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Red Nations offers an illuminating and informative overview of how the non-Russian republics of the Soviet Union experienced communist rule. It surveys the series of historical events that contributed to the break-up of the Soviet Union and evaluates their continuing resonance across post-soviet states today. Drawing from the latest research, Professor Smith offers comprehensive coverage of the revolutionary years, the early Soviet policies of developing nations, Stalin's purges and deportations of small nationalities, and the rise of independence movements. Through a single, unified narrative, this book illustrates how, in the post-Stalin period, many of the features of the modern nation state emerged. Both scholars and students will find this an indispensable contribution to the history of the dissolution of the USSR, the reconstruction of post-Soviet society, and its impact on non-Russian citizens from the years of the Russian Revolution through to the present day.

Stalin’s death on 5 March 1953 meant far more than just a change of face at the top of the Soviet system. The frustrated hopes that had arisen after victory over fascism in the Great Patriotic War now came to the fore again. The political uncertainty that followed the unprecedented death of a Soviet tyrant encouraged different interests in Soviet society to trade support for individual leaders and the institutions they headed in return for policies that favoured their interests. As politics consolidated around the CPSU its leader, Nikita Khrushchev, pursued a utopian programme of reforms which aimed at improving the life circumstances of Soviet citizens, not only in a material sense but also in terms of rights, political participation and justice. Participation was to be on terms dictated by the centre, and fell well short of genuine democracy, and Khrushchev encountered many unintended consequences of his policies, particularly after the relative openness signalled by his Secret Speech of February 1956. Throughout his tenure of the post of First Secretary of the CPSU, Khrushchev played a risky game of alternating between favouring, reining in and putting down various interests, a tactic which ultimately left him with no support when a concerted effort to remove him from office was made in 1964. Thus the nationalities experience of the mid to late 1950s and the early 1960s consisted of a series of episodes of mobilisation (either spontaneous or state-led), and inconsistent policies from the centre which at times increased, and at times diminished, the ability of the Soviet republics to deal with their own affairs. Faced with this inconsistency and the unpredictability of national responses, efforts to promote an ideology of the ‘merger of nations’ failed to have any real impact or to inspire new attitudes.

The Brezhnev era (1964–1982) has been characterised as one of stagnation, and with some obvious justification: during the eighteen years when Leonid Brezhnev was general secretary of the CPSU, only sixteen new appointments were made to full membership of the highest decision-making body, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU. This does not, however, do justice to the many changes that were going on below the level of the top leadership, where society was developing in ways which eventually outstripped the comfortable complacency of the ageing leadership. This was also an active time in Soviet foreign policy, with the Cold War reaching new heights but also going through periods of calm, and the leadership often preoccupied with events in Eastern Europe, culminating in the Prague Spring of 1968. But the regime generally eschewed major policy upheavals. Many of Khrushchev’s innovations reached fulfilment in the years after his ouster, while others were quickly dropped. In the latter category, and of particular concern for the non-Russian nationalities, were the sovnarkhoz reform of 1957, abandoned in 1965, and the education reform of 1958–1959, which was quietly allowed to recede into irrelevance. Instances of large-scale unrest were rare, with the economy maintaining (by global standards) reasonable but not spectacular growth rates until the late 1980s. Although economic growth eventually lagged behind that of the major western economies and the limitations of the planned economy were already apparent, technological improvements and rising oil prices allowed for a greater emphasis on consumer goods, with many families now able to own refrigerators and televisions for the first time. Improved consumption levels (though low by western standards) did much to account for the stability of the time. Social stability was also underlined by the urbanisation of most of the country and universally high levels of education.

