Library:Soviet But Not Russian

Soviet But Not Russian: The 'Other' Peoples of the Soviet Union
Author	William Mandel
First published	1985 Edmonton
Type	Book
Source	https://archive.org/details/SovietButNotRussian/mode/1up
PDF	https://ia902801.us.archive.org/13/items/SovietButNotRussian/Soviet%20But%20Not%20Russian.pdf
Audiobook

UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS, Homelands of some of the many peoples of the Soviet Union are indicated. Since peoples of any Soviet nationality are free to live anywhere in the USSR, and the Soviets are very mobile, large numbers of every nationality live and work far from their traditional homelands.

UNION (Full Ethnic) REPUBLICS

The nation for which each Soviet Socialist Republic is named is a majority within its borders except for the Kazakhs and Kirgiz, who are less than half the population in their native territories.
Armenia S.S.R.	3,119,000
Azerbaijan S.S.R.	6,202,000
Belorussian S.S.R.	9,675,000
Estonian S.S.R.	1,485,000
Georgian S.S.R.	5,071,000
Kazakh S.S.R.	15,053,000
Kirgiz S.S.R.	3,653,000
Latvian S.S.R.	2,539,000
Lithuanian S.S.R.	3,445,000
Moldovian S.S.R.	3,995,000
Russian S.F.S.R.	139,165,000
Tajik S.S.R.	4,007,000
Turkmen S.S.R.	2,897,000
Ukrainian S.S.R.	50,135,000
Uzbok S.S.R.	16,158,000

AUTONOMOUS REPUBLICS

Many of these peoples are minorities in their own native territories, but the top party and government posts are reserved for them
Abkhaz A.S.S.R. (Georgia)	509,000
Adjhar (Ajar) A.S.S.R. (Georgia)	362,000
Bashkir A.S.S.R. (Russia)	3,865,000
Buryat A.S.S.R. (Russia)	929,000
Chechen-Ingush A.S.S.R. (Russia)	1,170,000
Chuvash A.S.S.R. (Russia)	1,311,000
Daghestan A.S.S.R. (Russia)	1,672,000
Kabardin-Balkar A.S.S.R. (Russia)	688,000
Kalmyk A.S.S.R. (Russia)	301,000
Karakalpak A.S.S.R. (Uzbek)	957,000
Karelian A.S.S.R. (Russia)	746,000
Komi A.S.S.R. (Russia)	1,147,000
Mari A.S.S.R. (Russia)	711,000
Morodovian A.S.S.R. (Russia)	984,000
Nakhichevan A.S.S.R. (Azerbaijan)	247,000
North Ossetian A.S.S.R. (Russia)	601,000
Tatar A.S.S.R. (Russia)	3,453,000
Tuva A.S.S.R. (Russia)	269,000
Udmurt A.S.S.R. (Russia)	1,516,000
Yakut A.S.S.R. (Russia)	883,000

Preface

With one exception, the "other" peoples described are not minorities in the American sense. They arc majorities or in two cases pluralities in the territories in which they developed over the centuries. That explains the name of the country: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union for short. It does not include the neighboring Communist-governed countries such as Poland.

In the USSR, the Russians are one-half the population. The others arc native to languages other than Russian. One-quarter of the entire population does not even claim to know Russian well, their census tells us. These are chiefly among peoples whose languages do not belong to the same family as Russian.

People of any nationality may and do live all over the country. When outside their ancestral territories, they do form minorities in our sense. The Russians themselves are minorities, sometimes large, sometimes very small (as in Armenia), outside the Russian Republic of the USSR.

This book provides separate chapters on the major and some smaller but particularly distinctive geographic nations of the Soviet Union. Other chapters treat related nations grouped to make it possible to relate to them from an American frame of reference. Because of the large Jewish population in the United States, there is a very substantial chapter on the Soviet Jews, although they are less than one percent of the people of the USSR. Not being a majority or plurality anywhere in that country, they are a true minority. There are many other true minorities — Germans, who outnumber the Jews; Poles, outnumbered by the Jews — but public interest in them does not justify separate treatment in a book designed to be read, hopefully studied, but not meant to be an encyclopedia on this subject.

My writing is grounded upon 10 visits to the USSR, beginning with a year of residence, 1931-32. 1 was United Press (UPI) Expert on Russia during World War II, have been a Hoover Institution Fellow at Stanford University, and have taught at U.C. Berkeley, San Francisco and San Jose State universities, and Golden Gate University Law School. My view of what North Americans want to know about the USSR is based largely on the questions put tome by listeners to my radio program on that country, now in its 27th year, students' queries in class, and readers' letters prompted by my earlier books about that country.

My travels, taking me to all 15 ethnic republics, most of them more than once, have included such means as a rented Soviet car in which I taped hitch-hikers of all ages.

When words have the exact flavor of the manner of a living human being, it is hard to disbelieve them even if they are contrary to everything one's education and the media have conditioned one to believe is true. But the moment they show signs of processing by an intermediary, one's prejudices take over and one can relax into the comforting thought that the intermediary is selling a bill of goods, even though he has simply cut and re-arranged for logical sequence and third-person English. Joyce and Faulkner discovered that a long time ago in the field of imaginative writing. The success of Studs Terkel's documentary books is that they present their tape transcripts as they were spoken.

As a consequence, I will make much use of that style. Today that is recognized as sound anthropology. I first started using tape recorders in the Soviet Union in 1966, and have done so on six visits. Some people there are mike-shy, exactly as here. Some will object to being taped but will then say, off mike, essentially the same things others are willing to say into it. Less educated individuals are often, not always, less articulate, which is why I have fewer workers and farmers to quote, relatively. But my intellectuals and professionals are almost always people born at the bottom of the social heap, who moved up thanks to affirmative action or simply the abolition of discrimination.

Although I had both students and travelers very much in mind in the writing, this book does not follow the normal rules for academic texts and certainly not for tourist guides. While a reader's ethnic background may cause him to be most interested in some particular chapter, the book is written to be read through.

My space allocation per country is not in proportion to population, but to Western interest arising out of ethnic backgrounds, and to the richness of my own eyewitness observations or those of highly qualified and vivid authors who knew the situation before my time. 1 have had colorful contact with writers in the Soviet East, South, and West, but social attitudes proved to be much the same, so to reproduce what was said in each case would be boring. The most gripping material about the life of the peasantry in the early Soviet years is from Belorussia. It applies equally to the Ukraine and Russia proper, except for nuances that are purely technical to anyone who is not a specialist on one of those nationalities. The differences among the Soviet countries will appear readily enough. The life of a nomad was obviously not that of a farming peasant. A people that lived in dispersion all over the world, like the Armenians, views matters differently than one very few of whose members have ever emigrated. Peoples with long histories of organized government differ in psychology from those whose first geographic ethnic administrations arose only as a result of Soviet policy.

In this as in all my writings, I am deeply indebted to my wife, Tanya, for research, criticism, and first editing. She too knows Russian and has been virtually all over the Soviet Union, repeatedly. The most detailed criticisms by others are those of Laura X (as she is publicly known), my son David, Drs. Shura and Sidney Saul, and Dr. Stephen Dunn. Particular thanks are due to Jon "Paka" Meachum, who made meticulous comments under the difficult circumstances of a prisoner sharing a cell in a state penitentiary. My colleague at radio station KPFA, Michael Butler, and Prof. Lynn Turgeon, also read an early version of the entire manuscript, and offered comments. An American anthropology graduate of Moscow University, Paula Garb, my daughter Phyllis, and my friends George David, Daisy Goodman, Louis Laub, and Sol Zeltzer, read and offered opinions, some at great length, on individual chapters. All those listed will have to forgive me where I did not accept sound advice for reasons of space, time, or feeling that I had simply done all that I had the energy to do. All are free to offer criticism of the finished product, in print if they desire.

Overview

"How will I recognize you?" I asked Dr. Lily Golden Hanga over the phone. We were arranging to meet in the lobby of my Moscow hotel. A peal of contralto laughter accompanied her answer, in English with a heavy Russian accent. "I'm big and black and fat!"

She turned out to be regal in bearing, large, and most definitely black. A historian, whose doctoral studies focused on the history of African music, she is now a researcher at the Africa Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. She was writing a paper on Black nationalism worldwide when we met. Since then she has assisted an isolated village of a Soviet sub-Arctic ethnic minority to get the community center promised them but delayed by bureaucratic neglect.

Her name is not Russian, obviously. The Golden is from her father, who in 1931 organized a group of sixteen Black families — the men were all graduates of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama — to move to the Soviet Union and teach modern farming to, in her words, the "people of color" in Uzbekistan near Iran, in the Asian part of the country. That is where she was born and grew up. "Some Uzbeks are much blacker than I am." Her own daughter, a Moscow University graduate, is half African.

Actually, there are very few persons of African descent in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — old Russia didn't need to import slaves, since the landowning nobility kept their own fellow Russians in a very slavery-like condition called serfdom. However, over 30,000,000 people (nearly an eighth) don't look "white," but more like Mexicans of Indian heritage or like Orientals or a mixture of both. One such is Tolomush Okeev, Kirgiz film director born in a Soviet village on the Chinese frontier. The story of his assistant, a Kirgiz woman, contains elements of the Soviet "minorities" story in almost classical form. ("Minorities" is placed in quotes, as the Kirgiz are a plurality and, with related Asian people, a majority in the Kirgiz Republic.)

"My name is Rakhia. 1 was born in the family of the very first to be a Communist." — the word is used in the USSR only to describe actual members of the party. "My father was 19 when they gave him his membership card in 1927."

Like most Kirgiz, her parents were nomadic peasants, but "In 1925, they joined a collective farm. My father was the chairman of the farm, then head of the county committee of the Communist Party. Now he's retired, with a personal pension." That is a high honor, something like the result of a private bill in the U.S. Congress.

"I too am one of the 'children of wartime.' I was born in 1942. I saw my father very infrequently because he was always away at work, but my mother was always there by my side. Among us Kirgiz, all children are treasured dearly by their parents, whether there is one in the family or 15.

"And so that's how I grew up, held very dear, the only daughter in the family, and mama always said, 4Be whatever you want, but the most important thing is to respect people. If a person comes into your house, do not ask him questions. Give him water, give him bread. Then ask him, Have you come a long way? From where? If he's from far away, give him your last horse'."

Immediately after graduation from high school, she went to work at the film studio, and later graduated from the USSR Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. "So that's been my work. I'm very happy in it. My husband, Arshan, assists me a great deal. Sometimes I'm away filming for three months at a stretch. We have two little boys, and he takes care of them. In my work, there are times when one works day and night, paying no attention to time. So I'm fortunate that he gives me support, and understands me.

"I regret only that my children did not see how my parents lived, how they were never lazy, and never begrudged anything to anybody. Somebody wanted tea, they always found time for that. They were accustomed to working all the time. I grew up that way; I don't know how to sit around not doing anything. I would like our children's generation to grow up with a love for work. That is our happiness."

At least one film on which she has worked is shown on the art and college circuit in the United States — The Ferocious One, sometimes titled Wolf Kokerek, a moving story of human relations.

Most people don't become anthropologists or movie directors. Nor does everyone have understanding parents who are eager for change. For that very reason the values that seem to have reached the younger generation in the most remote places are particularly impressive. In a park in Dushanbe, capital of Soviet Tajikistan, near the Afghan border, I talked with a young man of 23 who was born not very far away in one of the most desolate and isolated pieces of the Soviet Union, in mountainous country where a peak rises to 25,000 feet. He is a Tajik, some of whom are the dark brown color of most of the peoples of India. There are twice as many Tajiks in Afghanistan as in the USSR.

In the 1960s, he had said to his father: "I'm going to school. I want to be a real person when I grow up, and not a slave in your hands." My father said: 'What do you mean, you don't want to be here and be in my hands? I want it.' But I said to him: 'Now we have Soviet laws. I want to be a person. I love my whole people, no matter what nationality. There's more. I want to be an educated person, and not a worker on a collective farm or a state farm.' Well, he cursed me and I ran away from home again. I graduated from high school. I went to a trade school. I studied there for a year and became an electrician." There could be no thought of not finding work, as guaranteed full employment is built into the system. This one fact has done more to reduce ethnic prejudice than all other measures combined. No one need protect his job by convincing himself that he has more right to it than someone of different appearance or language or religion or gender.

Soviet Turkmenia is the southernmost Soviet republic. On a collective farm there, only 25 miles north of Iran, there is a gallery of paintings commissioned by the farmers to record their lives, past and present. My guide explained that the people on the farm had started at the level of Iran today.

"You see, this one has experienced every hardship, and those people's child is dying, and yet they have to pack up and leave the area," because the landlord wanted them no longer. "Over there you see a peasant: he ploughed the land himself, sowed it himself, threshed it himself, and what's left for him? The ruling khan took his share, the mullah [clergyman] took his, others took theirs, and he's left with a few sacks. That's his share. But this painting is already the period of collectivization, farming getting on its feet. The next one is simply a horse-racing scene, something very popular among Turkmen."

A second large room is lined with portraits. The subjects here do not look defeated, ragged, hungry. An elderly local farmer explained, "These are the people who founded our collective farm, that solid core. This man is one of our brigade leaders— he still is." Waving his arm at the whole gallery and beyond to the farm outside, he went on: "They made all this, starting in 1943. I started working on this farm in 1943. I ploughed a lot of land side by side with them, with horses, with camels.

"They all worked out in the fields. I worked with them every day. That one over there was an active worker, our first brigade leader. He died only three years ago, still young."

That portrait was distinctly larger than the others, a special distinction because, "He was the first to use water from the Kara-Kum Canal." That canal is the only one on earth with dimensions comparable to California's Central Valley Project: for 250 miles, it is wide and deep enough to be used for barge transportation through the desert it irrigates. But because its trace chemicals are different from those of well water, the pioneer in using it for cotton could have been taking a big risk.

The Kara-Kum Canal and California's Central Valley Project canal are the only human works astronauts can see with the naked eye.

One portrait is of a woman. The farmer explained. "When our collective farm was established, she was our first village mayor. She died not long ago. These paintings were done by very prominent artists," he said, pointing to one by Izzat Klychev, a furkmenian. and "People's Painter of the USSR, an artist very well known throughout the entire Soviet Union." It depicted a local wedding "in accordance with our customs."

So a country where painting was forbidden by religion (Turkmenia is Islamic by heritage) now has painters of USSR-wide prominence, and people whose fathers were medieval sharecroppers not only enjoy art but encourage it financially. When we left the village, after dark, it was obvious that there was electricity in every home. (Iran, just over the nearby mountains, produces only a fraction as much power per head of population and the half-million Turkmenians [Turcomans] there, still semi-nomads, are demanding the simplest elements of self-government.)

In 1977, in Moldavia, the European Soviet republic bordering Romania, I spoke with a woman of the Gagauz people, who are about as numerous as Indians in Arizona. She said, "Now, as a people that has only recently acquired a written language," — they adopted an alphabet, based on the Russian, for the first time in 1957 — "we are developing our culture."

