This article presents a preliminary examination of national conflicts in the USSR in the 1920s, between the period of the Russian Civil War and the purges of ‘national communists’ at the end of the 1920s. After discussion of the attitude of the United Opposition and Right Opposition to nationalist challenges to the regime, and consideration of the major conflicts in Georgia, Central Asia and Ukraine, it goes on to examine the basis and nature of smaller conflicts at the level of the local community among the Muslim peoples of the USSR. In particular, it analyses local conflicts in Central Asia and Kazakhstan for the single year 1926. This part of the analysis is based on reports compiled by the OGPU, and is set in the context of the situation after the national delimitation of Central Asia in 1924/25. The article finds that by the middle of the 1920s, large-scale national conflict no longer presented any serious threat to the Soviet regime. Rather, attention shifted to the growing incidence of conflicts at the local level, particularly among the ‘new’ nations promoted by the delimitation of Central Asia and the policies of korenizatsiia. While the analysis finds support for the growth of new forms of national conflict resulting from the delimitation, older forms of conflict still predominated at this stage – namely, conflicts between clans, and conflicts between the local Muslim population and Russian settlers, especially in Kazakhstan. To the extent that the reports reveal the emergence of national identity in local conflicts, they do not lend support to the view that the adoption of the ‘new’ national categories was based entirely on rational, calculated self-interest.
For many years, discussion of the nationality question in the USSR was presented as a conflict between a Russian-dominated center and a non-Russian periphery, in which the nationalities of the periphery were held in the Soviet Union against their will and where national identity and the aspiration to national independence were held in check only by an oppressive state intent on imposing a single culture on a multi-national territory.^[1] Thus it was widely supposed that all the major nationalities of the USSR were fully-fledged modern nations intent on independence, an impression which was given superficial support by the events of the late 1980s. It was only the repressive apparatus of the state that managed to contain the conflicts that were inevitable between nationalities and the center, but also between different sections of the non-Russian periphery, on this view. But already in the 1980s an alternative picture of the early soviet period in particular was emerging.^[2] In part this was a response to an increased general understanding of the origins and nature of nations in general, especially as ‘imagined communities’ in Benedict Anderson’s phrase. Partly it reflected new trends in the historiography of the Soviet Union and the availability of new sources. The 1920s was now viewed as a period of ‘nation-building’, especially among the Muslims of Central Asia, and was centered on the ‘delimitation’ of territorially defined national groups and the policies of korenizatsiia.
This characterization underlay the new works of the 1990s, based on far wider access than ever before to archive sources. General appraisals of Soviet nationalities policies have been presented by myself for the period 1917-1923^[3] and by Terry Martin for 1923-1938.^[4] Both see a nation-building program at the heart of Soviet policies in the 1920s, while Martin also examines the reasons for the partial abandonment of these policies in a backlash on the part of the Russian population. Nation-building is an even more central theme of an ever-expanding number of articles, monographs and doctoral dissertations on particular nationalities or regions.^[5]
The nation-building characterization of the 1920s presents a dilemma: if, (to put the extreme case) many soviet nationalities were largely artificial constructs of the socialist state with no deep-rooted national identities, and were given preferential treatment (‘affirmative action’ in Martin’s phrase) by the regime, why were national conflicts so frequent, both in the form of nationalist movements against soviet rule and as more localized conflicts between different non-Russian nationalities? The answer is in part that it is impossible to generalize about Soviet nationalities: conflicts between Azeris and Armenians are clearly of a different nature to conflicts between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz. But the dilemma still remains for at least parts of the Soviet Union, and it is this dilemma which this article hopes to address.

The United and Right Oppositions and the National Question ^[6]

The views on the national question of the leading protagonists in Soviet politics at the time of Lenin’s death can be summarised from the proceedings of two important discussions of 1923: firstly, the matter was debated at the XII Congress of the Russian Communist Party (bolsheviks) which met from 17-25 April 1923, both in open session,^[7] and at a sectional meeting, the proceedings of which were not published until 1991.^[8] Secondly, a secret meeting involving representatives of the centre and of the non-Russians was held in the wake of the so-called “Sultan-Galiev Affair” in June 1923.^[9] The views of some of the lesser known figures involved in nationality affairs at a local level can also be gauged from these sources, particularly from the June meeting, where a sharp split between the ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ among representatives of the muslim nationalities in particular is evident.
The terms Left and Right need to be used with caution in this context. The labels were first applied to the two main Tatar factions at the Congress of the Peoples of the East held in Baku in September 1920.^[10] Here, the Lefts were those who proclaimed an internationalist position and in general were opposed to any specific provisions in favour of the non-Russian national minorities which, in their view, would reinforce dangerous nationalist tendencies. The Rights gave their full support to the policies of korenizatsiia - measures to develop and promote local languages and cultures, recruitment and promotion measures in favour of local nationals in the Party and state apparatuses, and the reservation of broad decision-making powers to the competence of the regional authorities in the national republics and autonomous republics.
To some extent these Left vs. Right divisions follow the pattern of the disputes which had occupied the Bolshevik leadership since before the War, and where leaders of the Left such as Bukharin, Piatakov and Radek took up an internationalist position against Lenin’s Right of Nations to Self-Determination before and after 1917.^[11] By 1923, however, the Left-Right split on the national question rarely coincided with the more general Left-Right alignment: Bukharin, then seen as being on the left of the party, was now the most ardent defender of national rights, and Trotsky as well was seen as sympathetic; the internationalist position, on the other hand, was most clearly stated at the XII Congress by Zinoviev. Quite apart from the fact that individuals and groupings often shifted their positions on the Left-Right spectrum and were in frequent disagreement among themselves on specific questions, the specific meaning given to Left and Right positions on the national question mean it is important to distinguish these groupings from the more general political tendencies. For the purposes of this paper I shall use the terms national Lefts and national Rights as distinct from the widely used categories of the Left Opposition, United Opposition and Right Opposition.
Stalin himself has frequently been portrayed as an individual who had little real interest in the national question, barely took his responsibilities as Commissar for Nationality Affairs seriously, and by nature was a centraliser who only grudgingly accepted the federal structure of the USSR forced on him by Lenin in 1922, and in any case saw the granting of any rights to the national minorities as a temporary concession necessary to buy a breathing-space for the consolidation of the regime.^[12] On this view, Stalin’s theoretical writings on the national question in 1913 can be dismissed as being based on detailed instructions provided by Lenin and in any case irrelevant to the implementation of national policies in the 1920s.^[13] More recent works, however, have stressed Stalin’s role in the evolution of a coherent set of policies aimed at promoting national development.^[14] Erik van Ree finds a continuity in Stalin’s thinking on the national question, traced back to his 1913 article “The National Question and Social-Democracy” which explained the persistence of national differences under socialism and support for linguistic and cultural autonomy.^[15] Terry Martin ascribes to Lenin and Stalin jointly a policy that explains the positive nationalities policies of the 1920s: “a strategy aimed at disarming nationalism by granting the forms of nationhood”.^[16] The fact is that while Stalin emerged as a supporter of national distinctiveness in the early soviet years and played a major part in developing the soviet system of national-territorial autonomy and korenizatsiia, these policies never sat entirely comfortably with him. Like Lenin, he was well aware that the dominance of the Russian Communist Party would ensure central direction over the non-Russian areas whatever their formal standing; and his ‘autonomisation project’ of 1922 was a genuine attempt to promote a more formally centralised state system than either Lenin or many of the leaders of the national republics were prepared to accept. But it was not so much Lenin’s late intervention which forced Stalin to back away from this project as the battering he received at the closed session of the XII Congress. Although his main protagonists at this time, the Georgians Mdivani and Makharadze, were sidelined from the debate, a number of other delegates led by Khristian Rakovsky and Mikhail Frunze laid into elements in Stalin’s national programme, forcing him to accept a number of significant amendments to the theses he had originally presented to the Congress.^[17] On the other hand, there is no evidence to suggest that Stalin at this point had any intention of reducing the number of nationals in leading positions in the republics or of any alteration in the regime’s language, education and cultural policies.
Trotsky’s role at the Congress has been widely discussed.^[18] Having been asked by Lenin to take up the case of the Georgians, Trotsky declined, citing ill health and the pressure of having to prepare and present the economic report to the Congress.^[19] Possibly, he had reached an agreement with Stalin not to drop what he later described as ‘Lenin’s bomb’ in exchange for a free ride over economic policy and in the interests of Party unity.^[20] Trotsky absented himself from the plenary session on the national question, but he did appear at Stalin’s side for the closed session. Here he made only token gestures towards the task Lenin had tried to entrust to him, but otherwise came time and again to Stalin’s defence. Although his warnings against the dangers of Great Russian Chauvinism were stronger than Stalin’s, his only significant contribution to the debate was an emphasis on the need for industrial development in the non-Russian regions.^[21]
Trotsky was more forthcoming at the June conference. Here he denounced both factions of the National Left and the National Right, condemning in almost equal measure Great Russian Chauvinism and the ‘national deviation’ of which he saw Sultan-Galiev as an example.^[22] Unlike Stalin, who made clear his conviction that Great Russian Chauvinism was the greater of the two dangers,^[23] Trotsky argued that the Party had to steer a course between the twin dangers, emphasising now one and now the other. His ambivalence seems hard to explain. He has been regarded as someone who was particularly sympathetic to the national minorities, and certainly Lenin seems to have believed this in trying to make Trotsky his ally over the Georgian affair. He had been opposed to the 1921 invasion of Georgia, was already close to Khristian Rakovsky, Stalin’s main assailant at the Congress, and his later writings on Ukraine (see below) suggest as much. But there is little else to suggest that at this particular time he shared Lenin’s forebodings over the handling of nationalities policy, or that he regarded it as a particularly important issue. His main concern seems to have been to avoid an obvious split in the party leadership.
Zinoviev’s remarks at the plenary session of the Congress were scathing of the Georgian Opposition, marking him as an unequivocal Left on the national question.^[24] Kamenev did not take part in these debates, and does not appear to have any strongly stated views on the national question as he managed to enjoy the confidence of the leaders of all three tendencies – Lenin, Trotsky and the Central Committee majority. It had in fact been Kamenev who, in a private meeting with Lenin, had sketched the outline of the federal structure of the USSR as a formula satisfying Lenin’s concerns over Stalin’s handling of the ‘autonomisation project’ in the autumn of 1922.^[25] Trotsky had shown Kamenev Lenin’s final notes on the national question in February 1923, in defiance of Lenin’s strict instructions to show them to no-one else. And Kamenev it was who the Central Committee entrusted with the final solution of the crisis in Georgia, to where he travelled in March 1923 and successfully negotiated a conciliation of sorts between the warring factions.^[26] The CC’s choice of spokesman was perhaps an indication of his reputation as a moderate whose views may have been close to Lenin’s but who could be relied upon to carry out the CC majority’s wishes.
Of the leading Moscow Bolsheviks, only Bukharin came out in unequivocal support of the National Rights at the XII Party Congress. Abandoning his previous internationalism and support for ‘proletarian self-determination’, he accused Zinoviev of underestimating the power of nationalism and endorsed a policy of concessions to local nationalism in the broader interests of both domestic and international policy.^[27] Isaac Deutscher has described this intervention as ‘a great and stirring speech [which] was to be the swan-song of Bukharin the leader of Left Communism.’^[28] But in these comments we see more in common with his later attitude to the peasantry in general, and there is no obvious reason to suppose that he or other leaders of the Right Opposition would have felt any differently by the end of the 1920s.
Although only the views of Zinoviev and Bukharin were absolutely clear cut at this time, on the surface there was plenty of material with which to batter Stalin should anyone care to make use of it. Not only were there Lenin’s final notes and letters, there was a clear opposition to Stalin’s policies among a wide layer of the leadership in the republics, most notably in Ukraine. Divisions in the republics and a series of crises, outlined below, also meant that the national question was never far from the leadership’s attention.
And yet the issue of national policy was barely raised in the subsequent factional disputes which focussed above all on economic policy and Party organisation. The Left Opposition never raised the issue.^[29] The United Opposition did not address it until the summer of 1927, when Zinoviev raised Lenin’s 1922 articles in accusing Stalin of ‘colonialism’.^[30] Finally, a more considered statement appeared in the United Opposition’s platform of September 1927. While condemning the splits in the republican parties, the platform made the following concrete demands (as summarised by Terry Martin):

