On 2010-04-29, at 12:00 PM, c b wrote:
> Chris Doss
> In the Russian Revo (more precisely, in the Russian Empire from circa
> 1917 to circa 1920) you had Bolsheviks, EsErs, anarchists, Ukrainian
> nationalists, Polish nationalists, an internally fractured White
> movement (some devoted to reinstating absolutism, some partisans of
> one or another national independence movement), various other
> independence movements (Georgian, Cossack, "Mountaineer," Polish,
> Finnish), religious movements in greater or lesser overlap with the
> one or more of the above, etc. The Chechens started out shooting
> Whites and within 5 years' time were shooting Bolsheviks. Which side
> were they on?
>
> ^^^^^^^
> CB: Obviously, the Chechens switched sides.
>
> War provides the most definite situation of only two sides; or in a
> war there are only two sides.
=====================
Also, my reference was to class conflict, in which a left and a right and the social forces which each side represents is discernible, especially when the conflict is acute, as in a civil war. Chris conflated my reference to civil conflict with national conflict, in which these distinctions are less clear. In fact, Marxists have historically sided with "oppressed" nationalities against "oppressor" nations and empires, even when the leadership of the oppressed nation could be characterized as being ideologically to the right of the leadership of the dominant power - a contemporary case in point being the current conflict between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the US.
BTW, it would be useful if Chris could provide more info about the Chechens "shooting Bolsheviks" in 1924. It's not obvious to me that they switched sides. My understanding is that the mass of Chechens fought against the Whites on the side of the Bolsheviks and then formed part of a Soviet Mountain Republic in the Northern Caucusus from 1918 until it was disbanded in 1924, and that they then were then allowed to form their own autonomous republic in the 30s. I haven't seen any evidence of a mass uprising by the Chechens against the Soviets in 1924, nor when Stalin ordered their deportation during WW II. According to the wiki entry on Chechen history, whose reliability I can't judge, far more Chechens fought on the side of the Red Army than went over to the Nazis in WW II. The Chechen committment to the USSR prior to its dissolution seems to have stemmed in part, perhaps large part, from their historic enmity towards the Cossacks, many of whom fought on the side of the Whites during the civil war.
It should be added that nationalist resistance to Soviet rule was not as evident and popular as Chris suggests above. The Georgians, Cossacks, Poles, Ukranians, Finns, etc.) were themselves internally class-divided, with corresponding political divisions between left and right, with the left in these societies generally supportive of the USSR and hostile to the nationalist movements tied to the old order.