A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

upon local conditions than this would suggest. Under pressure from the native Communists, Lenin came to realize by 1920 that conquest in itself was not enough to control the non-Russian territories — at least not without the constant resistance of the native population. The effective exercise of power necessitated the recruitment of leaders who could speak the native language and give the regime a national veneer. Since the native population was based mainly in the villages, and the regime in the cities, it also demanded a softer approach towards the peasants. In this sense the New Economic Policy was closely linked with the process of state-building in the non-Russian lands. The Tenth Party Congress of March 1921, which introduced the NEP, also passed a resolution calling on the party to foster national cultures. Korenizatsiia (indigenization) was the thrust of Bolshevik policy in the 1920s. The domain of the native language was extended into education, publishing and administration. Schools and colleges were rapidly established to train up a native elite. Peasant boys from the native population became clerks in the towns, hitherto dominated by the Russians. In the cultural sphere, at least, the Soviet regime was in many ways continuing the work of nation-building and modernization begun by the nationalists before 1917. Granting cultural and economic freedom largely pacified the native peasantry, leaving what remained of the nationalist intelligentsia without a popular base.

In the Ukraine the nationalist movement had already collapsed by the time the Bolsheviks launched their third and final invasion during the autumn of 1919. The military vicissitudes of 1917—20, when the Ukraine had ten different regimes, were hardly conducive to national unity. Two brief spells of nationalist rule in Kiev — the Rada of March 1917 to February 1918, and the Directory of the following December to February 1919 — were not enough to inculcate a national consciousness into the Ukrainian peasantry, who were largely cut off from and hostile to the towns. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of an independent Ukrainian state had existed mainly in Shevchenko's poetry and Cossack myth. With the exception of the western Ukraine, where the landowners were mainly Poles, the mass of the peasants remained untouched by the intelligentsia's nationalism. The strength of the peasantry's attachment to the idea of the independent village made them hostile to a national state. During 1917, however, the socialist parties in the Rada had built up a mass base of rural electoral support by linking the idea of national independence with the autonomy of the village and a land reform in the interests of the peasants. They succeeded in translating the abstract concept of the nation into social terms which were real to the peasantry. But the promised land reforms were never carried out. The Rada and the Directory were politically paralysed by the growing internal division between nationalists like Petliura, who subordinated social reforms to the national struggle, and those like Vinnichenko, who subordinated

nationalism to social change. Without land reform, the peasants had little incentive to fight for an independent Ukraine. Neither the Rada nor the Directory was able to mobilize a truly national force against the invading armies of the Reds or the Whites. Even Petliura was forced to raise his so-called National Army on Polish soil.

The urban head of the Ukrainian national movement was thus cut off from its rural body. What remained was a local peasant nationalism, focused on the idea of the autonomous village, which continued to dominate the Ukraine, making it virtually impossible to rule from the cities, until the early 1920s. This smallholders' nationalism was seen in the atamanshchina, the local peasant bands of Makhno, Grigoriev and countless other warlords, who claimed to defend the free Ukrainian village from both Whites and Reds; in the rural economic war against the towns, which the peasants saw as 'foreign' and as the centres of a hostile state; and in the pogroms against Jews as the outward symbols of that alien nature. It was also seen in the mass appeal of the Borotbist Party, formed from the Ukrainian Left SRs, which stressed cultural nationalism as a form of village autonomy, a means of uniting and empowering the peasants in the revolutionary struggle against the Russified urban bourgeoisie.