For once the date on the spine is the date of the book. Victor Shevtsov's The State and Nations in the USSR was written for a specific occasion and says so in its first line: "Nineteen eighty-two is the year of the 60th anniversary of the foundation of the USSR, an integral, federal, multinational Soviet state." It opens by quoting the CPSU Central Committee resolution issued for that anniversary, and the internal evidence agrees — the statistical series run to 1979 and 1980, the 1979 census is the freshest data in the book, and nothing later appears. This is an anniversary commission, produced in the last year of Leonid Brezhnev's life, translated by Lenina Ilitskaya and put into English for readers abroad. 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 sixty years ago.
That commission is worth taking seriously, because the claim was not absurd on its face. The Bolshevik record on the national question in 1917–23 was the most advanced of any state of its era, and this book, in its middle chapters, sets out a good deal of that record accurately. It reports the recognition of Finnish independence, and quotes the Finnish Social-Democrat Reinhold Svento to the effect that "The Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, were the only ones to give unqualified recognition to Finland's state sovereignty." It reports the manifesto of 4 December 1917 addressed to the Ukrainian people, affirming their right to secede from Russia entirely. It is precise about the sequence of treaties between the independent Soviet republics in 1920–22, and precise about the congresses of soviets that ratified the Union in December 1922. Its chapter on cultural development contains a genuinely remarkable story, told with justified pride: that before the revolution "merely twenty of the 130 peoples of what is now the Soviet Union had more or less developed systems of writing," that literacy among people aged nine and over in 1926 stood 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 was an effort unexampled in the history of culture," the book says, and on that narrow point it is close to right. Nothing in the critique that follows requires denying it.
The book is also, on one matter, franker than most Progress titles of its decade. It describes the "autonomisation" crisis of 1922 as a real dispute with real sides. It names the commission that drafted the plan — "Kuibyshev, Myasnikov, Ordzhonikidze and Stalin". It states that the group pressing for the independent republics to enter the RSFSR as autonomous republics "included among others Stalin, Manuilsky, Myasnikov and Kamenev". It says that carrying out that plan "would mean, in practical terms, a substantial limitation of the sovereign rights of independent Soviet republics and create conditions for displaying greatRussian chauvinism". And it concludes, in a sentence no Soviet textbook of 1952 would have printed: "In the specific historical circumstances, however, in which the USSR was formed, great-power chauvinism was the greater evil." Readers who come to this volume expecting the Short Course will not find it. Shevtsov is a jurist writing a constitutional treatise, and within the limits of what could be printed he is trying to be accurate.
The limits are where the interest lies.
The book names, correctly, the source that decides the question. It cites Lenin's notes dictated at the end of December 1922 "under the common heading 'The Question of Nationalities or `Autonomisation'". It even quotes from them. What it quotes is this:
". . .we must maintain and strengthen the union of socialist republics. Of this there can be no doubt. This measure is necessary for us and it is necessary for the world communist proletariat in its struggle against the world bourgeoisie and its defence against bourgeois intrigues".
That is the first of the three or four things Lenin said in that memorandum, and it is the only one the book reproduces. The others are these. Lenin wrote that Ordzhonikidze had gone "to the extreme of applying physical violence" against a Georgian communist — he had struck him — and proposed exemplary punishment. He attributed the crisis to "Stalin's haste and his infatuation with pure administration, together with his spite against the notorious 'nationalist-socialism'". He insisted that "It is, of course, necessary to hold Stalin and Dzerzhinsky responsible for all this out-and-out Great-Russian nationalistic campaign," and that "A distinction must necessarily be made between the nationalism of an oppressor nation and that of an oppressed nation." And he wrote the sentence that this entire volume exists to disprove:
"It is quite natural that in such circumstances the 'freedom to secede from the union' by which we justify ourselves will be a mere scrap of paper, unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is."
