A Double-edged Sword: The Political Use of National Heterogeneity in the Soviet Union during the Interwar Period*

Abstract

In the aftermath of two revolutions and after the civil war that shook the former Russian Empire from 1918 to 1921 and led to the Red victory, the process of reshaping the Soviet territories took the opposite direction from that of the newly independent states of Eastern Europe. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) foregrounded its federative status, and the ruling Bolsheviks deliberately rejected the model of homogeneous, assimilatory nation-states espoused by its neighbors to the west, preferring to embrace its own multinational status. For the Bolsheviks, multinationalism was not the opposite of national self-determination. They constructed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a jigsaw of territorialized nations organized in a federal frame. In 1923, the politics of korenizatsia-often translated as indigenizationtriggered the development of national cultures and languages in each Republic. According to Lenin, this policy of promotion of national cultures and languages would neutralize nationalist parties by preventing them from mobilizing around ethnicity. It would also compensate the harm done to non-Russian people by the Russian imperial masters. Moreover, the new external borders of the Soviet Union did not coincide with any ethnic delimitations. The same nationalities lived on each side of the border.All these features, the multinationalism of the USSR, its blurred ethnic borders, and the state as a jigsaw of national republics did not worry Lenin. For him, it was not a source of weakness in building up the new state. Rather, he saw it as a strength. His purpose was to internationalize and expand the revolution. In parallel to the class struggle, national selfdetermination could fuel expansion at the edges of Soviet territory. The Bolsheviks called this the "Piedmont policy" (pyemontnaya politika) in reference to Italian unification, driven by the kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia in the nineteenth century. 1 The multiple nationalities organized in the periphery of the USSR as Union Republics, autonomous republics, or national districts had to become Piedmonts to attract national minorities on the other side of the border or to become national showcases for the Sovietization of the neighboring countries.