Formation of the USSR

On the Ruins of Empire: Six Republics Forged by Civil War and Treaty

In December 1922, what the Bolsheviks held across the territory of the former Russian Empire was not a single state but six formally independent countries. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, and the three Caucasus republics (Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia) each existed as a separate sovereign Soviet republic. To understand how this strange map came about, one must go back to November 1917.

On 15 November 1917 (2 November Old Style), the Bolshevik government issued the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia. Signed by Lenin and Stalin, the document proclaimed equality and sovereignty for all the peoples of the former empire, including the right to secession and the formation of independent states. For the Bolsheviks, who had condemned the Tsarist order as a 'prison of nations,' this was both an ideological commitment and a practical instrument for securing non-Russian support during the Civil War. Finland, Poland, and the three Baltic states exercised this opportunity to secede permanently; in Ukraine, Belarus, and the Caucasus, independent republics were proclaimed, only to be Sovietized as the Red Army advanced. Georgia alone persisted as an independent state under a Menshevik government until February 1921.

As the Civil War entered its final phase in the autumn of 1920, the Bolshevik leadership confronted a hard reality. The industrial heartland of central Russia could not function without Ukrainian grain, Donbas coal, and Caucasian oil. Lenin himself wrote in October 1920: 'Central Russia, that hearth of the world revolution, cannot hold out long without the assistance of the border regions, which abound in raw materials, fuel, and foodstuffs.' This is what gave rise to the bilateral treaty system of 1920–21. On 30 September 1920, a military and economic alliance between the RSFSR and Azerbaijan; on 28 December 1920, the Workers' and Peasants' Union Treaty between the RSFSR and Ukraine; on 16 January 1921, an analogous treaty with Belarus: these agreements preserved the formal sovereignty of each republic while integrating the key sectors of military affairs, the economy, and foreign policy. As early as 27 January 1920, the Ukrainian Revolutionary Committee had gone so far as to declare that all decrees and resolutions of the Ukrainian SSR relating to bodies connected by agreement with the RSFSR were to be annulled and replaced by RSFSR decrees.

Yet this treaty system carried a fundamental contradiction. Constitutionally, each republic was sovereign, but the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), which governed all of them, was a single centralized organization. The 'independence' of the republics was independence on paper; real decisions were taken by the Politburo of the Party Central Committee in Moscow. This contradiction, born of civil war, was tolerated as a wartime expedient but could not be sustained once postwar reconstruction began.

The situation in 1921 was urgent. After World War I and the Civil War, industrial output had collapsed to below 20 percent of its 1913 level. The great famine of 1921–22 claimed roughly five million lives across the Volga region, Ukraine, and the Caucasus. The forced grain requisitions of War Communism had triggered the Tambov Rebellion and the Kronstadt uprising, and in March 1921 Lenin was compelled to retreat to the New Economic Policy (NEP).

Diplomatic pressure was mounting as well. At the Genoa Conference in April 1922, the former Entente powers demanded that the Soviet regime assume the Tsarist debts and compensate for the nationalization of foreign assets. Ahead of the conference, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgy Chicherin sent an official inquiry to the RSFSR authorities asking whether the RSFSR could legally represent the interests of the other Soviet republics, a moment that laid bare the need to bind the republics together into a single diplomatic front. The separate Treaty of Rapallo, signed between Soviet Russia and Germany on 16 April 1922, saw Germany de facto recognize the RSFSR's authority over its 'federated republics.'

In short, by mid-1922 six Soviet republics coexisted on the ruins of the old empire, but their relations were legally and practically ambiguous. Economic reconstruction demanded a unified plan; the international arena demanded a single voice; and the contradiction of one party governing multiple states was becoming harder to sustain. The fight over the form of the state (Stalin's autonomization plan versus Lenin's federation) thus began in a pot that was already boiling.

Independent in Form, One State in Fact: The Treaty System and the Transcaucasian Federation

As the Civil War drew to a close, six Soviet republics coexisted on the territory of the former Russian Empire: the RSFSR, Ukraine, Belorussia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia. In form, these republics were fully independent sovereign states, each with its own constitution, government, and even a commissariat of foreign affairs. But the shared battlefield of the Civil War had already woven them into a single functioning state apparatus. The Red Army's high command was in Moscow; the railway network and telegraph operated as a single system; and the economy, under War Communism, was de facto unified.

