Ideology meets practice in the struggle for the Transcaucasus: Stepan Shaumyan and the evolution of Bolshevik nationality policy

ABSTRACT The Tiflis-born Stepan Shaumyan (1878–1918) was one of the most active revolutionaries in the Transcaucasus and a prolific theorist about the “national question” who corresponded regularly with Lenin and other leading Bolsheviks. In a crucial moment in the spring of 1918, as the Russian Empire was disintegrating and the Russian Civil War was breaking out, Shaumyan, appointed by Lenin as Commissar Extraordinary for the Caucasus, attempted to create a compelling internationalist and “Soviet” appeal to challenging the emerging nationalist paradigm in the Transcaucasus. Shaumyan’s efforts to consolidate Bolshevik rule in the “Baku Commune” in 1918 contributed to a bloody ethnic massacre, and his attempts to spread Soviet Power in the region failed, resulting in his execution together with the other “26 Baku Commissars” in September of that year. Making extensive use of Shaumyan’s writings, including his early work held in manuscript form in the Georgian Party Archives in Tbilisi, this article examines Shaumyan’s conceptions of the “nationality question” and their implementation in the Transcaucasus under his leadership in 1918, and the lessons that the Bolsheviks may have drawn from failure of his program for the later formulation of Soviet nationality policy.