"There are some 125,000 Gagauz in Moldavia; about 200,000 in the Soviet Union altogether. The bulk of the Gagauz villages are ethnically pure, though there is now some mixture, due to professional people from the outside who help raise the level of our people's culture, teachers and physicians. But we already have our own people in all the professions that serve a population at a modern level of development.

"We have artists, we have composers, we have our own poets and writers: those who write on the basis of folk themes, legends and those who collect our folklore. Among scholars we have linguists, historians. The anthropology of the Gagauz is being studied by Stepan Karoglu and me. He is researching the intellectual culture of the Gagauz, and I the material culture. Each of us has already written a book — I took my PhD this year. Then in Moscow we have Comrade Guboglo."

I admit I was surprised to learn Guboglo is a Gagauz; I had translated articles of his into English for the American journal, Soviet Anthropology and Archeology. So one of the Soviet Union's leading anthropologists, a man who theorizes on matters far beyond the bounds of his own nationality, is a member of a people who did not even have an alphabet little more than 20 years ago.

That interview was near the Black Sea, at the southernmost end of the European Soviet republics. At the northwestern end, on the Baltic Sea across from Sweden, lies Lithuania, the only Roman Catholic country in the USSR. In the Department of Philosophy, Law and Sociology of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, 1 asked about the origins of the scholars I was taping. The department head, Jonas Macevicius, said he was of peasant birth. Another OVERVIEW 19 answered: "Peasant," a third: "workingclass." Dr. Macevicius said: "A majority are from the peasantry. We all started in life by taking cows to pasture. Then we gained the opportunity to study," in Soviet times, which for Lithuania began in 1940. He spoke of his own life before that:

"My family had 14 acres. Naturally it was impossible for us all to go to school. To begin with, you had to pay and then you needed what to live on. Only rare individuals broke through this barrier. True, I personally did study. First I graduated the six-year elementary school, and then from a technical high school. But those were under terrible conditions of semi-starvation, when I had to ration myself. Hanging on was terrible, terrible, awful. But the mass of the people, the mass just didn't make it through school."

Many did not make it even to school. Macevicius had twelve brothers and sisters. "Most of them died. The doctor wasn't called. Only folk remedies. Those who got past the illnesses survived, and those who didn't died. To call a doctor cost five leetu. That was a lot — on five leetu I lived seven days, sometimes more."

Great numbers of American Jews whose parents or grandparents emigrated from the Russian Empire before the Revolution have their roots in Lithuania. Its capital, Vilnius, was a traditional focus of European Jewish culture (they called it Vilno or Wilna). During the Nazi occupation in World War II, nearly all the Jews there were exterminated. Only two categories escaped: those who accepted the Soviet offer of priority evacuation eastward (many refused because they could not believe the Germans would really murder everybody), and those who fought as guerrillas. The latter were led by Henrikas Zimanas, today a national hero of Lithuania. This one-time teacher of Yiddish is listed four times in the history of Lithuania published by its Academy of Sciences in 1978.

I sought him out for an interview largely because in an article in the best Soviet newspaper of nationwide circulation, he reminded his millions of readers that "The Hitlerites . . . sought to exterminate the Jews and the overwhelming majority of them were in fact wiped out" and explained that of 6,000,000 Jews in the United States, only 200,000 belong to Zionist organizations, a distinction not known to the general public in the USSR or here.

When we met I asked him why 40 percent of the 25,000 Lithuanian Jews who had survived Hitler had emigrated to Israel or the U.S. in the 1970s, while only two percent of those living in pre-war Soviet territory had done so. (Lithuania has been Soviet only since 1944.)

He replied, "In Lithuania the Jewish population consisted of big capitalists, comprising a small percentage; middle-level businesspeople, and professionals — there was virtually no Jewish peasantry. I come from the Jewish peasantry." On a map he indicated that part of the country which once belonged to Prussia. "Here the Code Napoleon applied, and Jews had the right to own land. My grandfather, my great-grandfather, my father all worked the land. In that country there was some number of Jewish peasants, and landlords as well.

"Most of the towns were entirely Jewish. The Jews lived in a milieu of their own. Their principal occupation was trade — the Jewish proletariat was very small. The principal cause [of emigration] was not ethnicity but class. They know that in the capitalist world there are those on top, and those on the bottom. And they hoped to be among those on top. Simply, as between capitalism and socialism, they chose capitalism. And we did not succeed in re-educating them in the years available to us.

"During the war years, I was First Secretary ftop leader] of the underground Southern Regional Committee of the Communist Party of Lithuania, which included both Vilnius and Kaunas IKovno]. I did everything possible to get the Jews out of the ghetto into the woods, into the guerrilla struggle. The head of the Vilnius ghetto was a man named Genz, who knew me well; in Kaunas it was Elkus, a physician. He too knew me well — he couldn't help but know me; he had been in my home a couple of times. I wrote him a letter, in Yiddish, saying we would get the young people out, we would get the old people out — we would get everybody out. If there were little children and women unable to bear arms, we would place them in villages.

"They responded: maybe that would be good, but we can't take the chance. You will expose us all, and they will kill us. And they held to what is called in Hebrew Havlaga, restraint. We said: 'Escape. We will take every caution.' And the fact is that we got hundreds out, despite the fact that they were blocking our activity. The Zionists thus helped the Nazis in the extermination of the Jews. Objectively. It was we who organized the escapes from the Ninth Fort . . . "

Zimanas' wartime headquarters is now a national monument; the dugouts and underground field hospital have been rebuilt! When I visited it, alone, I saw a busload of schoolchildren, brought A bastion in the old city wall. there as part of their civics course. Nearby is the ethnically Lithuanian village of Priciupis, which the Nazis had burned down with all its inhabitants, alive, because it had sheltered Jews at Zimanas' request. There, because the Lithuanians are Catholic, the Soviet government has erected three enormous crosses in traditional local design, as a monument. There is also a memorial stained -glass window in the secular community center.

It was not only in Lithuania that peasants saved Jews. My mother came from near Lvov (Lemberg) in the western Ukraine. On a visit in the '70s a retired organizer of theater for children told me of his time in World War II.

"I was not drafted but, having been under the [Nazi] occupation for a period, I escaped and joined up, in view of what they had done to my Ukrainian people, and personally to me." He was reluctant to explain his personal circumstances, saying only "Well, I had had to hide." The woman seated next to him, black-haired and darker in complexion than most Ukrainians, joined me in urging him to explain, but he added only; "There were reasons." Pressed, he conceded, he had to hide "Mainly because I had married a Jew. I changed my residence 16 times, and wound up with a whole briefcase full of I.D.s."

The woman who had asked him to explain was his wife, and she took up the story. "It was Ukrainians who hid me during the war. They were so wonderful about it, I was never given to feel that I was benefiting from an act of kindness." She recalled the day when "A visitor from Lvov came to the village and she said: 'Oh, that Jewess is here. Now, what will happen! MmV . Her cousin ran to me, and he said: They're saying you're a Jew,' and he laughed. I said: 'This is no laughing matter. I have to get out of here.' I asked him not to tell his mother, because she was very attached to me. 'She is deeply religious, and this will be a shock to her.' He said: 'I see that you don't know my mother,' and ran off. In minutes, the old woman came toward me — he had told her — and she picked up my little baby, who was in his carriage, and hugged him: 'My dear one, my little dove, you aren't going anywhere! You have to live!' I said: 'And do you know what that threatens you with? It threatens you with death. Better that I should go away?' She: 'No, you may live here, and this little angel too'."

Ukrainian is a very emotional language. Recalling the conversation, the Jewish woman had switched totally to Ukrainian, but she went on in Russian for my sake, "The mother said, 'You aren't going anyplace. Either we'll all die or we will all survive. Things cannot be like this!' They had been good to me before that, but after that they were even better.

"It was Ukrainians who saved me. Of course it would not be true were I to say that all were people as good as this. Those who ran away to your country, their hands were deep in blood. But the majority — we were always on friendly terms."

Questioned, she repeated 'The majority." And went on, "Our family is international. Our son is a Ukrainian on his father's side. His wife is a Tartar. The children converse in more than one language, each as it wishes. And when that began to happen, no one was surprised."

I have heard Ukrainians speak with respect of Jews as much as the other way around. A journalist told me of writing articles which resulted in a street being named for a Jew — a man who fought in the International Brigade for the Spanish Republic and then returned and died fighting for his native Ukraine.

I have been at pains to describe the Lvov-centered region as the "west Ukraine." With some 10,000,000 people, it has a distinct history, having been under Polish rule between World Wars I and 11. In that time, three Ukrainian-language academic high schools igimnazia) were closed down in a policy of Poionization; even small village schools were converted to Polish or — where this would have prevented all understanding — to bilingual education, and churches were required to conduct services in Polish. The landlords had been Polish from time immemorial. This period is not forgotten: when I visited in 1982 I found great bitterness against the Solidarity movement in Poland because one of its demands was that the west Ukraine be restored to Polish rule.

As these brief accounts show, language, not color, is the greatest delineator in the Soviet Union. As in the U.S., most of the people are "white." Yet there are marked differences. In the capital of Lithuania, for example, parents can choose among public schools taught either in Lithuanian or Russian or Polish. Children who study in Lithuanian are taught Russian as a second language, or vice versa.

Children's schools offer similar language choices in the cities of Armenia, the Ukraine, and elsewhere, and often in the countryside as well. In Daghestan, a tumbled Soviet mountain fastness of only a million and a half people, northwest of Iran, school is presently taught in nine languages. This recognition that each people has the right to education in its own language — USSR-wide, instruction is in 52 distinct tongues — has eliminated defensiveness from the national psychology of the various groups, and made them willing, even eager, to learn Russian as the language giving them mobility in careers outside their native territory.

Five different major alphabets are in use: Latin like ours, Cyrillic like the Russians (the most widespread, naturally), Hebrew (for the Yiddish magazine, newspaper, and over 100 books published in that language since 1968 alone), Armenian, and Georgian. In addition, Korean is used for the 400,000 people of that nationality, while Islamic religious bodies publish in Arabic.

Although race does not play as important a role as it does in the United States, physical differences among European Soviet peoples in complexion, eye and hair color, size and shape of features, and mannerisms, are sufficient to enable them usually to spot each other by nationality without saying a word — or at least so they think.

As in most countries, religion goes with nationality. The vast majority of Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians and Moldavians are of Orthodox Christian background. Religious Estonians are Lutherans; Lithuanians, Catholic; Latvians (Letts), both; while 35,000,000 people are of Moslem [Muslim] heritage, mostly in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Religious Jews practice Judaism — there were 92 synagogues in 1978. There are lamaist Buddhists of Kalmyk nationality in the European part of the country, and in Soviet Asia that is the traditional religion among the Buriats and Tuvans. Religious Koreans divide among animists, Confucians and Christians. Armenians and Georgians have distinct Christian denominations — even atheistic Armenians are proud that, at Echmiadzin, they have the oldest Christian church in the world, functioning since 303 A.D.

The contribution of religion to ethnic cultures is fully recognized. The government puts enormous sums into the restoration and maintenance of architecturally significant churches and mosques. In the "USSR" volume of the official Large Soviet Encyclopedia, plates titled "Sculpture of the Peoples of the USSR" include a St. George from an Orthodox church and a "Madonna and Child" from a Catholic church. The level of religious belief varies tremendously, from probably 50 percent among the Moslem Central Asians and Catholic Lithuanians to 30 percent among Armenians, 10 percent among Latvians, and less than 5 percent among Jews who, world-wide, are generally the least religious ethnic element in any country. This relates to the fact that they are urban, and urban people everywhere are less religious than rural. There are probably well over 20,000,000 Orthodox Christian believers — an impressive number, though it probably represents not much more than 10 percent of those nationalities that once had this as their religious heritage.

At that dinner in Kirgizia, where I spoke with Rakhia, one man mentioned that he was a Moslem believer. I asked him to elaborate in view of the fact that there are few religious Moslems among Soviet intellectuals. He did:

"My name is Doron-bek, surname Sadyrbaiev. I was born and raised in the family of a Party official, an unshakeable Bolshevik who, in the years of the Revolution and then in the 1930s here in our Kirgizia suffered a great deal [in Stalin's purge, he explained later], but remained a Communist to the end of his days, and even died at his post, at work.

"I was educated in the Soviet schools, traveled to Leningrad [3,000 miles away], entered the Leningrad Institute of Theater and Cinematography, majored in directing. Graduated and went to work. I don't belong to any organizations, to any party, and I have neither sympathy nor hostility toward any. The motto of my life, my striving, my goal, is to be a human" being, simply a human being. I love — I am terribly in love — with art. I work at the Kirgiz TV Film Studios, where I write the scripts of my own films. 1 also write a lot of humor: stories published both in Russian and Kirgiz. locally and USSR-wide. I cast ridicule on no one; I laugh only at myself, at my own shortcomings, of which I have more than enough."

He did not look at all introspective: square-faced and healthy, 37 years old, with a Groucho Marx moustache and a broad and open smile, he wore the medal of an Honored Worker of Culture, "the highest recognition in our structure."

Rakhia stands in the corner, Arshan next to her. Doron-bek stands far left; Bek-Sultan stands between them. His wife sits to his left. Chokmorov picks his ear, museum director far right. Okeev's actress mother sits left, Mrs. Mandel center.

Still, I was curious as to why he considered himself a Moslem.

"I don't do those prayers five times a day. I don't pray either by myself or in a mosque, but, just as I write by myself, so I believe by myself, and in the Moslem religion there are matters, concepts with which I do not agree. There are a great many of its propositions that I edit in my own way, to suit me."

A playwright broke in: "In that respect I agree with him. To a certain degree we're all Moslems because, as you understand, our fathers, mothers, were adherents of that religion. This doesn't mean that there's any fanaticism involved. Some of its provisions in the realm of ethics are necessary, necessities."

Doron-bek resumed:

"There are very many Moslems — our Kirgiz, Kazakhs, and Uzbeks — who, while not understanding the Arabic language, the routine call to prayers, the Koran, nevertheless perform rites. I know all the prayers, although only in translation. I have read the fanatical things there — there's nothing worth adopting in that. But I found fragments of love poems, of writings on education, facts from history. I understand a little Arabic. [The playwright interjected: "We took Arabic in school."] So if the occasion arises, for the sake of paying respect to custom, I am capable of reciting a number of passages from the Koran without difficulty. Although I got 'A' grades in philosophy [meaning dialectical materialism] and in the history of Marxism-Leninism, that doesn't prevent me from adhering to Islam, in which, however. 1 select only certain progressive aspects."

At different times, I have talked to the mullah of a historic rural mosque, to the second-ranking Islamic religious figure in Soviet Central Asia, and to the head of its seminary. All disagreed totally with Doron-bek's attitude. They are fundamentalists, as are the leaders of all organized religions in the USSR. But I strongly suspect that these attitudes of first-generation Kirgiz intellectuals — like our Unitarians, or Quakers, or the Reformed Judaism or Roman Catholic beliefs that have developed in the past 20 years — are quite widespread among people of all religious backgrounds in the Soviet Union.

