In March 1920, as the first step towards this, the Borotbists were finally admitted to the Ukrainian Bolshevik Party. Like the earlier alliance with the Russian Left SRs, this was a great political victory for the Bolsheviks: it split the main rival party in the Ukraine and gave them access to the villages. The Borotbists were the only Ukrainian party with a mass peasant following. During the campaigns against the Hetmanate, Petliura and Denikin, the Reds had relied upon them to organize the peasant partisans. The Borotbists espoused a synthesis of cultural nationalism and peasant socialism within a decentralized Soviet federal structure. They were the true heirs of the peasant nationalism which had driven the revolution in the Ukraine during 1917 and 1918. When the Ukrainian Directory abandoned its commitment to a socialist programme, most of the Borotbists (about 4,000 out of 5,000) joined the Bolsheviks. They hoped to moderate the Bolsheviks’ Communism and to make them more aware of the national culture of the Ukrainian peasants.88 Once again, it was nationalism that turned these opponents of the Bolsheviks Red.
Although, in the long run, the Borotbists failed, they did succeed in gaining a decade of relative cultural autonomy for the Ukraine during the 1920s. National sentiments, defeated in the form of the Ukrainian national movement, reappeared within the Ukrainian Bolshevik Party and state apparatus. Both were increasingly taken over by Ukrainians determined to defend the autonomous rights of their republic. Here, then, was another sort of ‘national Bolshevik’. In some ways it was a precursor to Tito’s nationalist movement in Yugoslavia against Stalinist supercentralism. As in Russia, most of the new Ukrainian élite was recruited from literate peasant sons mobilized by the war and revolution and eager for progress and social advancement. The result was the rapid Ukrainianization of the Ukraine’s towns, which before the revolution had been dominated by the Russians. Between 1923 and 1926 the proportion of Kiev’s population which was Ukrainian increased from 27 per cent to 42 per cent. Closely connected with this was the flourishing of Ukrainian culture during the 1920s, especially after 1924, when Olexander Shumsky, the ex-Borotbist leader, was placed in charge of the republic’s cultural affairs. The Ukrainian language, which the tsarist rulers had dismissed as a farmyard dialect, was now recognized as an essential tool for effective propaganda in the countryside and the recruitment of a native élite. During the 1920s it spread its domain into schools and offices, street names and shop signs, Soviet documents and ensignia, party congresses, newspapers and journals. More Ukrainian children learned to read their native language in the 1920s than in the whole of the nineteenth century.89 The nationalist ideal of an independent Ukraine may have been crushed by the new Empire-State, but at least the Ukrainian nation had been given a cultural base.
In the Muslim lands this same pattern — of military conquest by the Reds followed by the fostering of national cultures — was even more marked. In fact here the Bolsheviks did not so much foster existing national cultures as create new nations where only tribal entities had existed before 1917.