It was this contradictory condition, formal independence alongside practical integration, that a series of bilateral treaties institutionalized between the autumn of 1920 and early 1921. First came the Military and Economic Union Treaty between the RSFSR and Azerbaijan on 30 September 1920, followed by the Workers' and Peasants' Union Treaty between the RSFSR and Ukraine on 28 December 1920, and an identically named treaty between the RSFSR and Belorussia on 16 January 1921. The Ukrainian treaty became the model for the system. Its preamble declared mutual recognition of the two republics' "independence and sovereignty," yet simultaneously declared seven commissariats "unified": military and naval affairs, the Supreme Council of the National Economy, foreign trade, finance, labor, transport, and posts and telegraph. These unified commissariats were placed under the RSFSR Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom); the Ukrainian side was permitted only to station "plenipotentiaries" for those departments within its own Sovnarkom. Ukrainian representatives participated by sending delegates to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK), but decision-making authority rested with Moscow. In short, these treaties proclaimed that the republics "united" as equal sovereign states while creating a structure that governed through the institutions of the RSFSR.

This treaty system immediately generated two opposing political meanings. On one hand, the very fact that the republics concluded treaties with the RSFSR as "independent states" confirmed their sovereignty vis-a-vis the outside world: Ukraine even signed a separate treaty with Turkey in early 1922. On the other hand, the operation of the unified commissariats rendered republican borders practically irrelevant, and for some leaders in Moscow, particularly People's Commissar for Nationalities Joseph Stalin, this system was merely a transitional stage on the road to full incorporation into the RSFSR.

In the Caucasus, this tension expressed itself most sharply. After Azerbaijan (April 1920), Armenia (November 1920), and Georgia (February 1921) were each occupied by the Red Army and Sovietized in succession, the three republics found themselves in a vortex of border disputes, interethnic conflict, and economic collapse. The oil industry of Baku, Georgian tea cultivation, and the railway network could not be operated in separation. Sergo Ordzhonikidze, who headed the Caucasian Bureau (Kavbiuro) of the RCP(b) Central Committee, was convinced that the only way to bring order out of this chaos was to bind the three republics into a single federation. Stalin fully agreed, and Lenin initially raised no objection.

A substantial section of the Georgian Communist Party, however, regarded this project as the liquidation of Georgian sovereignty. Underlying the dispute was an earlier confrontation: in the summer of 1921, Stalin had removed Filipp Makharadze as chairman of the Georgian Revolutionary Committee for being too lenient toward the Mensheviks and too insistent on national autonomy, replacing him with Polikarp Mdivani. Yet it was this same Mdivani who now became Moscow's most stubborn opponent on the federation question. He and his comrades argued that Georgia, like the other republics, should join the future Soviet Union directly as an individual member, not through the intermediate stage of a Transcaucasian federation. In their eyes, the Transcaucasian Federation was a device for diluting Georgian statehood alongside Azerbaijan and Armenia.

On 12 March 1922, overriding this opposition, a conference of representatives from the three republics convened in Tiflis and proclaimed the establishment of the Federative Union of Socialist Soviet Republics of Transcaucasia (FSSSRZ). Unified bodies were created for military affairs, the economy, finance, and foreign trade; each republic retained formal autonomy, but substantive authority passed to the Union Council. Ordzhonikidze and Stalin saw this as the "normalization" of the Caucasus. Mdivani and the Georgian opposition saw it as the institutionalization of conquest. That the same document could sustain two such contradictory interpretations reveals that, even before the edifice of the Soviet Union was erected, its blueprint was already a battlefield.

The leaderships of Armenia and Azerbaijan were less hostile toward the federation than the Georgians. Armenia desperately needed security guarantees on its border with Turkey; Azerbaijan needed to secure export routes for Baku's oil. For them, the federation offered a framework for arbitration of disputes and economic reconstruction. But even this "pragmatic acceptance" was less voluntary than it appeared: it was substantially the product of relentless pressure from Ordzhonikidze's Kavbiuro. The pattern that first emerged in this episode, Moscow pushing while local communists resisted and that resistance was branded a "national deviation," was a preview of the larger confrontation that would unfold in the autumn of 1922.

