In the chaotic conditions of the Civil War, the gap between central Bolshevik policies and local implementation was most often played out in the form of undisciplined Russian soviets and Red Army bodies acting in ways that antagonised the local population. But as Soviet power became more secure, it emerged that there were real differences, based on a mixture of prejudice and ideology, which divided the Party both in the regions and at the centre. It was rarely the case that competing positions were associated exclusively with Bolsheviks of different ethnic backgrounds: the groupings that became known as the ‘National Lefts’ and the ‘National Rights’ could, in places like Crimea, both be associated with leaders from the same national group. Disagreements over policy locally were reflected in ideological divisions which went to the top of the Party leadership. Although their positions were not so far apart, subtle differences between the two Bolsheviks who had the greatest influence over nationality policy – Lenin and Stalin – had important consequences for the future of the nationalities experience in the USSR.

The different positions that had been adopted by the European Marxist movement over the national question before the First World War continued to divide the Bolsheviks during and after the Civil War. The internationalists were represented by the leading Bolsheviks Yuri Pyatakov and Nikolai Bukharin, while the right to national self-determination was defended by Lenin with the support of the commissar for nationality affairs, Iosif Stalin. Although much of the debate remained abstract, the experience of the revolution and the task of putting back together the parts of the Russian Empire that had dispersed lent these arguments a concrete urgency. At the discussion of the new Party programme in March 1919, Pyatakov argued that ‘the slogan “the right of nations to self-determination” . . . has shown itself in practice, when it comes to the question of the socialist revolution, to be a slogan which is the rallying point for all counter-revolutionary forces’.