Staunton, Sept. 5 – The essence of Soviet nationality policy, Ruslan Masagutov says, was the creation of small republics without enough resources to challenge Moscow on their own and creating tensions among them so that they couldn’t form alliances that might threaten the territorial integrity of the country.
The senior scholar at the Kazan Institute of History makes that point at the end of a detailed article about Stalin’s first great act of ethnic engineering, the destruction of a Tatar drive to create a large autonomous formation in the Middle Volga with enough power to serve as a basis for real federalism (milliard.tatar/news/stoletnii-tatarstan-kak-sozdavalas-tassr-6099).
To drive it home, he quotes Ismail Firdyevs, a Crimean Tatar Bolshevik who worked closely with Stalin in the wake of the revolution but later fell afoul of the Soviet dictator and was executed in the Great Terror, to the Second All-Russian Congress of Muslim Communist Organizations of the Peoples of the East in December 1919:
“Of course, we must support the national movements but only by creating small republics. Such movements must not be allowed to unite, extend over a huge territory and acquire economic resources” that will give them the basis for challenging Moscow or exiting from the Soviet state. Having created such small republics, Firdiyevs continued, the Bolsheviks will be able to “link them to ourselves and not give them the chance to unite.”
That this is what Stalin did first in the Middle Volga and then in the Caucasus and Central Asia is common ground. But what makes the Firdyevs’ observation so critical is who said it and when, an ally of Stalin’s at the time and as early as 1919, and also the fact that it is being recalled now by a Tatar historian, perhaps the first target of such Bolshevik ethnic engineering.
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