Autonomization

The question of 1922

In the summer of 1922 the question of how to settle relations among the Soviet republics became pressing. Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Transcaucasian federation were formally independent republics, but the party was single and military, foreign, and economic policy were effectively unified, so a gap existed between legal form and actual operation.

The plan Stalin submitted as People's Commissar for Nationalities was autonomization: the other republics would enter the Russian Federation as autonomous units. Administratively simple, it confirmed in law a relationship that already operated. The plan was adopted in committee in August and the agreement of several republics was obtained.

Lenin's intervention

Lenin, then ill, examined the plan at the end of September and opposed it. His objection was that autonomization expressed Great Russian chauvinism, and that in relations between an oppressor nation and oppressed nations the symbol of formal equality carries substantive meaning. He proposed instead that all republics, Russia included, enter a new union on equal terms.

The plan was revised as a result. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics established in December 1922 took the form of a union of equal republics, with the right of secession written in. He returned to the question afterwards in On the Question of Nationalities or Autonomization, criticizing the handling of the Georgian affair by Ordzhonikidze and Stalin.

Consequences

The gap between legal form and the actual structure of power was not closed. The union was formally a federation of republics, but a single party apparatus decided appointments and policy in all of them, so the right of secession remained a clause without any procedure for use. This double structure became a defining feature of the Soviet state.

The form was not meaningless, however. Because the republic as a unit reproduced itself with its own territory, language, education system, and party apparatus, these units functioned at once as political actors when central control weakened in the late 1980s. That the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 proceeded through declarations of independence by republics was a consequence of the form settled in 1922. The autonomization dispute is also treated as the point at which the relationship between Lenin and Stalin decisively parted.