Pete Glatter, "Stalinism & centralisation".
Paper presented at the New Socialist Approaches to History seminar, Institute of Historical Research, December 6th 2003
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The decade which followed the revolutions of 1917 witnessed the first serious attempt to decentralise power in Russian history. Stalinism scotched this initiative, both in terms of economic regionalisation and in terms of korenizatsiya(“indigenisation”). In their place, giant economic and security ministries sprang up and bestrode the land, forcing through industrialisation and the “collectivisation” of the peasantry. Regions were increased in number and reduced in size to facilitate control by the Moscow leadership which boosted what we would now call institutional racism to the point of apartheid. This paper is based on research which focused on western Siberia, hence the tendency in what follows to refer to the Russia, rather than to the Soviet Union as a whole, and to the Northern Minorities rather than to other non-Russian nationalities.