ABSTRACT
Nationalism is a natural ally and concomitant of democracy. This connection is often lost sight of in the West where nationalism, once it matured, shed its democratic affiliations and became increasingly identified with conservative and reactionary causes. A complicating feature of the history of Russian imperialism is the fact that the Great Russians developed a sense of national consciousness more or less concurrently with their subject peoples. The foundations of Soviet nationality policy thus were laid not in Lenin's pre-1917 writings, but in the practical directives issued in the midst of the Civil War. In the borderlands which they reconquered during the Civil War, the Communists at first granted the minorities a considerable measure of linguistic and cultural autonomy in addition to pseudo-federal institutions. Russian investments have stimulated and continue to stimulate economic activities which would have been beyond the capacity of the borderlands were they independent.