• Faster industrialisation in national regions;

• A revision of resettlement policies in favour of non-Russian interests;

• A conscientious korenizatsiia of the Soviet, Party, cooperative and union apparats;

• A fight with Great Russian chauvinism especially in central Commissariats and the central government apparat;

• Making the Soviet of Nationalities into an organ capable of defending national interests;

• Devoting more attention to forming a national proletariat and having union work carried out in national languages;

• Calling a Fifth TsK Conference on Nationalities Policy with real representation of titular nationals ‘from below’.^[31]

While the last of these demands indicates an intention to exploit the splits at the republican level to the Opposition’s advantage, most of the other points were wide of the mark when it came to addressing the real concerns in the republics. There was no real mileage in calling for a conscientious korenizatsiia or for the carrying out of union work in national languages as Stalin had been clearly identified with the vigorous promotion of these policies since the beginning of the twenties. Likewise, the fight with Great Russian Chauvinism at all levels had remained an important slogan of the regime. There is little to suggest that the Soviet of Nationalities was a significant focus for the non-Russians, and much the same can be said of the policy of industrialisation and creating a national proletariat, which was no more than a restatement of Trotsky’s 1923 position and had never been challenged by Stalin, or anybody else on the Left, Right or Centre of the Party. If anything, these demands sought to exploit the divisions in the Ukraine which had climaxed with the Shumsky affair (described below). But the battle had been fought and lost in Ukraine and these issues were of much less relevance elsewhere.
Of the issues which I shall argue in the next section were of real significance at this time, only the question of the redistribution of land is addressed in these demands. The rest is mere padding. The demands had little or no impact outside of Ukraine, where they were exploited by Kaganovich in his fight against perceived Ukrainian nationalists.^[32]
The only concrete attempt by the United Opposition to rally support in a non-Russian area was a short tour of Ukraine undertaken by Khristian Rakovsky at around the same time the platform was issued, in November 1927. But his efforts were concentrated on publicising and defending the platform as a whole among a largely Russian constituency of workers who were already thought to be sympathetic to the left, rather than appealing to any lingering national resentment. Rakovsky’s efforts were met by the same obstructive tactics as were the Opposition’s attempts to spread their message to a broader audience in Leningrad and Moscow, and Rakovsky gave up the attempt after a few weeks on hearing of the suicide of Adolf Ioffe.^[33]
The Right Opposition was even more silent on the point. According to Stephen Cohen, ‘Throughout the 1920s, non-Russian nationalities had few greater protectors than Bukharin”.^[34] And yet Bukharin seems to have made no attempt at all to draw on the well of goodwill this attitude might be expected to have inspired.^[35] This omission is even harder to understand, given Bukharin’s 1923 stand and that the Right’s natural sympathy for the Russian peasantry.
On the surface, this reticence was curious. Among important sections of the national leaders there was considerable resentment against Moscow’s policies, as recent crises in Ukraine and the Tatar Republic showed. Stalin was seen as vulnerable on the national question thanks to Lenin’s final notes, while Trotsky and Bukharin at least commanded considerable respect among the National Right, and others such as Rakovsky could be expected to draw on a certain degree of personal support.
Terry Martin provides three explanations for this silence:^[36]

1. The Opposition leaders had no direct experience of nationalities questions.
2. The same leaders simply did not see the national question as important.
3. A majority of the United Opposition, led by Zinoviev, were opponents of Lenin’s nationalities policies and had more sympathy with the National Lefts, making a united position impossible.

The first of these reasons barely stands up: Trotsky, Kamenev and Rykov had all been intimately involved in the Georgian Affair of 1922/23. Trotsky had personally visited Bashkiriia in an attempt to sort out the crisis there in 1920, while Tomsky had served for a while in Turkestan in 1921. Kamenev had been intimately involved in the disputes surrounding the creation of the USSR. Bukharin and Zinoviev, while they had no direct experience in the national regions, involved themselves intimately in the general disputes about national policy and were indirectly concerned through their positions in the Comintern. At a slightly lower level, the Left included many individuals such as Rakovsky and Piatakov who had been active in Ukraine, and also many of the former leaders of the 1922 Georgian Opposition, while a number of the Muslim leaders were involved with the Right Opposition.
This involvement also runs against Martin’s second explanation. Although Trotsky’s apparent apathy to Lenin’s request to take up the case of the Georgians in 1923 suggests a certain indifference, he did not in fact ignore it, as we shall see, and his early writings on Georgia (he penned a pamphlet on Menshevik Georgia in 1922)^[37] as well as his later writings on Ukraine suggest he was well aware of the significance of the national question. The disputes of 1923 and subsequent splits among the national leaders could not have escaped the attention of any of the protagonists.
On the inability to provide consistent support to the National Right, the United Opposition was certainly vulnerable. In June 1927, at almost the same time as attacking Stalin for ‘colonialism’, Zinoviev condemned Ukrainian chauvinism, while Vaganian’s anti-national book ‘On National Culture’ was widely regarded as a United Opposition document.^[38] It was not without reason that Stalin, in a letter to Lenin’s sister Maria, taunted Zinoviev with his failure to exploit the national question.^[39] But both Zinoviev and Vaganian were signatories to the Opposition’s platform, and it should not have been impossible to stick to a common line even where it contradicted earlier pronouncements, as Zinoviev had shown willing to do in other policy areas.
There may have been more deep-seated reasons for the reluctance of any of the three Oppositions to raise national factors in their struggles with Stalin. Firstly, it should be pointed out that historians have tended to exaggerate Stalin’s vulnerability on the national question, and in particular his differences with Lenin.^[40] The solution to the national question based on autonomy and federalism which had evolved in the Civil War and received a concrete form in 1923 had largely resounded to Stalin’s credit; in general, even the hard core of National Rightists reserved their resentment for local Russian officials rather than the central leadership. Stalin had cleverly side-stepped his disagreements with Lenin over the ‘autonomisation project’ and his direct involvement in the 1922 Georgian crisis has never been documented. In his 1922 notes on the national question Lenin had charged Stalin (together with Dzerzhinsky) with ‘political responsibility’ for the Georgian crisis, but his real ire was vented against Ordzhonikidze (far more potentially damaging to Stalin were Lenin’s comments on his unsuitability as General Secretary and their rift over Stalin’s behaviour towards Krupskaia). Had any Opposition tried to pursue this issue in 1923 or at any time later, it seems likely that, at worst, Stalin could have got away with sacrificing Ordzhonikidze, who was never the most reliable of his allies in any case. Stalin’s self-assured tone in his letter to Maria Ulianova cited above was well-justified: this was not a powerful stick with which to beat Stalin.
Further clues to Trotsky’s attitude can be found in his behaviour in 1923. While in his reply to Lenin and his public statements Trotsky appeared reluctant to pursue the Georgian crisis to a conclusion, behind the scenes he moved to secure two significant results: the removal of Ordzhonikidze as head of the Party’s Transcaucasian Committee (Zakkraikom) and a softening of Stalin’s theses to the Twelfth Party Congress in favour of the national republics. On 23rd March 1923, Trotsky proposed Ordzhonikidze’s removal to the Politburo, and having failed in that attempt, he tried again at the full Central Committee on 31st March.^[41] In both cases, he was unable to muster more than one additional vote in his support. He was more successful in his proposed amendments to Stalin’s theses, which Stalin apparently accepted without a murmur.^[42]
What this suggests is, that while Trotsky was aware of the significance of national factors and was prepared to bring about changes in national policy and its execution, he was unwilling to bring them into the open. This attitude appears to have stayed with him until well into the 1930s, and to have been shared by other Opposition leaders. For most leading Bolsheviks, their formative experiences of nationality politics had been two of the most serious internal Party disputes up until 1927: the splits in the Ukrainian organisation throughout the Civil War, and the Georgian crisis of 1922/23. The former had not only damaged party unity, but for a while had threatened to undermine altogether Soviet power in Ukraine. In the case of Georgia, while no direct links can be drawn between the 1922/23 crisis and the Menshevik-led rising of 1924 (see below), to the Bolshevik way of thinking the disunity shown in 1922 could only have provided encouragement to the rebels a year and a half later. Although the years 1923-1928 were generally peaceful as regards the national minorities, a series of events, to be described below, were enough to remind the leaders of the potential explosiveness of the national situation. From Trotsky’s general behaviour at this time, we know he was extremely reluctant to go down any path that might disrupt the unity of the Party and undermine its authority. His loyalty was above all to the Communist Party and the Soviet state. To take any action which may have raised the possibility of revolt in the national republics would have been against Trotsky’s and the other leaders’ instincts. It was not until 1939, when he had already come to reject a peaceful, political solution to the problem of Stalin’s leadership, that Trotsky felt able to propose a more radical solution to the national question in calling for Ukrainian independence.^[43] It was above all this reluctance to broaden the struggles of the Oppositions beyond Party circles and stir up a potential threat to the integrity of the Soviet state that inhibited the Opposition leaders from utilising the national question.

