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EIT Week 17- Nationalities and the Soviet Union (Nationalities in Imperial…
EIT Week 17- Nationalities and the Soviet Union
Nationalities in Imperial Russian Empire
Ukrainians the 2nd largest nationality- 18% of the population
20-25 million Muslims
1897 census population- 125 million only 55 million Russians
Alexander III (1881-1894)- policy of Russification
Economic policy- modernisation, including assimilation of outlying areas
Denigration of non-Russian language, cultures
Administrative integration- state building
Nationalist discontent could be used to destroy Tsarist state
Post-Revolution
- all nationalities would unite, form a socialist federation, and be stressed that internationalism (workers of the world unite) would replace nationalism
Civil War
‘A voluntary and honest alliance’ between Russia and the different national groups that lived within its border
Civil war showed voluntary alliances not always possible
16th Nov 1917- Stalin in Helsinki- promised Soviet government would grant ‘complete freedom for the Finnish people, and for other people of Russia, to arrange their own life’
Bolsheviks abandoned commitment to self-determination
Nov 1917- Stalin appointed commissar of nationalities- 65 million non-Russians
The Union Treaty, 1922- Creation of the Soviet Union
Jan 1918- formed federation of Soviet national republics
30 Dec 1922- All-Union Congress of Soviets- delegates from-
Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic
Transcaucasian Soviet Socialist Federative Republic (Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia)
Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic
Belarussian Soviet Socialist Republic
USSR- Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
How to stop it becoming a Russian Empire
- need to counterbalance Russian chauvinism- gain control over non-Russian areas- nativisation- proletarian internationalism- USSR divided along ethnic lines
How to keep it together
- military force- coercion- recruit local leaders- peasant support- foster national cultures- make Central Asia Soviet- nativisation or indigenisation
Stalin Constitution, 1936
The Kazakh and Kirghiz ASSRs elevated to fully-fledged union republics
Transcaucasian Federation became 3 new union republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia
Creation of Ethnic Republics
USSR now composed of 11 union republics
Assassination of Alexander I, 9 October 1934
5 dead in total
Vlado Tchernozemski, a member of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation
French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou
Alexander I, King of Yugoslavia
Memories of 1914
The League of Nations
Belgium, UK, Chile, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, USSR, Spain, Switzerland
‘Committee for the International Repression of Terrorism’
16 November 1937- Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism
Resolution of 10 December 1934- ‘the rules of international law concerning the repression of terrorist activity are not at present sufficiently precise to guarantee efficiently international co-operation’
Ultimately ineffective
Precedent for international agreement on terrorism- 1904 St Petersburg Anti-Anarchist Protocol, following McKinley assassination
France appeals for help with the extradition of the accused from Italy
Failure of the Convention
Switzerland doubted whether terrorism existed to the extent of constituting a public menace or a general panic
Argentina doubted the distinctiveness of terrorism
Outbreak of WW2 and decline of L of N
Never came into effect
The Red Army was engaged for much of the period of the Russian Civil War in a simultaneous battle against ‘bourgeois nationalists’ and ‘foreign interventionists’- (
G. Hosking, A History of the Soviet Union (London: Fontana, 1985), Chapter 3
)