Autonomization vs. Federation: The September Lenin and Stalin Clashed

On 10 August 1922, the Politburo instructed the Orgburo to set up a commission to examine the relations between the RSFSR and the independent Soviet republics. Appointed to it were Stalin as Commissar of Nationalities, Grigory Sokolnikov, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Christian Rakovsky, and representatives of each republic. Stalin held the pen.

His draft was simple: the Soviet republics of Ukraine, Byelorussia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia were to 'enter' the RSFSR 'with the rights of autonomous republics.' Their commissariats for foreign affairs, defense, transport, and post and telegraph would be merged with those of the RSFSR; their commissariats for finance, labor, food, and the national economy would be subject to RSFSR directives; only education, justice, internal affairs, agriculture, and health would remain independent. Decisions of the RSFSR All-Russia Central Executive Committee and Sovnarkom would bind every republic. It was de facto absorption: the formal independence the republics still enjoyed reduced to a shell under central control.

Stalin's motive was explicit. As he wrote to Lenin on 22 September, four years of civil war had forced Moscow to 'demonstrate liberalism in the national question' to break international isolation, and the result was the growth among republic communists of 'real and consistent social-independents demanding real independence in every sense.' For Stalin, the union of independent republics had never been serious; it was a 'game,' and the problem was those who took the words at face value.

Meeting on 23–24 September under Vyacheslav Molotov's chairmanship, the commission approved Stalin's draft. Only the Georgian representative Polikarp Mdivani voted against; the Ukrainian Grigory Petrovsky abstained. The Georgian party Central Committee had already resolved on 15 September, after reviewing Stalin's theses, that 'a union in the form of autonomization of the independent republics is premature' and that 'all attributes of independence should be preserved.' The Byelorussian Central Committee likewise favored preserving treaty relations among independent republics. The Ukrainian Central Committee had not even discussed it. Rakovsky, on leave in Crimea, sent Stalin a long letter of dissent on 28 September, warning that the draft amounted to 'the formal abolition of the independent republics' and would undermine proletarian Russia's liberating role.

On 25 September all the commission's materials (Stalin's draft, the voting record, the resolutions of each republic's party central committee) were sent to Lenin at his sickbed in Gorki. Lenin immediately summoned Stalin for a two-hour-forty-minute talk; the day before he had seen Sokolnikov, the next day he would see Mdivani. Then, on 26 September, he sent a letter for the Politburo members to Kamenev. This document changed the entire trajectory of the union's formation.

Lenin's letter opens in a strikingly practical, moderate tone. Noting that 'Stalin tends to be somewhat hasty,' he reports that Stalin has already agreed to one concession: in Clause 1, instead of 'entry into the RSFSR,' they would write 'formal unification with the RSFSR in a Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia.' Lenin then proposes: alongside the RSFSR's All-Russia Central Executive Committee, create a 'Federal All-Union Central Executive Committee of the Union of the Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia'; let merged commissariats have representatives from each republic; make all changes by agreement of the republics' central executive committees.

The core sentence reads: 'The important thing is not to provide material for the "pro-independence" people, not to destroy their independence, but to create another new storey, a federation of equal republics.'

Lenin did not attack Stalin openly. By placing the word 'independent' in scare quotes when referring to Mdivani ('suspected of "independent" sentiments'), he quietly invalidated Stalin's 'social-independist' label while avoiding a direct clash. But Stalin felt the humiliation. In his reply to the Politburo on 27 September, while accepting the union formula itself, he struck back: 'There can hardly be any doubt that this "hastiness" gives nourishment to the "independents" at the expense of Comrade Lenin's national liberalism.' The exchange of notes between Stalin and Kamenev at the Politburo the next day was rawer still. 'Ilyich has gone to war in defense of independence,' Kamenev wrote. Stalin answered: 'What is needed, in my opinion, is firmness against Ilyich. If a pair of Georgian Mensheviks influences the Georgian communists, and the latter influence Ilyich, then what has "independence" got to do with it?' Kamenev's reply was practical: 'I think that since Vladimir Ilyich insists, resisting will make things worse.' Stalin: 'I don't know. Let him do as he sees fit.'

