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

by Serhii Plokhy

general’s palace in Lviv on April 9, 1915, there would have been little doubt that the Russian Empire had finally succeeded in making its long transition to a Russian nation-state. Instead of succumbing to the rising ethnic nationalism that threatened to divide the empire, it had risen to the challenge by expanding its borders to incorporate all the Russias.

In March 1917, Shulgin volunteered for the Duma mission to the tsar. He felt that by asking Nicholas to resign he would save the monarchy. His companion, Aleksandr Guchkov, shared that view. Like other members of the government, such as the new minister of foreign affairs, Pavel Miliukov, Guchkov believed that the tsar’s abdication in favor of his son and heir, the twelve-year-old Tsarevich Aleksei, would calm the people and allow the Duma and the Provisional Government to retake the initiative from the Petrograd Soviet. The monarchy would survive at the price of becoming constitutional.

THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY AND THE VACUUM OF POWER IN Petrograd, which resulted from competition between the liberals in the Provisional Government and the socialists in the Petrograd Soviet, created an opening for the leaders of the national movements, which had been in retreat since the outbreak of the war.

To begin with, there were three revolutions in Russia between 1905 and 1917. In 1917 alone, two revolutions took place: the February 1917 overthrow of the tsarist government and the October 1917 takeover of state power by Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks.

The most confusing aspect of the term “Russian Revolution” is that it obscures what actually took place in the multiethnic Russian Empire—a revolution of nations, of which the Russians were only one.

They needed state power to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and lead the world to socialism.

For Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who insisted on the political primacy of social classes, the nationality question was of secondary importance, and for a long time they had all but ignored it. Only the rise of national movements in the Russian Empire and Austria-Hungary on the eve of World War I forced Lenin and his allies to articulate their view of the nationality question.

Whereas in the Russian provinces of the empire the revolution brought about peasant revolts against the local nobility, and in the Caucasus and Central Asia it took the form of an insurgency of autochthonous populations against Russian colonists, in Ukraine the peasants were mobilized by Ukrainian activists in support of territorial autonomy.

Thus Ukrainian autonomy, in curtailed form, survived its first encounter with the central government in Petrograd.

In June 1917, he went out of his way to manifest his support for the Rada, not only recognizing the Ukrainians as a distinct nation but also endorsing their right to autonomy, or even independence.

The Kyiv Bolsheviks moved to Kharkiv, an industrial center close to the border with Russia, and declared the creation of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic.

The entire population of Kyiv was subjected to weeks of arbitrary arrests and executions, the kind of “Red terror” that served as a template for subsequent Bolshevik atrocities.

representing a growing group of Russian-speaking Ukrainians who combined allegiance to Russian culture with loyalty to the Ukrainian state and nation.

GERMAN NATION-BUILDING INITIATIVES IN EASTERN EUROPE were not limited to support for a Ukrainian state independent of Russia. They also had a major impact on the articulation and development of the Belarusian project, whose rise created additional cracks in the imagined monolith of the imperial Russian nation.

At first the German occupation authorities were unaware of the Belarusians as a distinct nationality and of their national organizations. They discovered both a few months after the start of the occupation, as they looked for local cadres to limit the influence of the dominant Polish elites in the region. A German report on ethnic policy in the region, now called Ober Ost, blamed the Poles for arresting the national development of the Belarusians and living “off this disoriented group parasitically, drawing upon it for recruits for their own nationality.” The author of the report suggested that “the German future in this land depends on the Weissruthenen [White Ruthenians] experiencing a renaissance and confronting the Poles.”

Now all Ukraine and most of Belarus (with the exception of its eastern lands) was under German or Austrian control. But the Germans treated the two nationalities differently: whereas the Ukrainian Rada had signed a separate peace with the Central Powers at Brest, the Belarusian Rada was not invited to the negotiating table. Whereas Ukraine had a government recognized by Berlin and Vienna, the Belarusian lands were simply occupied by German troops with no provision for a separate state or government—the Brest treaty explicitly prohibited the recognition of any new state on the territory of the former Russian Empire. It was something of a repetition of the mid-seventeenth-century situation in which Ukraine became part of the tsar’s realm on the basis of special rights and conditions negotiated by the Cossacks, while Belarus was merely occupied by Muscovite troops with no such provisions.

