18 - Non-Russians in the Soviet Union and after

Summary

The end of the First World War was followed by a total reorganisation of the political geography of Europe and parts of Asia, not so much as a direct result of the defeat of Germany and her allies, as through the break-up of the three great land-based empires of the region – the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman. From the rubble of the latter two, new nation-states emerged. From the Russian Empire, some nations followed suit – Finland, Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania – but for the others the outcome was different. Although Lenin avowedly espoused a doctrine of national self-determination similar in many ways to US President Woodrow Wilson’s on which the new East European order was based, after a few years all the remaining territories of the Russian Empire had been incorporated into the world’s first socialist state, renamed in 1923 as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union. Instead of encouraging outright independence, Lenin and his successors implemented nation-building policies within a territorially defined federal structure. The constitutional structure of the Soviet Union and many elements of the early policies remained largely unchanged until 1991. In other respects, however, treatment of individual nationalities varied greatly while an increasingly overt elevation of the political and cultural dominance of the Russian nation contradicted earlier policies. The incorporation of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Moldova into the USSR after the Second World War further upset the balance of a system that collapsed in 1991.