Lenin and Stalin, "To all toiling Muslims of Russia and the East"

“Henceforth your beliefs and customs, your national and cultural institutions are declared to be free and inviolable. Establish your national life freely and without hindrance.  You have the right to do this. Know that your rights, and the rights of all the peoples of Russia, are guarded with all the might of the revolution and its organs, the soviets of workers’, soldiers’, and peasants’ deputies.”  — November/December 1917

Stalin, "Marxism and the national question"

“A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture. It goes without saying that a nation, like every historical phenomenon, is subject to the law of change, has its history, its beginning and end. . .
     “It is possible to conceive of people possessing a common “national character” who, nevertheless, cannot be said to constitute a single nation if they are economically disunited, inhabit different territories, speak different languages, and so forth. Such, for instance, are the Russian, Galician, American, Georgian and Caucasian Highland Jews, who, in our opinion, do not constitute a single nation. It is possible to conceive of people with a common territory and economic life who nevertheless would not constitute a single nation because they have no common language and no common “national character.” Such, for instance, are the Germans and Letts in the Baltic region. . .
     “It is only when all these characteristics are present together that we have a nation.”  —1913

Contradictions and paradoxes

Vladimir Lenin, Lev Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin carried out their revolution in the name of liberation from capitalist, tsarist and Russian ethnic oppression. Before the revolution Lenin had argued strenuously that national autonomy for colonized peoples was a necessary component of Marxism, and during the civil war the Bolsheviks tried to forge alliances with non-Russian peoples of the former empire by promising cultural and political independence. They then proceeded to re-possess by force almost all of the former Russian Empire (except for Finland and the far-western borderlands), and to destroy all non-Russian independent political groups. How did they justify this behavior?  Bolshevik and later Soviet policy toward the “nationalities” (as we refer collectively to the many non-Russian peoples of the USSR) was shaped by many people under varying circumstances, and so it is impossible to say that there was one simple motivation behind it. Rather, the major impulses behind Bolshevik and Soviet policy were a mix of pragmatism, ideology, and great power ambition.

Pragmatic: the revolution must survive

During the Civil War, which killed approximately seven million people, Lenin focused on survival. If the only way to gain needed support from non-Russian fighters was to promise them freedom, he eagerly promised freedom. As the Bolshevik position grew more secure, Lenin introduced an ideological caveat to this promise: he believed that nationalism was a product of capitalism, and that true communists could not be nationalists. For example, in February 1919 Lenin and Stalin sent a telegram to support a Bolshevik alliance with independent Bashkir fighters, who were Turkic Muslims living along the southern Volga River. Lenin and Stalin wrote: “The Soviet government pledges its full guarantee for Bashkir national freedom. But naturally, you must deal severely with counter-revolutionaries among Bashkir population and achieve de facto control to ensure proletarian reliability of Baslikir [sic] forces”  In plain English, Lenin recognized as legitimate ONLY Bashkir leaders who fully accepted the Bolshevik program and did not actually want to be independent. Those Bashkirs who wanted to set up any kind of non-communist, independent government were by definition “counter-revolutionaries,” to be fought against as class enemies. Thus, Lenin could simultaneously promise to support national freedom, and shoot anyone who wanted to exercise that freedom, while believing that he was being completely consistent.

Ideological: "Marxism is omnipotent because it is true" (Lenin, 1913)

The Bolshevik leaders were unshakably convinced that their revolution was merely the start of the world-wide proletarian revolution that would destroy capitalism and usher in an era of justice and equality for all. Lenin believed that Marx’s laws of the historical development of society were proven, ironclad science, and so opposing communism was like opposing the force of gravity. Therefore, including the “backward” non-Russian peoples in the revolution was simply to pull them into the larger and unstoppable flow of History..  The social structures of non-Russians posed a major problem, however. Central Asian nomads, farmers, and merchants were unpromising material from which to forge a communist society. Once the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was firmly established in 1923, the Communist Party’s belief in the inevitability of communism led them to try anyway. By then, after it had become clear that the USSR was going to have to exist as a lone communist state surrounded by hostile capitalist powers, the cultural development of the “backward” peoples had evolved from being a right to being a necessity for the success of the revolution. The Soviet government operated in a dialectical mode of thought: in order to reach the developmental stage of socialist internationalism, the non-Russian peoples would have to go through the stage of nationhood first—Marx’s laws of history said so. This conclusion had huge implications for the future of Central Asia [Martin, pp. 2–9; Slezkine].

Great power ambition

Stalin, who was himself a Georgian from the Caucasus, was never as committed to the ideal of internationalism as were Lenin and Trotsky. He wanted to reconquer the former Russian Empire because he made no distinction between the power of the revolution and the power of the Russian nation that was the vanguard of that revolution. To be dominant, a country needed lots of territory, resources, and people. For Stalin, and arguably for most rank-and-file Bolsheviks, voluntarily giving up territory for abstract ideological reasons was unthinkable. Stalin did not question the pre-revolutionary assumption that Russians were politically and culturally superior to all other former tsarist subjects, which made them the natural leaders and models.