The national question had been relevant for the Russian Empire long before the Civil War, but it became the focus of public policy only after the February Revolution of 1917. The rapid growth in the number of publications for national groups and the emergence of numerous organizations based on national and religious identity led to a dramatic rise in the sense of national identity of most peoples living on the country’s territory. The spring and summer of 1917 saw an active process of self-organization of ethnic groups at the All-Russian and regional levels. During this period, the requirements for granting national and cultural or territorial autonomy within the federative Russian state prevailed. In the context of the gradual weakening of the central power, the Provisional Government began to create ethnically more homogeneous governorates in the national regions, and national military units in the army.

During the Civil War in Russia, national movements were widely deployed not only on the outskirts of the former empire but also deep in its center. The Bolsheviks’ elimination of the universally recognized central power and the principle of free self-determination proclaimed by them in the “Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia” (November 2, 1917) were perceived as complete freedom for nation-building “up to secession and the creation of an independent state”. Finland, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, the peoples of the Baltic States and the Caucasus announced the formation of their national states; the movement for broad autonomy of small peoples expanded in the Volga region, Central Asia, and Siberia, as well as the Cossack regions. The peoples of the former empire defended their right to independence with the insistence that would turn into fierce armed clashes. The revolutionary class-political confrontation continued within the new state formations, and the need to define borders led to numerous inter-ethnic conflicts.

Soviet Russia and the Russian state rulers had to take into account the interests of this independent party. As a result of the Civil War, the territorial and administrative structure of the former Russian Empire had changed dramatically. It had a number of new independent national states formed in its territory, and as part of some state entities, mainly in the Russian SFSR, there were national autonomous republics and districts.

National movements