No region presented him with trickier problems than did his native Caucasus. The ethnic intermingling — on both the north and south sides of the mountain range — was intense and the chronic rivalries were acute. Stalin could not deal with this exclusively from the Kremlin and on 14 September the Politburo assigned him a mission to the north Caucasus. After the disappointments of the Soviet–Polish War, he was given much scope for initiative.13 This was the kind of mission he liked. Reaching the region, he gave approval to the existing Mountain Republic: he liked its capacity to unite Chechens, Ossetians, Kabardians and others. But he did not include the Cossacks.14 Much of the trouble in the north Caucasus derived from the Imperial practice of settling Cossacks, descendants of Russian peasant refugees, in villages as a means of controlling the indigenous nations. A Mountain Republic with their participation would scarcely be effective. Stalin boasted to Lenin in October 1920 that that he had meted out ‘exemplary punishment to several Cossack settlements’ for their rebellious activity.15 Despite his later reputation, Stalin had no special fondness for Russians and his continuation of the ethnic cleansing of the Cossacks reflected this.16
Attending the Congress of Peoples of the Terek in November 1920, Stalin considered future constitutional arrangements:17
What type of autonomy is going to be given to the Mountain Republic?… Autonomy can be diverse: there’s administrative autonomy such as is possessed by the Karelians, Cheremis, Chuvash and Volga Germans; there’s also political autonomy such as the Bashkirs, Kirgiz and Tatars have. The Mountain Republic’s autonomy is political.
He clearly meant that the peoples of the north Caucasus would be allowed not only to manage their own territorial units but also to pursue their national and ethnic interests within them.
Stalin explained his policy to the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921 when introducing the debate on the national question. His speech contrasted western Europe where nation-states were the norm and eastern Europe where the Romanovs, Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns had ruled vast multinational states. Stalin exaggerated the national homogeneity of states in the West but he was right that the mixture of nations was denser to the East. At any rate he declared that the anti-imperial struggle had intensified after the Great War as Turkey in particular supported movements for national liberation in the colonies of the European powers. But supposedly only Soviet Russia could do anything practical. Stalin declared:18
The essence of the national question in the RSFSR consists in eliminating the backwardness (economic, political, cultural) of nationalities which has been inherited from the past in order to give an opportunity to backward peoples to catch up with central Russia in relation to statehood, culture and economy.
He identified two dangers. The first was obvious to anyone like himself from the borderlands of the Russian Empire. This was ‘Russian great-power chauvinism’. The other was the nationalism of non-Russians outside Russia, and Stalin stressed that it was a nationalism widely shared by local communists. Both dangers had to be confronted by the Russian Communist Party.
‘Under the Soviet federative state,’ Stalin declared, ‘there are no longer either oppressed nationalities or ruling ones: national oppression has been liquidated.’19 The speech was uncharacteristically vague in content. Stalin may have been too busy to prepare it properly while organising the Leninist faction in the trade union controversy. He was also suffering from agonising stomach pains.20 Then again, he had a huge capacity for work and had always summoned up the strength for a big speech. The probability is that, knowing how quickly passions were ignited by the national question, he sought to damp things down.
