solidated in 1956 at the 20th Party Congress. A great number of federal laws which involved a transfer of powers from the federal government to the republics emanated from that Congress. For example, a decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the All-Union Council of Ministers of May 30, 1956, ordered the transfer of enterprises in a number of branches of the economy from the authority of the Union to that of the republics.2 Heavy industries, however, were not included in the transfer. In another decision of the same day, also aimed at reducing superfluous centralization, the Central Committee of the CPSU and the All-Union Council of Ministers ordered the abolition of the Union Ministry of Justice and the transfer of its functions to the Ministries of Justice of the republics.* Thereupon the latter abolished their own Ministries of Justice and transferred these functions to their own Supreme Courts. This might be seen as a step backward, not only because of the hierarchical order of the federal Supreme Court and those of the republics, but also because, since 1957, the president of the Supreme Court of each republic has been a member of the plenum of the All-Union Supreme Court, and consequently may be called to account for his actions by the federal government. Note, too, that the USSR Supreme Court, according to Article 2 of its Statute of February 12, 1957, is in turn answerable to the Supreme Soviet and, during the time between sessions of that body, to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.

45

44

43

hree laws which tended further to strengthen the position of the republics were issued on February 11, 1957, by the Supreme Soviet: 1) The republics were empowered to issue their own laws concerning their judicial systems and judicial procedure, and their civil and criminal codes, although the determination of general principles in these fields was still reserved to the all-Union government. 2) The republics were given the right to authorize the formation of krais and oblasts in their territory. The Union was confined to confirming any new divisions. 3) The all-Union ministries

of the river fleet, automobile transport and highways were abolished, and the administration of the enterprises and organizations subordinate to them was transferred to the republics.46

On the same day, the Soviet of Nationalities, one of the two chambers which together form the Supreme Soviet, ordered the establishment of an economic parliamentary commission." The task of this commission, which was to consist of 30 members (i.e., two members from each republic), was to work out a uniform set of principles, acceptable to all republics, regarding their economic and cultural structure. These principles would be reflected in all-Union legislation.18

On May 10, 1957, a law was enacted that transferred important powers to the republics in the industrial and building sectors. As a result of this law, the administration of industry and building, "with a few exceptions," came under the direct authority of the republics." In the field of industry, for example, administration was to be executed by the national economic councils, the "sovnarkhozes," which were directly responsible to the governments of the republics. Originally, each republic was divided into economic regions (raions), and the industry in each raion fell under the jurisdiction of a sovnarkhoz. All-republic sovnarkhozes, supervising the sovnarkhozes of the raions, were formed in the RSFSR, the Ukraine and Kazakhstan in January

at the present stage of the revolution is a profoundly counterrevolutionary one.

-J. V. Stalin, Pravda, Oct. 20, 1920.
From Sochineniia, Vol. IV, pp. 353-354.

and July 1960, mainly as correctives to "localism" on the part of the raion units.50 But the process of undoing Stalin's extreme centralization ended, and some recentralization was begun in November 1962 when the sovnarkhozes were reduced in number from 10 to 40 odd, and in March 1963, when a Supreme Sovnarkhoz of the USSR (Vesenkha) to coordinate and direct the activities of the republic-level sovnarkhozes was formed.51 After the fall of Khrushchev, his successors gave even further impetus to recentralization by dismantling all of the sovnarkhozes and the Vesenkha following the September 1965 party plenum. The union republics thus lost the responsibility for economic activities that they had held for eight years.

Myths and Realities

The future formal status of the republics will not be known until the draft of the new Union Constitution is published. (The commission charged with its preparation was appointed by the Supreme Soviet on April 25, 1962.) 52 However, there is no reason to believe that its essential character will be altered. Most important, the striking contrast between formal rights on the one hand, and actual rights on the other, will undoubtedly

continue.

This contrast, which has characterized the status of the republics almost from their very inception, can be easily illustrated. In spite of the two laws of February 1, 1944, mentioned earlier, the republics do not possess their own armed forces, nor do they maintain any diplomatic relations with foreign countries. The visitor to the Soviet Union will find that in many cases the foreign ministry of a union republic is housed in dingy offices, and that its representatives are hardly ever there.

