HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

PIATAKOV: A MIRROR OF SOVIET HISTORY 139Stalin's position by a composite front under Lenin, of which the Ukrainiansled by Skrypnyk were a strong component. With the birth of the USSR, thisfront imposed a solution that, at least from the formal standpoint (the creationof a federal structure founded on national republics), had enormous andlong-term importance. In the short term it represented the second of the fundamentalcompromises that went into creating the essence of the NEP:aware of its own weakness, the new state center that had emerged from theCivil War now made a pact not only with the countryside but also with the"strong" national leaderships. 27 And, just as in the case of the pact with thepeasants (or of that with the spetsy), the pact with the nationalities showed acertain vitality, also of content, in the years immediately following.Paradoxically, this vitality took the form of an alliance between some ofthe winners and the defeated Stalin—an alliance that surfaced already in1923, at the Twelfth Congress. As is well known, in the first months of thatyear, Trotsky had rejected Lenin's request to lead, in his place, "a fight tothe death" against "great Russian chauvinism" for the supremacy in theparty. As Danilov has told us, it was, above all else, considerations of his"Jewish origins" that stopped Trotsky (that is, factors, again, connectedwith "nationality"). In addition, he may have been concerned over thediscontent that a battle of this sort would have caused among his closestcollaborators—primarily Piatakov, who was then, according to Souvarine,the most authoritative Trotskyite after Trotsky himself, and who, at the endof 1922, was close to the position held by the gensek on the nationalityquestion. 28Under the impetus of defeat, and because of the need to find allies in thestruggle against Trotsky and in the struggle planned against Kamenev andZinov'ev, the gensek radically changed direction during the same months,giving proof of his great ability at political maneuvers, fruit of his "freedom"from principles.Taking good care to expose the menace of Trotskyite hypercentralism,he offered the leaders of the strong nationalities not only decisive supportfor their policies of korenizatsiia, but also the prospect of industrializationpolicies in tune with their needs (we shall return to this later).27In smaller and weaker republics (Georgia is the obvious example), the central powers fromthe beginning showed a quite different face.28From this point of view, 1922-1923 marked the beginning of yet another rift in the relationshipbetween Trotsky and Piatakov. This rift grew in the following years, when Piatakovfound himself more and more in agreement with Stalin, and especially with his "private"thoughts, on the national question. Trotsky followed a different path, which in the 1930s ledhim to recognize Ukraine's right to independence.