“The revolution, which started in the centre,” wrote Stalin, “could not long be confined to this narrow territory. Once having triumphed in the centre, it was bound to spread to the border regions. And, indeed, from the very first days of the seizure of power, the revolutionary wave spread from the North all over Russia, sweeping over one border region after another.”[1]
But a number of serious obstacles and enormous difficulties stood in the path of establishing the Soviet regime in the non-Russian, so-called national and border regions. The counter-revolution had concentrated all its forces in the Ukraine, the North Caucasus, the Crimea, Transcaucasia, Turkestan and the Far East, to combat the Soviet regime even before the October Revolution had definitely triumphed at the centre. This explains why the struggle for the victory of the proletarian revolution assumed a more fierce protracted character in the national and border regions than in the other parts of the country. The specific features and difficulties of the work of preparing for and developing the proletarian revolution in the national and border regions may be reduced to four main points.
First, the onward march of the proletarian revolution was here checked by, as Stalin said, the dam of regional and “national governments,” which were bourgeois in character and imperialistic in their nature.
One of the most important centres of counter-revolution was the Ukrainian Central Rada.
The Central Rada had tried to pose as the saviour of the dying Russian bourgeoisie even before the October Revolution. The growing front of the Socialist revolution was encountered by a bloc of the bourgeoisie of all the nationalities inhabiting Russia.
Striving by their united efforts to prevent the triumph of the proletarian revolution in Russia, the nationalist counter-revolution set out to dismember the country, to set the various nationalities against one another in order to break up the united front of the working people of all nationalities, to divide the forces of the revolution and thereby strengthen the forces of the counter-revolution.
In addition to the Ukrainian Rada, “national governments,” sometimes fictitious and sometimes real, appeared in Transcaucasia (the “Transcaucasian Commissariat” and the “Transcaucasian Diet”), in the Crimea (the “Kurultai”), in Central Asia (the “Khokand Autonomy” and “Allash-Orda”), in Byelorussia (the “Byelorussian Rada”), in the North Caucasus (the “Central Committee of the Union of Mountain People”), and also in Bashkiria and the Tatar Region.
The second obstacle to the victory of the revolution in the national and border regions was the Cossack counter-revolution, which tried to hurl against the revolution the entire mass of the 11 Cossack Forces (Don, Kuban, Terek, Astrakhan, Urals, Orenburg, Siberian, Amur, Transbaikal, Ussuri and Semirechensk) which were stationed in the border regions and served as instruments for the enslavement and oppression of the peoples of the Caucasus and Transcaucasia, Central Asia, Siberia and the Far East.
While the Central Rada in the Ukraine played first fiddle among the “national governments,” the leading role in organising the forces of the all-Russian counter-revolution was played by the upper ranks of the Don Cossack Force, the largest of the Cossack formations, which was strategically situated nearest to the revolutionary centres of the country.
The third specific feature of the struggle to establish the Soviet regime in the national regions was that here, and particularly in the southern and eastern border regions of the Soviet Republic, the pressure of the foreign imperialists was felt far more than in the central parts of the country.
The border regions of Russia had long been the objects of special attention of foreign governments.
Right from the beginning the “Khokand Autonomy” and the “Allash-Orda” in Central Asia, the “Transcaucasian Commissariat” in Tiflis, the “Central Committee of the Union of Mountain People” in the North Caucasus and the Whiteguard governments in Siberia and the Far East received the support of the foreign imperialists.
In the course of the struggle for the establishment of the Soviet regime the imperialist governments exercised no less pressure in other parts of the country besides the Far East—in the North, in Archangel and Murmansk. The foreign ships in Archangel harbour served as a reliable support for the local Whiteguard organisations. It was no accident that in these districts the struggle to transfer power to the Soviets dragged on until the summer of 1918.
Lastly, still another difficulty in the path of the struggle for the Soviet regime in the national regions was the fact that the tsarist government had deliberately kept the border regions of Russia in a state which Lenin described as “semi-savagery, and even actual savagery.” In these regions industry was scarcely developed, and in a number of districts there were no industrial enterprises whatever. Among many of the nationalities there was no native industrial proletariat; the few proletarians that were to be found in the national regions were mainly Russians. This state of affairs inevitably affected the work of the Bolshevik organisations. In most of the towns of Central Asia, the Far East and Siberia independent Bolshevik organisations were formed either on the very eve of the October Revolution or, as was the case in a number of places, several weeks and even months after the October Revolution had triumphed in the capitals. In these regions illusions about the possibility of reaching a compromise were more tenacious and lasted longer than elsewhere. The long “co-habitation” of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the united Social-Democratic organisations did not help to dispel these illusions. While Menshevik influence was destroyed in the main centres of the country before the October Revolution, in these regions, the Menshevik poison had so corroded the minds of the backward groups of the working class that it was not easy to eliminate it. It was in these border regions that the supporters of the treacherous line advocated by Kamenev and Zinoviev found favourable soil for their disruptive tactics. “Coalition combinations” were made in these regions on a more open and wider scale and met with less resistance than in other parts of the country. In Chita, Transbaikal, for example, the so-called “Peoples’ Soviet,” a coalition government headed by the Mensheviks, was in power for over a month; the Soviet regime was established there only in the beginning of February 1918.
Such were the specific features and difficulties that impeded the development and victory of the proletarian revolution in the border and national regions of Russia. It goes without saying that these factors operated differently in the different national regions, which varied in their level of development of productive forces, availability of proletarian forces, and rapidity of Bolshevisation of the masses.
In the Ukraine, Byelorussia, the Baltic provinces, proletarian Baku, and an important centre like Tashkent, the working-class forces were very considerable and the Bolshevik organisations had large masses of working people behind them. Here the difficulties and obstacles were overcome and swept away much faster than in the other national regions, and the process of preparing for the proletarian revolution bore features that were a peculiar mixture of those typical of the main industrial centres and of the national regions of the country.
This was particularly marked during the preparations for the revolution in the Ukraine and in Byelorussia.
[1] J. Stalin, “The October Revolution and the National Question,” Marxism and the National and Colonial Question, Eng. ed., p. 63.
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