It was galling for Stalin that Lenin had turned against him on the national question. Their collaboration in trying to solve it had begun before the Great War, and Lenin could not have coped without him. Although Stalin did not look for gratitude, he had cause to expect a more reasoned exchange of opinions. Disagreements between them about policy were not new.1 But Lenin and Stalin had concurred about the strategic orientation of rule in the Soviet multinational state. Stalin was the People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs and the Politburo’s specialist on the nexus of matters touching on nationhood, religion and territorial boundaries throughout the Civil War. As his military duties ended, he maintained control over decisions on the nationalities. When the leadership began to plan the country’s permanent constitutional structure, he was given a central role. The task was taken up in earnest in 1922.
Sovnarkom had long ago settled its viewpoint on several aspects of ‘national’ policy. Non-Russians were allowed their own schools and press and promising young supporters of the Bolsheviks of each national and ethnic group were trained to occupy leading political positions. Stalin supervised the policy even though, during the Civil War, he was often away from Moscow. Meetings of the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs collegium in his absence had been chaotic. Sometimes they were also noisy and over-long when he was present. His deputy Stanislaw Pestkowski recalled:2
It is hardly surprising that he sometimes lost patience. But on no occasion did he show this at the meetings themselves. In those instances where his supply of patience had been exhausted as the result of our interminable arguments at our gatherings he would suddenly vanish. He used to do this extraordinarily deftly. He would say: ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’ Then he would disappear from the room and go off and hide in one of the cubby holes of the Smolny [Institute] or the Kremlin.
The time had not arrived when anticipation of Stalin’s displeasure caused all to shiver in their boots. Stalin was but one Bolshevik leader among others. Only Lenin with his greater personal prestige could get away with rebuking miscreants.
When Stalin got very fed up he crept out of Sovnarkom itself. (So much for the myth of the grand bureaucrat with inexhaustible patience.) Pestkowski, who knew Stalin’s habits better than most, would receive instructions to flush him out of his lair: ‘I caught him a couple of times in comrade-sailor Vorontsov’s apartment where Stalin, stretched out on a divan, was smoking his pipe and thinking over his theses.’3 There were times when Stalin longed to be reassigned to the fronts of the Civil War and get away from the palaver in his Commissariat.
The cardinal decisions on the national question had anyway been taken by the central party leadership. As the Red Army reimposed central authority over the outlying regions of the former Russian Empire, the Kremlin leadership needed to clarify and disseminate policy in order to maximise its appeal to non-Russians. This was a difficult task. In 1917 it had been the workers and soldiers of Russia who had voted most strongly for the Bolsheviks. The Red Army on the rampage failed to allay suspicions about Russian imperialism, and the stream of decrees from the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs took time to have a positive impact. A further problem was caused by the international situation. Although the Western Allies pulled out of the former Russian Empire at the end of 1919, regional powers in eastern Europe and western Asia continued to pose a military threat, and the Politburo was concerned that Britain and France might use such powers to overthrow Soviet communism. Turkey, Finland and Poland were feared as potential invaders. In these circumstances the Central Committee and Politburo in 1919 set up independent Soviet states in Ukraine, Lithuania and Belorussia — and in 1920–1 in Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia. Communist leaders in Moscow hoped by such means to prove that their commitment to national self-determination was genuine.
The division of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia into separate states had occurred because of inter-national enmities in the anti-Bolshevik Transcaucasian Federation established after the October Revolution. Before the pan-Turkic Musavatist party came to power in Baku in 1918 there had formally been no such place as Azerbaijan.4 The frontiers of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia remained contentious under the early Soviet administration. Yet rudiments of statehood had been acquired. The invading Bolsheviks intended to build on them.