Kazakh historian whose father was illiterate; the author; PhD obstetrician-gynecologist; their musician daughter.

The United States has immigrants and dissidents of most of the Soviet nationalities, religious and racial groups, and all have publications which express various complaints about the ethnic situation in the USSR. But none claim that there is anything anywhere in the Soviet Union resembling the warfare in Northern Ireland (with its terrorist extension into England), the tribal slaughter m several African countries, the holocaust in Lebanon between Christian and Moslem Arabs further complicated bv Israel, the Palestinian armed struggle for independence in their'native land the murder of a provincial cabinet minister by Quebec terrorists over the English-French division, the riots in Belgium over whether universities shall teach in French or Flemish Dutch, and the Basque terrorist effort to win self-determination from Spain by assassinations that have averaged over one per week since 1977.

Nor do any of these anti-Communist emigre publications claim that anything in the USSR can compare to things reported regularly in the United States. In 1980, in Oroville, California, three whites pleaded guilty to killing a Black when they "couldn't find a deer or even a cow to kill" on a hunting trip — and a Black school official, who had escaped death in a similar incident in the same town a few years earlier, said she saw no reason to leave, because things were no worse than in her native Chicago. In Dayton, Ohio, a convicted killer told police in 1977 that he and two others killed 25 to 30 Blacks randomly; records showed that number of unsolved cases. That same year killings of Blacks by police themselves work out to one every six hours somewhere in the country, based on data of the PoIice Foundation. Over half the deaths at the hands of police are Black, and the most respectable of Black organizations — the Urban League, the NAACP — have long insisted that fact is a consequence of racism.

Neither is the Soviet Union alleged by anyone to have situations like Filipino waiters being given a separate menu from whites, consisting of spoiled and leftover food, and being forbidden to speak in their native tongue; Latino-populated East Los Angeles having only one-tenth the ratio of physicians to residents as that in major California urban areas in general; a U.S. Court of Appeals judge expressing the belief that "there is a rise in Ku Klux Klan type of activity that we didn't see much of in the '60s or '70s. Although a lot more of it has been directed toward Jews and blacks, there has been some targeting of Asians." An official commission of the State of California reported late in 1984 that "students of Asian background have been ridiculed, attacked and killed by white students." All items in this paragraph appeared in the single year before this book went to press.

Not even the most stridently anti -Soviet Jewish publication alleges that there are ghettoes or housing discrimination in the Soviet Union, although that was general in prerevolutionary Russia. None claims that pogroms — mass beatings and pillage of Jews, usually accompanied by murders and rape — have occurred in Soviet-controlled territory for half a century, although the old Russia was notorious for that. An American reporter in Moscow writing about a Jewish dissident there reminds us of something long forgotten: "During World War II, his family, tike many other Jews, was sent to Central Asia ahead of The invading Nazis. " [Emphasis added] "Many" is an extreme understatement — most Soviet Jews had lived in the part of the country Hitler overran, and a majority, nearly 2.000.000 were evacuated eastward. This was under Stalin. No Western government organization or individual Jewish or otherwise, rescued remotely as many.

The editor of the Jewish-language (Yiddish) magazine published in Moscow has agreed with me (on tape and for the record) that certain Soviet journalists have published anti-Semitic materials in recent years. His own office had bas-reliefs of Jewish writers killed in a purge 35 years ago. But he was editing a literary magazine in Yiddish, now in its 24th year, and spoke proudly of very young new novelists writing in Yiddish, which they learned from lessons he had printed in the magazine, and of artists on Jewish themes who had been encouraged by his publishing reproductions of their work. He was also proud that a friend of his who is one of the two Jewish cabinet members is personally steeped in Jewish culture.

This editor, his approximately 100 contributors, his artists, the author of the grammar he is serializing, arc success stories specifically as Jews, not simply as Soviet citizens who happen to be of Jewish origin. The number of Soviet Jews who are success stories in the general world — in science, technology, management, medicine, in all the arts, in law — is many times higher than their ratio to the population, higher proportionately rhan any other ethnic group, including the Russians themselves.

The levels of ethnic tension that have expressed themselves so explosively elsewhere in the world simply do not exist any longer in the USSR. One historical fact makes that strikingly clear. When the Russian Revolution took place in 1917, much of the world belonged to empires: British, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Belgian. Austro-Hungarian. German, Spanish, Russian. Each had colonics and/or other countries incorporated in them. Today, the pressures of nationalism, often violent, have pushed every one of those empires back to a fraction of its former size, with a single exception: the Soviet Union. It is smaller than the old Russian Empire, but not by much — it lost only Finland, whose economic and governmental systems are essentially identical to those of Western Europe, and Poland (where farming is almost entirely private and the church holds a degree of power unimaginable in the USSR). Yet the Russian Empire suffered greater human losses, greater stresses, in World War I than any other participant.

The Revolution of 1917 was followed by years of civil war and foreign intervention, including U.S. troops in the north of European Russia and also in Siberia. In World War II Soviet losses were again the largest by a very wide margin, because most of the fighting took place on that front: 20,000,000 Soviet soldiers and civilians died, by comparison to 400,000 Americans — fifty to one. Most of the fighting was in non-Russian countries of the USSR: the Ukraine, Belorussia, the Baltic states, Moldavia. All were under German occupation for three years. Hitler expected the Soviet Union to break into pieces along ethnic lines, yet the vast majority of the non-Russians remained loyal. Soviet Armenians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Jews have all recited to me the names of generals of their nationality who commanded Soviet divisions, and entire armies, against the Nazis.

Such cohesion in such extreme conditions would not have been possible unless all these peoples had been treated in a way that was fundamentally different under the Soviets than in the Westerncontrolled world empires and, of course, in pre revolutionary Russia — where World War I brought a massive revolt of the Central Asians. The essence of the matter is that, since the Revolution, non-Russians have had real power, not merely recognition of their languages and cultures.

Jews played an extremely large role in the Revolution, and the early post-revolutionary government. Trotsky, organizer of the Red Army, was Jewish, as was the first chief of state, Jacob Sverdlov. After Lenin's death, a man who was not Russian or even European actually ran the country for 30 years: Joseph Stalin (Jugashvili), a Georgian from the Caucasus. His very closest associates until his death included not only Russians but an Armenian, Mikoyan, and a Jew. Kaganovich, both members of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party, which is the day-to-day seat of power. Today that small body includes members from Soviet Asia and the Caucasus as well as Europe, two from peoples of the Turkic language group and Moslem religious heritage, a Georgian, and several non-Russian Slavs: Ukrainians and Belorussians. The most impressive aspect of this is that there has never been any claim, from any source, that voting in the Politburo divides along ethnic lines.

Like the policy-making Political Bureau, the government's cabinet, which conducts actual operations, is supposed to consist of the most competent people and therefore has no formal rules of ethnic representation. But it, too, contains several nationalities, including two Jews.

Because the tsarist empire had come into being through Russian expansion into the lands of others, Russians are only one-half the population of the Soviet Union. In 14 countries — one-quarter of the immense area of the USSR — the Russians are minorities. In those places, store and street and institutional signs are bilingual (except in Armenia, where Russian is often totally omitted in unofficial billboards and the like). In prerevolutionary times, the policy, by and large, was Russification. Indeed, the very existence of some peoples was flatly denied, in an attempt at forced assimilation. This was true of the very largest non-Russian nations, the Ukrainians and Belorussians (peoples far more numerous than the overwhelming majority of countries in the United Nations). Since they are Eastern Slavs, like the Russians, the tsarist government sought to force them to be Russians, and treated their languages contemptuously as dialects. Imagine forcing the Irish to be English, though most speak the same language, or Danes and Norwegians to agree they are Swedes, or Spaniards and Italians to define themselves as French.

Furthermore, there was a state religion in the Empire. Orthodox Christianity. Moslems were infidels, Jews were pariahs, Catholics represented a conquered past enemy (Poland with Lithuania), but all Christian nationalities were favored over non-Christians. However, minority Christian sects of Russian ethnic origin were treated as heretics, and often either exiled en masse to Siberia or the Caucasus, or hounded until many moved to other countries: Dukhobors to Canada, Molokans to San Francisco, and so forth.

In the Russian Empire, the language even of local government offices was Russian, although at least a third of the population didn't speak it. There was a crazy-quilt of ethnic policies before the Revolution. The Baltic peoples — Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians — were permitted schools in their own languages, but only in the primary grades; beyond that instruction was in Russian. Schools in Georgia were allowed to teach the native tongue only as a second language. Moslems and Jews were permitted to have their traditional schools for teaching religious subjects and did create small numbers of modern schools in the years just before the Revolution.

Although old Russia was an absolute monarchy, there was a system of elective government at the local level. Asian and Caucasus peoples had no right to vote in it, but some of the other non-Russians did. Divide and rule. An unsuccessful revolution in 1905 forced the tsar to grant an elected parliament, the Duma, although it had little power. Again divide and rule: the major Moslem peoples had no right to vote for it, while the Christian nationalities did, somewhat like today's differing levels of discrimination between Blacks, Coloureds, and whites in South Africa.

Elimination of blatant discrimination of these types does not of itself bring ethnic equality or peace. If a sprinter is given a ten-yard lead over an opponent of the same class, he'll win the race. The Soviets recognized this. It was they who, for all practical purposes, invented the policy we call "affirmative action," and they pursued it consistently to eradicate the historic lag in education, economic development, and knowledge of governmental affairs. (Rakhia and Doron-bek are examples of this.) Because the Central Asian nationalities were, at the time of the Revolution, recently-conquered peoples in exactly the same state as the Islamic peoples south of the border — in some cases precisely the same peoples — comparing those two groups today provides a clear picture of what has happened among the masses, not merely a small elite.

Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and China flank the formerly colonial areas of the Soviet Union. In 1928 they, and the Islamic Soviet areas, were essentially still in the Middle Ages in terms of industrialization, agricultural techniques and education. Even by that very early date — when guerrilla fighting by former ethnic nobility and tribal leaders was still going on — the Soviet territories had doctors and hospital beds in quantities that Turkey did not reach until forty years later. By 1969 the Soviet peoples of this area were totally literate (99.7 percent to be precise), the Turks only one-third. The Turkic-and-Farsi-speaking [Turkic-and-Persian-speaking] peoples of the USSR had, in that year, four-and-a-half times as many college students, fourteen times as many newspaper readers, nearly five times as many physicians, seven times as many hospital beds as Turkey, in proportion to population.

When, in 1977, a Soviet atomic-powered icebreaker became the first surface vessel in history to make it to the North Pole, its captain was a man born into a mountain tribe in the North Caucasus — the Near East. At the International Congress of Historical Sciences in 1975, the head of the Soviet delegation was an Oriental, a Korean. The recently-retired prima ballerina of the Bolshoi Ballet, Maia Plisetskaya, is Jewish — a member of an ethnic group as totally barred before the Revolution as Black prima ballerinas arc from classical ballet in "white" companies in the U.S. today. Jewish names predominate among the Soviet musical performers who travel the world: pianists Lazar Berman and Emil Gilels, the immortal Oistrakh, and many more. They have not "defected."

Turkmen founder of a collective-farm just outside Ashkhabad

This pattern, the idea that success is limited only by one's individual talent and effort, explains why those I interviewed in all fifteen countries of the USSR for this book, spoke of their personal progress and that of their peoples, but not in terms of having overcome obstacles of an ethnic nature. They simply don't feel there are any today. There is one exception: because Jews are greatly overrepresented in posts of status in research and technology — itself a policy of Soviet door-opening — individuals have been passed over in favor of members of underrepresented peoples. Some of these individuals feel the same resentment voiced by some American whites who were denied admission to medical schools in favor of Black applicants under quota-type "affirmative action" programs that existed in the U.S. a few years ago.

These could be his grandchildren in Ashkhabad, right on the border with Iran.

The loyalty of the non-Russians to the Soviet Union is based on what they have gained, economically and in dignity, as peoples. A U.S. government survey has found that Blacks are currently discriminated against three times out of four when they seek to buy or even rent living quarters. Imagine a total end to that- That is what has happened to housing discrimination in the Soviet Union. Imagine an end to the three-out-of-five unemployment rate among Black youth, the even higher rate among Indians, and nearly as high among Latinos. Imagine that Third World people in the U.S. were employed in the mass media in proportion to their number in the population, one in five — eight times their present representation — which is one in forty. Imagine a Black governor of Mississippi, statues of Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X on the State House lawn in Richmond, Virginia — instead of the generals who fought for slavery — which stand there now. Imagine the children of Spanish -speaking farmworkers not being taken out of school to follow the crops. Imagine an Eskimo woman as governor of Alaska, like the Chukchi woman who governs the Soviet territory that faces Alaska across the Bering Straits.

These are the realities of the changes in the USSR. Visitors who have lived with discrimination have no difficulty in seeing the difference in the Soviet Union. The first group of Latinos to visit the Soviet Union were students and staff from the University of California, Berkeley, in the early '70s. They had never been abroad. When they changed planes in London, the scene was very familiar — the British had found people of color to do the dirty work at the airport. When they got to Moscow, those jobs were being done by whites, although they saw plenty of darker people in the USSR.

Before the Revolution: Realities and Ideas

This chapter will be difficult, complicated — even irritating, if the reader has ethnic roots or associations with peoples who live in, or once lived in, the Soviet Union or what was the Russian Empire. (Poland and Finland were part of the Russian Empire but do not belong to the Soviet Union.)

Virtually everyone with such associations has a tendency to defend "one's own" When outsiders criticize points of view existing in one's ethnic group, the criticisms are resented, and characterized as prejudice—anti-Semitic, white racist, etc.— even if one happens to agree with such criticism oneself. But those who aspired to lead a countrv like the Russian Empire— consisting of many real territorial nations, plus dispersed minorities, all wracked by ethnic conflict — could not take such a narrow attitude. They had to try to develop or adopt a theory that would explain the reasons for that conflict, and a program to eliminate it.

This meant, first, independently examining the real situation. Secondlv, it meant considering proposals from each nationality, debating them, and arriving at conclusions. This was necessary even though an Armenian, or Estonian, Jew, or Ukrainian might greet any disagreement with anyone speaking for any element in his own group by saying: "why pick on us?"

In this chapter the reader will find Lenin, the man who set the course of the Russian Revolution, debating, as well as agreeing with, Jewish, Ukrainian, Polish, Armenian, and Russian spokespersons, some representing parties far to his right, others representing socialists, and still others even members of his own Bolshevik (Communist) wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party. The discussion here is focused more on the interests of American and Canadian readers than on what concerned peoples and political figures in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. There, the question of what to do about subject peoples who had lived from time immemorial in their own territories — Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Armenians, the Asian peoples — was, and is, by far the more important issue. Canada has some understanding of this, because of French-speaking Quebec. In the U.S., only reservation Indians and Puerto Ricans on that island itself clearly fall into that category. Among Blacks and Latinos, there is a point of view, presently a small minority, holding that a large string of counties with Black majorities in several states of the deep South comprise an embryonic Black nation and a large area in the Southwest with Latino majorities comprise an Aztlan nation. But the great majority of Blacks and Latinos, and virtually all whites, think of the ethnic question in terms of minorities living dispersed among, and surrounded by, the white population. In old Russia, that situation applied above all to the Jews, who. although white, lived under circumstances that can only be regarded as discriminatory in the worst sense. For example, Jews were forbidden by law to live anywhere but in the westernmost corner of the empire. They were simply forbidden to own land. Mass physical violence against them was so commonplace that a special word, "pogrom," attached to it, just as lynching almost automatically referred to a Black in the United States.