The book quotes the memorandum three times and does not go near that passage. It also softens the one concrete proposal Lenin made. Lenin's text says that the next Congress of Soviets might have to "retain the union of Soviet socialist republics only for military and diplomatic affairs, and in all other respects restore full independence to the individual People's Commissariats". Shevtsov renders this as: "As for the other areas of state political activity, Lenin considered that, given certain conditions, the question of transferring the relevant functions to Union republics might be presented for discussion at the next Congress of Soviets." A proposal to strip the centre back to two commissariats has become an item that might come up.
The same operation is performed on the people. The book identifies "The second group (Mdivani, Makhar[a]dze, Rakovsky and others)" as one of the "two fundamentally fallacious deviations on the national question" that the Party had to overcome. Budu Mdivani and Filipp Makharadze were the leaders of the Georgian Bolsheviks whom Ordzhonikidze was suppressing, and they were the people Lenin sided with. Trotsky, whose account of these weeks was written in December 1932 and published as "On the Suppressed Testament of Lenin", records that on 5 March 1923 Lenin "for the first time openly joined forces with the irreconcilable Georgian enemies of Stalin, informing them in a special note that he was backing their cause 'with all my heart' and was preparing for them documents against Stalin, Ordzhonikidze and Dzerzhinsky", and adds: "'With all my heart' — this expression was not a frequent one with Lenin." Mdivani was shot in 1937. Christian Rakovsky, the third name in the book's parenthesis, was a founder of the Ukrainian Soviet republic and had been its head of government; he was condemned at the third Moscow trial in March 1938 and shot in 1941. It was Rakovsky who supplied, years before either killing, the sentence Trotsky quotes in the same essay as the last word on the subject: "To the national question, as to all other questions, the bureaucracy makes its approach from the point of view of convenience of administration and regulation."
The book cannot say that Lenin lost this fight. It has to say instead that "the plenary meetings of the CC RCP(B) in October and December 1922 fully confirmed Lenin's principles" — that the crisis was a drafting disagreement, resolved correctly, in 1922, sixty years ago, and closed.
The right of secession is affirmed here more often than in any other volume in this series. It appears a dozen times. It is called "a major legal expression of the voluntary character of republics' membership of the federal union", and it is attached to its constitutional address: "the right freely to secede from the USSR (Article 72 of the USSR Constitution)".
Nowhere in seventy-two thousand words is there a description of how a republic would do it. No procedure, no initiating body, no threshold, no referendum, no arbitrating court. This is not an oversight of the book's; there was nothing to describe. The USSR passed no law setting out a procedure for secession under Article 72 until April 1990, sixty-eight years into the federation's life and eighteen months before it dissolved.
What makes the omission legible rather than merely absent is that the book raises the objection itself. Chapter VI reports, in order to dismiss it, that "bourgeois writers often see the proof of the absence of legal guarantees of Soviet federation also in the fact that the Constitution does not establish any procedure whereby a republic could protect its rights in case of conflict with the federal government, as the Soviet judicial system does not include any constitutional court to which a republic could go for protection from excessive encroachments of the centre." The answer given is not a procedure. It is a definition: "As a complex politico-legal attribute of the state, implying the supremacy of state authority, sovereignty may not be divided, transferred or circumscribed. Therefore, the sovereignty of Union republics, too, is full and indivisible." The objection was that there is no remedy. The reply is that there can be no injury.
And then, two paragraphs later, the book concedes the substance while denying the form. The 1977 Constitution, it says, "should be characterised by a redistribution of terms of reference between the USSR and Union republics, which tends to strengthen centralism in the administration of the whole country and extend the competence of federal bodies in certain fields." Read that against Lenin's scrap of paper and the sixty years between them are accounted for.
This series has learned to read Soviet lists. The 1968 Progress volume Soviet Socialist Democracy enumerated twenty Autonomous Republics and, without a word of explanation, silently reinstated three — Kalmyk, Kabardinian-Balkar, Checheno-Ingush — that had been abolished in 1943–44 when the peoples who named them were deported wholesale to Central Asia and Siberia, and silently omitted two, the Crimean and the Volga German, that were never restored. A book on Soviet democracy might plead that the nationalities were not its subject. This one has no such defence. It is a book about nations.
