The State and Nations in the USSR

An anniversary commission, and it says so in its first line: 1982 was the sixtieth year of the USSR as a federal, multinational state.

Its job was to demonstrate that the national question, which every other multinational state in the world was visibly failing to solve, had been solved here six decades earlier. That claim was not absurd on its face, and the middle chapters set out a good deal of the record accurately.

It reports the recognition of Finnish independence, quoting a Finnish Social-Democrat to the effect that the Bolsheviks under Lenin were the only ones to give unqualified recognition to Finland's sovereignty. It reports the manifesto of 4 December 1917 affirming the Ukrainian people's right to secede from Russia entirely. It is precise about the sequence of treaties between the independent Soviet republics between 1920 and 1922, and about the congresses of soviets that ratified the Union in December 1922.

Its chapter on cultural development carries a genuinely remarkable story, told with justified pride: that before the revolution only about twenty of the 130 peoples of what became the Soviet Union had more or less developed systems of writing, that literacy among those aged nine and over stood in 1926 at 3.7 per cent in Tajikistan and 10.6 per cent in Uzbekistan, and that the state then set about designing alphabets for languages that had none.

It is also franker than most volumes of its decade about the autonomisation dispute of 1922, treating it as a real argument with real sides.

Translated by Lenina Ilitskaya. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.