Therefore this discussion of the prerevolutionary debate over ethnic problems will be illustrated disproportionate by reference to the Jewish experience, because it pertains to a dispersed minority resembling those in North America, and also because Jews outnumber any other single group in the English-speaking world with roots in what is today the Soviet Union.

This chapter will be complex because it deals with the overall ethnic history of the Russian Empire; employment patterns by nationality, hostilities among non-Russian peoples, housing segregation, social stratification, religious differences, "native state" versus direct-Russian-rule arrangements, tribalism, the role of social class oppression and struggle, language rights and education, political organization, assimilation, values in ethnic cultures self-determination and secession rights for subject areas, landownership as the key to equality for pre-industrial peoples, the leveling upward of formerly underdeveloped peoples, size criteria for independent territorial recognition, immigration and emigration, distortion of census figures to justify oppression.

Why so many elements in one chapter? Because all were either part of the prerevolutionary reality, or factors that had to be considered before any solution could be attempted. True, each topic could fill a chapter, but that would have resulted in a specialized textbook. Here it is simply the historical introduction to a book on the individual nationalities. And those who find the subject matter too formidable can skip this chapter, or skim it, or return to it if the rest of the book rouses interest in these subjects.

Ridicule of minorities is one of the surest and most universal signs of ethnic oppression. In 1919, Lenin reminisced about his youth along the Volga River: "We nationals of a big nation . . . commit . . . insult an infinite number of times without noticing it. . . . Poles are not called by any other name than Polyachishka, . . . the certain way to mock at a Tatar is to call him Prince, . . . the Ukrainians are always Khokhols and the Georgians and other Caucasian nationals always Kapkasians." Jews were called Zhid, the Russian equivalent of "kike" or, for Blacks, "nigger."

The ideology underlying this was that of Great-Russian superiority, and Russifieation. ("Great-Russian" is the term used to distinguish Russians as such from Ukrainians — "Little Russians" — and Belorussians; under Russifieation, the tsarist government sought to force these people to abandon their own Slavic languages for Russian.) In common -sense terms, this view seemed to have every support: The Russian tsars had managed to gather under their rule the largest unbroken territory on earth, so presumably their way was better.

But the colossus had feet of clay. Not long after the Russian Empire reached its greatest size, it was defeated in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, a defeat which shook up all elements of society. This stimulated disobedience, and even emigration by oppressed minorities. My father's oldest brother, a draftee, was killed in that war. thousands of miles from his home. The family reasoned: why should Jews fight for, or remain in, a country that then would not even let them live outside a fixed line? The monarchy did not even try to enroll in its army the peoples of Central Asia and most of those of the northern Caucasus, brought into the empire in the 19th century, some as late as 1881.

The reasons for Russia's conquests were diverse. There was the desire— as with America's taking of Indian territory-to gain land for agricultural settlement, which also meant, in Russia's case, throwing a bone to some of its own dissatisfied peasantry, including Ukrainians and Belorussians, by giving them land seized from nomadic Asian peoples. A second reason was to gain raw materials, such as cotton from Central Asia. A third was simply dog-eat-dog competition with other empires: for example, to control parts of Central Asia by advancing southward before the British moving north from India, could get them. This has left its mark! To this day, as in Africa, boundaries established by competing European empires a century ago mark the frontiers between independent states, cutting right across ethnic lines and putting people of the same language and culture under different governments. For example there are nearly as many Azerbaijanis in the Soviet republic of that name as in the northern portion of Iran right across the border, a situation that reflects centuries of wrestling for territory between the old Russian and Persian empires.

In old Russia, as elsewhere, oppressed peoples did the menial jobs. One-third of the Tatars were janitors, porters, and rag-pickers. It took time for such situations to disappear twenty years after the Revolution, an observer could still write: "In Moscow, . . . every shoe-black at every street corner claim(s) to be an Aisor (the Aisors declare that they are the descendants of the ancient Assyrians, some of whom immigrated to the Caucasus) . . . " in countries that havg been socialist only since World War II, one still finds ethnicallyassociated "businesses" such as shining shoes -in Bulgaria that's a Gypsy occupation — but that is no longer true in the USSR.

"Divide and rule" is a natural tactic for any rulers, particularly where different minorities lived side by side. (The situation was similar to that in which Blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans have to scramble for the same jobs, and the educated among them compete tor the small number of status posts available.) The Caucasus Mountain for example, are inhabited by the Azerbaijanis, of Moslem heritage and Turkic language, and by Georgians and Armenians, both Christian, each with a distinct language. There during the unsuccessful revolution of 1905, Russian ultraconservatives incited the Azerbaijanis against the Armenians, while these Russians themselves directly attacked Georgians and engaged in pogroms against Jews.

Ghettos existed, both spontaneous and forced. Because minorities in the Russian Empire were identified by their distinct languages, which they used as much as possible, and frequently worked for employers of their own nationality, living in ethnic neighborhoods often made sense. In addition, the ghetto offered protection against hostile actions by others. A Moslem cottongrower, reminiscing years later about one Central Asian town, said: "The past was a stairway of years carpeted with pain. The Uzbeks feared to go along the street of the Arabs; the Tajiks carried sticks when they walked through the Uzbek quarter. " Yet all were Moslems.

Russians were half the people of the towns of Central Asia, although only one-tenth of the total population there. This is like Mississippi and southern Alabama, where the countryside is overwhelmingly Black, the cities heavily white.

College education was nearly unknown, in some areas literally unheard-of. except among the Russians, who were therefore the doctors, lawyers, teachers, and the clergy of the official church. By and large, they also had the money, although there were some very rich traditional native rulers, land and livestock barons. Even Russian workers, miserably poor and working outrageous hours under awful conditions, with practically no rights to organize, were skilled in comparison to the indigenous peoples. Consequently, the Russian laborers earned a bit more and held somewhat steadier jobs.

Religion complicated prejudices. Every church — Christian, Jewish, and particularly Moslem, frowned strongly upon marriage out of that particular faith, and virtually everyone was religious.

In a few places, the Russian Empire, like European empires in Asia and Africa, ruled through indigenous royalty so long as they were loyal, and even where the Russian structure of government existed, it was general policy to function through the local nobility and elite. The Emir of Bokhara, a principality in Central Asia, was made a general in the Russian Army, and allowed to invest in Russian industry, but, except in such "native states," police were Russian.

The nearly universal illiteracy — three-quarters of the Russians and nine out of ten non-Russians could not read or write — tended to isolate peoples even further, and to maintain ignorant prejudices. A literate person could read a story, novel, or poem by someone of another nationality, and conclude that other people, although different, had human feelings like his own. But with no ability to read, the most vile superstitions and fears about "strange" peoples could spread easily.

In very many cases, peoples were divided within themselves along tribal lines. The most famous of all Georgians, Joseph Stalin, wrote of his own people's situation 100 years ago: "split up into a number of disconnected principalities, . . . for centuries they waged war against each other and pillaged each other, each inciting the Persians and Turks against the other." This was not unlike the wars between Indian tribes in America and, just as the U.S. government used such hostilities to obtain guides from one Indian tribe to make war against another, so the Russian Empire often simply exploited existing hostilities.

Some of the countries swallowed up in the empire had themselves consisted of dominant and subjected ethnic groups, again, a situation similar to that in some places in Africa, such as Nigeria. And there were oppressed nations whose strongest hostility was not toward the Russians. The Ukrainians — by far the largest "minority." numbering tens of millions — were most hostile to Poles, because their landlords were Polish before that territory came under Russian rule. They were also hostile to Jews because, centuries earlier the Poles had brought Jews in to manage their estates.

The Marxists argued that these hostilities were rooted in competition among propertied classes, not among peoples as such: the richer Ukrainian peasants versus Polish landlords; the capitalists and prosperous market farmers of Poland, Lithuania and the Ukraine against the Russian nobility whose privileges and laws kept them from expanding. With this understanding. Jewish, Polish, and Latvian (Lettish) Marxist parties sought to affiliate with the Russian; they saw a common interest of workers and peasants of all nationalities. They also pointed to many occasions when the wealthy cooperated across ethnic lines because the poor became too restless.

Stalin was a prominent member of the party led by Lenin which sought to develop a policy that would create unity across ethnic lines, unity strong enough to overthrow the monarchy and open the way to socialism. Others, also regarding themselves as Marxists, wanted to organize workers along ethnic lines within the overall Social-Democratic Party. The major advocate of that policy was the socialist organization of Jewish craftsmen and workers called the Bund. Lenin had the deepest appreciation of the oppression of Jews in the Russian Empire, and the highest respect for their contributions — in a 1913 article, he described them as "the most oppressed and persecuted nation," and added, "the great features of Jewish culture, progressive on a world scale, have clearly made themselves felt: its internationalism, its responsiveness to the advanced movements of the epoch (the percentage of Jews in the democratic and proletarian movements is everywhere higher than the percentage of Jews in the population as a whole)."

Today no government except that of South Africa adheres to e idea of inborn racial superiority as official policy. But at the :ginning of this century that ideology was professed by the United States, England, Germany, and all "civilized" countries. Segregation, justifying itself by that theory, was the law in the American South, and enforced in nearly all respects in the North without benefit of law. In light of that it is remarkable to read the statement of principles adopted— on Lenin's initiative — by the Social-Democratic Party as early as 1903. Clause 7 calls for: "Complete equality of rights for all citizens, irrespective of sex, religion, race or nationality." In 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I and just after an unsuccessful attempt by the tsarist authorities to frame a Jew, Mendel Beilis, on a charge of ritual murder,* Lenin drafted a bill to be presented in the Duma (or parliament, though with very limited powers) titled "A Bill for the Abolition of All Disabilities of the Jews and of all Restrictions on the Grounds of Origin or Nationality." In his introduction, he wrote:

This Bill aims at abolishing all ethnic restrictions against all peoples: Jews. Poles, and so forth. But it deals in particular detail with the restrictions against the Jews. The reason is obvious: no nationality in Russia is so oppressed and persecuted as the Jewish. . . . It is sufficient to recall the anti-Jewish pogroms and the Beilis case. . . . The voice of the Russian workers must be particularly loud in protest against ethnic oppression. . . . We hope that the Russian workers will give particularly strong support to our Bill by their declarations.

When formally submitted, the Bill was to have a list of all the regulations and laws to be rescinded, including "about a hundred such laws affecting the Jews alone." The most important passages of his proposed law read:

1. Citizens of all nationalities inhabiting Russia are equal before the law.

2. No citizen of Russia, regardless of sex and religion, may be restricted in political or in any other rights on the grounds of origin or nationality. *Ritual murder is killing humans as, or as part of, religious observance. It has never been part of the Jewish religion.

3. . . . All and any restrictions of the rights of Jews as regards residence and travel, the right to education, the right to governmental and organizational employment, electoral rights, military service, the right to purchase and rent real estate in towns, villages, etc.. are herewith abolished, and all restrictions of the rights of Jews to engage in the liberal professions, etc., are herewith abolished.

In that stacked parliament the bill was not passed, of course. But the revolution put its principles into force only three years later.

Conservatives often attack attempts to achieve equality as being "Communist." These charges are based on historical fact: When the Russian Revolution raised these egalitarian ideas to the level of government policy they moved from the level of a dream to the status of reality. As the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Carter administration, Donald F. McHenry, put it: "The Soviets are on the side of motherhood when it comes to racial equality. . . . they identify with it." Since 1917 this has raised the question in numerous countries — if in Russia, why not here?

The same may be said of Clause 8 of the 1903 platform of Lenin's party: "the right of the population to receive education in their native languages, this right to be ensured by the establishment of schools for this purpose at the expense of the state and of local government bodies." This program of education in the native language was to make it easier to educate, not to isolate nationalities from each other.

The language issue was a practical matter, not simply one of theory or a hoped-for future. When the tsarist government made some concessions to quiet the people following an immense revolutionary movement in 1905-07, and allowed Marxist papers to be published legally, the Bolsheviks began to publish not only in Russian but also a paper in the Tatar (Tartar) language. This reached people of the Turkic nationalities living along the Volga River, in the Ural Mountains, in the oil-producing Caucasus range, and in Central Asia, as their languages, like Tatar, fall into the Turkic family, and are closely related. But to understand the paper they had to be able to read, which they could obviously learn to do more quickly in their own language. Not only did they not know Russian, many hated it as the language of their oppressors and exploiters.

Similarly, on at least one occasion the Bolsheviks published a major statement in translation into Yiddish, with a special introduction by Lenin as a way of paying special attention to the largest socialist organization in the Russian Empire. The Russia-wide Social-Democratic Labor Party, including Lenin's Bolshevik and the moderate Menshevik wing, accepted people of all nationalities, and had 31,000 members; the Polish Social-Democrats had 26,000; the Latvians 14,000, but the Jewish Social-Democratic Workers Party, the Bund, had 33.000. At that time, 1906, all three ethnic parties had joined the empire-wide organization. (In proportion to population, the Latvians were the most revolutionary, followed by the Jews.) The Bolsheviks feared a repeat of the kind of situation that then existed in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where labor unions were organized along ethnic lines: a Czech union would break a strike conducted by a union of German workers, or unite in municipal elections with other Czechs however wealthy, rather than with workers of other ethnic origins.

Lenin and his followers cited such stories in their writings as horrible examples of nationalism dividing workers living within one and the same country. They were equally outraged when speakers at a Bund conference demanded Jew-ish hospitals on the ground that "a patient feels more at home among his own people" and "the Jewish worker will not feel at ease among Polish workers, but will feel at case among Jewish shopkeepers." Such issues probably arose most strongly among the Bundists because theirs was the organization of a dispersed nationality.

To Marxists this was absolutely unacceptable. Their purpose was to teach class solidarity to labor regardless of ethnic lines, while such proposals would focus the workers' attention upon members of his nationality who had "made it," as examples to be emulated.

That the real cause of ethnic hostility among workers was capitalism as a system seemed proved by the effects of unemployment, which exists under no other economic system. One consequence was that Polish workers forced Jewish workers out, justifying this in their own minds by anti-Semitism, in precisely the same manner in which certain skilled trades keep Blacks out in the U.S. to this day, justifying it to themselves by racist beliefs. Employers welcome and encourage this division in the ranks of labor. Another speech at the Bund conference responded to this: "We regard the Polish workers, who are pushing us out, as pogromists. as scabs; we do not support their strikes, we break them. Secondly, we reply to being ousted by ousting in our turn: we reply to Jewish workers not being allowed into the factories by not allowing Polish workers near the [craftsmen's] benches. . . . If we do not take this matter into our own hands the workers will follow others."

