberal and socialist parties, in the elected bodies of local government and other public and cultural associations, and were therefore quite capable of tracking the dynamic processes of social and ethnic conflicts against the backdrop of a revolution that broke everything.

In their work, employees of the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities (many of whom later transferred to the People’s Commissariat of Education) faced the complex ultraleft, ultimatist, and idealistic views of the intelligentsia, which, in the words of Berdyaev, resembled “a monastic order or a religious sect with its own particular morality, very intolerant, with its obligatory world outlook.”⁵ Placed inside, they changed (although not easily) and actively engaged in propaganda, linking cultural issues with the formation of a new statehood. They had to take into account the socially and mentally complex landscapes of ethnic cultures and identify and evaluate their archaic resources. In other words, they had to create a front for working with a complex reality.

Many of them paid with their lives for the transition to Soviet power structures and for their refusal to cooperate. At the end of 1918, the Whites killed M. Shovgenov, the commissar for mountain affairs of the Kuban–Black Sea Revolutionary Committee (later Commissar of Education of the Kuban–Black Sea Republic). The first head of the Udmurt department of the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities, M. Prokopiev, died in summer 1919. M.N. Bogdanov, chairman of the Buryat–Mongol Central National Committee of Eastern Siberia and European-oriented ideologist of the Buryat revival, was incinerated in a locomotive furnace in 1919. In the Terek Soviet Republic, the People’s Commissar for Education Ya.L. Marcus, People’s Commissar for National Affairs A. Sheripov, and Chairman of the Local Council of People’s Commissars N. Buachidze all perished. The People’s Commissar of the Crimean Republic I.A. Nazukin was arrested by the counterintelligence of the Armed Forces of Southern Russia and shot. M. Subhi, a Turkish activist who worked in autonomies with Islamic populations, died in Trebizond, as did M. Fanziev, a teacher of Arabic in Kabardian schools. A. Adzhiev and the well-known publicist I. Khubiev (Islam Karachayla) were saved from hanging by D.A. Khachirov, who paid a ransom for them to the Whites. Those who gave no thought to going over to the Soviet side also perished. Thus, Azerbaijani minister N. Usubbekov was villainously murdered in Kurdamir by unknown persons in May 1920. In March 1920, the opposition killed the representative of the North Caucasian Revolutionary Committee, T.D. Aliyev.

Incidences are well known from published documents of the collection of B.I. Nikolaevsky and P.N. Wrangel on the violence of the Bolsheviks against the Nogais: “During evening prayer, a qadi of the people was strangled … Umar Gazy Kulunchakov and his wife were stabbed to death …. A few days later, the Bolsheviks hacked to death the effendi cleric Nur-Mohammed Espolov.”⁶

The posts of people’s commissars of education in the republics of various ranks were occupied, with rare exceptions, by educated and authoritative people from the ethnic elites. They reflected the most important feature of the period: the need for professionally competent leaders who knew the ethnocultural specifics of a region. In February–October 1917, the future people’s commissars A. Baitursunov, S. Gabiev, A. Takho-Godi, Sh. Akhmadiev, A. Amur-Sanan, I. Firdevs, etc., were actively engaged.

Contrary to the assertions of many authors, at the beginning of his governmental career, Stalin played the federalism card. He could not resist federalist ideas even within the walls of his own people’s commissariat, from where workers transferred (not individually, but in whole structures) to the People’s Commissariat for Education. Stalin’s unsuccessful attempt to return them to the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities in 1922–1923 in order to save it from liquidation is also known.⁷

Having embraced the Soviet project and at the same time resigned to the division of power structures into conditionally federal (in fact, central) and regional (autonomous) structures, the Bolsheviks should have distributed their powers. True, the goal of building a future society with the resources and means of culture was seen as a problematic field, there were debates about what progress is, what a person is, and what kind of education and upbringing is needed.

The leftist “modernists” were suitable for the destruction of the old world. In the early years, the Soviet government needed them. K. Malevich, sensing the “spirit of the times,” argued “Blow up, destroy, and wipe out the old art forms from the Earth. How can a new artist, a proletarian artist, a new person not dream about this?”⁸  This paved the way for interaction. A.V. Lunacharsky inscribed modernist resources into the Soviet project of the USSR, understanding by it the introduction of the Soviet dimension into the ethnocultural context.

In a sharp struggle for dominant status in the first half of the 1920s, modernists still limited themselves to pointing at each other with ““ink fingers,” L. Aragon later stated ironically. In the administrative circles, the Russian avant-garde took on the formation of the Soviet avant-garde. It seemed that the futuristic utopia, like the communist one, was focused on the future and placed the proletariat at the center of events.⁹ The artistic forms evoked by the “terrible events” were reminiscent of what J. Ortega-y-Gasset called the “revolt of the masses.”

