“The Permiak question”: Bolshevik central authorities, Russian and non-Russian provincial elites negotiating over autonomy in the early 1920s

Abstract

This is an article on Bolshevik nationalities policy and ethnic engineering, asking who, in fact, decided which populations belonged together as ethnic groups (narodnost') and thus had the right of national self-determination, and how the level of autonomy was determined for each ethnic unit. Scholars have dealt with Russian and Soviet nationalities issues for decades already, but they have turned their attention mainly to the larger nationalities (at the level of SSR, and to a lesser degree the levels of ASSR and autonomous oblast). I argue that the lower levels of national territorial autonomy in the Soviet Union (national okrug, raion, volost', and selsovet) are worthy of greater academic attention, at least from the ethnological point of view. Having this kind of low-level territorial autonomy has often been a question of to be or not to be for the small ethnic groups concerned, and hence the subject is connected with the question of preservation of cultural and linguistic diversity in Russia.

Keywords:

• Komi-Permiaks
• Soviet Russia
• nationalities policy
• territorial autonomy
• nationalism

Acknowledgements

This article is based on research supported by Estonian Science Foundation (grants no. 7010 and 9271). The draft version was presented at the 15th ASN Annual Convention, 15-17 April 2010. I wish to thank the discussant Yuri M. Zhukov for his inspiring criticism. Many thanks also to Paul W. Werth for some valuable advice.

Notes

Several national okrugs did exist in the Mountain (Gorskii) ASSR (January 1921 to November 1924), although they turned out to be transitional and their legal status remained unclear.

“Zyrians” and “Permiaks” are old-fashioned ethnonyms of Russian origin used to label the Komi and Komi-Permiaks respectively. They had somewhat pejorative connotations and were removed from public use gradually in the 1920s, as part of the all-Russian process, and the peoples' self names entered the public sphere. The Cheremises became the Mari, the Votiaks became the Udmurt, etc.

Other early examples come from the North Caucasus (Severo-Kavkazskii krai, founded in October 1924).

See Pravila izdaniia istoricheskikh dokumentov v SSSR (Moscow: Glavnoe arkhivnoe upravlenie pri SM SSSR, 1990), especially p. 28: scientific publication of historical documents means that the quantity of sources concerning the topic is clarified and a representative and objective selection is published.

An updated version of this book (Lallukka, Komi-permyaki) is now available in Russian.

In his Russian text, Lytkin used the Russian term Zyriane to mean both the Zyrians and the Permiaks. The Permiaks were the “Zyrians of the Kama River” for him.

There were 91,982 Permiaks living in the Cherdyn and Solikamsk districts of Perm province, and 5364 of them in the Glazov district of Vyatka province, according to the census data of 1897 (Troinitskii, Vol. X: 2–3, Vol. XXXI: 2–3).

For more thorough information on the creation of the Komi AO, see Jääts, Building a State in a State.

On the legal differences between AO and ASSR see Smith 51. In short, ASSR meant more extensive autonomy than AO.

Perm province was incorporated into the Ural Oblast in late 1923. The Oblast's capital city Ekaterinburg was renamed Sverdlovsk in 1924.

F.G. Tarakanov was educated as an agronomist. He went to Moscow using an agricultural exhibition as a pretext; otherwise the Perm authorities would not have let him go. He traveled through Ust-Sysol'sk, the Zyrian capital. A colorful story of this trip and the speech he made can be found in Tarakanov 22–29.

A separate literary language was created for the Komi-Pemiaks in the 1920s (see Lallukka, Below the Republican Level).