Lenin's followers argued that if workers were not organized into separate ethnic unions, as in Austria-Hungary or the self-segregated Bund in Poland, such attitudes would not have existed. U.S. labor experience confirms this. Black efforts to organize lasting segregated trade unions as a means of combating all-white organizations have never worked. However, where they and anti-racist whites won them admission into white unions or organized from the outset on an interracial basis, as in the auto, steel, mining and rubber industries, unions have been vastly more effective.

Lenin's party learned these lessons early in this century when it won the support of workers in the oil city of Baku, by overcoming the friction between Armenian Christian and Turkic-speaking Moslem workers, friction often characterized by massacres and shoot-outs. Such experiences had a strong influence on the policies of Lenin and his followers, then as well as later, during and after the Revolution.

Lenin continued to oppose nationalist demands that sought to advance the interests of one oppressed people at the expense of others. In 1913 a bill was proposed to permit teaching in the Ukraine in the Ukrainian language, to appoint Ukrainian teachers, to teach that language and its history, and to permit Ukrainian associations. Lenin agreed with the ultra-conservative Ukrainian Orthodox bishop, Nikon who said, in support of that bill: "the rich, beautiful, talented, flourishing and poetic Ukraine is being condemned to degeneration, gradual stultification and slow extinction" and that the issue "is one of outstanding importance." But the bishop then added that Ukrainians should be given the rights proposed in the bill because they "are not people of foreign origin -unlike "the Jews, Poles. Georgians and others, who actually are people of foreign origin." To this Lenin responded: the Ukrainians cannot be protected from oppression unless all peoples without exception, are protected from all oppression, unless the concept 'people of foreign origin' is completely expunged from the life of the state, unless complete equality of rights of all nationalities is upheld." He wanted these rights administered by an internationalist government, not by organizations of the various ethnic communities that would inevitably fight over turf.

In hammering out the policy regarding nationalities, a policy he would have the responsibility of carrying out only five years later Lenin also had to combat the liberals, who were also critical of tsarism. but were contending for leadership of the Russia-to-be. A major difference between them was over the issue of whether or not there should be a single official language. A liberal Moscow newspaper with the standing and much of the quality of the New York Times wrote, in 1913: "It is doubtful whether even an opponent of Russianization will deny that in a vast state like Russia there must be one common state language and that the language . . . can be only Russian."

Lenin objected furiously to the notion of giving Russian "any privileges whatever." Yet some members of his own party, themselves from oppressed peoples, rejected nationalism and adopted internationalism in a way that made them "more Russian than the Russians." One was the outstanding Armenian Bolshevik, Stepan Shahumian. whose name is perpetuated all over the Soviet Caucasus today — he w as killed soon after the Revolution by the British who invaded from Iran and temporarily overthrew the government of Soviet Azerbaijan. He did not want to deprive his own people, or any other, of the right to speak their native language, but he believed there should be an official language, Russian, which "has been and will be of great progressive importance."

Lenin replied. "I disagree emphatically. . . . The Russian language has undoubtedly been of progressive importance for the numerous small and backward nations" of the empire, but, he asked: "is not an 'official' language a stick that drives people away from the Russian language? Why will you not understand the psychology that is so important in the national question and which, if the slightest coercion is applied, besmirches, soils, nullifies the undoubtedly progressive importance of centralization, large countries and a uniform language?"This has been an issue of importance in American life as well — it took nearly 50 years for Puerto Ricans to win official status lor their own language, Spanish, on their own island, along with English — a quarter century after Armenian had been recognized as the official language of Armenia thanks to the revolution in the "backward" tsarist empire. (Russian is also an official language, but only in the Russian Republic of the Soviet Union.)

Five years after the Revolution. Lenin bitterly criticized his fellow-Communists Stalin (a Georgian by nationality), and Dzerzhinsky (who was Polish), for what he termed their "truly Great -Russian nationalist" insensitivity to the ethnic feelings of the peoples of the Caucasus (including the Georgians) on these very matters.

The complexity of the entire problem is nowhere illustrated better than in Lenin's views regarding assimilation. He favored it, despite all his stress on the righits of ethnic groups to their own languages. He cited two nationalities:

The best of the Jews, those who are celebrated in world history, and who have g.ven the world foremost leaders of democracy and socialism, have never clamored against assimilation. Only those who contemplate the backside of Jewry with reverential awe shout against assimilation. . . . An approximate idea of the . . . process of assimilation that is taking place under the present conditions of advanced capitalism can be obtained . . . from the immigration statistics of the United States. . . . New York State . . . is like a mill which grinds up national distinctions. . . . A well defined process of accelerated economic development has been going on in the South, i.e.. the Ukraine, and this is attracting . . . peasants and workers from Great-Russia. . . . The "assimilation" — within these Jimits — of the Great-Russian and Ukrainian proletariat is an undoubted fact. And this fact is certainly progressive. Capitalism replaces the dull, bigoted, stick-in-the-mud muzhik [peasant] of the Great-Russian and Ukrainian backwoods with a mobile proletarian whose conditions of life break down . . . ethnic narrowmindedness. both Great-Russian and Ukrainian. Let us assume that in time there Will be a state frontier between Great-Russia and the Ukraine. In such a case, too, the historically progressive nature of "assimilation" between the Great-Russian and Ukrainian workers will be beyond doubt just as the grinding together of nations in America is progressive.

Several of the present Soviet leadership, chief among them Chernenko, are products of this process. Of Ukrainian name, his tamily s assimilation took place in Siberia, to which it had moved.

Assimilation is a living issue in the USSR to this day. On the one hand, urban nationalities, such as the Jews, have assimilated to a very high degree in the past 50 years, including much intermarriage, something they once rejected to protect their ethnic existence In the Ukraine, Ukrainians who have moved to town now tend to speak Russian in the areas which have been Soviet since the Revolution, but in the countryside they retain their own language as do city people in the West Ukraine, which has been Soviet only since World War II.

In Armenia, on the other hand, the native language remains universal, because Armenians are the overwhelming majoritv in the cities as well as in villages. Nationalists — Ukrainian, Jewish and other — believe this proccesses endanger the existence of their nationalities. To which anthropologists reply that assimilation has always occurred in world history and always will, so long as nations exist. The real issue is the extent to which the assimilation may be forced. This always engenders some degree of nationalism in response. Current Soviet scholarship seeks to grapple with this problem. and the political leadership is trying to formulate guidance, as indicated by a Chernenko speech on the revision of the Communist Party platform ("Program") underway in 1984.

Before the Revolution, another issue was that of maintaining ethnic culture. This was argued with particular vehemence by certain Ukrainians. Lenin's reply was. in essence, which Ukrainian culture? " There arc two nations in every modern nation. . . . There are two national cultures in every national culture," an idea advanced half a century earlier by the British Prime Minister Disraeli in a novel which spoke of the nation of the rich and that of the poor. Lenin sought to stress everything in culture that would unite workers across ethnic lines, and attacked whatever would strengthen nationalist antagonisms. Anthropologists today recognize the concept of sub-cultures, but debate on this issue has continued throughout the history of the Soviet Union. It even cost lives on the eve of World War II and again when the Cold War began, when Stalin worried whether nationalists would be loyal. In its crudest form, the argument ran: if a cultural figure had not come from the working class or the peasantry, how could his work reflect their interests?

Lenin quite often used the word "barbarism" to describe the Russians' own level of civilization before the Revolution. Afterward, he argued that the working people, to raise themselves from that level, should make themselves the heirs of all that was good in human achievement. It made no difference, he said, if the great art works of the Renaissance, for example, had been financed by religious or other wealth obtained by squeezing the poor. But the question remained: what was "good"? Folk epics, from Homer onward, describe wars with neighboring peoples. But what if those peoples live side by side, within a single multi-national state?

Suppose a figure is a hero to his own people but a monster to another? This was the case with the Ukrainian Cossack Bohdan Hmelnitsky, who led that people against the Polish landowning nobility — but also conducted pogroms against the Jews. Or consider a people that has been told it had no history or achievements, or that it is "primitive." What mix of emphasis upon its own creative culture to support its self-esteem and that of others is needed to produce diversity within unity, and not nationalism? The post-revolutionary Soviet Union has dealt with these issues in different ways at different times; Marxists hold that truth is never abstract, always specific. The USSR has also dealt differently with different nations or ethnic groups at the same time. In the U.S., what Latinos need is not precisely the same as what Blacks need, but they share a history of ethnic oppression and neglect of their needs and rights.

As cultural figures from the different nationalities of the Russian Empire are not familiar to us, it helps to consider more familiar personalities. When Leadbelly, the Black musician, sang "It's a Bourgeois Town" about Washington, D. C, that was tine by Lenin's criterion; "Yaller Gal" was acceptable because it dealt with personal life in an ethnic framework. But in film, there was Stepin Fetchit — the very name ridiculed Blacks — who was always cast as a character that shuffled and scratched his head and was afraid of the dark and snakes. Should Blacks be proud that otic Black had made it in a medium otherwise closed to them, or should they be outraged because he reinforced white feelings of superiority, and Black feelings of inferiority? The same issue continues to face minority peoples, most recently in TV comedies.

Perhaps one internationally understandable example from Soviet experience will do. Shakespeare is extremely well-known and performed in theater, opera, and film in the USSR, in dozens of languages. There is one exception, however: The Merc hum of Venice has been prohibited since the Revolution because of its stereotype of the Jewish usurer demanding a pound of flesh.

While Lenin's objective for dispersed minorities was equality of rights, his target for oppressed geographic nations was self-determination, up to and including the right to secede. Pre-revolutionary Poland was divided among Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. The Polish Social -Democrats opposed the notion of self-determination because they feared that nationalist elements would use it to establish a government that would maintain capitalism. Poland later had such a regime for a quarter of a century. Lenin argued against this holding that human progress depended upon destroying imperialism and colonialism, and that self-determination as a goal would move colonial and other subject nations to action in their entirety as nations. His view was that if this were led by Marxists of such nations, it would also bring them to socialism.

The Poles, Jews, and Latvians — the nationalities among whom socialist organization was strong — together were little more than one-fifth of the non-Russian peoples of the empire, and only a ninth of its total population. Marxist convictions were disproportionately strong among them because Poland and Latvia were the most industrialized areas, and the Jews were almost totally urban. Most of the other peoples had hardly entered the industrial era, had no wage-earning class to speak of, and were overwhelmingly peasant. Socialism in the Marxist sense, which conceives of power passing from the hands of essentially industrial capitalists and the banks financing them to a government acting for the workers employed in industry, was an abstraction to peoples who had neither capitalists nor their workers. For them, the economic aspect of their ethnic oppression lay in deprivation of land.

The unsuccessful 1905-1907 revolution did result in the establishment of a parliament, the Duma. That Duma was powerless, but members could at least place their complaints on the record. After 1905, a representative from the Bashkirs (a Moslem people at the south end of the border between Europe and Asia) said the government had stolen 5,400,000 acres of land from that nationality alone, and demanded it back. He complained that individual Russian officials and high police officers had been granted as much as 5,000 to 15,000 acres each, and that the governor-general ot the region had told a Tatar applying for land that only persons of the Christian faith could homestead.

Complaints such as this made Lenin's party recognize that, in the agricultural Russian Empire, the nationalities issue was, in its economic aspect, fundamentally a question of landownership. For American Indians, and Blacks in the rural South the relationship between ethnic oppression and land is equally clear.

The analogy is not just my own. Lenin followed the status of American Blacks very closely. In 1913 he wrote a very brief article that is worth reproducing in full:

RUSSIANS AND NEGROES

What a strange comparison, the reader may think. How can a race be compared with a nation?

It is a permissible comparison. The Negroes were the last to be freed from slavery, and they still bear, more than anyone else, the cruel marks of slaverv — even in advanced countries — for capitalism has no "room" for emancipation except as a legal matter, and it curtails even the latter in every possible way.

With regard to the Russians, history records that they were freed, "almost," from the bondage of serfdom in 1861. It was about the same time, following the civil war against the American slave-owners, that North America's Negroes were freed from slavery.

The emancipation of the American slaves took place in a manner less like a "reform" than that of the Russian slaves.

That is why today, half a century later, the Russians still show many more traces of slavery than the Negroes. Indeed, it would be more accurate to speak of institutions and not merely of traces. But in this short article we shall limit ourselves to a small illustration of what we have said, namely, the question of literacy. It is known that illiteracy is one of the marks of slavery. In a country oppressed by pashas, Purishkeviches [a proto-fascist and anti-Semitic rabble-rouser] and the like, the majority of the population cannot be literate.

In Russia 73 percent are illiterate, exclusive of children under nine years of age.

Among U.S. Negroes. 44½ percent were illiterate in 1900.

Such a scandalously high percentage of illiterates is a disgrace to a civilized, advanced country like the North American republic. Furthermore, everyone knows that the position of the Negroes in America in general is one unworthy of a civilized country — capitalism cannot give either complete emancipation or even complete equality.

It is instructive that among the whites in America illiterates number no more than six percent. But if we divide America into what were formerly slave-holding areas (an American "Russia") and non-slaveholding areas (an American non-Russia), we shall find 11-12 percent illiterates among the whites in the former and 4-6 percent in the latter areas!

The proportion of illiterates among the whites is twice as high in the former slave-holding areas. It is not only the Negroes that show the vestiges of slavery!

Shame on America for the plight of the Negroes!

Returning to Lenin's opening question, "how can a race be compared to a nation?", it is interesting to look at a list of the forms of national oppression drawn up by Stalin in the same year, which clearly applies to Blacks as slaves, and, in many respects, for a hundred years after emancipation: "Restriction of freedom of movement, repression of language, restriction of franchise, closing of schools, religious restrictions, and so on."

In the East, among most of the Turkic and Iranian-speaking peoples in the Russian Empire, where capitalism was not yet so widespread, class struggle between workers and employers was far less important than feelings of resentment against Russian rule. Consequently, a Pan-Islamic movement arose which took the Moslem religion of many different peoples as a binding factor, opposing them all to tsarism, and to its official Orthodox Church.

In short, because Russia was an empire, ethnic equality was much more a question of the right of self-determination and secession for geographic nations than equality of rights for people living intermixed among others. This question is still very much alive in Puerto Rico — independence, statehood, or the present commonwealth status. Lenin provided his answer in another part of his 1913 letter to Shahumian, whose position was "statehood.":

"We are in favor of the right to secession (and not in favor of everyone's seceding). . . . In general we are opposed to secession But we stand for the right to secede owing to reactionary, Great-Russian nationalism, which has so besmirched the idea of national coexistence that sometimes closer ties will be established after free secession! The right to self-determination is an exception to our general premise of centralization."