On 6 October, the Central Committee plenum (Lenin absent due to his health) adopted the union formula Lenin had revised. Stalin backed down; the autonomization draft was dead. As Mdivani later recorded: 'At first (without Lenin) they beat us like bullies, mocking us, but then, when Lenin intervened, the matter turned toward communist reason. The voluntary union on the basis of equality was adopted, and the Great-Russian chauvinists themselves came under attack.' But the victory was precarious. Stalin had conceded, not been convinced. His characterization of Lenin as a 'national liberal' was not the last word in this dispute.

One Blow and One Congress: From the Georgian Affair to the Bolshoi Theatre

Three days after the October Central Committee plenum adopted Lenin's formula of a union of equals, the Georgian Communist Party split. The Central Committee led by Mdivani and Makharadze demanded that Georgia enter the USSR directly, not through the Transcaucasian federation. They saw Ordzhonikidze's Transcaucasian party committee (Zakkraikom) as trampling republican sovereignty. Ordzhonikidze called it 'national deviation.' At 2:55 a.m. on 21 October, Mdivani appealed by direct telegraph from Tiflis to Kamenev and Bukharin against Ordzhonikidze's 'tyranny.' The same day Lenin sent a telegram rebuking Mdivani, siding with Ordzhonikidze. Yet the next day, 22 October, the Georgian Central Committee took the unprecedented step of resigning as a body.

Ordzhonikidze immediately appointed a new Central Committee. Open internal war followed. The Mdivani group flooded Moscow with protest letters, while Ordzhonikidze's Kavbiuro branded them 'national deviationists.' The conflict peaked in November. Alexei Rykov, dispatched to Tiflis as Lenin's personal emissary, was staying at Ordzhonikidze's apartment when Akaki Kabakhidze, an Old Bolshevik and Mdivani supporter who had known Rykov in Siberian exile, came to visit. The conversation inevitably turned to Georgian politics. Ordzhonikidze, in a fury, struck Kabakhidze. The incident was stopped only by the intervention of Rykov and his wife.

This incident was decisive for Lenin. He sent Felix Dzerzhinsky to Tiflis to head an investigative commission, but Dzerzhinsky filed a report sympathetic to Ordzhonikidze and Stalin, downplaying the abuses. When Dzerzhinsky returned to Moscow, Lenin had already heard the truth from Rykov. That Dzerzhinsky's report effectively defended Ordzhonikidze enraged Lenin, and that rage fed directly into the dictation of 'The Question of Nationalities or Autonomisation.'

Yet alongside all this furious political combat, the machinery of union formation never stopped. On 29 December, a conference of plenipotentiary delegations from the four republics, Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Transcaucasia, met under Stalin's chairmanship and approved the Declaration and the Treaty on the Formation of the USSR. On the afternoon of 30 December, 2,215 delegates gathered in Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre. Over 90 percent were members of the Russian Communist Party. Lenin, confined to his sickbed, was elected honorary chairman but could not attend. Kalinin chaired the congress.

Stalin delivered the founding report. He framed it as a summation of five years of Soviet power: the first period of civil war ruin, overcome to build the Red Army, and the present period in which the republics must pool their strength for economic recovery. He read out the Declaration and the Treaty and moved their adoption, which the congress passed unanimously. On Frunze's motion, the documents were to be submitted for final review by each republic's Central Executive Committee. A Union Central Executive Committee of 371 members was elected, with four chairmen representing the four republics: Kalinin, Petrovsky, Chervyakov, and Narimanov.

Outside the theatre, Lenin was already preparing his next battle. His dictations of 'The Question of Nationalities or Autonomisation' were taken down on 31 December, the second day of the congress. From the collective resignation of the Georgian Central Committee to the applause in the Bolshoi, seventy days had passed.

A Dying Lenin and a Living Party: From the Last Dictations to the Twelfth Congress

On 30 December 1922, as the Bolshoi Theatre proclaimed the birth of the Soviet Union, Lenin was in his room at Gorki outside Moscow dictating "The Question of Nationalities or Autonomisation" to his personal secretary Maria Volodicheva. Dictated over two days, it was no celebration. "I seem to have been very guilty before the workers of Russia," Lenin began, "for not intervening energetically and sharply enough in the notorious question of autonomization." Illness that summer and autumn had let the matter "pass me by almost completely."

