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How much freedom nationalistic Ukrainians would be allowed soon became apparent. Ukrainian, recognized as a distinct language by the former imperial government only in 1913, became the official language, though Russian was soon given the status of second official language. Mikhail Hrushevsky, doyen of Ukrainian historians and a notable patriot, became president of the new Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Newspapers were published in Ukrainian; theatres, museums and libraries were Ukrainianized, and Ukrainians were given prominent posts in Ukraine’s government and Party. Agreements with Russia were sometimes dignified by the status of international treaties, but key decisions were taken by Moscow. There was freedom for cultural nationalism, not for political nationalism. The new Soviet Union could be a federation of independent nations provided a central Communist Party supervised them all from Moscow. ¹⁰

Though Stalin was a Georgian, as well as being a former trainee for the Orthodox priesthood, he did not at first support the idea of Georgian independence. Instead he lumped Georgia together with Armenia and Azerbaydzhan in an attempt to create a Transcaucasian Federation. Such a federation had been formed in the wake of the Revolution, only to split up into three ephemeral independent states, and it was force, as represented by a victorious Red Army, which eventually decided the matter. So it was that in the spring of 1921 the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic came to replace the Georgian Democratic Republic. Azerbaydzhan was brought into the union in September 1920, and Armenia a year later. In 1922 representatives of a ‘Transcaucasian Republic’, which subsumed all these, signed a union treaty with the Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian republics, but Transcaucasia proved too fissile to survive.

Further east, most Kazakhs seem to have favoured autonomy and, like the local Cossacks, sided with Admiral Kolchak’s White army against the Reds. The fighting was heavy, widespread and prolonged, but by the end of 1919 the Reds had prevailed in eastern Siberia, Orenburg and the northern Kazakh territories. By the spring the Seven Rivers territory was also in their hands. Famine followed. Although the Soviet regime had established political dominance, it discovered that it could not administer an economy based largely on semi-nomadic livestock-herding. ¹¹ In both the Kazakh areas and the rest of what had become Soviet Central Asia officials had to cope with societies seriously different from those to the west. These societies were largely Muslim and poorly educated. Some regarded the new regime as liberating, but rather more disliked their new rulers much as they had the old. Still further east Bolshevik rule took longer to establish. Eighty thousand Japanese troops had occupied the Amur region in 1918, and, though the Communists had soon set up a ‘Far Eastern Republic’ in Siberia east of Lake Baikal, it was 1922 before the Soviet Union secured that region. The United States had put 7,000 troops into Vladivostok, and the British a further 800. ¹²Only in 1923 did Chukhotka and Yakutia become Communist.

In 1924 a constitution for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was promulgated. The Union was to be a ‘federal multinational socialist federation’ based on the principle of self-determination. It consisted of three Republics of the Union - Russia, Ukraine and Belarus - and eleven Autonomous Republics - including Kazakhstan, Karelia and the Crimea, and others for Buriat-Mongols, Volga Germans, Tatars and others. There were also thirteen Autonomous Provinces designed to accommodate, inter alia, the Udmurts of western Siberia, the Koni, the Chechens and the Maris. Jews were allotted Birobijan in the Amur region of the Far East as a national home; the Ulch and other small peoples were given ‘national districts’. However, Kazakhstan and Ukraine contained large minorities of ethnic Russians, and not a little ethnic-Russian territory was parcelled off to Estonia and Latvia, which were outside the Soviet Union. ¹³ Political and ethnic frontiers were not congruent in the Soviet Union, but, given the propensity of peoples to reproduce at different rates, to acculturate and to migrate, they never could be. How genuinely the values earnestly proclaimed in the Constitution were reflected in the Union is open to question, but if it really was an empire that had taken shape it was a new kind of empire.