ABSTRACT
The Bolshevik leaders who shaped the Soviet Union (as it became after 1922) felt in no doubt that they were creating a revolutionary new form of state, using radical and at times necessarily violent techniques. In this sense the Bolshevik elite were passionate Marxists and true ideologues, and although their efforts at state building were dismissed by some, both at the time and since, as mere empire (re)building behind a hypocritical outer face, this is both to seriously underrate and to misunderstand the sheer scale and radical modernity of the Soviet project.2 At the same time, however, there was no master plan; Bolshevik nationality policy throughout its whole existence was characterized instead by the absence of rigid consistency, to the extent that ‘[n]ot only did the guiding principles change over time, but they were applied to different degrees to different nationalities’.3 In 1920, moreover, the Bolsheviks were also aware that, nationwide, they had only managed to come to power at all after 1917 via a whole series of tactical retreats and local coalitions. Until the summer of 1918 their hold on power at the national level had been dependent on a fragile alliance between them and the Left SRs; the whole history of the rise of Soviet power in the North Caucasus in 1917-21 meanwhile was an epic of tactical coalitions with Mensheviks, SRs, Islamists and ‘bourgeois nationalists’. The civil war in the region had witnessed multiple shifting alliances and defections, of which some were even, as we have seen, openly and cynically labelled mere ‘business contracts’ by those involved, conducted in order to obtain temporary political breathing space.