What enraged him most was Dzerzhinsky's report on Georgia. Hearing that Dzerzhinsky had dismissed Ordzhonikidze's striking of the Georgian communist Kabakhidze, Lenin wrote: "If things had gone so far that Ordzhonikidze could lose control and resort to physical violence, you can imagine the swamp we have landed in." He diagnosed the "fatal role" played by Stalin's "haste and his enthusiasm for administration" and "his spite against the notorious 'social-nationalism.'" He held "Stalin and Dzerzhinsky, of course" politically responsible.

The real explosive charge in the text, however, was not the personal indictment but the refounding of principle. Lenin rejected abstract talk of nationalism and insisted: "One must distinguish the nationalism of an oppressor nation from the nationalism of an oppressed nation, the nationalism of a big nation from that of a small nation." The internationalism of a formerly oppressing great nation required going beyond formal equality to "that inequality which would compensate, on the part of the oppressing nation, the big nation, for the inequality that emerges in actual life." This rewrote the philosophical basis of Bolshevik nationality policy. Lenin went further, urging the party not to rule out "returning at the next Congress of Soviets and leaving the union of Soviet socialist republics only in military and diplomatic respects, while restoring the full independence of the individual commissariats in all others."

The text was aimed at the party congress, but Lenin would never reach the rostrum. On 5 March 1923, with a third stroke imminent, he wrote to Trotsky: "Esteemed Comrade Trotsky! I would ask you very much to undertake the defense of the Georgian case at the Central Committee. The case is now under 'persecution' by Stalin and Dzerzhinsky, and I cannot rely on their impartiality." The next day he told the Georgian opposition leaders Mdivani and Makharadze: "I follow your case with all my heart. I am outraged by Ordzhonikidze's arrogance and the connivance of Stalin and Dzerzhinsky." But Trotsky kept Lenin's text under wraps for more than a month. In the meantime he sought compromise by amending Stalin's draft theses for the congress. He succeeded in naming Great-Russian chauvinism the "main danger," but on the congress floor itself he neither read Lenin's text aloud nor spoke for Mdivani.

The Twelfth Party Congress (17–25 April 1923) was the first congress Lenin missed. Kamenev opened by assuring delegates that Lenin would "soon seize once more the helm of world revolution," but the congress's real center of gravity was shifting toward Stalin. Lenin's text was read only at the closed 'senior council' (senioren-konvent) of delegation leaders, not on the congress floor, and Kamenev blocked Mdivani's attempts to quote from it.

In his report on the national question, Stalin attacked two deviations: Great-Russian chauvinism and local nationalism. While acknowledging Great-Russian chauvinism as the "main danger," he insisted that "the national question has its limits": the "higher question of working-class power" could override the right to self-determination. This logic sidestepped the most radical conclusion of Lenin's dictation, his proposal to shrink the union to military and diplomatic functions.

The real fight erupted in the congress's national-section session. Rakovsky, the Ukrainian premier, called the creation of the USSR a "colossal break" (kolossal'naia lomka) and condemned the centralization that was hollowing out the sovereignty of the republics. Invoking Lenin's December text directly, he warned that the more the center encroached on republican powers, the more the union would become a dead letter. Skrypnyk reinforced the point with concrete Ukrainian cases, insisting that formal equality alone was not enough.

Yet the final resolution was a compromise in which both sides won something. Great-Russian chauvinism was named the main danger, and korenizatsiya, the policy of running administration, schools, and publishing in national languages and systematically training national cadres in every republic, was adopted as official party line. It was a declaration, without precedent in the world of its time, committing the state to the institutional development of minority nations. But the center retained its strong powers, and within the single centralized party the republican party organizations remained subordinated to the decisions of the Moscow Politburo. The tension Lenin's last dictations had warned of, between formal federation and substantive centralism, already existed in finished form on the congress floor. The text itself remained unpublished until 1956.

The Constitution as Battlefield: Dividing Power Between Union and Republic

The Declaration and Treaty of 30 December 1922 had sketched only the outlines of the new state; the actual division of powers still had to be filled in by a constitution. On 10 January 1923, the Presidium of the Union Central Executive Committee set up six commissions: on the budget, the Supreme Court, the flag and coat of arms, the structure of the people's commissariats, the regulations of the CEC, and personnel. If the Twelfth Party Congress of April 1923 had set the broad direction on the national question, the drafting of the constitution was the fight to translate that direction into articles.