National Opposition in the 1920s

By the end of 1921, most of the nationalist movements which had arisen during the Revolution and Civil War had either been put down or melted away with the Bolsheviks’ granting of national autonomy and other rights. Thousands of former nationalists joined the Communist Party and received important positions in the republics. Others were able to serve in cultural and academic capacities without abandoning their nationalism or committing themselves fully to Communism. The rest were either repressed or found their way abroad where they set up small and ineffective émigré organisations which tried desperately to win the attention of western governments. Only in Georgia did a significant underground nationalist movement remain.
There were no large-scale organised nationalist challenges to the soviet regime in this period as a result. A number of well-known incidents did occur, however, which revealed either a growing nationalist tendency within the Communist Party organisations or lingering resentment among a layer of the population. Less well known are the day to day disputes which pitted national groups against each other at a local level. These conflicts always had a national character, and in many cases grew in intensity as the decade went on.

Nationalist challenges to the Soviet regime

If the Civil War was a time of nationalist revival, when non-Russian forces fought both Reds and Whites in the cause of independence in Ukraine, the North Caucasus and elsewhere, the period 1921/28 was relatively quiet in this respect, albeit with a number of significant episodes serving to remind both the ruling faction and its rivals of the potential threat of nationalism. The most important events of this period were:

1. The Basmachi Revolt (1921-28)
2. The Georgian Affair (1922-23)
3. The first Sultangalievshchina (1923)
4. The Georgian Revolt (1924)
5. The Shumsky Affair (1926-28)
6. The second Sultangalievshchina (1928)

While this list is not exhaustive, and the divisions between national Rights and national Lefts led to a series of minor crises and purges in the Tatar Republic, the Crimea and elsewhere, these were the major set-piece episodes that occupied the attention of the CPSU and can be said to have been the most important in influencing the direction of the Party.

1. The Basmachi Revolt (1921-28)

The immediate cause of the Basmachi Revolt or Basmachestvo can be traced to a single event – the massacre in Kokand perpetrated by forces of the Tashkent soviet in February 1918. But it can also be seen as the result of decades of resentment against the forms of Russian rule, which had already led to a series of revolts, notably the 1896 Andizhan uprising and the 1916 revolt, mostly among the Kazakhs and Kirghiz. To describe it as a single revolt is misleading. The Basmachestvo occurred in a number of different regions – the Ferghana valley, the Lokay region and Bukhara – over a ten-year period. The term itself is taken from basmachlik – a Robin Hood type of bandit who robbed only Russians or their collaborators. Most frequently the Basmachi were organised in small bands based on tribal or even familial loyalties, who would carry out small-scale raids against Russian settlements and small garrisons, often fighting at night or at dawn and returning to work their fields in the day. The bands usually had no links with each other, no universally accepted leader, and poorly articulated aims. In general they were motivated by resentment against Russian encroachments on land and local customs, fuelled by the malpractice of tsarist administrators and the purely Russian Tashkent Soviet. As a consequence, many Basmachi leaders were only too ready to lay down arms and even take up posts in the Soviet system in return for concessions over land and cultural autonomy which were readily granted after the initial Tashkent period. At their height in 1922, the Basmachi rebels numbered no more than 18,000 – no match for the far larger and better equipped Soviet forces that arrived under the command of Mikhail Frunze early in 1920, but none the less hard to defeat because of their tactic of launching lightning raids and then melting away into the desert.^[44]
Writing at the end of the Basmachi period, the former leader of the Kokand government, Mustafa Chokaev, bemoaned the lack of both a political programme on the part of the Basmachi leaders no more than the absence of any sense of national identity on the part of the mass of the Central Asian muslim population which could have turned the Basmachi into a real force.^[45] The lack of any political programme is further emphasised by Marie Broxup:
They had no political programme, nor did they use any “propaganda”; they had no political strategy and none of them spoke of a liberated Turkestan. Political independence was certainly not their goal. Pan-Islamic or Pan-Turkic dreams did not interest them. Enver [Pasha’s] prospect of a unified Turkic world was beyond their understanding. If one wants to qualify their struggle, it could be said that it was the attempt of a rural community, threatened and economically ruined, to preserve its traditional spiritual values and way of life. It was neither an authentic liberation movement, nor a war against a foreign invader (the Russians were already in Turkestan) nor was it a holy war. The Basmachi had no clear idea of their national identity and never reached the level of a Pan-Turkestani consciousness.^[46]
With national identity poorly developed or non-existent in Central Asia at the time, it would be wrong to describe the Basmachestvo as a national revolt, or even as a unified movement based on adherence to Islam. In as much as it had any demands, these were easily satisfied in the context of Soviet national policies once the centre was able to exert its control over the soviets after 1920. It was these policies as much as Frunze’s innovative and successful military tactics which ensured that the Basmachi posed no real threat after 1923.

2. The Georgian Affair (1922-23)

Much has been written about the crisis which shook the Georgian Communist Party in late 1922,^[47] and its course is well known, so I will confine myself here to a few comments. Firstly, the affair aroused intense interest among the whole CPSU, as is evidenced by a Central Committee circular on the affair to all regional party bodies of 5th January 1923^[48] and by the memoirs of one of Lenin’s secretaries, Foteva.^[49] But it’s protagonists were all members of the Communist Party, and its significance to Lenin and others was precisely because it was an internal party dispute which turned ugly. Secondly, inasmuch as the affair did concern the implementation of the Party’s national policy in Georgia, it was linked to an attitude of ‘special concessions’. Following the forcible sovietisation of Georgia in 1921, the Bolsheviks viewed Georgian demands for independence as quite exceptional believing, with some reason, that elsewhere there were no serious movements for independence. Hence the Georgian Affair was of such great concern precisely because it was here that nationalism was a danger. But at no time did anyone express the belief that the affair would end up stoking the fires of a Georgian national revolt. Rather, it was viewed as an isolated, and internal Communist Party dispute.

3. The first Sultangalievshchina (1923)

Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev is the most controversial figure involved in 1920s Soviet nationality questions. With a background in the Kazan Tatar Jadid movement, he enjoyed Stalin’s patronage in rising to senior positions inside the People’s Commissariat of Nationality affairs, in effect becoming the head of Muslim matters. His confrontational style and unorthodox views won him a number of enemies in Narkomnats from an early stage. After throwing in his lot with the communists, he did not abandon his pan-Turkic views and developed a theory of ‘proletarian nations’ which meant laying aside the class struggle in the muslim regions in favour of a unified struggle against colonialism. In practical terms, he devoted himself to creating a network of muslim organisations under the Muslim Commissariat of Narkomnats, and agitated for a completely separate Muslim section of the Communist Party.
Prior to the publication of the stenographic report of the secret meeting of June 1923 which met to discuss the case of Sultan-Galiev, many historians have supposed that his arrest in May of that year was the result of a premeditated assault by Stalin on Sultan-Galiev’s ideas and influence. But Kuibyshev’s report to the meeting indicates that the GPU had firm evidence of a secret conspiracy organised by Sultan-Galiev and involving not just disaffected communists but non-communist nationalists and foreign communists, especially in Turkey. This organisation had, apparently, even attempted to make contact with the Basmachi rebels.^[50] The fact that Stalin had initially tried to shield his protégé and suffered personal embarrassment at the uncovering of the conspiracy makes it most unlikely that he was behind any fabrication of evidence. Moreover the facts of the case were not denied then or later by Sultan-Galiev or any of those implicated with him.
On the surface, then, this was a straightforward case of treason against the Communist Party and the Soviet state. But it involved the raising of pan-Turkic demands and an undermining of Soviet national policy. Sultan-Galiev enjoyed considerable support among a section of the Kazan Tatar intelligentsia, as well as among a few Kazakhs, Bashkirs and others. But there was no mass base for this movement, whose ideas were of little interest to Tatar peasants or Kazakh nomads. The limited scale of the Sultangalievshchina is witnessed by the very small number of arrests made at the time, and by Sultan-Galiev himself not only being released but having his party membership restored by the end of the year.

