Why was the Soviet Union created?
When Putin in his ideological salvo that preceded the actual war in Ukraine placed the blame for the existence of the Ukraine within its current borders on Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev, he not only opened up the Pandora’s box of borders, but led to the renewed discussion of the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in December 1922. (Putin’s blaming of the three Soviet leaders was as follows: Lenin for ignoring the Russian majority population in the Donbass and thus “giving” the Donbass to Ukraine; Stalin for “giving” the eastern part of Poland after World War II to Ukraine, and Khrushchev who “for whatever reasons” decided in 1954 to transfer the Crimea to the Ukraine.)
There is often very little understanding among many, especially young, people about the ideology behind the creation of the Soviet Union. In an otherwise good article recently published in the “National Interest”, Mark Katz rejects Putin’s critique of Lenin by arguing that “instead of blaming Lenin, Putin should draw lessons from Lenin’s realization that a more accommodative approach toward Ukrainian nationalism would better serve Russia’s long-term interests”.
This point however shows marked lack of understanding by Katz of the forces that led to the creation of the Soviet Union, in addition to imputing Lenin to have been concerned with “Russia’s [sic!] long-term interest”—a statement that only people unfamiliar with Lenin’s ideology and writings could make. But let us go back to the creation of the Soviet Union. The most important person behind the creation of the Union was Stalin, not Lenin. Stalin, as is well known was the People’s Commissar for Nationalities, and was, within the Bolshevik leadership the person in charge of nationality questions, including obviously the creation of a new Union composed of ethnically-based republics. (At the creation there were six republics: RSFSR, Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the Transcaucasian Federation composed of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.) Here is what Stalin said about the creation of the Union:
Finally, there is a third group of facts, which also call for union and which are associated with the structure of the Soviet regime, with the class nature of the Soviet regime. The Soviet regime is so constructed that, being international in its intrinsic nature, it in every way fosters the idea of union among the masses and itself impels them to take the path of union. Whereas capital, private property and exploitation disunite people, split them into mutually hostile camps, examples of which are provided by Great Britain, France and even small multi-national states like Poland and Yugoslavia with their irreconcilable internal national contradictions which corrode the very foundations of these states— whereas, I say, over there, in the West, where capitalist democracy reigns and where the states are based on private property, the very basis of the state fosters national bickering, conflicts and struggle, here, in the world of Soviets, where the regime is based not on capital but on labour, where the regime is based not on private property, but on collective property, where the regime is based not on the exploitation of man by man, but on the struggle against such exploitation, here, on the contrary, the very nature of the regime fosters among the laboring masses a natural striving towards union in a single socialist family. (my emphasis)
Very similar statements are repeated in several publications, speeches and interviews that Stalin gave at that time. The links are here and I would suggest that people read at least some of them. For my purpose here, the key thing to understand is that the ideology behind the creation of the Union was not whether that Union, with the Ukraine defined one way or another, would be more or less stable at Katz implies, but that the Union is simply the reflection of the end of national and class contradictions that come with the socialist revolution. It is thus a “natural” striving of peoples liberated from under the rule of capital, and –the most important point—it is therefore open for all other parts of the world that, sooner or later, may also become free. The USSR was envisaged not as a finished state, but as an open-ended state that would grow as socialism spreads to the extent of including within it all European, and perhaps even all countries in the world.
To make this union more attractive, the open-endedness was not only in accepting the new countries, but in allowing those that are included to leave. Thus “the character of the union should be voluntary, exclusively voluntary, and every national republic should retain the right to secede from the Union. Thus, the voluntary principle must be made the basis of the Treaty on the Formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”. Here the point is made by Stalin, but Lenin, as is well-known, insisted on that double open-endedness even more.
