ABSTRACT
My final quest concerned the Soviet Nationalities and most of my time was spent in the Caucasus and Asia. The Soviet State had inherited a Colonial Empire of vast extent and dominated by principles embodied in the phrase “One Tsar, one religion, one language.” An area of 8,700,000 square miles, embracing 177 distinct races or nationalities or tribes, speaking 125 different languages and professing forty different types of religion, had been forced by an iron autocracy into a single mould, which had thwarted industrial development and ironed out the cultural languages of all non-Russian people. How fared the nationalities under Soviet rule?