The right of each union republic to secede from the Union is another case in point. The right was granted in the 1924 Constitution to mollify fears. on the part of the constituent republics that their new status would be extremely restrictive. The right was sustained by the 1936 Constitution, and hence is theoretically still in effect today, but Lepeshkin, for one, admits that in practice seces

sion would be "inexpedient" for a republic. He points out that the republics, during the years of building socialism, have become powerful industrial states, highly dependent on the states around them. He goes on to quote from the 1961 Party Program to the effect that each republic can now prosper only in the "great family of brotherly socialist nations of the USSR." 53 To this statement might be added Khrushchev's warning, at the close of the 22nd Party Congress, that "even the slightest vestige of nationalism should be eradicated with uncompromising Bolshevik determination.'

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The efforts of Soviet writers to present the USSR as a union of truly sovereign republics cannot convince any impartial observer that the republics are more than provinces possessing only a limited measure of self-government. In comparison with the Soviet Union, for instance, the cantons in Switzerland or the states of the US are virtually independent countries.

At the same time, the position of the republics in the administrative structure of the USSR should not be underestimated. The attempts at decentralization since 1954 were aimed at expanding the role of the republics as the major administrative subdivisions of the USSR. These were not benevolent gestures on the part of the Soviet government towards the republics, but rather measures of expediency. But in the re-evaluation of these measures that followed the advent of the post-Khrushchev leadership, the republics lost some of their responsibility and status again in the name of economic and political expediency.

To sum up, then, the rights and prerogatives acquired by the republics since 1954 are far less meaningful than Soviet authors would want us to think. Any legislative, planning or budgetary initiative is, after all, circumscribed by the limits set forth in the All-Union Constitution. Even more importantly, it must be borne in mind that the Soviet Union is ruled, in the final analysis, by the Communist Party. The primary alliegance of all government officials, central and republican alike, is to the party-to its ideology, to its overall program and to its specific directives and instructions. And nowhere in the Party Program is there any indication that the union republics are to have any more power than they now enjoy.

By Lowell R. Tillett

n May 16, 1934, a resolution of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee "On the Teaching of Civic History in the Schools of the USSR" opened a far-reaching campaign to harness the Soviet historical profession and put it to the service of the party's goals. Under this and subsequent directives, Soviet historians were called upon to play a vital role in the construction of the new Soviet society, and one of their most difficult assignments has been the support of Soviet nationality policy. They have been among the chief architects of the new "Soviet patriotism," which purportedly cuts across nationality lines to create a love of the multinational Soviet motherland. They have rehabilitated the Russian past, so maligned by the first generation of Soviet historians, in order to rekindle the pride of the Soviet citizen in his country. They have artificially reconstructed the history of all the peoples now contained in the Soviet family from ancient times, so as to give the impression that nationalities as diverse as the Estonians and Georgians, the Moldavians and Yakuts, were

Mr. Tillett is a member of the History Department at Wake Forest College (Winston-Salem, N.C.) His article is based on a full-length study tentatively entitled The Great Friendship: Soviet Historians on the Non-Russian Nationalities, to be published in 1968.

somehow involved in a common historic march which reached its destination in the present Soviet state. They have inculcated the doctrine of Great Russian leadership by demonstrating the superiority of Russian culture and pointing out the many advantages which the non-Russian peoples have derived through their association with the Russians. But their most challenging task-and the one they have been most reluctant to undertake-has been the rewriting of the history of the non-Russian peoples of the USSR in such a way as to picture

1 The 1934 Central Committee resolution was published in Izvestia, May 16, 1934, and has been translated in Anatole G. Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography (2nd ed.), Princeton, N. J., Van Nostrand, 1958, pp. 194-95. Early in 1936 the Central Committee passed another resolution setting up a commission of twelve members, headed by Zhdanov, to examine and pass on history textbooks. Pravda's issue of January 27, 1936, which was devoted largely to the teaching of history, contains this resolution and the observations of party leaders. The most detailed directive to historians before World War II was a decision of the Zhdanov commission in August 1937 regarding the selection of a textbook for the schools. The text of this decision, containing twelve specific suggestions for historians, is in Direktivy VKP(b) i postanovleniia sovetskovo pravitelstva o narodnom obrazovanii. Sbornik dokumentov za 1919-1947 gg. (Directives of the VKP (b) and resolutions of the Soviet government on public education. Collection of documents, 1919-47), Moscow-Leningrad, 1947, pp. 188-90. For general discussions of Soviet historiography, see, in addition to Mazour's book, C. E. Black (Ed.), Rewriting Russian History, New York, Praeger, 1956; and Konstantin F. Shteppa, Russian Historians and the Soviet State, New Brunswick, N. J., Rutgers University Press, 1962.

their relations with the Russians and with one another as uniformly friendly and devoid of frictions in every epoch.

