The emergence of independence movements was partly the result of opportunity. The coercive power of the old state had collapsed; the persuasive power of the Provisional Government was, to say the least, extremely limited; while the Germans and the Austrians, whose armies occupied the western borderlands, were only too ready to help the nationalists set up mini-states they could control and use against Russia. Yet the nationalists were more than ‘German agents’, even in those countries (e.g. the Ukraine and Lithuania) where independence was achieved with a separate peace and at the price of a German puppet-state. Many of the nationalist parties achieved mass electoral support. In the Ukraine, for example, 71 per cent of the rural vote went to the Ukrainian SRs and the All-Ukrainian Peasant Union during the elections to the Constituent Assembly in November 1917. Socialist parties with a nationalist platform also gained the majority of votes in Estonia, Georgia, Finland and Armenia during elections in 1917.29
To be sure, it is not at all clear — and this remains one of the biggest unanswered questions of the Russian Revolution — what this mass support at the ballot box really tells us about the national consciousness of the peasantry, the vast majority of the population in all these societies. As one would expect, the most active and conscious nationalists were drawn from the petit-bourgeoisie, the petit-intelligentsia and the most prosperous and literate peasants, the peasant soldiers in particular.fn3 After all, as we have seen, the growth of a peasant national consciousness was dependent on the spread of rural institutions, such as schools and reading clubs, peasant unions and co-operatives, which exposed the peasants to the national culture of the urban-centred world; and it was among these literate peasant types that these institutions were most developed. In the traditional political culture of the Ukrainian or Georgian countryside one might well expect the mass of the peasants — and even more so the peasant women, who were voting for the first time — to follow the lead of these rural élites and cast their votes for the nationalists. This was one of the main reasons why the SRs did so well in the elections to the Constituent Assembly: many of the village elders had been involved with the SRs in the past and they often recommended that the whole village vote for the SR list; rather than split the village into two all the peasants agreed to vote for the SRs. Second, all the most successful nationalist parties put forward programmes that combined nationalist with socialist demands, and it is not clear that the peasants were aware of the former separately. It is probable, as Ronald Suny has suggested in the case of the Ukraine, that while the peasantry had a ‘cultural or ethnic awareness’ and preferred ‘leaders of their own ethnicity, people who could speak to them in their own language and promised to secure their local interests’, they did not conceive of themselves ‘as a single nationality’ and were ‘not yet moved by a passion for the nation’.30 In other words, they interpreted the nationalists’ slogans in terms of their own parochial concerns — the defence of the village, its culture and its lands (against the foreign towns and landed élites) — rather than in the terms of a nation state.
Certainly, the nationalists were most successful where they managed to persuade the peasants that national autonomy was the best guarantee of their revolution in the villages. Their policy of land nationalization was particularly successful. In many regions the struggle for the land was also the struggle of a native peasantry against a foreign landowning élite, so when the nationalists spoke of the need to ‘nationalize the land’ it made real and literal sense. In the northern provinces of the Ukraine, where the Ukrainian villages were closely intermingled with the Russian ones, the nationalists were able to mobilize the Ukrainian peasants around the defence of their traditions of hereditary land tenure against the threat of a Russian land reform based on the principles of communal tenure. Mykola Kovalevsky, the leader of the Ukrainian SRs, recalls how their propaganda worked:
The Russians want to impose a socialization of the land upon you, I said to the peasants, that is to transfer the ownership of the land to the village communes and, in this way, to abolish your private farms; you will no longer be the masters of your own land, but will be workers on communal land.
