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

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 elite was recruited from literate peasant sons mobilized by the war and revolution and eager for progress and social advancement. The result was the rapid Ukraini-anization 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 elite. 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.

In the Bashkir and Tatar regions of the Volga-Urals new republics were created as the Red Army moved across the region pursing Kolchak. Moscow opposed the plans of the pan-Muslim intelligentsia for a Bashkir-Tatar state and ruthlessly exploited the ethnic divisions between the two regions. The Red Army, in alliance with Validov, the military leader of the Bashkir pastoralists, set up the Bashkir Autonomous Republic in March 1919. Most of its population was

Tatar. Validov and his troops had defected from the Whites at the height of the fighting on the Eastern Front. He believed that the Reds, unlike Kolchak, would give the Bashkirs independence and the right to expel Russian settlers. But once the conquest of the Urals was completed, the Reds handed power in the region to the Ufa Soviet, which was dominated by Russian workers. Moscow was not prepared to let the vital industries of the Urals region fall into the hands of Bashkir nationalists. In May 1920 it issued a decree abolishing the political autonomy promised to the Bashkirs only fourteen months before: the key institutions of the republic were henceforth to be subordinated to the Moscow authorities. The Bashkir Communists resigned from the government en masse and fled into the Urals, where they joined the other Bashkir rebels against Soviet rule. The new republican government had no Bashkirs in it but was made up of Tatars and Russians. Meanwhile, a separate Tatar Autonomous Republic was also established in May 1920 — although, like the Bashkir one, it was autonomous only in name and not even properly Tatar. Three-quarters of the ethnic Tatars in the region were left outside the republic's borders; and even inside them they made up only half the population, compared to the 40 per cent which were Russian.⁹⁰Divide et impera.