To Denikin, the Ukrainian movement was a threat, whether based in Ukraine or in his own backyard, the Kuban region of southern Russia originally settled by Ukrainian Cossacks who now dreamed of unity with Ukraine.

The official policy on the Ukrainian question formulated by Shulgin and sanctioned by Denikin was a major blow to the Ukrainian cultural program, especially in light of its positive treatment by the Central Rada and the subsequent Skoropadsky regime.

Eight days earlier, on December 22, he had suffered a major stroke and lost control of his right hand and leg. Two days later, a commission composed of party officials, led by Joseph Stalin, had placed strict limitations on his activities, effectively isolating him. The restrictions were designed to prevent the worsening of Lenin’s health. But they also served a political purpose.

In the months leading up to the convocation of the congress, Stalin had wanted Ukraine, Belarus, and Transcaucasia—the federation of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia—to join the Russian Federation as autonomous republics like Bashkiria and the Crimea, which had already been incorporated with that status. They were to be subordinate to the Russian government in Moscow. Stalin had had to abandon his plan because of protests from the prospective republics and pressure from Lenin, who insisted on the creation of a federal union of equal republics, including Russia.

As far as Lenin was concerned, Russian imperial nationalism constituted the main threat to the future of the Union and the proletarian revolution. He wanted to establish a government structure that would divest Russia of its imperial role in form, if not in substance.

However, it was one thing to proclaim the right of non-Russians to self-determination while the Bolsheviks were in opposition, and another to keep the promise when they seized power.

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...

The Bolsheviks in Ukraine were mainly Russian or Jewish, with largely Russified Ukrainians constituting only a quarter of the party membership. As Lenin saw it, the party would have to involve Ukrainians and take a positive attitude toward their language and culture if it was to gain their support.

To make things worse, the same resolution prohibited staffing government institutions with representatives of the Ukrainian urban middle class—whose devotion to communism was questioned—probably in an attempt to stop Ukrainian socialists from taking control of local government agencies. But in the countryside, Lenin welcomed the inclusion of the poorest peasants—the party’s traditional base of support—as well as the inclusion of owners of medium-sized plots—who accounted for most of the rural population—in the new government institutions.

Lenin was prepared to leave the question of Ukrainian independence open so as to avoid creating conflicts within the anti-Denikin front in Ukraine. But once the situation became more stable, he used the first available opportunity to crush the pro-independence movement among his allies.

the telephone rang in the residence of the German delegation. On the line was a Soviet diplomat who suggested that the Germans and Soviets sign a treaty renouncing financial claims on each other and opening the way to trade and economic cooperation. The Germans spent a sleepless night discussing the proposal, and the next day they came to the Soviet headquarters in Rapallo and signed the deal. It was a major coup for the Bolshevik government, which had now been recognized for the first time as the legitimate successor to what remained of the Russian Empire. Diplomatic recognition would follow, starting with Britain and France in 1924; the United States didn’t follow suit until 1933.

The Georgian communists were also insisting on their rights as the members of an independent republic, and it was this conflict that ultimately triggered the negotiations that resulted in the formation of the USSR.

The formally independent republics would be incorporated into the Russian Federation with rights of autonomy like those already possessed by the autonomous republics of the Crimea and Bashkiria.

Stalin refused to budge and pushed ahead with his plan for autonomization only to be stopped by Lenin.

Given the danger that the Russian bureaucracy, which dominated the party and state apparatus, might use its powers to oppress the non-Russian nationalities, Lenin regarded Russian chauvinism as the main threat to the unity of the country.

If we lean too far in the direction of the peasant borderlands at the expense of the proletarian region, then a crack may develop in the system of proletarian dictatorship.”

