Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation

by Serhii Plokhy

In the summer of that year, with the Bolsheviks in opposition, he raised his voice in support of the Central Rada against what he perceived as the great-power chauvinism of the Provisional Government. In December, with the Bolsheviks in power, Lenin dismissed the Central Rada’s proclamation of its right to self-determination and separation from Russia, accusing it of relying on bourgeois policies and refusing to recognize it as a legitimate representative of the toiling masses. It took a while for Lenin and his comrades to figure out what their nationalities policy would be. It was a difficult process for a party whose intellectual leadership was composed largely of non-Russians. Leon Trotsky, who had been born into a Jewish family in Ukraine, and Joseph Stalin, a Georgian who had begun his literary career writing in his mother tongue, were the most prominent Bolshevik leaders of non-Russian origin to embrace the internationalist Marxist project, choosing it over the nationalist alternatives offered by the local anti-imperial movements. But there were others as well, and for them to go back on their internationalist beliefs was a difficult task. Lenin, a practiced tactician, charted a new course for the party and its supporters. Responding to developments in Ukraine in 1919, he formulated a new approach to Bolshevik nationality policy. In the summer of that year, the Bolsheviks had been driven out of Ukraine by the combined forces of General Anton Denikin and the Ukrainian...