The Reintegration of the Russian Empire and the Bolshevik Views of "Russia": 
The Case of the Moscow Party Organization


Author(s) Ikeda, Yoshiro

After the years of the civil war much of the former imperial territory appeared to be reintegrated by the Bolsheviks. The process of reintegration itself took the form of the conquest of the peripheries.6 But the notion of “Russia” remained ambiguous for the Bolshevik regime. In connection with this we cannot avoid Agurskii’s study on so-called national Bolshevism. According to him, in the years of the NEP, an emigrant ideology of national Bolshevism, which considered the Bolshevik regime as the only real political power able to reintegrate and develop the “one, indivisible Russia” and called on technocrats to support it, found resonance within the party. By tolerating and even promoting currents of Russian nationalism in culture and politics, the leaders of the party, and especially Stalin, caught up and introduced this ideology into the party policy for the consolidation of the legitimacy of the regime. Thus, Agurskii explained the intensive emergence of Russian nationalism in the USSR of the NEP era. The study of Agurskii is pioneering in making clear many aspects of the underground dialogue between the emigrant statist movement of the Change of Landmarks and the Bolshevik regime. However, if he assumes that the Bolshevik government tolerating the Russian nationalist currents in Soviet society, had been seeking reinforcement of the cultural and political hegemony of the Russian ethnicity (and judging from his attention to the writers whose main theme was the Russian peasantry, he seems to do so), then he is not correct. It seems that in 1920s and afterwards the Bolshevik regime had aimed not so much for the hegemony of ethnic Russians, as for the consolidation of a supra-ethnic entity. To make this matter clear, I will turn to the recent studies of the Bolshevik nationality policy in the 1920s and later. These studies had made clear that the 4 Here I depend on the argument of Anthony Smith that “the nation has come to blend two sets of dimensions, the one civic and territorial, the other ethnic and genealogical.” Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno, 1991), p. 15. Especially on the “civic nation,” see, ibid., p. 116. 5 Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation, pp. 21-38; David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956 (Cambridge, 2002), ch. 1.