Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia

Why this document came first

Imperial Russia was a multinational empire in which non-Russians were more than half the population, and its discriminations were written into law, from bans on schooling in minority languages to the Pale of Settlement. Declaring those abolished within days of taking power was the fastest way to tell the borderlands what the new government intended.

Beyond the four principles the declaration carried no procedure. Implementation fell to the People's Commissariat for Nationalities (Narkomnats), and which unit received which status was settled case by case over the years that followed.

Did it work as declared

Finland's independence was recognised that December, and Poland and the Baltic states separated. But where non-Bolshevik governments declared independence, in Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia, Soviet power arrived through civil war and the Red Army. Reading the subject of self-determination as the working people of a nation rather than the nation as a whole is what justified that outcome, and it became the basic grammar of Soviet nationality policy thereafter.

What survived

Of the four principles, the one whose wording lasted was self-determination. The union treaty of 1922 and every constitution after it carried it over as the republics' right of secession, and it was never deleted. Long after the policy had been reversed, the ground the republics cited when they left the union after 1988 was that clause of the Soviet constitution itself.