The fiercest clash over the draft centered on the structure of the commissariats. Article 50 of the constitution divided the union people's commissariats into three tiers. Five were "all-union" (Foreign Affairs, Military and Naval Affairs, Foreign Trade, Transport, and Post and Telegraph) and had only direct delegates in the republics, bypassing the republic governments entirely. Another five were "unified" (the Supreme Council of National Economy, Finance, Labor, Workers' and Peasants' Inspection, and Supplies), with commissariats of the same name in each republic forming a dual chain of command with Moscow. The remainder (Education, Health, Justice, Internal Affairs, Agriculture, and Social Security) remained purely republican commissariats, spheres into which the union constitution did not reach. This three-tier architecture was at once a codification of the power balance between union and republics and a channel for creeping centralization. The unified commissariats remained formally in republican hands, but their directives, budgets, and personnel were set by the union commissariats.

What Rakovsky saw in this edifice was "dead-handed centralism." At the June 1923 Central Committee conference on implementing the Twelfth Congress decisions, he protested that Stalin was giving the federation "a more centralist twist." "I consider that we Ukrainians are no less communist than Stalin," the transcript records him saying. Stalin shot back that Rakovsky and Skrypnyk were effectively demanding not federation but "confederation," and the majority sided with the General Secretary. The article Rakovsky fought for down to the wire was Article 59: the right of a republic Central Executive Committee to suspend orders of a union people's commissariat when those orders were "in evident incompatibility with the federal constitution, federal legislation, or legislation of the member republic." For Rakovsky this was the last redoubt of republic sovereignty. His broader demand, that "the sovereignty of the individual republics of the Union is restricted only by the limits specified in the treaties and only within the limits of the Union's jurisdiction," did not prevail, but the article itself survived.

The legislative structure was no less contested. The constitution created a bicameral CEC: a Federal Soviet of 371 members elected proportionally to population, and a Soviet of Nationalities with five delegates from each union republic and one from each autonomous republic. At the national section of the Twelfth Congress, Rakovsky pointed out that the 15 autonomous republics and oblasts within the RSFSR, each with a vote equal to Ukraine's or Belorussia's, would give the Russian federation at least 280 of the 360 seats. He moved that no single republic hold more than two-fifths of the seats in the upper chamber. Stalin dismissed the motion as "state fetishism," and it was voted down. The RSFSR's overwhelming weight was institutionalized.

At the Central Committee Plenum on 26-27 June 1923, the draft constitution was debated, amended, and approved. On 6 July, the second session of the Union CEC adopted the draft together with a resolution "On Bringing into Effect the Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics." From that day the constitution was in force in practice. Each republic's CEC then reviewed it, and on 31 January 1924 the Second All-Union Congress of Soviets ratified it unanimously. The final text, now 72 articles in eleven chapters, placed the original Declaration and Treaty at its head and inscribed in Article 4 that "each one of the member Republics retains the right to freely withdraw from the union." Yet Article 1(w) of that same constitution empowered the union "to abrogate the acts of the Congresses of Soviets and the Central Executive Committees of the member Republics contrary to the present Constitution." Sovereignty and centralization were carved into the same document, side by side.

The State That Built Nations: Korenizatsiya on the Ground

In the summer of 1923 the Ukrainian government launched korenizatsiya with two decrees. The 27 July decree 'On Ukrainization of Schools and Cultural Institutions' ordered all schools switched to Ukrainian within two years. The 1 August decree 'On Ensuring Language Equality and Promoting Ukrainian Culture' required all public officials to master Ukrainian within two years and mandated that official business be conducted in Ukrainian. The problem was that the party and state apparatus tasked with enforcing these decrees was itself overwhelmingly Russian-speaking. In 1922 ethnic Ukrainians made up only 23 percent of CP(B)U members, and only 11 percent of members could speak Ukrainian.

Resistance was immediate. Dmytro Lebid, the CP(B)U's real power-holder, attacked Ukrainization as 'a compromise with Petliura elements.' But Moscow did not retreat. In April 1925 the party Central Committee adopted a resolution to accelerate Ukrainization, and later that year Stalin appointed Lazar Kaganovich, a native Russian speaker, as CP(B)U first secretary. With the paradoxical logic that a Russian speaker had no grounds to refuse, Kaganovich drove Ukrainization harder than anyone. Officials who delayed received dismissal notices; a corps of 'Ukrainization inspectors' was authorized to descend on institutions without warning.