Having succumbed to the romanticism of the revolution, the modernists soon became convinced that they were dealing with chimeras. The modernist mosaic of Lunacharsky was melted down from absurdist-stoic existential complexes into the unfree projectivism of the early Soviet practices of creating the image of a “new” person. His features were selected from the political dialog of the 1920s. The image remained a beautiful goal, the ideal of a Utopian projection. It contained signs of the Renaissance era: a combination of a disinterested desire for work and knowledge, poetization of urban and peasant life, production and scientific research, sports, and a new way of life. In the federal sector of politics, the multidimensionality of life processes gave rise to different directions and styles of modernity. L.N. Andreev in September 1919 wrote about the policy of the new government: “Lunacharsky is as cunning as a fox tail and is more terrible and worse than all the other devils from this ferocious pack.”^10,11

The liberties of the modernists proved of little use for a responsible mission. In a draft letter to V.N. Bill-Belotserkovsky on February 1, 1929, Stalin noted one should not “treat the crooked Meyerhold … with respect.”¹² Russian modernists were required to have a recipe for early Soviet man (also modernist, but simpler, more mass-produced and imitative). In the late 1920s the founder and theorist of formalism V.B. Shklovsky forever renounced the formalist heresy; the constructivists repented that they had fallen into constructivism and declared their organization disbanded; “the old anthroposophist Andrey Bely swore in print that he was, in essence, an anthroposophical Marxist.”¹³ While Lunacharsky dealt with the modernist canon, clumping and compromising it in Lenin’s plans for the propaganda of communism, and the political course was increasingly moving “to the right,” the national elites were eyeing the modernists.

The assignment of the RSFSR and the USSR to the federal states is very conditional. The Soviet project demanded institutions characteristic of the modern era. The ethnic leaders in governments such as Milli Idare, Alash Orda, Ikomus, Gorsky, and Bashkir in the east, as well as the Ukrainian Central Rada, the Belarusian People’s Rada, etc., in the West, striving to meet the challenges of the time and seeking a federal structure, were of course distinguished by their managerial experience. However, their projects were aimed at a partnership with the central government—to transfer personal experience into real processes.

Federalism proved a side and forced branch of the party goal. For Stalin, the practices of S. Maksudi (unification on the basis of Turkism and Islam) and A.-Z. Validov (if a federation, then only an honest one), the Ukrainian Central Rada, and even the new Soviet product, the Lithuanian–Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (Litbel), were equally unacceptable. The Bolsheviks used the equality of peoples and federalism as elements of their ideology. Stalin helped to mount them in dogmatic robes. Is it possible to compare the experience of the power of the ethnic leaders (they were classified as “the average type … teachers, journalists, lawyers” and called “dreamers and writers”¹⁴) with the revolutionary perseverance of those who went through the school of Bolshevism? They moved the ethnic leaders to the center of events, using the pathos of ideological slogans to promote a political, symbolic, and informational product, forming links between the ethnic and the unifying Soviet.

The bargaining of the Bolsheviks with the national elites was determined by the tasks and rights of the federal structures in pursuit of the modern meaning of the all-Russian political projects of the People’s Commissariat of Education. Consensus on the scope of rights was difficult to find. The negotiated structures began to be used as mechanisms for introducing modern European and Russian resources and technologies into the national environment. It was in them that the interest of local elites lay: in modern practices and their adaptation to ethnocultural specifics. The ideological pole of the October Revolution attracted and began to influence those who joined the “educational” machine of socialism. The Ossetian journalist called them, who returned to the mountains, “guests in jackets who brought gifts to the highlanders.”¹⁵ However, together with wariness, there was also a zone for dialog, primarily with Stalin, who also was looking for a way out of the ideological difficulty associated with Lenin’s thesis about the parallel existence of two cultures: national-bourgeois and international proletarian-socialist.¹⁶ The thesis, acceptable in the circumstances of the struggle for power, in the NEP era became a logical barrier.

In the 1920s Stalin formulated approaches that were important to him: the monopoly organization of power; reliance on administrative control levers; strict hierarchy of the political elite; optimal placement of personnel in strategically important posts; and ideologization of the political system as a whole. The mobilization (administrative-command, let us remember this characteristic) type was reinforced by the metaphor of “drive belts,” which Stalin saw as a tool to actuate the power structure. This inherently paradoxical formula, claiming the opening prospect of mutual penetration of the two cultures, thereby discursively affirmed their existence. On the one hand, “socialist” and “national” already existed, and on the other hand, their fate was presented as constructively inseparable. Thus, the formal logic of discourse began to assert the political logic of Soviet federalism and the federal picture of Soviet politics. It allowed decisions to be made in controversial and borderline cases. Most of the arguments were based on psychological motives, on mutual grievances, and on unsatisfied vanity bordering on the cunning and dexterity of Stalin and others. At best, it was a competition between versions of the Soviet project of the 1920s, firstly, ethnoregional elites and the center, and secondly, elites with each other.