Consequently, it is not the political stability of what then constituted the USSR that was of paramount importance to its Bolshevik founding fathers but its openness. This is a point on which Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and the entire leadership were in full agreement. The new federated Soviet Union was not the end- formation, but the beginning-formation. The Bolsheviks expected the success of the revolution in Germany, Austria and Hungary any time. Thus they expected that these new Soviet republics (as they indeed called themselves) would ultimately join them in a federated state even if they were defeated for now. It is notable that the USSR has no geographical denomination in its name. When the United States of America were created (in a somewhat similar fashion like the USSR) the founding fathers did include a geographical limit in its name. Not so the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
It is then fully understandable that Mao Zedong proposed in 1949 to Stalin that China join the USSR (Stalin, after some reflection, rejected the idea). It was a “normal” view entertained by many communists world-wide. When the communist revolution won in Yugoslavia, many people there thought that the next step would be the accession to the Soviet Union. I recall my father’s friends in 1960s in their conversations talking of believing in the 1940s that Yugoslavia would immediately apply to become another republic of the USSR.
Perhaps for today’s generations that know very little about the communist ideology and the forces that led to the creation of the USSR, this may be difficult to grasp, but it would help to think by analogy: if instead of the USSR they think of the European Union. The EU is a similar supra-national and ideological creation, and it is at present thought “natural” in many parts of Europe to believe that countries will ultimately “accede” to that Union. It was likewise thought “natural” among the communists that, as individual countries became free, they would “accede” to the Soviet Union.
One can think of at least two other historical precedents when ideological homogeneity was thought sufficient to trump over all other allegiances including national. The first precedent is the Christian empire that was thought indissoluble and one. The emperor in Constantinople was thus shocked when the Pope decided to bestow the crown on Charlemagne and create yet the second Christian emperor. It was thought inconceivable that Christians would have two different empires since they were all just that: Christians. Another example is Islam where too, at the origin, it was believed that all Muslims, anywhere in the world, would be united into a single political union, the khalifate. That too rather quickly evaporated. But as in the case of communism and the Soviet Union, it is important to understand the ideological motives of the founders and not to ascribe to them the goals that seem reasonable to us now, but that they simply did not have at the time.
Dear Branco,
You are absolutely right about the ideological "source" of USSR formation, but imo you are missing a second equally important "source", which is the opportunism of the moment. Anyone who is reading things as written and is not blinded by the later theorizing by Stalin and Trotsky is able to clearly see that Lenin and the party were riding a hurricane which was the Russian revolution, and a lot of what they did was just to stay on top and not to fall off. Thus they had to make constant concession to local elites and do major political contortions to retain consensus even within their own party, not to mention the fellow travellers, of which there were many, especially on the periphery. And while the idea of the USSR is predominantly, as you say, the result of ideology, the execution, including the outline of the borders within it, is almost exclusively the result of local and contemporaneous compromises, i.e. mostly random. If we take Ukraine as an example, there is absolutely no top down ideological reason why Krivoy Rog - Donetsk Republic ceased to exist and was later merged with Soviet Ukraine, it was all decided as a result of local events and later more or less accepted by Moscow.
Just to complement. From what I can remember from Edward Carr's "A History of Soviet Russia".
There is no Marxist theory of nationalities, so to speak. According to Marx, the Nation-state is just a historically specific formation that will disappear with the rise of socialism. The Bolsheviks, therefore, had to improvise a practical policy towards nationalities after their sudden victory in 1917.
The way they did that was absolutely improvised and changed with time until it more or less stabilized in the 1930s: to the nationalities which already had a strong bourgeoisie before 1917, automatic independence and an option to enter the Union given; to the nationalities which didn't have a bourgeoisie, a republic would be created within the Union, in which an intermediary phase - the "bourgeois-democratic revolution" phase - would be enforced or stimulated, so that it would quickly go through the capitalist stage in order to evolve further to the socialist phase.
Geographically, that meant, in practice, that the Asian nationalities fell into the second case, while the European nationalities fell into the first case.
Nationalities with extremely developed capitalism and bourgeoisie immediately used the opportunity to get unconditional independence. In such cases, the Bolsheviks didn't even pretend to try to get them into the Union. The most illustrative examples were Finland and Poland (the more Western, the stronger this tendency).