4. The Georgian Revolt (1924)

The only planned and co-ordinated national revolt against Soviet rule began in Georgia on August 28th 1924. Although the Georgian Menshevik Party had been disbanded following sovietisation in 1921, a large number of Mensheviks remained in the country and enjoyed considerable influence in areas of traditional support such as Guria in the west. In late 1922 these Mensheviks together with some other anti-Bolsheviks formed a secret Committee for the Independence of Georgia (damkom), which in late 1923 began preparations for a general rising. Although the rising enjoyed considerable support in some areas, it failed to take a grip on the country as a whole and the Soviets were able to put it down within a matter of days. As Ronald Suny has summarised it, ‘the revolts were remote from one another, cut off from the major towns. No aid came from other peoples, and the great majority of the Georgian people did not join the rebellion’.^[51] If a national revolt was going to succeed anywhere, it was in Georgia, which had enjoyed three years of independence prior to 1921 and where there remained a substantial nationalist underground movement. But the Mensheviks clearly over-estimated the level of popular support for armed action, and subsequent repressions saw their influence in Georgia disappear.
5. The Shumsky Affair (1926-28)
Disputes over the implementation of the policies of ukrainizatsiia in Ukraine came to a head in March 1926. On arriving in Ukraine as first party secretary, Kaganovich had set about introducing the Ukrainian language in the party and state administration. But on meeting widespread resistance among Russian (and russified Ukrainian) communists, he began to soften his line and sought to reassure his critics by stating that he would not seek to Ukrainise the proletariat. This set him on a collision course with his Commissar of Education Oleksnadr Shumsky, a former Left Socialist Revolutionary. The two clashed openly at a Ukrainian Politburo meeting of March 19th 1926, and the dispute continued for two years thereafter as factions began to solidify around the two leaders. Stalin at first equivocated between the two, and referred the case to the Comintern for resolution. At the beginning of 1928, however, when it became clear that the majority of leaders of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine (KPZU) were siding with Shumsky, a dramatic intervention followed. The KPZU leadership was disbanded. Shumsky himself had resigned his post and been transferred to Saratov almost a year earlier, but now ‘Shumskyism’ was identified as a nationalist deviation and condemned as “the theoretical formulation of Ukrainian fascism”.^[52]
In many respects the Shumsky Affair mirrored the Georgian Affair of 1922/23, but had rather more serious consequences: in the first place, it had an international impact through the KPZU. Secondly, while the leaders of the Georgian opposition had been attacked for a ‘national deviation’, Shumskyism was portrayed as a deeply rooted ideology which was hostile to the current aims of Soviet policy. Its political fall-out was much greater than in Georgia, and the label of Shumskyism formed the basis for future purges. Like the Georgian Affair, however, it never developed beyond the circles of the Communist Party, and was mostly confined to the leadership. While Shumsky and Kaganovich clearly articulated the interests of different sections of the population, there was never any danger of mobilising mass support for either side.

6. The second Sultangalievshchina (1928)

Until more work is done from the archives, it will be impossible to evaluate the exact nature and extent of the second Sultangalievshchina, which led to the re-arrest of Sultan-Galiev in 1927 and a wide-scale purge in Kazan and other muslim regions. It seems clear however that shortly after his release in 1923 Sultan-Galiev had become active in organising another underground organisation the ‘National Union’ (Milli Ittihad) and other organisations which eventually came to embrace a number of leading muslim communists in Moscow, Kazan, Kazakhstan and the Crimea.^[53] Although Sultan-Galiev’s network was now much broader than in 1923, it again lacked any real popular support, in part because of the conditions of secrecy, but also because it’s pan-Turkic aims were out of touch with the bulk of the population. The scale of repression with which this movement was met was far wider than in 1923 (see below), but all the same it proved relatively easy to deal with and at no point was any large-scale resistance mounted.
None of these six episodes represented a serious nationalist threat to the Soviet regime. In two cases, the Basmachi and the Georgian Mensheviks, arms were taken up, but on a limited scale and in the former case without any clearly formulated political demands. The other cases involved either purely internal party disputes or a movement confined to a layer of the inelligentsia, including many national communists, and with no general resonance.
And yet the national question continued to preoccupy the leadership throughout the period, as the high turnover of cadres directed from the centre and the frequency of national factors in OGPU reports testify. To some extent, these were reflections of the old Left/Right rivalries among the national leaders themselves. But there were also a number of recurring concrete issues which involved broader layers of the population in nationality disputes.
Recent studies of the progress and effects of the “national delimitation” of Central Asia into distinct republics, autonomous republics and autonomous regions in 1924-25 has tended to focus on two issues: firstly, the extent to which the national categories of Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Karakalpaks were ‘invented’ by the Soviet regime, as opposed to being based on existing ethnic and linguistic criteria and involving the active participation of members of the local intelligentsia; and secondly, the apparently rapid adoption of the new labels by members of the local population in pursuit of their own interests.
Scholars addressing the first of these issues have found little evidence to support the long-held assumption, originally encouraged by emigres from the region, that the regime was pursuing a ‘divide and rule’ policy in Central Asia in response to a perceived pan-Islamic or pan-Turkic threat.^[54] Steven Sabol’s analysis of this question concludes:

“What is evident was that, from 1918 on, the Bolsheviks pursued a constant policy of absorption, based upon their theory of self-determination, which was a seductive, flexible, and opportunistic policy that was often disingenuous and brutal in its implementation, but, except perhaps for the Ferghana Valley region, provided no indication that ‘divide and rule’ was the principle motive.”^[55]

In his report to the Central Committee of the CPSU in October 1924, which launched the process of delimitation, Rudzutak referred only to the economic and cultural needs of the local population,^[56] while both the protocols of the Politburo and Central Committee of the RKP(b)/CPSU, and the confidential reports of the OGPU for the early 1920s are notably silent on the pan-Islamic or pan-Turkic ‘threat’. Adrienne Edgar has demonstrated conclusively that the creation of a Turkmen republic was based on clearly visible criteria and involved the full engagement and support of a substantial Turkmen intelligentsia.^[57] While similar studies of the other nationalities of Central Asia do not exist, it seems likely that similar processes were at work elsewhere. Rather than pursuing a policy of divide and rule, the Bolsheviks were implementing policies in Central Asia consistent with the practice of nation-building elsewhere in the USSR, aimed at promoting the cultural and economic development of the ‘backward’ minorities of the Soviet state through territorial delimitation, korenizatsiia, and educational and cultural programmes.^[58]
Nevertheless, it remains generally accepted that, prior to 1925, the ‘nations’ of Central Asia existed only on paper, in ethnographic reports and censuses, and in the minds of a limited national intelligentsia. Even by comparison with the western and Transcaucasian republics of the USSR, and many of the national minorities of the RSFSR, separate national identities held no meaning for the bulk of the population in Central Asia. Rather, clan loyalties were of far greater importance in societies where people were divided from each other by centuries of tradition, linguistic variety, localised power structures and, above all, organisation into insular and largely self-sufficient agricultural communities.
Therefore the nation-building project was being built on much less promising ground in Central Asia than elsewhere in the USSR, and yet the project met with remarkably rapid success. In the long-term, the surest evidence of this success was seen after 1991 with the emergence of five independent countries displaying most of the hallmarks of fully-fledged modern nation-states. In the shorter term, a number of pointers indicate a widespread understanding and acceptance of the national categories by the population as a whole by the end of the 1920s, as well as a local political elite which knew full well how to promote and manipulate nationalist feelings to their own advantage. Indeed, it can be speculated that the regime itself was taken aback by the speed and depth of the national awakening, and responded by resorting to the spectacular political and cultural purges in the Crimea, Tatar Republic, Kazakhstan and elsewhere in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
In particular, what has become evident from recent research is that local communities rapidly adopted the new national labels in their dealings with each other and with the central authorities. In the conditions of the mid-1920s in the USSR as a whole and Central Asia in particular, local conflicts arose over a number of issues, some long-standing, others a recent product of the new political and territorial order. In general, three major causes of conflict might be expected: land (including the use of scarce resources connect to land usage, notably water and forestry), borders, and religion.
Each area of conflict took on a different form and had different implications: land disputes mostly involved local nationals vs. Russians; border conflicts were mostly between different non-Russian groups; while the struggles over Islam presented the possibility of a more generalised struggle against soviet rule. Border disputes were particularly protracted and bitter in Transcaucasia, but in the Volga region and Central Asia all three types of conflict were in evidence.