The test returns the same result, and worse.
The words deportation and resettlement do not occur in this text in that sense. The year 1944 does not occur at all. There is no Volga German Autonomous Republic anywhere in the book — the phrase does not appear — and no Crimean Autonomous Republic. "Crimea" occurs four times: twice in the context of 1918–19, and once in a list of the alphabets in use before the revolution, where we are told that "The Karaites, Crimean, Caucasian, Central Asian and East European Jews used the Hebrew alphabet." The Crimean Tatars, deported in May 1944, are not in this book. Neither are the Meskhetian Turks.
The peoples who were deported and later restored appear, but only in the past tense of the 1920s. Chapter III lists "the Chuvash, Kalmyk, Mari, Votyak, Karachai-Circassian, Kabardin-Balkar and some other autonomous regions" among the formations of 1920–23, and then explains that "In the course of Soviet national-state development many autonomous regions (the Buryat, Kabardin-Balkar, Karelian, Kalmyk, Kirghiz, Komi, Mari, Mordovian, Tuva, Udmurt, and others) were reorganised into autonomous republics." One smooth developmental curve, region to republic, with nothing in between. The Kalmyk and Kabardino-Balkar autonomies were abolished by decree in 1943 and 1944 and restored in 1957; the Karachai autonomy likewise. The verb the book supplies for those years is "reorganised".
The single most telling passage is not a list at all. Chapter VIII, arguing that the spread of Russian is voluntary and that Western talk of Russification is a falsification, offers a piece of survey evidence: "The significance of Russian as international language is evidenced also by the figures obtained on the Chechen-Ingush ASSR." A table follows, showing what proportion of that republic's population preferred to read, listen and write in Russian. The Chechens and Ingush were deported en masse in February 1944 and spent thirteen years in Kazakhstan and Central Asia before the republic was restored in 1957. Whatever those percentages measure, they measure that too. The book chose, out of every republic in the Union, the one where the linguistic evidence is most contaminated by a history it will not name, and presented it as proof of free choice.
There is also a quieter gap. "Such is, briefly, the history of the formation of all the fifteen Soviet socialist republics and their joining together in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics," Chapter V concludes. There were sixteen. The Karelo-Finnish SSR was a Union republic from 1940 until 1956, when it was demoted to an autonomous republic within the Russian Federation — a Union republic unmade by a decision of the centre, which is a difficult fact for a chapter arguing that Union republics are sovereign states. Karelia appears in this book only among the autonomous regions that became autonomous republics. Sixteen went down to fifteen and the arithmetic is not mentioned.
The Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian republics entered the Union in 1940. The book's account is pure legal formalism: the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, "after hearing the declarations of the authorised commissions of the diets of Lithuania and Latvia and the authorised commission of the State Assembly of Estonia, enacted the laws on admitting" them. Moldavia is handled the same way — Bessarabia was "reunified", the Supreme Soviet was "guided by the principle of free development of peoples". There is no Nazi–Soviet Pact in this book, no Secret Additional Protocol, no Soviet ultimatums of June 1940, no Red Army. Ernest Mandel, in The Meaning of the Second World War (Verso, 1986), states the matter in a single clause when describing Stalin's wartime diplomacy: what Moscow sought from Churchill was recognition of "what had been obtained through the Hitler-Stalin pact: the Baltic States, the Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia as well as Bessarabia and the Northern Bukovina" (ch. 17, "The Aftermath", pp. 169ff). Mandel's own text elsewhere misdates the signature of the Secret Additional Protocol by four days; it was signed on the night of 23 August 1939.