Stalin adopted Lenin’s model of the Union but adapted it to his needs. His policy of “autonomization” of the republics was now dressed up as a federal union. Even the First All-Union Congress, which had declared the creation of the Soviet Union, was in fact a Russian Congress of Soviets joined by representatives of the soviets of the other republics. Two-thirds of the Chamber of Nationalities in the Soviet parliament consisted of Russian deputies.

Lenin’s victory created a separate republic within the Union for the Russians, endowing them with a territory, institutions, population, and identity distinct from those of the Union as a whole.

Stalin’s disagreements with Lenin on the structure of the Soviet Union notwithstanding, the two Bolshevik leaders regarded nationalism as an inevitable stage in the development of human society. The sooner one allowed nationalities to flourish, the more quickly they would complete that phase and leave it behind, opening the way to the internationalist society of the future.

The cultural component called for the promotion of local languages and cultures, which began with support for education, publishing, and theatrical performances in those languages and ended with the obligatory Ukrainization, Belarusization, and so on of the party and government apparatus, first on the local level and then in the major cities and capitals as well. These measures were intended to enracinate the new Soviet regime in the non-Russian peripheries of the former Russian Empire.

The period after the Twelfth Party Congress became known in Ukraine as one of “Ukrainization by decree,” meaning that the authorities kept issuing one decree after another, demanding rapid Ukrainization of education, culture, and the government apparatus.

Ukrainization managed by the intelligentsia was likely to take on “the character of a battle for the alienation of Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian society from all-Union culture and society, the character of a battle against Russian culture and its highest achievement—against Leninism.”

As envisioned by party decrees, Ukrainization proceeded on two fronts—the recruitment of local cadres and the linguistic Ukrainization of the existing apparatus.

An important sphere in which the policy made little headway was the city street. The cities remained largely if not exclusively Russian-speaking, as the proponents of Ukrainization had little influence on the working class.

In the western borderlands of the former empire, those who benefited the most from Moscow’s nation-building efforts were the Belarusians—an essential component of the imperial-era tripartite Russian nation.

The first two regions were transferred to the Belarusian republic in 1924, more than doubling its population from 1.5 million to 3.5 million.

Even so, the Belarusian language and culture did not achieve dominance in the print media: of the nine newspapers published in the republic at the time, four were issued in Russian, three in Belarusian, and one each in Polish and Yiddish.

The problem stemmed from the underrepresentation of Belarusians in general—and Belarusian speakers in particular—in the cities.

This positive discrimination in favor of Belarusians meant negative discrimination against Jews, who constituted between 40 and 60 percent of the Belarusian urban population and had been correspondingly represented in the university system.

The strategy of the central authorities would further evolve in the late 1920s and early 1930s as local nationalism was pushed aside and partly replaced by a variant of traditional Great Russian nationalism.

Stalin’s victory over his opponents in the Politburo meant that in future he would need less support from the national republics and would not have to appease their leaders with new concessions on the nationality question.

Around the same time, the government in Moscow became more cautious with regard to policies that might alienate the Russian majority. It also began to see the cultural and political mobilization of the non-Russian nationalities not as an instrument for destabilizing adjoining states and bringing the world revolution to Central and Western Europe, but as bridgeheads for foreign aggression against the Soviet Union.

In December 1932, in the midst of policy discussions that would lead to the Great Ukrainian Famine a few weeks later and take the lives of close to 4 million victims,

Stalin explained peasant resistance to the forced collectivization of agriculture, which the Bolsheviks launched in 1929, and their grain requisitions of 1932 by blaming it on agents of Józef Piłsudski and Ukrainian nationalists in Poland and Ukraine. In the months and years to come, Stalin and his propagandists would claim that Ukrainization had been hijacked by foreign agents and nationalists, who had exploited it against the party, alienating the Ukrainian peasantry from Moscow and endangering the communist project in the countryside instead of helping to implement it.