With a centralized union of republics, the Soviets have been able to place the common interests of geographic nations above factors that might divide them, and to influence development so as to raise more backward republics up toward the level of the more advanced This has avoided a situation like the one which exists . . . Yugoslavia. Thai is also a federation of geographic nations, but it allows them to compete with each other economically, and also allows the workers to own an enterprise independent of the central government. As a result, the living standard in the most advanced ethnic republic is three times as high as in the most underdeveloped. The workers in the former quite literally exploit those in the latter by building branches of worker-owned industries in them and paying the very much lower local wage.

There is a tendency everywhere for numerically larger oppressed peoples to be so intensely conscious of their own problems that they look with disdain upon, or ignore, smaller ones. Rosa Luxemburg. pre-revolutionary leader of the Polish Marxists, demanded autonomy for Poland — but not for the Lithuanians. Census figures showed the Lithuanians to be a minority in each existing province, so she concluded that there was no Lithuanian nation. but only a dispersed minority — a rural equivalent of the situation ot the Jews. Lenin replied that if she had studied the statistics, not for entire provinces but for "counties" whithin them, she would have found solid blocks of counties neighboring each other across "state" lines in which Lithuanians were a majority, a situation similar to that now existing in states of our Deep South.

American Indians will be interested in Lenin's rejoinder to a Bundist named Medem, who argued, before the Revolution, that peoples numbering half a million to two million were "too small" to enjoy territorial rights. "Why there cannot be autonomous national areas with populations not only of half a million, but even of 50,000 — why such areas cannot unite in the most diverse ways with neighboring areas of different dimensions in one autonomous krai (region) if this is convenient . . . remains the secret of the Bundist Medem." That is precisely the way the USSR is organized today: prerevolutionary "state" lines were disregarded in order to give geographic peoples stretches of territory providing self-rule on matters of interest to them. In one case, a territory with an Azerbaijani majority which is separated from the bulk of Azerbaijan by Armenia has nonetheless been made part of the Azerbaijan Soviet Republic. This "island" has only a quarter million people; had it been made part of Armenia for the sake of geographic convenience, there would have been no end to the hostility between the Turkic-speaking Moslem Azerbaijanis and the Christian Armenians. Today one gets no sense of any such feeling in visiting either of those republics. Some "National Areas" have fewer than 50,000 inhabitants, though none are internally segregated or limited to people of any ethnic affiliation.

The Soviet example has affected other countries, even totally non-socialist ones, in many ways. Perhaps ihe most visible is the United Nations, which includes as members many countries smaller than the national areas of the USSR. In the pre-Soviet era of world-wide imperialism that was unthinkable, except for freak situations left over from feudal times, such as Andorra, a tiny principality between France and Spain.

Armenians will recognize Lenin's foresight to have been quite remarkable. In the same article, he wrote: "It is extremely important to create autonomous areas of even the smallest dimensions . . towards which the members of the given nationality scattered in different parts of the country, or even of the world, could 'gravitate'." About 220,000 Armenians have /mmigrated to Soviet Armenia from foreign countries, including some from the U.S., and hundreds of thousands more have come from other parts of the Soviet Union. Yet a million more are sufficiently assimilated to life in Russia proper, in the Ukraine, etc., to prefer living there. The same factor has been operative among Jews; from most countries, including the U.S. and USSR, only a small minority have gone to Israel. The great majority want to remain where they are, though they are interested in what happens in Israel, and some, especially in the U.S., give Israel political and other support. The Soviet support for a separate Palestinian state reflects its own experience at the time of the Revolution, and the success of solutions such as that for the Azerbaijanis encircled by Armenian-populated territory.

Lenin's party was a small minority in pre-revolutionary Russia. We focus on his views because the Soviet Union of today has been shaped essentially on them. Parties that had vastly more influence than Lenin's proved unable to deal with Russia's crisis and disappeared from the scene. The most important in the pre-war years was the Constitutional Democratic Party, which advocated liberal capitalism and ruled immediately after the tsar was overthrown. On the fundamental issue of the colonies and semi-colonies that comprised half the population of the Russian Empire, its newspaper stated that members of the party "have never pledged themselves to advocate the right of 'nations to secede' from the Russian state," but only freedom of languages. Lenin did not mince words in responding:

"Herein lies one of the root causes of your chauvinism and of your ideological and political alliance with the Purishkeviches. . . . The Purishkeviches and their class inculcate in the ignorant masses the 'hard-line' belief that it is 'right' to 'grab 'em and hold 'em" the non- Russian peoples.

Reading the records of that far-off time and place, it is amazing to see how closely the acts of governments seeking to maintain the dominance of one ethnic group parallel each other. It has now been established in response to persistent protests and research by U.S. Black and Latino organizations that census gathering techniques through 1970 deliberately under-counted those groups, for both economic reasons (to reduce the amount of federal aid) and political ones. Here is Lenin, in 1914, complaining about exactly the same thing:

"In Russia, even according to official, i.e., palpably exaggerated statistics, which are faked to suit the 'government's plans,' the Great-Russians constitute no more than 43 percent of the entire population of the country." He attacked the government for seeking to rule on behalf of what was, by its own admission, a minority — but he never failed to point out that it was not the Russian people that gained by this but primarily the landlord class. The government tried to overcome this problem by forcing the Ukrainians to regard themselves as Russian. For example it sought to ban celebrations in honor of the hundredth anniversary ot the birth of Taras Shevchenko, a poet, painter, and revolutionary democrat whose picture hung in every Ukrainian home. Lenin waxed merrily sarcastic over this gross insensitivity:

The ban on the celebrations in honor of Shevchenko was such an excellent, splendid, exceptionally happy and well-chosen measure as far as anti-government agitation is concerned that no belter agitation could be conceived. I think that none of our best Social-Democratic agitators against the government could ever have achieved such sensational success in so short a time as was achieved by this measure in rousing opposition to the government.

Four months after this was written, World War 1 broke out. Within a year, just south of Russia's border, a million and a half Armenians had been exterminated or starved to death by the Turkish Empire in the first mass genocide of the 20th century. Another year, and Russian manpower losses in the war were so great that the tsar tried to draft colonial Central Asians — for labor service, as he didn't dare put modern weapons in their hands. They revolted, spontaneously and without organization, over a huge area. And although they were put down by massacre and cruelty, this was the handwriting on the wall; one more year, and the Russian armies themselves were in revolt, joined by starving soldiers' wives and the workers of the cities. The monarchy was overthrown in March 1917. On November 7 of that same year, the Communists came to power. The time for talk was over. Now they had to prove to the non-Russian majority of the people that they meant what they said.

Revolution: Time to Deliver

Beginnings: Medical Technical School, Turkmenia, 1937.

The Provisional Government that took over upon abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in March 1917 did not act decisively to solve the problems that had come to a head. Most important of these was how to seek peace in World War 1, then in its third year, a war in which the backward Russian Empire had lost more millions killed and wounded than any of its allies or its enemies. Next was the demand of the peasants, in that overwhelmingly agricultural country, that landowners' land be turned over to those who worked it. A third was simply providing bread to feed a population starving — partly because the country's meager resources had been diverted to the army, but increasingly because the absence of men and horses from the farms meant that production could not be kept up. The fourth was the demand for independence or restoration of rights by the conquered nations within the Russian Empire, and for equal rights by minorities dispersed therein.

Of the Ukrainians, Lenin wrote at this time: "Accursed tsarism made the Great-Russians executioners of the Ukrainian people, and fomented in them a hatred for those who even forbade Ukrainian children to speak and study in their native tongue."

With respect to the massive stealing of Bashkir land, described in the previous chapter, he had written: "This is a tidbit of colonial policy that will stand comparison to any of the feats performed ... in . . Africa." That indictment is borne out by the fact that in some counties the Bashkir death rate reached genocidal levels.

The Ukraine is on the western frontier. Bashkiria is in the Ural Mountains separating Europe and Asia, Kirgizia deep in Central Asia, on China's westernmost border. Just a year before the overthrow of the tsar, the Russian Army had taken hundreds of thousands of sheep from the nomadic Kirgiz, and paid in rubles. But in that subsistence economy, large sums of money were meaningless: there was nothing to buy. Sheep's wool provided clothing and shelter, sheep's milk and meat were food, sheep's intestines became bags, their sinews served as cord. With the inefficiency of that day, of that country, and of armies in general, the sheep had been slaughtered by the tens of thousands before provision for storage was made, and the Kirgiz had seen them rot uselessly, while they themselves hungered. On top of this came the decree conscripting Central Asians for unarmed labor service at the front, thousands of miles away. A rebellion broke out which "took the form of an indiscriminate slaughter of Russian peasants." As a Russian geologist told Anna Louise Strong in Kirgizia, a dozen years later, perhaps 10,000 were wiped out. The Russian colonial occupation army, plus divisions moved from the front, responded ruthlessly. About a million of the nomadic Kirgiz and Kazakhs — one-out-often people in the affected area — tied to Chinese Turkestan, where they were sold into slavery.

At the very opposite end of the country, north of Leningrad, bordering Finalnd, live the "white" European Karelians. Their language resembles Finnish, but "To sell a Bible written in Finnish was punishable by exile. . . . Children were punished for speaking Karelian even in the schoolgrounds." (Native Americans have had that experience in Bureau of Indian Affairs schools, and Chicanos did until very recent years.) Those Karelian children were lucky simply to be in school at all: in Bashkiria, of 4,778 children in secondary schools in 1910, only ten had been Bashkirs.

This was the reality when the tsar was overthrown. When, after eight months, the Provisional Government failed to move on these issues, and refused to withdraw from the world war, the people lost patience. Among the industrial workers in the major cities, and also among the soldiers and sailors, who were still being killed, the Communists (then the Bolshevik wing of the Social-Democratic Party) won great support. This was based on their argument that nothing had changed because continuation of the war, of landlordism, and of food hoarding were in the interests of the capitalist and landlord classes. They also pointed out that even the most Left of the governing parties thought Russia was not ripe for socialism, and was therefore committed on principle to seeking only reforms within the existing socio-economic system.

On November 7, 1917, the Communists seized power with the aid of armed workers in the capital, sailors and vessels of the Baltic Fleet, and soldiers in urban garrisons. They proceeded literally overnight to deliver the land to the peasants, bid for peace in the war, and distribute what bread was available. As a consequence, in four months time their rule spread over nearly the entire immense empire, though they had no army of their own, and there were millions of armed men who could have opposed the regime.

The Communists' easy early success also came because the Provisional Government had brought little or no significant change from tsarist oppression. The Ukraine (with nearly 30,000,000 people) and Poland were the largest non-Russian countries in the empire. When the tsar abdicated, a Ukrainian congress, the Central Rada, came into being much like the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War. But the Provisional Government claimed the Ukraine's richest industrial area, and much else, as Russia, and appointed an official as supreme authority over the Ukraine. Lenin argued: "Force will not check the Ukrainians. It will only embitter them. Accede to the Ukrainians, and you will open the way to mutual confidence and brotherly union between the two nations on the basis of equality!" A few weeks earlier he had spelled out his own program: "If there is a Ukrainian republic and a Russian republic, there will be closer contact and greater trust between the two."

A similar situation arose in Finland, which asked only for restoration of the rights enjoyed before annexation to Russia. The Provisional Government rejected this. Lenin said: "We are for giving the Finns complete freedom, because then there will be greater trust in Russian democracy and the Finns will not separate." They did secede in 1917, but remained separate only because after 1918, the Western allies of World War I left an enemy — German — division intact so it could help the anti-socialist element in Finland win the civil war. After its victory a rightist government under Marshal Mannerheim massacred the defeated local socialists much as Pinochet did in Chile in 1973.

In Central Asia the Provisional Government of March-November 1917 actually left in command the tsar's general who had slaughtered the indigenous rebels the previous year. In addition, that government's language policy was unacceptable. Language is a much greater natural barrier than race, People of different races can communicate if they speak the same language; people of the same race cannot, if their languages differ. The Provisional Government had extended recognition to non-Russian languages only in private affairs. Joseph Stalin, who was to be the Soviet Commissar for Nationalities, immediately took issue with this, in one of the earliest legal issues of Pravda after the overthrow of the tsar: "But what about the regions with compact majorities of non-Russian citizens whose language is not Russian (Transcaucasia, Turkestan, the Ukraine, Lithuania, etc.)? There is no doubt that they will have (must have!) their parliaments. ... Is it the idea of the Provisional Government ... to deprive these regions of the right to conduct 'affairs' ... in their native languages ... in their [own] institutions?"

But the Provisional Government could not live up to its pledges of ethnic equality because the liberals in power did not actually believe that the non-Russians, in most cases, were the Russians' equals. The Provisional Government had qualitatively the same attitude of Great-Russian superiority as the tsarist monarchy it had replaced. In the words of a Soviet anthropologist; "At that time things were interpreted as follows: everything Russian is good, everything Komi bad. Masterpieces of ethnic art were held to have no value." Referring to the judgment of a prerevolutionary anthropologist, Smirnov. she writes indignantly: "the Permiak (Komi), allegedly at the 'embryonic level of creativity.' was not quite the ignoramus Smirnov conceived him to be." When a certain motif was found to be shared both by Russian folk art to the west, and the Komi, it was taken for granted that the latter had learned it from the former. But the recent study finds: "there are no grounds for saying that the motif was taken from the northern Great-Russians." A similar neighboring people, the Mari, had gloves 500 years before the rest of Eastern Europe.

The Komi and Mari are perhaps more blonde and Nordic than the Russians, but the prejudice here did not need to be based on race: it was colonial and served to excuse exploitation.

While the Komi are somewhat fewer than American reservation Indians today, the millions of Turkic-speaking people along the Volga in the heart of European Russia are as numerous as Jews in the U.S. One of them, the Tatars, actually ruled over the Russians for 200 years, but the tables were turned several hundred years ago, and the general Russian belief was that this proved them superior. The achievements of the Volga peoples were put down, yet these nationalities had brick buildings with central heating about a thousand years ago. Some of the ancient churches of which the Russians are proudest were built of stone cut by ethnic Volga craftsmen and hauled to Russian territory.

The Tatars were nomads when they conquered the Volga peoples, but adopted the existing urban culture, with its thousands of towns, and it is possible that the Russians learned to build with brick from Tatars; the Russian word for brick is of Turkic origin, and Tatar is a Turkic language. The earliest Communist historian, Pokrovsky, held this view, even though the archeological proof was not yet available when he wrote.

The Tatar, Komi, and other subject peoples were not familiar with these points of scholarship in 1917. They knew perfectly well, however, that the liberal government looked down upon their cultures as essentially worthless, primitive, and savage, and were therefore in no way moved to support that regime.

When the Communists took power, they were at first in no better position to command the support of non-Russians. Although they were not all Russians, they were, with very few exceptions, what the Moslem peoples classed as Europeans. When confronted with the accomplished fact of an autonomous Bashkir nationalist government, established between the overthrow of the tsar and the founding of the Communist government, Lenin recognized that, "in these remote places the name 'Great-Russian' means to the Bashkir 'oppressor,' 'swindler.' We have to consider this and we have to struggle against it. But this is a long-term proposition. This is not the kind of thing that anybody will eliminate by decree. We have to be exceedingly cautious in this matter."