The transformation of education was the most dramatic. In the 1922-23 school year fewer than 50 percent of students attended Ukrainian-language schools; by 1932-33 the figure reached 88 percent. In higher education, Ukrainian-language instruction rose from 33 percent in 1926 to 58 percent in 1929. By 1932, 89 percent of newspaper circulation in the republic was in Ukrainian, up from 50 percent in 1925. Three-quarters of theater performances were staged in Ukrainian, and the Odesa and Kyiv film studios produced Ukrainian-language films.

Behind this radical turn stood two education commissars. Oleksandr Shumsky (1925-27) drove Ukrainization at its most aggressive pace and also demanded ethnic representation in the party leadership. He publicly called on Stalin to hand the CP(B)U first secretary post to a Ukrainian, and was removed in 1927 for 'national deviationism.' His successor, Mykola Skrypnyk, advanced Ukrainization further while avoiding direct collision with Stalin. The 'Skrypnyk orthography' of 1928, which freed Ukrainian spelling from Russian influence, and the compilation of Ukrainian scholarly terminological dictionaries were his signature legacies.

The human composition of the party and state also shifted. The Ukrainian share of CP(B)U membership rose from 23 percent in 1922 to 60 percent in 1933, while the Russian share fell from 54 percent to 23 percent. Cities changed color: between 1923 and 1933 the Ukrainian share of Kharkiv's population rose from 38 to 50 percent, Kyiv's from 27 to 42 percent, Dnipropetrovsk's from 16 to 48 percent.

Ukraine's transformation was the largest and best-documented case, but korenizatsiya was a simultaneous experiment across the union. In Belarus, Belorussianization was proclaimed in 1924; by 1928 nearly 80 percent of schools taught in Belarusian, up from only 28 percent in the mid-1920s. In Central Asia, Latin-based scripts were devised for peoples who had no writing system. The First All-Union Turkological Congress in Baku in 1926 resolved to convert Turkic languages to the Latin alphabet, a shift led by Azerbaijan. The 'Committee of the North' brought scripts and schools to some thirty minority peoples of Siberia and the Far North. The 1926 census recorded literacy rates of 25.2 percent in Kazakhstan, 10.6 percent in Uzbekistan, and 3.7 percent in Tajikistan; a decade later most republics had surpassed 70 percent.

Yet korenizatsiya carried an internal tension from the start. Its goal was not the free development of nations but the reinforcement of Soviet power through national forms. The more national-language schools, newspapers, and cadres multiplied, the more they produced national elites with interests distinct from the center. Figures like Shumsky and Skrypnyk in Ukraine, and Pryshchep in Belarus, had arrived as Moscow's enforcers but over time became voices for their republics' interests. The system Terry Martin called an 'affirmative action empire' was designed to cultivate nations, and was bound to perceive those nations as a danger once they were cultivated. When the first measure that spelled the end of Ukrainization came in December 1932, the wholesale abolition of Ukrainian-language education within the RSFSR, the cost of that contradiction was already being tallied in collectivization and famine.

Federation or Empire: A Century of Argument

What the formation of the USSR settled and what it did not has been the subject of sharp disagreement among historians for nearly a century. The compromise of December 1922 was born carrying at least three unresolved tensions. First, the contradiction between a constitution that guaranteed every republic's right of secession and a single, centralized party. Second, the gap between the principle of an equal union of national republics and the overwhelming weight of the Russian republic in practice. Third, the collision between the nation-building policy of korenizatsiya and the party's commitment to a single proletarian internationalism. These three tensions shadowed the Soviet Union until its end in 1991.

Cold War historiography was dominated by the interpretation of Richard Pipes. In The Formation of the Soviet Union (1954), Pipes argued that Soviet federalism was a sham. The republics' formal sovereignty was a device for Moscow to seize control of the periphery, and the federal structure was camouflage for centralization. For Pipes, the USSR was an "empire in federal disguise," and its collapse in 1991 was the inevitable reckoning when the disguise wore thin.

