If this was his intention, it was unsuccessful. Critics lined up to attack. They assailed Stalin for making an abstract report ‘outside time and space’ and for yielding too much to ‘petit-bourgeois’ nationalist demands while not struggling hard enough against Russocentrism.21 In fact Stalin had problems regardless of what he said. Some delegates wanted decentralisation and greater room for national self-expression. Others, wanting firmer centralisation in Moscow, attacked the alleged indulgence shown to nationalism since the October Revolution. Stalin himself was accused of ‘artificially implanting Belorussian nationhood’. This comment roused him to fury. His reply went:22
This is untrue because Belorussian nationhood does exist; it has its own language which is different from Russian, in view of which it’s possible to raise higher the culture of the Belorussian people only in its own language. Such speeches were given five years ago about Ukraine, about Ukrainian nationhood. And it’s not so long ago that people used to say that the Ukrainian republic and Ukrainian nationhood were a German invention. Meanwhile it’s clear that Ukrainian nationhood exists and that the development of its culture constitutes a duty for communists.
Stalin was not going to allow the entire policy developed by himself and Lenin to be derided, defamed or ditched.
His arguments were demographic and political. The towns of Ukraine, he predicted, would soon cease to be Russian when flooded with Ukrainian newcomers, just as Riga had once been predominantly a German city and had gradually been Latvianised. Secondly, he maintained that if ever the message of Marxism was to be accepted in the borderlands of the former Russian Empire, it had to be conveyed in languages which were comprehensible and congenial to the recipients. The idea that Stalin was a ‘Great Russian chauvinist’ in the 1920s is nonsense. More than any other Bolshevik leader, including Lenin, he fought for the principle that each people in the Soviet state should have scope for national and ethnic self-expression.
Yet it was fiendishly difficult to turn principle into practice. The Caucasus continued to worry the Politburo; and whatever general scheme was applied to it would have consequences for the entire constitutional structure of the Soviet state (or states). When Georgia fell to the Red Army in March 1921, the Bolsheviks had reclaimed as much of the former Russian Empire as they would possess until the annexations of 1939–40. Poland had thrown back the Reds at the battle of the Vistula. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had abolished their Soviet republics and grasped their independence. The Politburo was determined that this should not happen in the Caucasus. Soviet republics in Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia had been established and Moscow steadily increased its control over the region. All the old problems, however, were replicated there. Veteran Bolsheviks were few and popular support for the communist regimes was frail. Religious traditions were strong. Customary social hierarchies were tenacious. What is more, the Red Army had marched into a region which had been tearing itself apart with vicious armed conflict since 1918. There had been wars across borders. There had also been persecution of national and ethnic minorities within each state. Ethnic cleansing had been perpetrated.23 The Politburo had yet to bring about a final settlement.