On another occasion he had said: "We do not regard the Bashkir movement as a counterrevolutionary movement directed against us. ... We believe that the national [liberation] movements of the peoples of the East are entirely natural and very necessary. The peoples of the East come to the social revolution only through the national [liberation) revolution," and "the Bashkir movement, if it is granted the autonomy it demands, will not be directed against the Soviets but will constitute a tremendous force in the struggle against Dutov," a Russian Cossack counterrevolutionary general operating in that area.

The Bashkirs were the first indigenous people living in an island of territory within Russia to have their autonomy recognized. But for those not surrounded or outnumbered by Russians, within their own traditional territory, the issue was not autonomy but actual independence and whether or not to secede, as Lenin had predicted in the endless theoretical battles of prerevolutionary years. Poland and Finland did secede, and the Soviet government recognized those acts as it had promised in its platform. Lenin granted Poland independence even before a Polish government was organized. When one appeared, it sought to regain as much of its 18th-century empire as possible. Armed and provided military advisors by France, after Germany surrendered in 1918, Poland took Lithuania's largest city and capital, Vilnius, and held it and large territories with Ukrainian and Belorussian majority populations until 1940. Poland's rulers were blind to the contradiction between independence for their own previously subject people and Polish rule over non-Polish areas.

All this was part of an enormously complicated struggle that also involved the Ukraine, the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania. Estonia), and the Trans-Caucasus (Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan). It involved pro- and anti-Soviet parties within those nations, divided more or less along lines of economic class. There was also military intervention by 14 countries, including both Russia's former allies in World War I (the United States, Great Britain, France, etc.) and her enemies (Germany and Turkey, chiefly) — all now joined by the desire to prevent the establishment of any government that would seek to prove people could live without capitalism. Finally, it came to involve the Soviet government itself, which argued: that if world capitalism could aid anti-communist forces, Moscow could aid pro-communists.

Entire libraries have been written about those struggles. The United States was confident that the Soviet government would not last, and wanted to have the inside track with whatever non-Communist Russian government might succeed as heir to the old empire. So Washington did not favor independence of Russia's former subject peoples for fear that would antagonize such a government. This attitude, and those taken by other Western countries, plus Japan, China, and Turkey — all of which put armies on Soviet soil — strengthened Lenin's position. He argued that the intervention proved that no abstract independence for the countries once under the tsar was really possible: they had to choose between what we would now call nco-eolonialism under capitalist powers or association with Russia to develop socialism. He promised that in the latter case exploitation of one nation by another would cease, and that the language, culture, and territorial boundaries of each would be respected.

The results in each case depended upon the complicated combination of forces involved, domestic and foreign. There were not, and could not be, any nice, clean, honest elections, supervised by impartial honest ballot associations. The fighting, which lasted three years in most places (and didn't totally end until 1931 on the mountainous Afghan border), was as bitter and cruel as in the U.S. Civil War. The very real memory of this struggle is the historical origin of the impenetrable guarding of Soviet and East European borders that exists today.

We have already described what happened in Poland and Finland. When the Civil-War-and-Intervention ended, essentially in 1920, Latvia and Estonia were independent, thanks to the work of that German division which the Allies allowed to operate in the region, in cooperation with the British Navy. Those countries remained greatly dependent upon England until World War II. Lithuania was in the same general situation, except that Poland occupied her capital. Bessarabia, today called Moldavia, had been taken by the Romanian monarchy which treated it as a colony. But most of the Ukraine, most of Belorussia. nearly all of the Caucasus (though the larger part of Armenia was taken by Turkey) — Georgia, Azerbaijan — and nearly all of the former Central Asian Moslem colonies of the tsar wound up Soviet.

Russia proper was quite literally starved during the Civil War. The bread ration — there was nothing else at times — went down to four ounces a day in the biggest cities. It had no friend or ally — the West refused to permit even medical instruments and drugs to enter Soviet territory. The Soviet government was able to organize an army only because the peasants wanted to defend the land they had been given. Industry slowed to a standstill because its raw materials bases were in enemy hands for long periods. Many workers who were not Communists fighting at the fronts drifted back to their home villages in the hope of finding something to eat.

Geographically crazy as it may seem, Siberia was for a period in the hands of a Czechoslovak anti-Communist army consisting of former war prisoners. The other anti-Communist armies were also all led by professional officers, backed by British or French military advisers, and equipped by those countries with U.S. aid. The Red Army, on the other hand, was led by a complete civilian, Leon Trotsky and another civilian, Joseph Stalin, was in charge of various fronts while still another, Lenin, made the final decisions. Not one of them had ever been even an army private, although they all listened carefully to those professional officers who were loyal. By the time the fighting was over, a one-day railroad trip took eight to ten days, so great had been the destruction of bridges, tunnels, signals, locomotives, cars.

In all. 65,000,000 non-Russians, most living as compact territorial majorities bordering the outside world, wound up Soviet in the 1920s. Under the conditions described, the only rational explanation for this is that the great bulk of them wanted it that way. Those decisions were not made quietly under Robert's Rules of Order or by consensus, but with a stupendous amount of debate — family by family, village by village, regiment by regiment, town by town — probably to a degree without precedent in human history. The arguments were usually not over broad concepts of political theory, although there was a surprising leaven of that. The American Revolution stimulated the whole people of that day to make up its mind about Tom Paine's Common S&tse, which sold half a million copies in a population of no more than 3.000,000, including babies and the illiterate. After the Communists took power, the same rolewas played by the "Declaration of Rights of the Peoples of Russia," whieh was issued within one week of the formation of the Soviet government, and later by the appeal "To all the Working Population Among the Moslems of Russia and the East." which was adopted at a conference in Baku.

The Declaration proclaimed all peoples equal and sovereign. It said that each could secede or not as it chose, that all privileges or restrictions based on nationality or religion were abolished. For peoples not comprising majorities in their native territories or with no territories of their own, it guaranteed: "freedom of development for the national minorities and ethnographic groups inhabiting the territory of Russia ..." The very first Soviet cabinet, established the day after the Revolution, included a department (Commissariat) of Nationalities. It was headed by Joseph Stalin, not Russian, but a Georgian, who had authored the accepted Communist analysis of this subject four years earlier.

Paranja-wearing Central Asian bride before unveiling movement of 1927.

Russian oppression was only one obstacle to establishing harmonious relations with the other nationalities and to overcoming underdevelopment. Their own differing levels of development was another. Opium addiction was widespread in Central Asia. A scholar of Kazakh nationality has described the condition of his people before the Revolution when they numbered 4,000,000: 15 percent of the people had 60 percent of the livestock, and these were nomads for whom livestock was everything. "Blood vengeance, raids to seize herds, attacks on grounds of tribal and clan hostility were frequent phenomena, and persons committing such deeds believed that they, in defending clan and personal interests were engaging in acts 'permitted by custom and tradition'." Under adat and shariat, Moslem customary and religious law, the marrying of minors not even in their teens, polygamy, and compulsory marriage of a widow to her husband's nearest surviving male relative "were not only not regarded as crimes but were sanctified and legitimized. . . . Attempts to violate the norms of the adat and to challenge backward customs . . . were punished in the very crudest fashion," like stoning to death for adultery, as is still the case in Saudi Arabia and Iran. This legitimized oppression of women was universal among all Moslem nationalities in the Empire, who then numbered 15,000,000. As a problem tor the new government, the situation was made more difficult by the fact that these women themselves accepted it. A female Uzbek poet reminiscing about that period wrote in 1970:

"The centuries of oppression, the Koran and Shariat placed their dark imprint upon the psychology of women themselves. Being sequestered in women's quarters seemed to many of them a norm of life, submission to the will of fate. It was necessary to overcome the internal inertia of the woman herself."

When a mass movement among women to take off their veils developed a decade after the Revolution, hundreds were murdered or seriously injured.

The persistence of habitual beliefs and notions led to some truly ludicrous situations in the early postrevolutionary period as the desire for social change — or, in some cases, a self-serving adaptation to change — combined with habitual notions. In 1925 a young Ukrainian (later to become a distinguished historian) took a job as village librarian among the Islamic Adygei people in the Caucasus. (Libraries were one of the first means of bringing enlightenment to the countryside.) He had also been appointed to head the local Young Communist League. When he entered the room for the first meeting, a virtual brawl was going on. Through a translator, he learned that Adygei society had had castes, as in India: there was a caste of slaves, one of peasants of various status, one of nobility, and one of princely clans. Children of all of these castes belonged to the Young Communist League, and those from the nobility had tried to grab the front benches in accordance with their ancient privilege, but their ex-slaves and general peasantry resisted, and he was witnessing what amounted to class struggle inside a Communist organization!

The same historian recalls another meeting, when a heated discussion was under way until the muezzin's call to prayer was heard, and the most zealous Moslems dashed out to perform their devotions. He also witnessed weddings involving mock armed clashes between squadrons of mountaineers on horseback and pre-lslamic shamanist cures with witch-doctors driving out the devil by music and dances.

His work involved helping to establish membership organizations consisting of persons of their own ethnic groups and conducted in their own languages. This is why, as appointed temporary leader, this Ukrainian outsider needed an interpreter — no one would have come to a meeting in his language because they knew only their own. That is also why, in the early years, members of different castes and classes were allowed to join the Young Communist League. There was a wall of hostility against Russians, whose conquest of them was within living memory — he met a man in his eighties who personally remembered the war in which the Russians had seized the Caucasus, and had himself been in raids burning Cossack villages and taking captives. In this atmosphere, any indigenous person who saw merit in the new society was welcome to join, though none yet understood its principles well enough to head its local branch.

At this time— 1925— "USSR" was a new term. From 1917 to 1922, the striving for independence from Russia had been manifested in the founding of four separate Soviet republics: the Russian, the Ukrainian, the Belorussian, and a Trans-Caucasian Federation consisting of Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan. The four republics had treaty relations with each other, but, as Lenin had predicted, the granting of the right of secession caused a majority (by no means all) of these peoples to cease focusing on independence, and to turn instead to solving their internal problems.

What happened then was very well described by a Ukrainian from the very poorest strata of the peasantry, H.M. Odinets. He had been placed in the Secretariat, the most important body in the nationalist government of the Ukraine, to convince the mass of the people that the peasantry was in power. But he was a socialist, and he was imprisoned for that:

"When we socialists sat in a Ukrainian jail, we thought over what all that meant, and why, even though the letters over the entry read not tiur'ma [Russian for prison], but v'iaznitsia [Ukrainian, ditto], serving time in it was no different whatever."

But he still faced the question of what would happen to his freedom to be Ukrainian if he changed to the other side in that civil war. The Ukrainian Soviet Republic took as its principle that socialism could only really be built, under the circumstances of the day, in conjunction with Russia. He made that change, with misgivings, and was among the delegates of the Ukrainian Soviets to the congress in Moscow that joined the separate republics into the Union that exists today. At that 1922 gathering he said:

"We see that we now have our own schools, that Ukrainian schooling already exists, that no one is prohibiting such schools. The peasant sees: they really aren't forbidding them. If you want to read in Ukrainian, go ahead and read; if you wish, write in Ukrainian; if you want to speak it, speak it. That one can already do freely! A rumor was spread: they say that an end has been made to Ukrainian music, that its last notes have been played, that once again we've got that old 'indivisible' (Russian Empire). ... I can now say boldly and with a clear conscience: the idea that the Ukraine is being abolished is all a lie. . . . The Soviet government is guiding us along the right lines. Now I believe that and many besides me believe it."

I happened to be traveling in Soviet ethnic republics when the current Constitution was adopted in 1977. In Azerbaijan I watched a rehearsal of that people's songs and dances to be performed at the close of the "constitutional convention" in Moscow. It seemed to me an artificial and stagey show, set up purely for a governmental event, but it turns out to be a tradition dating back to that 1922 founding convention. One of its Central Asian delegates, reminiscing 50 years later, said:

"Actors and musicians of all the constituent and autonomous republics participated in a great entertainment after the closing of the congress. They not only performed for the delegates the fiery dances of the peoples of the Caucasus and the songs of the peoples of Central Asia, but displayed their 'wealth' right on the stage, including live camels, karakul lambs, the riches of the soil and mountains."

That assemblage needed no entertainers to provide ethnic flavor, another delegate recollected: "I recall one gathering of our Ukrainian delegation. Powerful choral singing got under way as we waited for the meeting to start. Delegates from other republics surrounded us on all sides. I remember the colorful national costumes of the Kazakhs, Kirgiz, Uzbeks, and the peoples of the Caucasus. They listened to us with eager attention, amazement, enraptured. A merry tune was sung, and suddenly a gray old uncle, a delegate from the Kharkov country, leaped out and danced the hopak" (the Ukrainian national dance). This totally new kind of government consisted of people with no previous experience of power. The Communist Party was the glue that held things together. To make sure it would not be diluted by people who did not understand its principles, the Party admitted new members very carefully — in some underdeveloped areas, this meant that it had no organization whatever for a period. Looser rules of membership existed in the Young Communist League. At times, this produced an odd kind of vote of confidence. A man who had been a 19-year-old delegate from the mountaineer Daghestan Republic at that founding congress recalled:

"In 1922 I was at a Daghestan Komsomol (Young Communist League) Conference . . . and saw among the delegates bearded men pretty nearly 40 years of age. They said: 'You think age interferes with being a Komsomol, a delegate? But age didn't interfere with fighting in partisan units against the white jackals, did it'?" (White was the political color of the anti-Communists just as red was of the Soviets. It had nothing to do with race.) "'And age didn't prevent organizing a unit of the mountaineer poor in the village, did it? And age didn't prevent us from fighting for the new life against rich peasants and mullahs? So don't look cross-eyed at my beard'!"

Similarly practical, and totally non -theoretical, judgments governed people's behavior when it came to organizing the first collective farms. As late as 1929 in isolated near-desert country in Central Asian Turkmenia, when the Communist Party assigned a Russian urban industrial worker to convince the poor that they would be better off in a collective, he found only one man in the village who knew any Russian at all, a 21-year-old farmer. The Russian suggested the name "Socialism" for that farm. Nearly 50 years later the farmer recalled, "I asked him then what socialism meant. What I understood from his answer was: we will work jointly on our land, we will bring water to it, we will grow crops and divide our harvest equitably. And I reminded my fellow villagers that our life had always been bad. It had been bad for our fathers, and for the fathers of our fathers, and for their fathers before them. Socialism means a good life, a just life. So we called our collective farm 'Socialism'."

That man went on to get a higher education under the atfirmative action program, and became a school principal. His Russian organizer was one of 25,000 industrial workers assigned to this job by the Communist Party, two-thirds of them from the Steel and Metalworkers Union, the element of labor constituting the Party's single strongest source of support.