The word famine does not appear in this volume. Neither does collectivisation. A book that devotes a chapter to the economic co-operation of nations and another to their social development, and that returns repeatedly to the Ukraine as the second republic of the Union, contains no reference to 1932–33. Historians continue to disagree about the death toll in Ukraine and Kazakhstan and about intent — the range in the serious literature is wide and the argument is live — but no serious account puts the losses below the millions, and no account of Soviet national relations that omits them is an account. Mandel, in the same book, names the combination directly: in "the Baltic republics and the Ukraine... national oppression had been combined with the large-scale terror and famine of the collectivization period" (ch. 3, "The Social Forces", pp. 35–46).
And then, in the middle of the chapter on culture, the book confesses. Discussing the switch of the Soviet Turkic and Caucasian languages from the Arabic script to Latin in the 1920s and from Latin to Cyrillic at the end of the 1930s, it offers this explanation of the second change: "In these circumstances, intellectuals in many ethnic republics considered it desirable to go over to the Russian script. As a result, in 1937–1940, the peoples of Central Asia, the Volga area, the North Caucasus, and Azerbaijan adopted the Russian alphabet." The years 1937 to 1940 are the years of the Yezhovshchina and its aftermath, when the national intelligentsias of exactly those republics were being arrested and shot, and the alphabet decrees were issued republic by republic from the centre. The book then supplies, without appearing to notice, the real reason: "Besides, this essentially uniform alphabet proved more convenient for the centralised methodological direction of linguistic development in an integral multinational state like the Soviet Union." Centralised methodological direction of linguistic development. That is the sentence, and the book wrote it about itself.
A reader told that this volume is worthless would be misled. Chapters IV and V are a usable, document-based narrative of how the Soviet republics were constituted and how the treaty of December 1922 was assembled, with dates, congresses and texts that can be checked. Chapter VII's fiscal data — the proportions of republican budgets funded by deductions from all-Union taxes and revenues, running from 41.9 per cent in the RSFSR to 100 per cent in two republics in 1976 — is real evidence about real transfers, and the industrialisation of Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Soviet North was not a fiction. The description of the Soviet of Nationalities, with thirty-two deputies from each Union republic regardless of size, eleven from each autonomous republic, five from each autonomous region and one from each autonomous area, is an accurate account of an institutional design that other federations might learn from, whatever that chamber actually did. And Chapter I's polemic against reducing nationhood to blood, soul and consanguinity is a serious argument, made against named Western authors who are quoted at length and answered. That the argument is being used as cover does not make it a bad argument.
The point is not that the doctrine set out here is false. It is that the doctrine is true and the book is describing a country in which it had ceased to operate. Self-determination up to and including secession was real Bolshevik policy; the korenizatsiya of the 1920s did create written languages and national institutions where none had existed; Lenin's last political fight was over precisely this and he fought it against the man who would rule for thirty years. What the book cannot say is that he lost, that the federation became a formality administered from Moscow, and that his warning about the scrap of paper was vindicated in the most literal way available — by the physical removal of entire nations from their territories in the 1940s, by autonomies abolished and restored at the centre's convenience, and by a right of secession that had no procedure attached to it for sixty-eight years.
The anti-Stalinist left said all of this while it was happening. Writing in Fourth International in 1952, thirty years before this book and five years before the Chechens and Ingush were allowed home, George Clarke set the whole sequence down in three sentences: "Stalin's record on the national question leaves no doubt on this score. Lenin on his deathbed broke off all personal relations with Stalin for his brutal treatment of the Georgian people. Subsequently there have been constant purges in the Ukraine; Volga Germans, peoples of the Baltic and the Caucasus have been bodily uprooted from their homes and lands." (Fourth International, vol. XIII, no. 6, November–December 1952.)
Read Shevtsov for what he is: a competent constitutional lawyer setting out, in the sixtieth year and with real learning, the most complete official statement in English of how the Soviet Union described its own federation — nine years before the republics used a right the book said they had, by means the book could not describe, and dissolved it.