Land Disputes

Russian rule in the North Caucasus and Central Asia in the 19th century had been consolidated by encouraging Russian settlers to inhabit these regions, usually being granted use of the best land at the expense of the local population. During and after the Civil War in the North Caucasus Chechens, Ingush and Ossetians had taken matters into their own hands, driving Russian and Cossack settlers off their land. These redistributions were later sanctioned retrospectively by the soviets.^[59] In the Crimea the redistribution of large estates made it possible to increase the land holdings of Muslim peasants without affecting the majority of Russians and Ukrainians.^[60]
In Central Asia the situation was more complex. Few large landholdings were available for redistribution (other than those attached to mosques) while the early grip on power exercised by Russian-dominated soviets backed by armed force prevented local muslims carrying out their own redistribution. The problem was particularly acute in those areas where land had recently been confiscated in reprisal for the revolts of 1916. Simmering disputes prompted the Politburo to intervene, resolving on 21st March 1921 to proceed with ‘the eviction of the most hated settlements in three uezds of Semirechie (Kesnensk, Pozheval’sk, Pishchneksk), and also the consolidation of other settlements, freeing up the canals and springs for the needs of the Kyrgyz’.^[61] A more general policy of evicting better off Russian (kulak) settlers was proposed by Narkomnats in June, and in November the Russian Sovnarkom generalised the resettlement policy still further, resolving ‘to organise the migration of the recently arrived European population from those districts where old or newly established settlements radically interfere with the possibility of uniting a regular cattle-breeding economy and lead to the destruction of the nomadic population, and also in those districts in which, owing to the lack of water and land there is a worsening of national relations in the environment of a settled agricultural population’.^[62] Land for the evicted Russians was to be made available in Siberia.
The policy was broadly implemented in Semirechie, but the process was not carried through elsewhere in the face of widespread Russian opposition. By 1923, Ryskulov could claim that 7,000 families had been resettled on former kulak land,^[63] but this represented only the tip of the iceberg. The establishment of separate republics in Central Asia only provided disputes over land with a more overtly national character, as members of the titular nationality pressed their claims ever more vigorously, leading frequently to violent clashes.
In densely populated Bashkiriia, land disputes were at the heart of the failure of the Bashkir national government (Bashrevkom) in 1919-1920, as Russian settlers backed by Red Army units clashed with Bashkirs and the forces of the Bashrevkom over particular areas of land.^[64] The collapse of the Bashrevkom government in the summer of 1920 induced Russians to not only take back land expropriated by the Bashrevkom, but to drive Bashkir farmers off land which had previously been theirs. The expansion of Bashkiriia in 1924 to include a much large Russian population only exacerbated the land disputes, which continued to assume violent forms throughout the mid-20s.

Border Disputes

The most notorious and protracted of border disputes in the early 1920s occurred in Transcaucasia, most notably in the Karabakh region. The compromise solution of the latter – granting Armenian Nagornyi Karabakh autonomous status within the Azerbaijan SSR - satisfied neither side and left a violent legacy unresolved to this day. A great deal of effort was put into the delimitation of Central Asia in 1924-25, with teams of ethnographers and cartographers visiting border regions to establish the ethnic make-up of local communities. Insoluble problems arose, however, with isolated villages ending up on the wrong side of the borders, nomadic practises cutting across the new national boundaries, villages of mixed population, and some instances of villages ending up on the ‘wrong’ side of the border for apparently arbitrary reasons. The problem was exacerbated by the new national governments enthusiastically adopting the cause of ‘their’ nationals, and local authorities adopting discriminatory policies against members of the wrong nationality, denying them representation in local soviets and closing down national schools.
Along the Turkmen-Kazakh border, where nomads from both groups were active, cross-border raiding was common, while the Lalimkan region between the Turkmen and Uzbek republics remained an object of dispute into the 1930s.^[65] The Aimsk and Iskandersk provinces on the Uzbek-Kyrgyz border and the whole Kazakh-Uzbek border near to Tashkent were particular bones of contention.^[66] In many cases these were continuations of old disputes, but now they took on a new form. As Francine Hirsch has put it:

“To some extent, border disputes were a continuation of inter-clan and inter-ethnic hostilities resumed against a new political backdrop. But something had changed – if not always in terms of how people thought of themselves then in terms of how local leaders and petition writers began to talk about the people they represented. Each region’s new national majorities and minorities, in a struggle for resources and rights, began to speak more about the ‘national principle’ and less about clan, tribal, and religious identities.”^[67]

In the case of border disputes, communities frequently addressed petitions to the national governments, to the TsIK commission in Moscow that had been established precisely to deal with such disputes, or individually to Stalin, Kalinin, Kamenev and Enukidze. Many of these petitions were successful, resulting in numerous small adjustments throughout the second half of the 1920s, but others were ignored or were deemed insoluble.