The immediate course of the Russian Revolutions of 1917 was decided in the capital cities of Moscow and Petrograd and, indirectly, on the front line between Russian and German armies. But even away from the front lines, in cities around the periphery of the empire the struggle that determined the fate of the Provisional Government was also in evidence. Soviet power was declared in Tashkent before Petrograd. Here the soviet (workers’ council) was almost exclusively Russian, and the Red forces remained isolated from the surrounding, Muslim-populated countryside. The Latvian city of Riga presented an unusual case of a working class dominated ethnically by non-Russians. Latvian workers were solidly pro-Bolshevik, and their influence on the struggle in the capital was reinforced by geographical proximity to Petrograd. In the cases of both Riga and Tashkent, the overlap of social and ethnic backgrounds shaped the nature of events there already in 1917. As the Revolution developed into civil war the significance of the convergence of nationality and class became ever more apparent, and was one of the key factors behind the eventual victory of the Reds. In Baku, as the Russian authorities were forced out, the stratification of the local workforce along national lines determined the development of the conflict into one between Armenians and Muslims. National parties grew in importance and were the dominant forces in between the fall of the Bolshevik-led Baku Commune in 1918 and the Red Army’s conquest in 1920.

In creating the USSR and a series of autonomous territories, the Bolsheviks had put territoriality at the heart of their nationality policy. But the course of the debates leading up to this had further implications. As the struggle between ‘National Lefts’ and ‘National Rights’ developed in the course of 1922 and 1923, the Rights came out, by and large, on top at the centre and thereby in the peripheries. Delegates returned from the June 1923 special conference to their republics and regions armed with a clear mandate to continue and deepen the process of national consolidation and nation-building. They set about this task with a will, and enlisted national intellectuals and cultural producers in the project. Where they proved insufficiently strong to override the objections of (mostly Russian) local Party members and officials, they were able to call on the centre to support them. While support usually was forthcoming, it was still not always sufficient to overcome opposition. The process of nation-building was, therefore, accompanied by political and, occasionally, violent struggle. Meanwhile, nationalist or religious opponents of Bolshevism continued to try to undermine Soviet rule, occasionally by open rebellion. The policies of korenizatsiia and nation-building were therefore being squeezed from two directions, but ultimately prevailed. In a short period of time, by the end of the 1920s people who had not really thought in national terms before the First World War found that they now had a national language, a national culture, national histories and national political structures – in short, they had become members of a nation.

In the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a majority or significant part of the population in five territories refused to accept the status determined for them by the governments of the new states and recognised by the international community – Chechnya in the Russian Federation, Nagorno Karabakh in Azerbaijan, South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia and Transdniester in Moldova. The demand for outright independence (or union with Russia) has been the bottom line in all five cases, while the newly independent states have appealed to the principle of territorial integrity in insisting that the territories remain within their borders. No amount of negotiation over the precise status of each region has been successful in finding a compromise between two positions which are essentially incompatible. The apparent impossibility of breaking out of a situation where each territory (apart, eventually, from Chechnya) is ungovernable by the state in which international recognition locates it has earned the disputes the label of ‘frozen conflicts’, while the regions themselves are often described as ‘breakaway’. Supporters of both sides have frequently appealed to ancient history to support their case. The esoteric nature of these disputes contrasts with the actual origin of the conditions of conflicts which in most cases first broke out in 1905. Rather more apt is the sarcastic characterisation by two American historians of the origins of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict as ‘shrouded in the mists of the twentieth century’. Soviet nationality policies combined with alternating tolerance of and suppression of chauvinistic nationalism preserved, for the most part, ethnic peace in the Caucasus and elsewhere until the late 1980s. But the same policies that prevented conflict also preserved underlying tensions and, crucially, once the structures of the USSR crumbled, the status of a number of territories was thrown into limbo.

The constitutional structure of the Soviet Union and many elements of the early policies remained largely unchanged until 1991. The nineteenth century was the high-point of nation-building in Western Europe, and in Eastern Europe minorities began to articulate national demands. The Bolshevik revolution in October 1917 marked, for many national leaders, the end of any hope of autonomy or federalism within a democratic Russian state. In the 1960s and 1970s, a flourishing Ukrainian culture circulated in the form of samizdat underground publications, and in 1970 a nationalist journal, Ukrainian Herald, appeared secretly for the first time. Most non-Russians enjoyed a relatively privileged position in their republics, could use their mother tongue at school and in public and had controlled access to their national cultures. For many non-Russians, the introduction of market-style economic reforms led to particular hardship as it meant that relatively underdeveloped regions such as Central Asia and the Caucasus could no longer rely on unconditional central investment.