From the offices of the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities, eight people went to head the first, albeit, short-term, Soviet “national” governments on the outskirts of the former empire. F.A. Rozin-Azis, Latvian; V. Mickyavicius-Kapsukas, Lithuanian; D. Zhilunovich, Belarusian; Ya.A. Anvelt, Estonian; S. Lukashin, Armenian; S.G. Mamsurov, Council of People’s Commissars of the Mountain ASSR; A.A. Biishev, Council of People’s Commissars of the Bashkir ASSR; and K.S. Atabaev, Council of People’s Commissars of the Turkmen SSR. Only two died a natural death, the rest were repressed in the 1930s.

S.Zh. Asfendiarov, A. Baitursynov, W. Balich, G.I. Broido, M.Yu. Brundukov, S.M. Dimanstein, S.N. Donskoy, A.A. Mravianz (Mravyan), A.G. Hovhannisyan, A.A. Polotsky, Sh.Kh. Suncheley, I. Firdevs, B.E. Etingoff, and E.E. Effert were People’s Commissars and Deputy People’s Commissars of Education. Among them only Broido, and (miraculously) Brundukov survived. The positions of people’s commissars for nationalities were occupied G.S. Aikuni, G.I. Broido, I. Firdevs, F.N. Tukhvatullin, and A.Z. Kamensky. The people’s commissars of internal affairs, the heads of the GPU were M. Avsaragov, S.M. Arzhakov, E.B. Bosch, P.N. Makintsian, I. Firdevs, and F.N. Tukhvatullin. The “party” career was followed by Yu.M. Leshchinsky (in 1929, Secretary General of the Communist Party of Poland), A.G. Hovhannisyan (First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (b) of the Armenian SSR), and S.M. Efendiyev (Chairman of the Central Control Commission of the Azerbaijan Communist Party (b)). Of the “party” followers, only Hovhannisyan survived the “Great Terror” of the 1930s.

With their positions of power, the Bolsheviks sought to turn the national elites into their support. For this, certain forms of statehood were provided. Judging by the frequent turnover of people’s commissars, Stalin was annoyed by their deviation from the interests of the central government, especially from the ideological foundations of the system. He criticized the “nationalist intellectuals” whom the “internal mechanics of the revolution had thrown out.”¹⁷

Against the backdrop of disputes and struggle for certain positions, the main work was done by the Central Committee’s Department of Distribution and its head L.M. Kaganovich, who personally created the notorious nomenclature scheme. Nothing could be undertaken without the knowledge of Lazar Moiseevich and his scheme. Lenin suggested to V.M. Molotov “The power of the Central Committee is enormous. The opportunities are gigantic.”¹⁸

Indeed, the Central Committee was asked to resolve disputes, with memorandums, alas, and with political denunciations. “The “vanguard of the party” dictates the social tastes,” L. Sabaneev assessed the modernist efforts of Lunacharsky. “In relation to … in general, to art in the USSR has adopted a democratic attitude, supporting the taste of the masses.”¹⁹ In May 1927, the Agitation Department of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks aimed theatrical policy at “protective-experimental” tasks. Head of department V.G. Knorin clarified that “The artistic skill of Stanislavsky, Tairov, Yuzhin, and others is controlled by the Soviet state in all its stages.”²⁰ Help and borrowing in such political practices were perceived as controlling creative freedom.

Stalin, emigration and their own people brought claims on the national elites. Analyzing the activities of the elites in leadership positions, the emigration made unflattering conclusions about them even after they were struck in the midst of the repressions of the 1930s. The general assessment boiled down to the fact that the experience of cooperation with the Soviet government had changed little since the days of “tsarism.” Although the emigrants acknowledged that the “communists-nationalists,” even those free of “any signs of ‘bourgeois nationalism,’ still automatically … oppose the equalizing and Russianist aspirations of the Soviet government.”²¹ This is, of course, an exaggeration: most of those who remained to cooperate, praising the Stalinist course, mastered the theory and practice of the Soviet project.

