Branko Milanović – Ukraine, Lenin and Sultan-Galiev

Branko Milanović is an economist specialised in development and inequality. His latest book, The Great Global Transformation: National Market Liberalism in a Multipolar World, was published November 2025.

 

It is a foolhardy endeavor today to review a book that discusses “the national question”. The topic is always slippery but in today’s age of nationalism it is certain to attract attacks from all sides involved in the book. And never more so than in Eastern Europe, and especially now when the two largest states in the region are involved in a fratricidal and increasingly murderous war for more than four years.

Still I could not resist the temptation to go back to Richard Pipes’ book The Formation of the Soviet Union (originally published in 1954; revised edition in 1964, with the latest preface written in 1997). As is well known, Pipes does not look kindly on the Bolshevik revolution and his The Russian Revolution (published in 1991) treats the revolution throughout as a coup, similar to, for example, Mussolini’s March on Rome. But Pipes was an excellent historian, and, what I think is absolutely indispensable in a great historian, an excellent writer. I remember that reading many years ago Pipes’ description of the events in Petrograd (St Petersburg) in September 1917, I genuinely felt unsure which way the events would move. Yes, I did know that the “coup” was to take place next month but the book put the reader in the shoes of a person who in September 1917 had no idea what might transpire next: war or peace with Germany, Provisional government or the new Constituent Assembly, Bolshevik coup or a military overthrow of Kerenski’s government.

Pipes is similarly excellent in the story of the formation of the Soviet Union. This is an extraordinary difficult topic to write about because of the complexity of the action that takes place from Warsaw to the Chinese border and that involves literally hundreds of parties—where party can be understood as everything from a political organization to a group of robbers. The book is divided into chapters that, after the general discussion of the national question in Tsarist Russia, proceed across three large regions (Ukraine and Belorussia, the Caucasus, and the Central Asia) and do so chronologically (the Provisional government, the Bolshevik “coup”, the Civil War and foreign invasions, and ultimately in 1923 the formation of the Soviet Union). Because of complexity of the topic I will limit my piece to three issues: Ukraine, Sultan-Galiev, and Lenin’s view on the national question. It is notable that the national question approach of the book makes it deal only with the reintegration of the “borderland areas” into a system ruled from Moscow, but not with the attitude of the Russian population within (whatever geographically it may mean) Russia.

Ukraine. For obvious reasons (importance and the size of the area), Ukraine takes the pride of place. Ukraine’s political situation was extraordinarily complex: no fewer than nine government have succeeded themselves in Kiev/Kyiv, including a German puppet government and a German occupation government, and if we include Kharkov/Kharkiv Soviet government as well, Krivoi-Rog Soviet government etc. we easily come to dozen if not more governments between 1917 and 1922. Most of them were governments on paper only; the area was in a state of total anarchy. Pipes concludes: “The history of the Ukraine from 1917… until early 1920s, when the Soviet rule was finally established reflects a state of rapidly-spreading anarchy which, both in its extent and its duration, is perhaps unique in the history of modern Europe” (p. 148).

To the risk of simplification, Pipes sees the main cause of heterogeneity in Ukrainian body politic in the difference in interests and to some extent culture between the more urbanized and industrialized areas that were Russian-populated or heavily Russified (including Jewish population), and much larger rural areas that were Ukrainian, often in some vague sense because the national identity may not have been very strongly felt among many peasants, interested primarily, and perhaps only, in land reform: “this desire to apportion the rich Ukrainian black earth independent of Russia, for the sole benefit of the local population, became a powerful factor in the development of nationalist sentiment among the Ukrainian rural masses” (p. 57).

This level of heterogeneity is not atypical: we find it in many parts of the world. What added to anarchy was that there were two other dividing lines: between pro-bourgeois and pro-workers parties, and between those who were in favor of greater centralization and those who were against. Thus a moderate nationalist Ukrainian party was in agreement with Bolsheviks when both wanted to weaken the Provisional government in Petrograd. When Bolsheviks came to power that identity of interests evaporated: Bolsheviks wanted stronger central government, Ukrainian moderate nationalists wanted autonomy or independence. But then when Bolsheviks were driven out of Ukraine by the German army and during the Civil War by the Whites, the alliance between the moderate (and even extreme) nationalists and Bolsheviks surged again. Both dreaded the return of pro-Tsarist forces in Russia.

This is just one of the coalitional switches: there were many others, more complicated, driven by the issues going from the formation of Ukrainian-only soldier battalions in the Russian army to the attitude toward desertion from the frontline, to the Ukrainian negotiations with the Germans to let them occupy Ukraine and create a puppet government, to finally the attitude toward the German occupation in 1918. The splits went through Bolshevik lines too: Lenin was against restarting the war with Germany when it occupied Ukraine; many others among the Bolsheviks were in favor. Or more generally, “the left [of Ukrainian Bolsheviks] stood for a peasant revolution, and for a certain measure of interparty democracy; the right for a strictly proletarian movement, and for complete subordination to the party organs in Moscow” (p. 131).

One of the finer ironic details is that Ukrainian Rada’s delegation that was included in the all-Soviet (Russian) delegation negotiating peace at Brest-Litovsk, established on its own contacts with the German delegation and negotiated German invasion of Ukraine. That occupation, in the brutality with which food was extracted from peasants, hostages taken and executed, looks to today’s reader like the first act in Soviet collectivization and Holodomor that would happen ten years later.

Finally, and not least importantly, there was a huge fissiparousness of Ukrainian parties, again not an unusual situation when, after a revolution, parties become led by various intellectuals with next to zero political experience. For Marxist economic historians, it is thus amusing to read a member of the Rada complain of the fact that Tugan-Baranovsky, one of the first commentators and critics of Marx, named minister of finance, had disappeared for several months and no one has heard of him nor knew of his whereabouts.