Islam and Communism

The relationship between Islam and Communism is an exceedingly complex one which remains unresolved in spite of numerous studies. The communal traditions of Islam in some ways made communism more compatible with the Muslim way of life than for the Russians. On the other hand, the emphasis on Islamic unity, in the hands of both religious leaders and secular thinkers like Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, went against the Bolshevik emphasis on class struggle. The influence of Islamic religious beliefs and practises varied greatly across the different muslim regions, but in general the long-term aim of secularising the state and undermining religion affected local communities and provided them with a common set of grievances. While the right to religious practise for muslims was not seriously challenged for most of the 1920s, a number of issues became bones of contention: the waqf system under which land was attached to mosques and guaranteed the economic position of the clergy; the Shariat religious courts; religious schools; and the veiling of women.
The liquidation of the waqfs between 1925 and 1930 proved relatively trouble-free, as poorer muslims already resented the wealth of the clergy and the soviets were able to popularise the measure by redistributing the waqf land to local farmers. A more circumspect approach was taken to the Shariat courts. Attempts to outlaw the Shariat outright by the Tashkent Soviet in 1917 were soon abandoned. Instead, the authorities followed a strategy of gradually undermining the courts by removing their competence over one area after the other, finally denying them all financial support and legal validity in 1927.
Resistance to the secularisation of schools provoked rather more resistance. Early attempts to abolish religious schools were met by parents refusing to send their children to school^[68] and the soviets backed down in 1922, when two decrees restored the right to religious education in Turkestan and restored the waqf revenues to schools. The subsequent undermining of the waqf, however, severely effected the situation of religious schools, the last of which were closed down or secularised in 1928.
The Bolshevik commitment to the emancipation of women, and specifically the right of muslim women not to wear the veil, provoked some of the most violent protests during and after the Civil War, leading to riots and individual assaults. On this issue, the regime appears to have been less ready to back down than on the others, and was prepared to commit troops to defend women taking advantage of this right.^[69]
The extent of local resistance to these anti-religious measures is hard to assess in the absence of thorough research. The way in which the Bolsheviks backed down and adopted a piecemeal approach from 1921 onwards suggest that resistance was widespread. On the other hand, the disdain of Sultan-Galiev and his associates for religious practises meant that this resistance never took on an organised form, and the gradual tactics employed against the waqf, the shariat and religious schools were by and large successful. It can provisionally be surmised that while local communities engaged in actions to defend their religious and cultural practises, the absence of any significant pan-Islamic movement and the rapid adoption of separate national identities made a generalised campaign to defend Islamic practises non-existent. According to OGPU reports of 1926, religious feeling in Central Asia was generally on the decline, although the schools question continued to be the major source of conflict.^[70]
As the analysis presented below will show, to these three causes of local conflict needs to be added conflicts over local and regional elections, and national abuses within the Soviet apparatus.
Ground-breaking research on local conflicts in Central Asia in the 1920s has been carried out by the American scholar Francine Hirsch.^[71] Drawing on the numerous petitions sent by villages to various Soviet leaders and administrative organs and collated by the TsIK regionalisation commission, Hirsch has analysed a number of cases of complaint by local communities which found themselves on the ‘wrong’ side of the new national borders created by the Delimitation. Hirsch accepts that nationality as a category had little meaning for most Muslims of Central Asia before 1926: ‘It was largely in conjunction with border-making and census-taking in the 1920s that the population of Tashkent had “learned” that “Uzbek”, “Kazakh”, and “Tajik” denoted separate national (as opposed to linguisitic, kinship, or other) identities’. Having ‘learned’ these identities, they were then able to make use of them in pursuit of their own demands: ‘Throughout the terrritories of former Turkestan, Bukhara, and Khiva official nationality categories took on political and practical significance as recently categorized populations used them to complain about injustices’.^[72] These injustices were many, as ‘the delimitation of new borders led to new inequalities, creating dominant nationalities and minority nationalities in each national republic and oblast….members of new national minorities – groups linguistically, physically, or culturally different from the titular nationalities (such as Kazakh native speakers in Uzbekistan) – faced forced discrimination, assimilation, and the loss of land and livelihood’. Both groups were quick to adopt the national categories: ‘Representatives of new titular nationalities who understood the benefits of nationhood redefined their concerns and interests in “national” terms’.^[73] Meanwhile, minorities addressed their grievances to the central authorities in language reflecting not just the new emphasis on nationality, but which also demonstrated an understanding of Soviet practises and policies.
Both groups showed remarkable adaptability in coming to terms with the new order in Central Asia. ‘As representatives of titular nationalities discriminated against or attempted to assimilate the new minority groups within their borders, dominant and minority groups alike began to use Soviet categories and administrative organs. Local elites and peasants in Central Asia who appealed to central authorities about disputed borders learned to frame their grievances in the language of the state and to direct them to the appropriate government institutions.’ Ultimately, the resource to the categories, languages and institutions of the Soviet state led to the complete adoption of those categories by the population and fulfilled the Soviets’ ultimate aim of centralising their rule over the border regions: ‘As petitioners expressed their demands and protests in official language – as they defined themselves in national terms and attempted to resolve their national status – they became increasingly integrated into the Soviet state and society’.^[74]
In this account, the adoption of national categories by the local Muslim population was a conscious act calculated to support their own interests. ‘As Soviet administrators and experts composed lists of nationalities and drew borders, local populations in Central Asia learned to manipulate the language of nationality to advance their own interests’.^[75] Hirsch provides ample evidence for this emphasis on rational self-interest in the adoption of national categories, on ‘learning’ and ‘manipulation’ on the part of local communities. At first glance, however, it seems unlikely that this is the whole story. At a general level, a purely rationalistic approach does not seem sufficient in explaining the development of national identity, and especially in explaining violent conflict between distinct national groups. While rational self-interest might explain the initial speed with which nationality categories are adopted, it would appear that Hirsch’s analysis could be developed in order to describe the nature and direction of national identity in Soviet Central Asia in the 1920s. The first problem is a methodological one: by relying primarily on petitions, Hirsch’s account is likely to exaggerate the degree to which national categories are employed manipulatively. In addressing grievances to the Soviet authorities, we would expect petitioners to frame their complaints in terms which they believed would most appeal to the recipients of the petition. Likewise, the rational element may be exaggerated by a focus on border disputes created by the delimitation, which were often regarded as correctable mistakes, rather than other, less rational and frequently more violent sources of conflict. Secondly, national identity, almost by definition, and certainly nationalism, if it is to be lasting and effective involves an emotional appeal, which must go beyond the purely rational.^[76] Thirdly, Hirsch’s account (along with others) does not address the dynamic of the processes involved: it provides an immediate explanation of the growth of national identity only in the border regions (or those internal regions where different national groups live side by side) but does not explain its spread to regions unaffected by conflicts of this sort, nor the development of national identity into a force which can promote the unity of a whole people, rather than underlining the differences between communities in one locality. Finally, and connected with this point, Hirsch’s conclusion that that adoption of the new national categories ultimately satisfied the regime’s aims of centralisation sits uneasily with the widespread and violent purges of national republican leaders in the late 20s which suggest, rather, that nationalism was by now regarded as a threat.
An analysis of local conflicts in Central Asia for the single year 1926, as reported by local branches of the OGPU, helps to address the first two of these problems. Further analysis of preceding and subsequent years will be needed in order to illuminate the third problem, (although I shall indicate below that there is already some reason to believe that local national conflicts were clearly on the increase in 1926) while only speculation can be made at this stage regarding the fourth problem. The year 1926 provides an appropriate starting point for this type of analysis as it was the first full year after delimitation and also the year in which preparatory work was carried out for the union-wide census.^[77]
This analysis of national conflicts in Central Asia and Kazakhstan in 1926 is based on the OGPU reports for that year on “Life in the National Eastern Republics and Autonomous Regions” (Informatsionnye svodki o zhizni v natsional’nykh vostochnykh respublikakh i avtonomnikh oblastakh). The reports are held in the Central Archive of the FSB of the Russian Federation (Tsentral’niy Arkhiv Federal’noi Sluzhbi Bezopasnosti Rossiskoi Federatsii), fond 2, opis 4, d.59. The reports vary between 2 and 8 pages in length and were prepared at least once a fortnight, more usually weekly or every ten days. The copies in the FSB archive were those sent to Iagoda, with other copies being sent to S. M. Dimanshtein, M. G. Roshal, the OGPU general office, and the State Committee for Justice. From June 1926 onwards a sixth copy was sent directly to Stalin’s office. In all there were 37 reports for the whole calendar year, of which 5 are missing from the FSB archive (one from the beginning of June, 3 from late August and early September, and one from October). In addition to national conflicts, the reports cover land reform, the activities of large landholders, nationalists, clergy, and members of the lower soviet and party apparatus, as well as economic development.
The available reports provide details of about 140 instances of national conflict for the year. These range from individual acts of violence or complaint to prolonged struggles involving up to 1000 people or, in regional elections at the end of February, ‘the whole population, virtually to a man’ of western Kazakhstan.^[78] Generally the reports contain details of the location, the cause of dispute, numbers involved, numbers of wounded and fatalities. Occasionally, the reports’ authors assign blame for the conflict to a group from among the usual suspects - bais, kulaks, Muslim clergy, nationalists. Even more rarely, individual ringleaders or agitators are named. More usually, however, the facts of each case are presented without analysis or elaboration.
Although the number of reported cases is sufficient to undertake a quantitative analysis, such an attempt should be made with great caution for a number of reasons. First, the majority of cases are reported from Kazakhstan, and it is difficult to draw general conclusion from the much smaller numbers of reported incidents elsewhere. Second, a quantification of conflicts conceals the wide differences in scale, duration, and levels of violence involved in different cases. Thirdly, the accuracy of OGPU reporting has been called into question, to the extent that reports may have been entirely fictitious. Such extreme doubts seem untenable given the precise location of reported incidents and the possibility in many cases of corroboration through party sources, petitions and correspondence, but there is at least a strong possibility of under-reporting. Incidents may have gone unnoticed by the OGPU, different agents may have considered lesser incidents not worth reporting, there may have been personal or political reasons for excluding specific incidents from the central reports. In the absence of detailed studies of the local organisation of the OGPU and the criteria laid down for reporting, it is hard to tell whether the reports represent an illustrative selection or a comprehensive listing. Thus it is possible, for example, that the predominance of instances of national conflict in Kazakhstan over the rest of Central Asia is a consequence of local OGPU organisation rather than reflecting the real situation. In the absence of further information, however, this should not prevent us from provisionally concluding that national conflict was more prevalent in Kazakhstan than elsewhere at this time.^[79] Finally, similar analysis will need to be applied to a number of years in order to establish with any degree of certainty precise patterns and trends.
In spite of all these caveats, I believe that there is sufficient evidence in this material to provide tentative support to the hypothesis that the national categories, which had been given administrative, political and legal meaning by the delimitation of 1925 and the census of 1926, achieved real meaning for the self-identity of the bulk of the population through the process of local conflicts over specific economic and political issues.
One final point that needs to be made is that I have included conflicts between different clans of the same nationality as a separate category. A shift from clan to national loyalties is a generally accepted trend of the post-delimitation era. It is clear from these reports that clan conflicts played a major role in 1926. Although the sample is too narrow to draw any definite conclusions, it appears that clan conflicts were declining in frequency as the year progressed.
As indicated above, the local conflicts of 1926 can be divided into five categories: conflicts over land, conflicts over borders, conflicts within or about the soviet apparatus, local elections, and a general category where no specific motive is given. The frequency of each type of conflict is summarised in the appended tables.

Conflicts over Land

The most common cause of national conflict at the local level in 1926 was disputes over land usage. Conflicts were especially frequent between Russians and Kazakhs in Kazakhstan (16 cases and 7 deaths), where Russian colonisation had penetrated furthest and where most of the forced resettlements in reprise for the Central Asian revolt in 1916 had taken place. Similar considerations apply to the Kyrgyz Autonomous Republic (3 cases).
However, only a handful of cases relate directly to the allotment and use of cultivated land. More common were conflicts over scarce resources such as, in particular, water, competing use of common pasture and woodland, and interference of livestock with the crops or animals of other communities. Competition over economic livelihood appears therefore to be more of an issue than avenging colonial land-grabbing. The largest local conflict, involving up to 1,000 people, did not involve Russians but took place between two Uzbek villages in Fergana oblast of Uzbekistan over access to water.^[80] While the highest number of fatalities (3 Russians and 4 Kazakhs) occurred in a mass fight on 22nd June over land previously confiscated from Kazakhs in Syr-Darya province,^[81] the next most violent conflicts (5 dead in each case) were internal feuds among Kazakhs and Uzbeks.^[82]
The destructiveness of these conflicts shows that deep-rooted clan divisions were alive and well. But the delimitation unleashed a series of even more violent and persistent conflicts between Russians and non-Russians, especially Kazakhs, often motivated by competition over land. According to one report on Aktiubinsk guberniia for November 1926, ‘inter-national relations between Russians and Kyrgyz [sic – probably Kazakhs] in a number of uezds is taking on much sharper forms. The basic reason for disputes is the question of land usage. The Kyrgyz are everywhere trying to do harm to the Russian population with the aim of driving them away and seizing their lands. Noted facts are damage to Russian meadows and sown fields, leading to fights with beatings and blows. The Russians, expressing vehement displeasure, threaten “to commit a Bartholomew night massacre on the Kyrgyz, since the authorities will not pay attention to lawlessness.”’^[83]
Of conflicts between different national groups, some fit in well with Hirsch’s model. For example, in Shir-Abadsk uead, Syr Darya oblast, Uzbekistan, Uzbeks from two villages were chopping down woodland on land belonging to the Tajik Ar-Abak village, and also depriving them of their share of water. According to the OGPU report, ‘they [the Tajiks] as a minority are not able to oppose the Uzbeks and intend to turn for help to the Oblistpolkom’.^[84] The Uzbeks, as the dominant nationality locally, were taking advantage of their position to gain an economic benefit at the expense of Tajiks, while the latter could only resort to complaints through official channels. Even in this case, however, there is a clear suggestion that the Uzbeks’ actions may have been motivated as much by national sentiment as by economic advantage.
In other cases, however, competition between national groups verged on open warfare. On the Uzbek/Turkmen border in Khorezm oblast, Turkmen were attacking ‘better land’ occupied by Uzbeks. 12 armed Turkmen horsemen seized all the Uzbeks’ cattle and drove them across the border. In another incident nearby armed Turkmen seized almost all the carts and horses of an Uzbek community.^[85] In Ganchin volost of Tajikistan, Tajiks were reported as wantonly depriving Uzbeks of water needed for their crops. In retaliation, Uzbeks had attempted to poison Tajik drinking water.^[86] Similarly, across the Kazakh/Kyrgyz border in Aule-Atin uezd, Kyrgyz were building dams on their side, which Kazakhs then crossed the border to destroy.^[87] In such cases, while there may be economic considerations at stake, it is clear that a destructive emotional nationalism is at work, similar to that in cases involving Russians.