However, the negative attitude of the party leaders toward the “locals” was deepening. Previously, if the party leaders were not satisfied with the performance of a local, they were transferred, which included being sent to study as graduate students, now removal from office ended in arrests and exile. The elites were losing the support of the people, who saw in them the personification of oppression and incomprehensible social experiments. Their activities, according to the center, did not bring tangible success.

However, the emigrants noted that “to mislead a representative of power is not considered a sin, because, in the end, even for a Caucasian communist, Soviet power remains primarily Russian power.”²² Some actions could be softened simply by not following the order, but by reporting it to the center. The short experience “with the nationals in the role of secretaries of the regional committees of the CPSU (b) … proved unsuccessful."²³ Irritation was spreading everywhere.

In a heated discussion, Karachayly sharply spoke out against the “arrogance in relation to everything mountainous,” against the “stupid attacks,” “swagger and great-power arrogance” of people: “You don’t know the Caucasus at all, and you don’t want to know.” Behind the demands to show “the most modern class struggle” was hidden, in his opinion, “superficiality” and “geographical and ethnographic ignorance.”²⁴

Federative sentiments did not subside in Kiev, the indigenization policy aggravated the discussions of the Ukrainians who remained in Poland, Austria, and Canada. People’s Commissar of Education of the Ukrainian SSR A.Ya. Shumsky said at a meeting of the Politburo on May 15, 1926: “The party is dominated by a Russian communist, who treats the Ukrainian communist with suspicion and unfriendliness, to say the least. He is dominating, relying on the contemptible and selfish type of the little Russian, who in all historical epochs has been equally unscrupulously hypocritical, slavishly double-minded, and treacherously sycophantic. He now flaunts his pseudo-internationalism, brags about his indifference to everything Ukrainian, and is always ready to smear him (sometimes even in Ukrainian) if this makes it possible to curry favor and get a good job.”²⁵

The Stalinist leadership changed leaders in the republics. In the Bashkir ASSR, six people’s commissars of education were replaced in one year (the 1926 census took them into account). The solution was sought in the need to “restructure the work of the party” and conduct a systematic “international education,” although the problem was different: The USSR is a special organism and mechanism of sociocultural development. No one tried to understand the specifics of the new arrangement, a most difficult psychological problem rather than a class problem, as interpreted by the propagandists, and even less solvable in a quantitative way.

Unlike the “vertical” relationships between the national elites and Moscow, the “horizontal” relations were analyzed extremely poorly, although they were responsible for the content of the Soviet project. The center tried to improve the “driving belts” through a complex pyramid of structures and positions. Their rights and powers were enshrined constitutionally, but the supremacy of the CPSU(b), inspired by trial and error, was situational and pragmatic. As a result, in the USSR the principles of equality and federalism sometimes even broke into practice. In 1931 P. Pavlenko wrote to M. Slonimsky that the Union of Soviet Writers “must become a union of the united states, a federation of groups of Soviet writers-intellectuals,” but this is “difficult and, in general, a lost cause.”²⁶

The national policy of the Bolsheviks was initially built on opposite foundations: centralism and federalism. Their confrontational interaction ensured the dominance of Stalinist dogma, which demanded unification and unitarity, and excluded voluntariness, variability, and any kind of real federalism. However, political expectations from Soviet federalization were observed until the end of the 1920s.

The problem also appeared on the other side. The elites, who headed the republics of various ranks, clearly lacked human and material resources. There is a clear lag in the experience of social construction. While the urban populations of Europe and America were enjoying the transition from impressionism to post-impressionism and the avant-garde, in the USSR, most ethnic communities had yet to raise an urban population that would appreciate them. The territory of the former Russian Empire was still the resource base of the Soviet project, although the Bolsheviks sought to tear people away from their traditional culture, considering it backward and hindering the development of Soviet principles. The culture of the village, rural settlement, and open courtyard was being rapidly destroyed. However, for the ethnic elites, it was a nourishing ground and still a living social space. Failure to modernize it was perceived by the center as a political failure. Various reports reached Moscow, but no use was made of them. Those who were sent as secretaries of party structures and commissions rarely understood the ethnocultural context or delved into the complexity of intraethnic problems. On June 8, 1920, V.V. Kuibyshev, working in the Commission for Turkestan Affairs, wrote to the Central Committee of the RCP (b): “As for Comrade. Broido, the Turkcommission qualifies him as a political adventurer, and considers his work in Turkestan absolutely harmful. Responsible political work cannot be entrusted to him.”²⁷ M.V. Frunze in 1920 also characterized Broido as the “evil genius” of the Turkcommission and “adventurer.”²⁸ Nevertheless, Stalin placed him in the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities and made him his right hand.

