Consolidating Soviet Power: the USSR, the NEP, and the Revolution's Legacy

The Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia (November 1917) formally recognized the nationalities' right to self-determination, including secession, though Bolshevik practice actively sought to keep most of the former empire under centralized control. Finland secured recognized independence in December 1917, and Poland and the Baltic states consolidated their own after the civil war, while Ukraine and the Caucasus republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, briefly independent between 1918 and 1921, were forcibly reincorporated, and Central Asia was subdued only after prolonged resistance, including the Basmachi movement, through the 1920s. Lenin's preferred model of a federation of formally equal republics, rather than Stalin's proposed "autonomization," prevailed in December 1922 with the formal establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), uniting Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Transcaucasian Federation, though the 1922 "Georgian affair," in which Stalin's associates used coercive methods against Georgian communists, drew Lenin's sharp criticism.