Conflicts over Borders

The drawing of national borders in the course of the Delimitation of 1925 left a number of anomalies, including areas of mixed population, but also including cases of nationally homogenous communities left arbitrarily on the ‘wrong’ side of the border. A Borders Disputes Commission had been set up to deal with complaints and so, even if such complaints were rarely upheld, communities were encouraged to protest against border decisions. Typically in such cases, a community predominantly of one nationality would petition to have the borders redrawn in such a way as to end up in the republic or region of their ‘own’ nationality.
However, in 1926 more common than these types of complaint were demands by Russian (8), and increasingly, Cossack (9) communities in Kazakhstan to either have the borders redrawn so as to locate their villages in a Russian province, or to set up a special autonomous Russian (or Cossack) region along the lines of those granted to other national minorities. In these cases, the Russians were clearly attempting (unsuccessfully at this stage) to employ the language of Soviet nationalities policies in order to present themselves as national minorities in pursuit of their demands.
In both types of dispute, frequently motives other than purely national ones are ascribed to the demands - most commonly, the belief that taxes will be lower in another republic, or the claim that the local soviet apparatus discriminated unfairly in favour of the dominant nationality. Thus, for example, the Russians of Irdzhar volost in Kazakhstan wanted autonomy as they believed that taxes fell 85% on the Russians, and only 15% on Kazakhs.^[88] In the Kara-Kalpak Autonomous Region, Kazakhs and Uzbeks wanted transferal to Uzbekistan apparently in the belief that peasants paid no taxes at all in Uzbekistan.^[89] In Turkmenistan, agitation was being carried out among Uzbeks to have their villages joined to Uzbekistan because ‘in the Turkmen Republic all responsible workers are Turkmen, Tatars and Russian, and soon Uzbeks will not be able to be in charge of their children and women, so we need to bring our own people into power.’^[90]
Occasionally, such considerations led communities to agitate for transferal to a republic of another nationality. Thus Kyrgyz in Tashkent uezd of Uzbekistan wanted to escape a land reform ‘that is being carried out exclusively in the interests of the Uzbeks’ by transferring to Kazakhstan ‘where no land reform is being carried out.’^[91] Similar opportunism was demonstrated by Russians and Taranchin in Dzharkent uezd in eastern Kazakhstan who joined forces to call for a joint autonomous region.^[92] In the most unusual case of this kind, local Uzbeks were persuaded to support the demands of 4 Kyrgyz villages of Boksa-Itsfanii district to unite to the Kyrgyz Autonomous Republic, by ‘being promised privileges on the side of the KASSR’.^[93]

Conflicts over the Soviet Apparatus

A frequent source of conflict was competition between different groups for dominance in the soviet apparatus, expressed in two major ways - organising along national or clan lines for regional elections, and complaints against the dominance of other national groups in the existing composition of the apparatus. In the latter cases, again Russians were involved in a majority, not just in Kazakhstan (6 cases), but this time also in Uzbekistan (3) and Kyrgyziia (2). It is a measure of how far korenizatsiia had progressed that in all but two of these cases the complaints were by Russians against the dominant local nationality. The exceptions were in Pishpek and Dzhalal-Abad in Kyrgyziia, where Kyrgyz officials sought the removal of European ‘responsible workers’.^[94] Korenizatsiia may not have been as successful in Turkmenistan, where land reform was resisted on the basis that ‘it [the reform] is in the hands of Russians and Tatars’.^[95]
More common in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan were Russians (together with Tatars in 4 cases) being excluded from the soviet apparatus. Frequently these were linked with examples of extreme national enmity. In Chagan district of Kazakhstan, Kazakhs were reported as declaring that ‘only we are masters here’, ‘outsiders can go back to Russia’, they ‘have illegally infringed Kazakh rights’ they should all be destroyed etc.^[96] There were further cases in both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan of local officials seeking to exclude Russians and Tatars altogether from the soviet apparatus.^[97] Elsewhere it was felt that the local apparatus was conspiring against the whole Russian population. In the village of Kara-Tiurbek in Kazakhstan all the Russians were refusing to pay taxes, claiming that ‘Kazakh power wants to drive us away from here by hook or by crook’, and that all complaints through official channels were being ignored.^[98]
It was not always the titular nationality which predominated in the local soviet apparatus. In Erisaev district in Uzbekistan, Uzbeks complained of Tajik domination locally, which led to bread being distributed only among Tajiks.^[99] Tajiks returned the complement in complaining of Uzbek power in Kurgan-Tiubinsk district of Tajikistan.^[100] In border regions where it was felt that the local or republican authorities of the titular nationality were giving minorities a raw deal, the response was most usually to seek a redrawing of borders or regional autonomy as described above, rather than complaining to higher authorities or taking direct action. This implies an acceptance of the national principle in administration in favour of the titular nationality.

Electoral Conflicts

Regional and republican election campaigns and meetings provided a focus for organisation along national lines. However, what is most notable in the OGPU reports on Kazakhstan is the predominance of clan conflicts when it came to elections (seven out of ten cases). Presumably most voting was along national lines in any case, meaning there was little point in carrying out nationalist agitation at election times. The attitude of acceptance of a dominant national majority, already mentioned, would have been another factor reducing national tensions in election. Reports of national conflict over elections in the Kara-Kalpak Autonomous Region^[101] and Tajikistan^[102] perhaps reflect the relative insecurity of those titular nationalities.
Given the powers of patronage at stake, struggles between different Kazakh clans gained huge significance and led to inter-clan conflicts on a mass scale. In Chubartaev district, one faction resorted to bribing voters with 36 heads of cattle and a thousand sheep, and rivalries escalated into a fight involving at least 150 people.^[103] In Leninsk district, January elections had to be postponed by a week following two mass brawls in which at least 11 people were seriously injured.^[104] At the beginning of March it was reported that almost the whole population of western Kazakhstan was involved in clan conflicts over elections,^[105] while in November the whole of Aktiubinsk province was consumed with the electoral struggle. ^[106]

General Conflicts

A final group of national conflicts do not fall into any of the above categories, and appear to have been motivated by general national hatred rather than specific grievances or competition. In some cases mob violence was sparked off by a particular incident, as in the lynching by a Russian mob of a Kazakh accused of raping a Russian boy. In this case, however, the mob went on to attack Kazakh police at the local jail.^[107] In other cases, violence appears to have occurred at random, as in the killing of a Russian peasant by Kazakhs in the Urals uezd ‘out of national hatred’ according to the report.^[108] Violence on a larger scale typically took place in town bazaars, where members of different nationalities would have gathered in numbers at the same time. Drunkenness is twice mentioned as a factor,^[109] but presumably may have been an influence in other cases. In 4 of the most violent brawls between Kazakhs and Russians, the Russian protagonists were identified as conscripts,^[110] who therefore may not have been from the area. In Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan members of opposing clans also engaged in mass public brawls (3 times and once respectively). Even if these cases are excluded, however, there are sufficient cases of random or weakly motivated acts of violence to indicate hostile national feelings which go beyond immediate causes and rational self-interest.
This last category includes mostly random or accidental acts of violence, motivated not by a specific issue but by general rivalry or hatred. It can reasonably be assumed that these incidents reflected deep-seated emotional oppositions. Almost all of these cases involved clan rivalries, or conflicts between Russians and non-Russians. There is sufficient evidence both here and elsewhere, however, to suggest that such emotional national rivalries were already at work in conflicts between the non-Russian ‘new’ nationalities. Local minorities were particularly vulnerable to apparently wanton acts on the part of the dominant nationality. As early as November 1925, the OGPU reported ‘chauvinist Kazakh attitudes’ to the Taranchin in Dzhetisuisk guberniia: removing them wholesale from the soviet apparatus (even in Taranchin villages), and closing down Taranchin co-operatives and cultural centres.^[111]
While most of these incidents at the local level appear to have been spontaneous acts on the part of village communities, in separate reports the OGPU indicated increasing concern at the direct intervention of nationalists in promoting conflict, particularly in removing Russians from the soviet apparatus. Thus one informant provided the OGPU with names of nationalists meeting in a private house in Karkaralin to discuss how to get Russians excluded from responsible positions, at the same time as a similar meeting was held in Zaisan uezd.^[112] Particular concern was expressed at the influence of nationalists over school pupils and students.^[113] A number of nationalist students recognised that the best way of achieving their aims was by joining the Communist Party and working from within the system. In the reported words of one Kazakh student, Baigurin: ‘In Tashkent the Russians are vanquished, now we need to vanquish the Russians in Kazakhstan, as here their policy is purely colonisatory, and to struggle with them we need to be communists…’^[114] Baigurin succeeded in becoming a member of the Collegium of the Commissariat of Health. In Tashkent, a number of students known for their opposition to communism, were now reported to have joined the party.
A summary report on Kazakhstan for the year 1925 claimed that there were ‘in all, only 20-30 cases of serious national hostility’.^[115] If we assume (and this is a big ‘if’) that the OGPU carried out the same level of surveillance and reporting, and considered similar incidents to be ‘serious’, in 1926 as in 1925, then my collated figure of 94 such conflicts (76 if we exclude clan conflicts) shows a marked increase in such conflicts, as would be expected in the circumstances immediately after delimitation. In the course of the year 1926 itself, the most marked trend is the increase in the second half of the year of agitation on the part of Russian and, especially, Cossack villages to be removed by border redrawing from Kazakhstan, either into Russia, or into a separate autonomous unit. These efforts, together with the language and levels of violence frequently cited in the reports, suggest that the most bitter feelings in the region existed between Kazakhs and Russian settlers, and that Kazakhs at both the local and republican level were swift to take advantage of the delimitation and Korenizatsiia not only to improve their own position, but to vent their feelings and exact vengeance for past injustices.
There is sufficient evidence in the reports to suggest that similar emotions were beginning to be felt in relations between the non-Russian nationalities in the region. These sentiments were not yet as widespread as anti-Russian feelings or inter-clan rivalries, but the latter form of conflict was already showing a gradual decline over the course of 1926. The speed of the adoption of national categories by the local Muslim population is remarkable on any count. But if rational self-interest was a major factor at work, it was clear that it was not the only factor. The new situation provided fertile ground for existing nationalists to spread their ideas, and it was the growth of emotional nationalism which may have caught the regime by surprise and prompted its moves to destroy ‘national communism’ at the end of the 1920s.