This method — which involved very careful individual selection — of sending manual workers who had known a lifetime of wage exploitation to help those who had lived under landowner exploitation was quite deliberate. Lenin had made the underlying reasoning clear in a 1919 speech warning that "measures must be immediately taken to prevent Soviet institutions from being flooded with Ukrainian urban petty bourgeoisie, who have no conception of the living conditions of the peasant masses and who frequently masquerade as Communists."

This was not at odds with the policy which allowed the offspring of both princes and slaves to join the Young Communist League in the Caucasus. Today we see the 3,000,000 recently-Stone-Age inhabitants of Papua New Guinea emerging into self-government, just as the industrialized Basques of Spain make similar demands. Soviet ethnic policy is instructive because the Russian Empire included peoples across that entire spectrum of development. While Ukrainians were overwhelmingly rural, feudalism was well behind them, tribalism a thousand years in the past, and castes had never been a factor. Ukrainian women, while not remotely equal to men, were a shade better off than among the Russians. Most important, except for what the peasants made for home use, processing in the Ukraine was in factories, relatively little by craftsmen. As a consequence, the Soviet government of the Ukraine could act from the very outset in accordance with its Marxist principles, and base itself on the urban wage-workers who were rid of private employers and the peasants who were rid of landlords.

Among the Moslem peoples, however, the only significant industry was in the oil city of Baku. Capitalism was not the dominant economic system. Lenin identified the problem there in two statements of November 1919. The first concerned Turkestan — the name given by the monarchy to those conquered areas in Central Asia it ruled directly. As we have noted, the Empire ignored geographic ethnic differences within that huge territory, and even called one people by the name of another. In a telegram to the Communists of Turkestan, almost all Europeans at that time, Lenin wrote, "Demonstrate to [the peoples of Turkestan] by your actions that we are sincere in our desire to wipe out all traces of Great-Russian imperialism." And in a speech to a Congress of Communist Organizations of the Peoples of the East, he said: "you must adapt yourselves to specific conditions such as do not exist in the European countries; you must be able to apply that [Communist] theory and practice to conditions ... in which the task is to wage a struggle against the survival of medievalism and not against capitalism."

Prior to this time, Marxist political activity had addressed itself solely to the notion that socialism was the solution to the problems of industrial countries. Even in Russia, a major wing of the socialists called Mensheviks, and later the Trotskyist current among Communists, held that socialism could not be established there because it was not primarily an industrial country. Now history was forcing a Marxist party in power to grapple with practical realities. The last quotation above from Lenin marked the beginning of what has since come to be known as the "non-capitalist" path to socialism from pre-industrial societies, and represents the Soviet view of what is desirable for African countries today.

The most important aspect of the early experience in Central Asia was the appearance of transitional governments that were not yet Communist. Tsarism had permitted two "native states" — the emirates of Khiva and Bokhara — to remain when it conquered Central Asia half a century before the Revolution. The Emir of Bokhara was granted the title of aide-de-camp to the tsar. He was also allowed to invest 100,000,000 rubles, a stupendous sum in those days, in Russian industry and finance. That money (and another $175,000,000 in bullion and gems with which he tied to Afghanistan in 1920), came from an age-old system of exploiting the tillers of irrigated farmland. Russia offered a tremendous market for cotton, and that had been one of the reasons for the conquest.

The emir was the biggest feudal lord, but there were also private landholdings and those of Moslem religious institutions. Sharecropping was the rule, and the peasant retained but one-fourth of the crop! The peasants also had to build and dredge canals, maintain roads and bridges, build and repair brick fortress walls. There was a very large class of artisans and tradesmen in the cities, as in the Arab countries today. Judges retained a percentage of the fines they levied; administrators received no salaries, but lived ott tolls and taxes they imposed. But the system was largely stable: the croppers at least owned the land on which their homes sat, a wooden plow, a working animal. After the Russian conquest, they continued to work for a member of their own nationality, and in a way hallowed by tradition. This, their sense of property, of clan loyalty — the man who took 75 percent of the crop was usually of the same clan — plus religious loyalty, created a firm wall of resistance to social change. At this writing, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan are examples of persistence of similar traditions.

However, the cotton trade with Russia, the contact with a different world provided by the new railroad, and the building of local cotton gins led to the emergence of a non-traditional merchant class. A desire for a type of education more utilitarian than the traditional Mohammedan schooling arose, and some such schools were opened. In the most medieval areas, the very name for such schools was taken as a synonym for rebellion, and their advocates were flogged, often to death — this happened to one of the major Eastern poets of modern times, the Tajik, Sadriddin Aini. He survived.

A few people in tsarist Central Asia were sent to higher educational institutions in Russia to train as veterinarians and the like. Some secular literature appeared, and modernization became a goal among the new class. This was the situation on the eve of the Revolution.

When Lenin came to power, the Soviets offered national independence without demanding a new economic or social order. Even in the directly Soviet territory in Central Asia — not the "native states" like Bokhara — no attempt was made to interfere with feudal ownership of land and water for several years. It was clear that the idea of taking the land of the bey (nobleman) or, even worse, that of the mosque, was foreign to the mind of the dekkan (peasant), as immoral by his standards as the tsarist conquerors' seizure of native lands. A period of education and practical elementary training in democracy would have to come first. In the Kazakh steppes outside the irrigated Uzbek and Tajik oases, the Communists granted amnesty to those who had been active in the nationalist movement that initially opposed them, when they lay down their arms.

Witnessing all this, the liberals of merchant background in Bokhara decided the time had come to revolt against this last enclave of feudalism. They rallied the poorest sections of their society by pointing to the improved position of the peasantry in nearby areas under Soviet rule and the increasing number of indigenous people in responsible government positions. They overthrew the power of the emir except in the capital city of Bokhara, where the inhabitants, roused by the Moslem clergy, resisted strongly, until Red forces from Tashkent, Soviet Turkestan, won the day. This was in August 1920.

The new governments in Bokhara and Khorezm (successor to another emirate in Khiva) called themselves Soviet but not socialist. The position of the rank-and-file improved only in so far as they shared in the property confiscated from the emir and his highest officials and the abolition of the old taxes. Russia was able to provide a new kind of help from without: 24 medical specialists, 136 general practitioners and 154 nurses were sent to Bokhara in 1923. Except for a single physician and perhaps four nurse practitioners (feldshers) serving the emir and high Russian officials, these were the only source of medical help for the entire population. Yet even these 300 people represented a sacrifice by Russia, for a very large proportion of her medical personnel had emigrated due to the hardships of life after the Civil War and Intervention. This in fact is what prompted the Soviet policy of barring free emigration. The population in 1922 was 7,000,000 less than in 1918. Millions had died of disease and starvation, 2,000,000 in the fighting, and 2,000,000 including a great many professionals, had emigrated.

The structure of Soviet nationality policy was put in place in the 20 years after the Revolution, and embodied in the Constitution of 1936. A form of territorial autonomy was devised for small tribal nationalities in 1926; larger tribal peoples consolidated themselves into nations, and were given the status of full republics of the USSR. Kazakhstan and Kirgizia were at first autonomous republics within the Russian Republic, but in 1936 were separated out to become the last two full republics on a par with Russia.

Because most Blacks and Latinos, a great many Indians, and all Asian-Americans constitute dispersed minorities in the United States, the Soviet experiences most pertinent to them are those of the Jews. Tatars, and Gypsies. Like the Ku Klux Klan here, old Russia had violent racist organizations of private citizens. The Soviet government outlawed such organizations, tried, imprisoned, and in some cases executed their leaders. That took care of that, because the conditions giving one a personal interest in maintaining racism or discrimination were abolished. Therefore the mass base for even secret revival of such organizations disappeared. But some mental prejudice persists, and very small illegal dissident groups of Russian nationalists crop up at rare intervals.

The change from a pro-racist government that encouraged pogroms to an anti-racist one made an end to the acquittal or failure to prosecute persons engaging in killing, maiming, or defrauding members of ethnic minorities. The regular police force of tsarist times, recognized as hopelessly racist and anti-working class, was totally disbanded, and its former members were denied the right to vote or hold office for many years after the Revolution. The very word, "police," has disappeared from the language. Public safety functions were performed by a new force, drawn from workers and peasants known to share the interests of their own social classes and to be opposed to racism. Today, in contrast to the situation in most American inner cities, the "militia," (as the Soviet public-safety force is now called) accurately reflects the make-up of the local population everywhere in the Soviet Union, both in terms of physical characteristics and languages.

Residential ghettoes in old Russia arose both out of legal prohibitions, in the case of the Jews, and out of economic factors. Confiscating rental property eliminated discrimination by landlords, and reducing rents to a very tiny fraction of income eliminated economic bars to housing integration. No complaints on this score are heard today even from the most bitterly anti-Communist emigrants from the Soviet Union.

Discrimination in employment was also abolished. Jews had been legally barred from government service, work in the railroads or in the postal service; these laws were simply wiped off the books. Affirmative-action placed 150,000 Jews in industrial jobs in the years before unemployment was totally eliminated by socialist economic planning. With the organization of government farms the proportion of Jews earning a living from agriculture rose from 2 percent to 11 percent in the years before World War II. Only civil marriage was recognized (although anyone could also have a religious wedding) which automatically removed bars to intermarriage, such as the U.S. had with its miscegenation laws until recently.

Anti-Semitic quotas in education were abolished and education in one's native language was provided everywhere. This initially led to people flocking into schools in their own languages. When it became clear that all languages were truly regarded as equal in value, dispersed peoples in the following generation tended to send their children to Russian-language schools because that is the language of general communication where Russians are the majority.

Tatars and Gypsies, and numerous other dispersed minorities, had similar experiences, although discrimination against them had not been as firmly fixed in law in the old days. The Tatars overcame the heritage of their former depressed status in a single generation or at most two; with the Gypsies it took two generations for most, for some, three.

Overall, anti-minority prejudices have declined so sharply that violence on those grounds has disappeared. Some minority individuals believe they suffer from difficulties with promotion due to prejudice, and in certain cases this is undoubtedly true, but overall statistics in all cases — Jews, Tatars, Gypsies — reveal exactly the opposite as the general rule. All moved upward far more rapidly than the Russians. The Jews are far ahead of the Russians in proportion to population. Peoples without the Jews' traditional striving for education are either about even with or still somewhat behind the Russians, but now their progress is entirely up to themselves.

World War II disrupted everything in the Soviet Union, including the patterns just described. Post-war developments affecting particular nationalities are discussed in detail in the chapters which follow.

On December 21, 1982, the sixtieth anniversary of the joining of the six Soviet republics then existing into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, then Soviet President Yuri Andropov delivered a speech setting forth the present view of the Communist Party and the government on the ethnic situation:

Marxism was the first doctrine to show that the nationalities question is linked organically to society's social class structure, to the predominating type of property. . . . For the first time in history the multinational character of a country has turned from a source of weakness into a source of strength. . . . The successes in settling the nationalities question by no means signify that all the problems generated by the very fact of the life and work of numerous nations and nationalities in a single state have vanished. This is hardly possible as long as nations exist, as long as there are national distinctions. And these will exist for a long time to come, much longer than class distinctions. That is why the further improvement of advanced socialism . . . must include a carefully considered, scientific policy with respect to the nationalities question. . . . We must remember that there are both good and bad. outdated elements in the cultural heritage, traditions and customs of each nation. . . . It is important, however, that the natural pride one takes in the gains achieved should not degenerate into ethnic arrogance or conceit, that it should not tend toward exclusiveness and disrespect for other nations and nationalities. Yet such negative phenomena still occur, and it would oe wrong to attribute them solely to the traces of the past. Among other things, they are sometimes fostered by the mistakes we make in our work. Here, comrades, nothing can be dismissed as insignificant. Everything counts — the attitude to the language, to artifacts of the past, the interpretation of historical events and the way we transform rural and urban areas and influence living and working conditions.

The natural migration of the population is making each of our republics — and, to varying degrees, each region and each city — increasingly multinational. . . .

In some of them, however, the indigenous nationality should be represented in the working class more fully. Hence the task set by the 26th Congress of the Communist Party — to expand and improve the training of skilled workers from among all the nations and nationalities residing in the republics. The need for this is both economic and political. Multi-ethnic work forces, above all those in industry, are that very milieu in which the internationalist spirit is fostered best . . .

Representation in Party and government bodies ... is also a highly important question. . . . There should be a consistent effort to ensure proper representation of all nationalities in any republic at all levels of the various Party and government bodies. . . . Great tact in selecting and assigning personnel are especially necessary in view of the multinational composition of the union and autonomous republics. . . .

To continue instilling in Soviet people a spirit of mutual respect and friendship for all the nations and nationalities of the country . . . should also be an everyday concern of all educational establishments in our country. . . .

All this means that problems of relations among nations are still on the agenda in the society of mature socialism." (my emphasis-W.M.)

Early in 1983, Mr. Andropov brought this same matter before the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Izvestia, the government's official daily, reported him as saying that there was need for "more concrete and deeper consideration of ethnic characteristics, for more concern for all-round development of all the nations and peoples, particularly the small ones. He emphasized the need for persistent efforts to eliminate from existing practices any deviations from Lenin's nationalities policy and for consistently providing for total equality of Soviet people of all nationalities."

The resolution adopted by the Presidium on that occasion charged educational institutions with "socializing the people in the spirit of mutual respect and friendship among all the nations and peoples of the country . . . [and] persistently to develop forms and methods of work, meeting contemporary requirements, to enrich the ethnic cultures and to make use of the best that is provided by the intellectual heritage and traditions of each of the peoples of our country, to resist actively attempts to idealize obsolete manners and morals . . . and to struggle against such negative phenomena as ethnic conceit, bragging and a disrespectful attitude toward other nations and nationalities.

Mr. Andropov died only a year after this program was adopted. The Chernenko administration is still too new for us to judge its implementation of these principles. However, a mid-1984 article in Pravda, the Communist Party's national daily, pointed the finger at non-Marxist trends of thought in the USSR that could bring problems in the ethnic sphere: It charged that, "Some scholars are showing a conciliatory attitude toward the ideology of Pan-Slavism," a prerevolutionary theory that justified Russian dominance on the grounds that Russia was the protector of other Slavic peoples. The article called some conciliatory even toward "forthright apologists for the monarchy," most likely a reference to writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, now living in exile in the United States, and went on, "Rationalizations are still current about religious figures who supposedly express the spirit of a nation, and of religion as the fount of high morality." This was directed both at Great-Russian chauvinists and at anti-Russian nationalists. Certain religions are directly associated with particular nations or nationalities in the Soviet Union, so the feeling that possessing a particular religion gives one a better morality leads to a sense of superiority over peoples who do not profess it. All religious wars have been justified thus — "God is on our side."

Lastly, the article contended that "certain published works 'derive' national character from a classless, absolute ethic, a 'national spirit,' and peasant patriarch alism is looked upon as the source of everything distinct to a people." That last is unmistakeably directed against Valentin Rasputin, one of the most popular Soviet Russian writers of our day, and other literary figures of the "ruralist group," including some non-Russians, who take the same stand with respect to their own peoples. Clearly, Andropov's point that the "national question" will remain so long as nations and nationalities exist has not been forgotten.