A plurality of the population perhaps (it is impossible to speak of a majority in the case of Ukraine) was politically close to the Ukrainian SRs (it was in reality two parties: Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers’ Party and Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party) whose main plank was the agrarian reform and farmers’ access to land. In other words, expropriation of large landowners. This was coupled with moderate nationalism that, in addition to the obvious demands for education and official use of Ukrainian language (banned in Tsarist Russia), was comfortable with autonomy of Ukraine within Russia. They won most votes in Ukraine in the election for the Constituent Assembly held in December 1917. The stronger the centralizing forces in Moscow, the more pro-independence was that portion of the Ukrainian political parties. Bolsheviks’ main support came from the urban areas, with Kiev itself playing a swing role: it was both the center of Russified urbanized population and intellectual home of pro-independence thinkers.

There is in principle the difference between being in favor of centralization and being pro-Russia. In reality, the two positions came eventually largely to overlap, but during the Civil War and with the formation of the Soviet Union centralization was seen by many as a way to reinforce the proletarian state and Bolshevik power. Thus it is notable that the sternest supporters of centralization were often non-Russian Bolsheviks, led to that position by ideological and state-building zeal: Stalin, Trotsky, Zinoviev Kamenev, Dzerzinsky, Ordzhonikidze. The last two, together with Stalin, played a key role in the formation of the Soviet Union, and in “solving” the Georgian national question that, just months before December 1922 and the decisive discussions on the Constitution of the Soviet Union, became the most contentious issue that almost derailed the entire process.

Lenin’s position on “the national question” changed over the years and Pipes pays lots of attention to it, including at the end of the book where he cites fully (on four pages) Lenin’s last writings on Soviet federalism and on dangers of great- Russian chauvinism. (I wish there were more discussion of Soviet federalism, the difference between the Union Republics and Autonomous Republics, the asymmetric party federalism where some Russian and Soviet institutions were merged; Russian Federation being the only one without its own Communist party etc. But understandably that might have led the book toward more politics and political philosophy and less history.).

Pipes sketches the standard Marxist view, originally very dogmatically shared by Lenin, that nations are largely the product of capitalist development and that with socialist victory they would tend to disappear. This view, originating with Marx, was consistent with the creation of large states, minimization of the national question as such and, in the Austrian vision of Otto Bauer and Karl Adler, with the solution of that question through so-called “personal autonomy”. In other words, there would not be territorially-based ethnic states: one could be a Martian, go to a Martian school and publish articles in Martian language, whether in Moscow, Berlin or Vienna, but there would not be a Martian People’s Republic. Personal autonomy, but no territorial autonomy. (That position was even in the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian empire rejected by Czech and Slovak parties; it never even came close to application in the Hungarian part.)

Lenin began with this view, but then, probably around 1917 or 1918, moved to a much more radical view holding that the creation of ethnic-based republics, with the right of self-determination including secession after the communist revolution, was the way to solve the national question. Pipes ascribes Lenin’s change of position to a very tactical reason: Bolsheviks had to promise an extreme version of self-determination to all national groups in order to garner their support during the Civil War. It was a strong reversal (not the first time that it happened in Lenin’s intellectual life): nations were no longer seen as simple products of capitalism on their way out of history but part and parcel of a socialist new order.

It is explained, I think, not only in function of winning the Russian civil war, but also by Lenin’s realization that after the end of the Great War the colonial question, brought up by the Versailles Conference, gives to Marxists an ideal tool to spread the struggle against capitalism to the rest of the world and to get support in countries such as China, India, Indonesia, Egypt etc. Lenin’s thinking was thus global, motivated not solely by the need to win the Civil War domestically but to spur the world revolution. This became very obvious at the Second Comintern conference in the Summer of 1920.

Pipes however does not mention, as other writers (including Adam Tooze in The Deluge) do, that Lenin was also moved by the need not to be outbid by Woodrow Wilson who similarly proclaimed the right to national self-determination. Marxists had to do better than a bourgeois American politician: Lenin could not offer to India less than Woodrow Wilson.

Sultan-Galiev. What happens to the rest of the world and the “underdeveloped peoples” if for them the rule of the proletariat or the continued rule of the bourgeoise in the rich world makes no difference? What happens if both “Northern” workers and “Northern” capitalists are happy to exploit the rest of the world? Enter Sultan-Galiev. He asked openly that question that was first indirectly posed by Engels in 1858: “the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is actually aiming at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation that exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain degree justifiable” (Marx-Engels: Selected Correspondence, p. 105).

Sultan-Galiev, a Tatar revolutionary and an early Bolshevik, went logically all the way to the other end where class struggle, on the global level, becomes in fact a struggle between nations. In today’s language of inequality, we could say, when between-country income differences far outweigh within-country income differences. He was the first “formulator” of what Lin Biao would forty years later proclaim as the class struggle at the global level: between the North and the West, on the one hand who are alike the urban ruling class, and everybody else who is peasant and, alike in the Chinese revolution, represents a genuine revolutionary force. Sultan-Guliev was for his efforts expelled from the Soviet Communist Party and, in what is seen as the first Stalinist trial of a Party cadre, was judged and condemned to death. He disappeared in 1930.

From Pipes, “The Formation of the Soviet Union”, p. 278.

PS. I have written on the same theme before (here). That piece “Why was the Soviet Union created?” is worth reading also for very good comments.

PS2. One cannot have a Yugoslav background, read Pipes and not think of the differences and similarities between the Soviet and Yugoslav approach to the national question. But this is for another day.