Druzhba Narodov

The concept of the friendship of peoples (druzhba narodov) is a fetish of Soviet nationality policy that is constantly reaffirmed not only by agitprop orators, but by scholars as well. The non-Soviet reader is likely to be more familiar with the term in its international application, but it also has an important domestic usage, referring to the mutual trust and good will which allegedly exist among all the Soviet peoples. The Bolsheviks have always maintained that hostility between peoples is based on class hatred rather than on feelings of nationalism. In their prerevolutionary program on nationalities, they promised to create a friendship of peoples in the Russian state through the elimination of class differences, and since about 1930 they have loudly proclaimed that Leninist nationality policy had attained this objective, producing a completely new historical phenomenon-a multinational state free of hostility among its peoples.

Up to World War II, this accomplishment was represented as strictly a Bolshevik victory: the Revolution was the great dividing line between the dark night of national hatreds and the bright new day of friendship. The historian's task in this period was comparatively simple he merely affirmed the party line on the triumph of Soviet nationality policy. But after the war he was given new directives which were very difficult to follow. Some party propagandists, who had raised such themes as the heroic alliance and common struggle of the Soviet peoples to a new pitch during the war, were not content to confine the friendship of peoples to the recent past and present. They asked the historians to prove that the concept had a historic dimension to show that friendly relations among the Soviet peoples not only antedated the Revolution but had indeed existed from the moment of their first contacts. The engineers of the new "Soviet man" wanted to get at the roots of national hatreds through a kind of Pavlovian conditioning: the Soviet schoolboy would be taught to believe not merely that hostilities no longer existed in Soviet society, but that they had never existed.

The execution of this task involved nothing less than turning the old history inside out. Early Soviet historians-most notably, their leader, M. N. Pokrovski-had considered Russia culturally

inferior to the West and had treated Tsarist conquests and the resulting colonial empire as prime examples of imperialist oppression by the capitalist class enemy. Tsarist brutalities and exploitation had been discussed in detail and contrasted with the "progressive" Soviet reformation of nationalities policy. To square these well-known interpretations with a prerevolutionary friendship of peoples obviously presented monumental difficulties and was not easily accomplished. There were many scholarly casualties along the way.

The Kazakhs and the New History

Opposition to the new history with its idyllic picture of a friendly family of peoples, even before the Revolution, has come notably from the Kazakhs, who have a long record of resistance to the Russians. A Turco-Mongol people with a fierce military tradition, the Kazakhs were troublesome subjects of the Tsars almost from the start of the Russian absorption of their lands early in the eighteenth century. Sparsely settled in a vast open territory (the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic is second in size only to the Russian republic), they fell comparatively easy prey to initial Russian conquest, but there were dozens of subsequent native resistance movements, and the Kazakhs played an important part in the Central Asian Revolt of 1916. A strong nationalist movement continued to exist after the Revolution, particularly the Alash Orda, which opposed the Bolsheviks well into the 1920's. The Kazakh Communist Party itself has frequently been charged with "bourgeois nationalist” tendencies— that is, with placing the Kazakh over the Russian or Soviet heritage. Because of its great resources and its unruliness, Kazakhstan was heavily colonized both before and since the Revolution: the 1959 census showed 43 percent of its 9,300,000 population to be Russian, and only 29 percent Kazakh.