Summary of Reported National Conflicts in Central Asia and
Kazakhstan for 1926 by Republic, disputants, and type^[116]

<img src=http://aimag.knet.ru/pics/smithtab.jpg>

The Regime and the National Question

In January 1928, Veli Ibragimov, first secretary of the Crimean Obkom of the CPSU and chairman of the Crimean Sovnarkom, was arrested, charged with ‘counter-revolutionary activity and espionage’, convicted and executed, making him the highest ranking communist official to that date to suffer this fate. In November that year, Sultan-Galiev was again arrested and a massive purge followed in the Tatar Republic. At the same time, a large number of Kazakh intellectuals were arrested and tried, and the following year preparations began in Ukraine and Belorussia for two great national show trials – of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (Spilka Vyzvolennia Ukrainy - SVU) and the Union for the Liberation of Belorussia (Saiuz vyzvalennia Belarusi - SVB). These events were the beginning of an ever more violent cycle of purges that overwhelmed all the national republics and eventually claimed the lives of almost all those leaders who had been promoted under the earlier policies of korenizatsiia, together with intellectual and cultural figures.
This sudden development was all the more surprising given the Opposition’s silence on national questions and the absence of any clear signs of possible national revolt. It is not altogether straightforward to determine the Stalin leadership’s handling of national policy at this time. Published sources are limited and Terry Martin’s excellent work on nationalities from 1923 to 1938 focuses on developments among Russians in the national regions. The Central Committee discussed national policy only once in this period (over the delimitation of Central Asia) while the Soviet of Nationalities mostly rubber-stamped decisions taken elsewhere. The Politburo clearly involved itself in events in the republics, but the main mechanism for policy implementation was the appointment of republican party secretaries and other senior posts. Turnover in these positions was high, especially in the Muslim republics. But Stalin met frequently and in private with national party secretaries, and it was no doubt here that policy directives were mostly given out.
The 1928 purges in Crimea and the Tatar Republic can be attributed directly to the uncovering of secret organisations and the second disgrace of Sultan-Galiev. The scale of the purge was unprecedented. Although Rorlich’s figure of 2,273 Tatar communists receiving the death penalty is probably exaggerated,^[117] a majority of the leading Tatars were arrested. This political purge was followed over the next couple of years by a ‘cultural purge’ of the Society of Tatarology of Kazan, the Oriental Insititute of Kazan, and the Tatar Literary Association “Dzhidigan”.^[118]
The trials of the SVU and the SVB occurred about the same time as each other and were public “show trials”. But in spite of the similar names given to the two fabricated nationalist organisations the origins and victims of the two trials were different. Martin’s analysis of the SVU trial shows that it ‘purposefully targeted the national smenovekhovstvo intelligentsia and likewise decisively marked the end of national smenovekhovstvo: that is, the use of former nationalists in cultural and soviet organs.’^[119] The trial was the culmination of a co-ordinated campaign against the increasingly outspoken nationalists in leading academic and other bodies, most notably Serhii Efremov. The 45 hand-picked defendants at the main trial were members of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Science, leaders of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, members of former Ukrainian ‘national socialist’ parties, and other prominent ethnic Ukrainian non-party intellectuals.^[120] No communists were arrested in connection with the SVU.
By contrast in Belorussia, where there was no similar history of smenovekhovstvo, the SVB trial originated from the routine enquiry of a commission of the Central Control Commission of the CPSU headed by V. Zatonsky. Similar and contemporary investigations in other republics did not result in any action. But Zatonsky’s damning report and equally damning letter to Stalin prompted the launching of a purge. Zatonsky’s most important finding was of a strong anti-Russian attitude, little regard for membership of the USSR and a provincial nationalism all of which went unchallenged by the local communist leadership, some of whom he named as having become nationalists.^[121] Like in Ukraine, prominent members of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences were arrested in late 1929, but unlike in Ukraine, they were joined by four prominent communists. Other figures were purged, but the most notable impact of the SVB trial was that the remaining communist leaders, many of whom came in for express criticism, readily reversed their policies of Belorussizatsiia.
The causes of the Kazakhstan purge are more obscure, but it seems to have been connected to the beginning of the forcible settlement of Kazakh nomads. On this occasion the main target of arrests were former members of the Alash Orda and leading cultural figures, together with a number of communists who may have been implicated in the Sultan-Galiev conspiracy.
Each of these purges, then, was different in its origins and encompassed a different group of victims. The Tatar purge was purely political; the Ukrainian purge was aimed against Ukrainian smenovekhovstvo; the Belorussian purge was a drastic way of remedying what were seen as incorrect policy implementations; while the Kazakh purge can in part be linked with that in the Tatar Republic, but may also have been an early attempt to forestall opposition to radical economic reform. On the surface it does not seem, then, that these purges were directly linked or that they can be traced to anything other than specific causes.
On the other hand, a clear pattern was emerging, and was to be repeated over the following years in all the national republics. The policies of korenizatsiia were being shifted into reverse, with former nationalists in particular falling victim to the new violence. One incident at this time might have caused particular concern for Stalin. A leading Tatar communist, Galimjan Ibragimov, previously a stalwart of the National Left, published in 1927 a pamphlet entitled ‘Which way will Tatar Culture Go?’ expressing pan-Turkic and anti-Russian views.^[122] In the previous year, Ibragimov had strongly opposed moves to Latinise the Tatar alphabet.^[123] Up until then, the delicate balance between Rights and Lefts had allowed the centre to play them off against each other, favouring now one and now the other group. If Ibragimov’s defection, possibly under the pressure of a growing sense of national identity from below, signalled a decisive shift in favour of the national Right, then this balance would be upset. By the same token, the Shumsky Affair became significant only once it became clear how much support Shumsky’s position enjoyed in both Ukrainian communist parties. The unprecedented and probably unexpected success of the nation-building policies of the 1920s combined with the resurgence of the nationalist wings of the national communist parties and the uncovering of underground conspiracies may have convinced Stalin that a genuine nationalist threat now existed, at least in potential.
In the circumstances of a radical economic reform which destroyed the traditional way of life of millions of soviet citizens, such a threat could not be tolerated, and at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s Stalin turned on possible sources of national opposition one by one. No combined attack on national communists was launched, and the change in direction in national policy was never announced and could only be deduced later from the new emphasis on Russian culture and the progressive nature of Russian history. Instead, a salami tactic of taking on one national group at a time, and often conducting a political purge at a separate time from a cultural purge, was adopted. Thus national political and cultural leaders could cling to the belief that they may survive if they did not come to the assistance of their colleagues in other republics.

Conclusion

The national question remained a taboo topic in the major political disputes which occupied the second half of the 1920s. Incidents such as the Georgian Affair and the Basmachi revolt, together with the memory of the force of nationalism during the Civil War, were sufficient to remind all the leaders of the potential danger of stoking nationalism. While there were no significant powerful nationalist organisations at this time, Shumsky and Sultan-Galiev served as a reminder of the unreliability of many national communists in the event of any upsurge in nationalism.
This consensus allowed the Stalin leadership a more or less free hand in the national republics. Cadre policies and the Left/Right national division were exploited to preserve the national order. While the major incidents of national opposition which concerned the regime were in general isolated and easily dealt with, there may have been an increasingly worrying tendency towards the resurgence of nationalism. In the second half of the 1920s, the impetus given to nation-building provided by the delimitation of Central Asia combined with a growing confidence and organisation on the part of nationalists. While further research is required to determine the precise dynamic of the growth of national identity in the second half of the 1920s, sufficient evidence is already available to suggest that local conflicts arising out of land, border, and electoral disputes were taking on the characteristics of emotional nationalism.
National conflicts for most of the 1920s can therefore be characterised as mainly local in character, and reflected the dual effects of nation-building and korenizatsiia. On the one hand, nationalist opposition movements remained small and isolated. On the other hand, the new situation encouraged conflict at the local level, especially when stoked by unscrupulous local leaders willing to exploit their new-found national advantages. This process, together with the Stalinist state’s new economic programme and a decisive move against the institutions of the Islamic religion, threatened to open up a broad front of nationalist opposition to the regime, elements of which were already evident in the Shumsky Affair. The purges can therefore be understood, at least in part, as a pre-emptive strike against the political leadership of such a movement.