The dissolution of the USSR and the opening of the archives fundamentally altered this landscape. Terry Martin, in The Affirmative Action Empire (2001), accepted the label "empire" but reached the opposite conclusion. Drawing on vast party records, Martin demonstrated that the Soviet state of the 1920s systematically promoted non-Russian languages, schooling, and cadres on an unprecedented scale. Korenizatsiya, which he termed "affirmative action," was not a ruse but a resource-backed state policy. In Martin's reading, the USSR was a unique multi-ethnic state that moved in the opposite direction from the imperial powers.

Francine Hirsch's Empire of Nations (2005) intervened from yet another angle. She showed that Soviet nationality policy inherited and continued the ethnographic knowledge and personnel of the tsarist empire, stressing continuity where Martin had stressed rupture. The two studies diverged in method and emphasis, but together they demonstrated that pre-1991 scholarship had underestimated the real operation of Soviet nationality policy.

One strand of the contemporary debate questions the very dichotomy of "federation versus empire." The political scientist Tania Raffass argued in her 2012 study that the formation of Western federations such as the United States and Switzerland was itself saturated with violence and coercion, and that the "sham federation" thesis applied to the USSR rests on a normative double standard. Boris Kolonitskii, meanwhile, interprets the formation of the USSR as a "compromise" among the various national-communist forces inside the party: the product not of any single architect's blueprint but of brutal choices made under the extreme conditions of civil war to survive.

The deepest question left by the formation of the Soviet Union remains open. The experiment of erecting a union of equal nations on the ruins of an empire asked whether form could change reality, whether a multi-ethnic state could endure without centralization, and whether the legacy of empire could be liquidated by institutions. The post-1991 world has answered these questions in multiple ways, but the questions themselves are still those first asked in the Bolshoi Theatre in December 1922.

What Was Settled, What Was Not, and a Century's Judgment

The formation process of 1922–24 settled three things. First, the state form: a union was established in which Russia joined alongside the other republics on nominally equal terms, rather than absorbing them through autonomization. This outcome was impossible without Lenin's two interventions, the September letter and the December dictations. Second, a state that recognized and cultivated nations: the Twelfth Congress resolution on korenizatsiya gave the republics both the responsibility and the resources to build national-language schools, national cadres, and national cultural institutions. Third, the constitutional architecture including the right of secession. Article 4 of the 1924 Constitution enshrined each union republic's 'right freely to secede from the Union,' and no one could have predicted that this clause would become the legal basis for the Belovezha Accords of December 1991.

What the formation process did not resolve, however, was the central tension between the centralism of a single party and the decentralization of a federation. The Politburo decided the appointment and removal of republic cadres; the security organs operated under Moscow's chain of command; the Union Central Executive Committee was an instrument for ratifying party decisions. This contradiction exploded in the 1930s during Stalin's 'Great Retreat': the Skrypnyk affair, the rollback of Ukrainization, the reassertion of the Russian language and the Russian people's primacy. The affirmative-action federation of the 1920s gradually turned into a hierarchical empire in which Russians were 'first among equals.'

The dominant Cold War interpretation in Western scholarship is represented by Richard Pipes's The Formation of the Soviet Union (1954). For Pipes, the USSR was an empire that had merely 'changed the sign on the door,' and the federation's outward form was camouflage for a strategy of divide-and-rule among nationalities. This view was fundamentally revised by the scholars of the 1990s 'imperial turn': Terry Martin, Ronald Suny, and Francine Hirsch. Martin proposed the paradoxical term 'affirmative action empire' precisely because the Soviet Union simultaneously pursued two apparently incompatible tasks, imperial centralization and the cultivation of nations. Hirsch demonstrated that the Soviet national republics were not simply lines drawn by Moscow but the product of ethnographic knowledge accumulated by former imperial scholars, combined with political negotiation by local elites. Suny argued that national identity was not 'false consciousness' but a real political force, and that the union's federal structure provided the very framework for national mobilization.

Today's assessment rejects both extremes. The Soviet Union was neither a simple continuation of the tsarist empire nor a pure project of anti-imperial liberation. It was a contradictory state that suppressed nations while producing them, centralized while nativizing, destroyed while it built. That contradiction was both the engine that held the union together for nearly seventy years and the blueprint for its undoing in 1991.