All this has rendered the production of an officially acceptable history of the Kazakhs a task of unparalleled difficulty. In fact, the first historical survey of the Kazakh SSR which proved satisfactory to party reviewers was published only in 1957, more than twenty years after the party's call for "scientific, Marxist-Leninist" histories of the union republics. There had been five previous attempts at compiling a Kazakh history that satisfied the party's specifications. These attempts involved a small army of historians, including some of the most prominent Russian as well Kazakh scholars, but virtually all of them who committed anything

to print on the Kazakhs before the middle 1950's were later reprimanded for error and their views. denounced as not only obsolete but ideologically harmful. Many of them disappeared from print until they had made their peace with the party; others were banished from the profession. At least one lost his life-S. D. Asfendiarov, Director of the Kazakh Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, whose History of Kazakhstan, published in 1935, was the first of these ill-fated efforts. In 1936, his work was violently attacked in a party journal,3 and he himself vanished in the Great Purge a few months later.

erhaps the greatest factor that has complicated the task of historians, not only of the Kazakhs but of other non-Russian nationalities within the USSR, has been the changing demands of the party in the realm of historiography. Over a twenty-year period beginning in 1934, the party itself was evolving its views of the past, and these views changed not only in accordance with the evolution of nationality policies, but also in conformity with more immediate shifts in Soviet domestic and foreign policy. One of the Soviet historian's peculiar nightmares is the realization that he must attune his interpretations to official policies that are constantly changing, which means that to write a lasting history he must be a virtual seer.

As a typical example of this sort of dilemma facing historians of the Kazakhs, one may cite the changing official view of the role of the British in Central Asia in the 19th century. When Asfendiarov's pioneer history of Kazakhstan was published in 1935, the approved line was that Britain and Tsarist Russia had been engaged in a typical great-power struggle for colonies in Central Asia, and that their moves were equally reprehensible. By the time the second history appeared early in 1941, however, both sides of the equation had changed. On the one hand, treatment of the Russian conquests had been softened somewhat by the party in an effort to bind the Soviet peoples together in the face of the conflict in Europe;

2 S. D. Asfendiarov, Istoriia Kazakhstana s drevneishikh vremen (History of Kazakhstan from Earliest Times), AlmaAta, 1935.

3 T. Ryskulov, "Protiv izvrashcheniia istorii kazakhskovo naroda i kharaktera oktiabria v Kazkhstane" (Against Distortions in the History of the Kazakh People and the Character of October in Kazakhstan), Revoliutsiia i nationalnosti (Revolution and Nationality), No. 6, 1936, pp. 62-67.

on the other, the Nazi-Soviet Pact had impelled Moscow to blame the British as fomenters of the current "imperialist war." r." In line with this, the historians were required to place more one-sided stress on the role of "British imperialism" in the Central Asian past and to represent the Russian military campaigns there as a countermove. Then, within just a few months, this version, too, became embarrassing. Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and the British became Russia's allies. As a result, the third history of the Kazakhs published in 1943 made no mention of the past British threat in Central Asia. However, the British have since reappeared as villains in all the later histories written against the backdrop of the Cold War. Today 19thcentury "British imperialism" is depicted as having been the greatest menace to the peoples of Central Asia, who in most instances are said to have turned to the Russians for deliverance.

Trouble Spots of Kazakh History

In their efforts to reconcile historical facts with party directives, Soviet historians dealing with the Kazakhs have been faced with four main problem areas. These center around (1) how the Kazakhs came under Russian rule; (2) how to evaluate the numerous Kazakh uprisings and resistance movements and the historic role of their leaders; (3) the comparative status of the Kazakh economy and culture before and since annexation; and (4) relations between the Kazakh and Russian peoples during the colonial period. Each of these problems was the subject of repeated discussion and controversy, and satisfactory answers were not reached until 1957.

The process by which the Kazakh nation came under Russian imperial rule was admittedly complicated. Beginning in the 1730's, Khan Abulkhair sought Russian military help against encroachments by hostile neighbors, and the Kazakh area became a Russian protectorate in the course of that

century. Its absorption into the Tsarist empire was which make it susceptible to different interpretaa long process characterized by blurred episodes tions. It is not quite clear what Abulkhair surrendered of his powers and of Kazakh independence in exchange for Russian aid, and the extension of Russian political control was accomplished by small, gradual steps rather than by the pitched battles of other areas. The early Soviet view, which prevailed in Asfendiarov's history, was that the Russian expansion into Kazakhstan constituted simple