Nationalities with pre-capitalist, sometimes even nomad modes of production, either didn't even notice they became republics or peacefully accepted the terms. You can put basically all the Asian nationalities (the "stans", among others) in this group.
In some extreme cases, even a republic wasn't feasible, such was the primitive level of development of these "nationalities". They became instead autonomous republics within the RSFSR. Those cases were even more peaceful, which make the anti-colonial aspect of the USSR very evident. One example of this, if memory doesn't fail me, was Tuva, which was essentially a tribe of some 10,000 people. The Tuvans didn't even have a written language. The Bolsheviks insisted they should become a republic, which they refused. After insisting - which included creating an alphabet for the Tuvan language, so that it could write its constitution - the Tuvan Soviet Republic was founded. In its first congress, it dissolved itself and re-entered the RSFSR voluntarily. Today's Minister of Defense, Sergey Shoigu, is Tuvan: he would never have reached such position were it not for the USSR.
There was one case that was extremely problematic because it was an intermediary one: Transcaucasia. Transcaucasia had a bourgeoisie that was militant but not strong, and was divided in ethnic terms, Armenian and Georgian. Each one claimed their own republics. However, it was not clear their will represented the will of the majority of the Transcaucasian peoples, and, to make things worse, the realities of the geopolitical game (the region was crucial to Soviet national security) of the time made it so that the USSR could not afford for Transcaucasia to opt to leave the Union. The issue was ultimately solved by the Red Army, who tipped the balance to the pro-Union forces in that region. The same thing, in an even more dramatic fashion, happened in the Ukraine (which saw an extremely rare three-side war, between the White, Black and Red Army).
Two bizarre cases happened: Turkmenistan and the Republic of Siberia. (Future) Turkmenistan was a so corrupt, so underdeveloped and so ideologically problematic that the Bolsheviks considered letting it go/expel it from the Union. The Republic of Siberia was a chimera created by the Japanese Empire during the Russian Civil War, where geographic obstacles impelled the Japanese to install a liberal republic with a tripartite chamber - one third Bolshevik, one third pro-Japanese, one-third pro-White Army/local liberals and monarchists. The republic was so artificial and so frail that its end was never contested or made official by the Japanese Empire: the Red Army inexorably advanced towards Siberia and enjoyed absolute support from the local population; the Bolsheviks didn't even bother to make it an ASSR, so overwhelmingly pro-Russian and pro-Bolshevik it was.
There was never any discussion about Novorossiya. It was never a thing. There was some dispute about the frontier industries of the Donbass, but, as far as I know, the narrative that Lenin contradicted some Novorossiyan national will to strengthen the Ukrainian one is a fantasy created by the Russian Federation elites. Crimea however was really a problem: the initial plan was to make it a Tatar autonomous republic, but the Tatars were a minority and it seems they didn't want it or were very problematic. It was then reabsorbed by the RSFSR. We don't know for certain why Krushchev transferred it the Ukrainian SSR; some rumors state he did in one single night, while he was drunk.
The nationalities policy of the Bolsheviks had a clear-cut limit which they never hid: class struggle. Class struggle, according to the Bolsheviks, was the overriding factor of national self-determination. The right to national self-determination only went so far as it didn't hurt the interests of the proletariat. In practical terms, that meant the economy was the decisive factor: once the Five-Year Plans started to be implemented, breakneck speed industrialization of the USSR ensued. Industry naturally leads to centralization of politics, which weakened the political power of the nationalities.
The result of the Bolshevik nationalities policy was dual: in the West, it didn't work (see the present-day Eastern European nations). But in the East, it was a tremendous success. The reason for that is obvious: in Asia, capitalism was either non-existent or an extremely brutal enterprise; there was no working class consciousness in Asia, and trade unions were non-existent. In such scenario, a revolution "from above" was better than no revolution at all. It had an anti-colonialist effect in Asia. That's why the USSR, and Marxism-Leninism, still enjoy great prestige and respect in Asia (and success, in the cases of China and Vietnam, where it still exists), while being demonized in Europe.