Having a good mix of elites at his disposal in terms of political and everyday experience, Stalin began to play the game of relegating people to the level of cheap conspiracy theories and shams on the topic of Marxist-Leninist ideas that could not be changed, let alone betrayed. This and only this worked well for him. With the arrest of M.Kh. Sultangaliyev, it became clear that there was no voluntariness or equality. There was only one way of rigid centralization, following which one can unify the space, present its political and bureaucratic contours as “federal,” and establish patron-client relations. This authoritarianism could not be resisted by the principle of the formal legality of the Constitution. We can, of course, blame the imperial memory and the resurgent great power, which opened the way for all sorts of repressions and coercion. Instead of the dream of liberation from obligation, the practice of compulsion grew.

Such an approach of using the elites exacerbated the conflict with their ethnocultural composition. Personal temperament and complex characters made it possible to claim the completeness of professional functions and react painfully to interference in their sphere of competence. The scale of personality and intellectual potential dictated not only the level of ambition, they were multiplied by the experience of prerevolutionary social movements and professional practices, and often persecuted by the authorities. The scale of personality of people of competence and conviction was undoubtedly reflected in the status of the posts they held. The first autonomies as republics were achieved mainly in the eastern Russian regions: Tatars, Bashkirs, Kazakhs, Crimean Tatars, and highlanders of the Caucasus and Dagestan, among whom the Jadids had great authority. Their synthetic motion captured not only the education system but also social and philosophical thought and ethical standards. In the political sphere, it tried to “reconcile” Islam with democratic and even socialist ideas. Tthe conceptual image of the autonomized ethno- and sociocultural space of Russia in the ideas and actions of the Jadids contained structural components and the synthesis of Western and Eastern principles. The Ukrainian, Jewish, and Buryat elites had the same practices.

Visiting the USSR in 1931, the American poet E.E. Cummings was shocked by the collision of two worlds of political and creative values, and, as it seemed to him, the lack of intellectual and artistic freedom. In 1948 the British poet and playwright T.S. Eliot wrote: “The aim here, I suspect, is to give several local republics… the illusion of a kind of independence, while the real power is exercised from Moscow…. Soviet Russia must maintain the subordination of culture to political theory….”²⁹

For the Bolsheviks, the USSR became a kind of testing ground for the construction of the “World Republic of Soviets,” but the prose of life interfered with their messianic plans. The world of ethnicity demanded an adequate response from the local elites. The Bolsheviks were inventive in creating leadership positions, new institutions, mechanisms for ethnic resources, and means of influencing the ethnocultural composition. They had to be tolerated, avoided, abolished, and invented again, as well as versions and hierarchies of various new meanings in the absence of their free competition. The republics still saw as an opportunity to adhere to the values of political equality and social justice and build a new society based on their own resources, while preserving their languages and cultural characteristics. Federalism in the 1920s was characterized, on the one hand, by economic ruin, and on the other hand, by the educational ambitions of the Bolsheviks, a kind of leap into the future without taking into account the realities of the present, a dream of independent development, without the participation of the leaders sent from the center.

On visiting the USSR, the Irish writer and linguist E.I. Dillon observed in 1929: “Sometimes I think that the Bolsheviks, without noticing it themselves, continue to be in a country hostile to them. They feign the existence of certain desired things, acting as if their assumption is true.”³⁰ In the 1930s the practice of writing off failures and difficulties on enemies turned into a primitive political charade. In this assessment, there was also the motive of the interethnic and intercivilizational conflict of the modernizers with the modernized.

The national elites made a significant contribution to the unification of a huge number of ethnic groups in the Soviet project, thus doing themselves a disservice. They opened the topic of selling their birthright for pseudofederalism by becoming the serving nomenclature for the project. The pain of ethnopsychological traumas was postponed for the future (each ethnic group had its own, for example, the Tatars had suffered the trauma in 1552). A crude form of adaptation to the still obscure realities of industrialism-modernism, as well as the interaction of complex ideas and ideologies, took over.

The epistemological situation in which the history of the USSR developed did not create a universally recognized hierarchy of scales of analysis and units of self-measurement. However, in the 1920s often heterogeneous facts began to be shaped by researchers into systemic formations of a new order. A number of concepts migrated from one professional community to others, simultaneously changing pragmatics and acquiring new functions. However, during the period of the revolutionary breakdown of the old empire and the creation of a new type of state encountered different times and deep and stable cultural attitudes that were hardly amenable to political change, although the archaic tradition of statehood was poorly modernized. Yu.K. Olesha, with almost childish naivety, wrote in 1929–1930: “To build socialism, the old methods of statehood are used: in this case, cunning. Ah, comrade descendants, socialism was built on cunning.”³¹