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This chapter traces the evolution of Soviet nationality policies in the 1920s and 1930s and highlights early attempts to layer korenizatsiia across titular and nontitular communities in Azerbaijan. It explains what it meant to be a minority in the Soviet Union and about the process of minoritization there. It also describes an informal hierarchy that began forming among nationalities in those early decades and kept shifting in subsequent years. The chapter talks about nontitular and titular nationalities in the Soviet Union as inconsistent national cultural investments which meant that Moscow treated various titular populations differently and there was often little coherence to the nontitular category. It focuses on the example of Azerbaijan, which shows that national cultural resources varied widely across nontitular populations throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

In theory, the Soviet Union offered all nationalities under its borders, at least in principle, cultural and territorial autonomy, education in one’s native language, the right to self-determination and individual rights which promised equality under Soviet law regardless of religion, nationality, place of origin and language. In reality, they found the Koreans on their eastern borders to be worrisome and problematic. Illegal Korean migrants kept coming across Soviet borders pushing the population of approximately 81,000 in 1917 to nearly 200,000 by 1937. How would the Soviet state offer the Koreans the putative legal, cultural and territorial rights under Soviet socialism? Afanasii A. Kim was one of the first Soviet Korean leaders who had to negotiate between serving the state and his community. In the 1930s, the state, its policies and institutions became more repressive due to geo-political threats (Germany, Poland and Japan) on both the eastern and western Soviet borders. What became of Afanasii A. Kim?

There were five main components to the construction of each Soviet nationality during korenizatsiia (indigenization). These were: representation (through Soviet cadres), economic life, citizenship, land and territorial autonomy and receiving a Soviet education to inculcate “class consciousness.” The Soviet Koreans excelled in every measure and campaign in order to show and prove their loyalty to “Soviet power.” But they never received a large autonomous territory which was commensurate to their population. Thus, the Soviet claims of “real and legal equality” for all nationalities fell short of reality when it came to the Koreans.

From 1923 to 1930, we witnessed the first half of korenizatsiia, that is, Soviet indigenization for the national minorities. Already there were major attempts to dismantle this program. Vladimir Arsenev called for the total deportation of the Koreans in 1928. Comrade Geitsman called them “aliens” to Soviet socialism, even those Koreans who were Soviet citizens. However, this did not deter the Koreans. Khan Myon She, a local Soviet Korean leader called out local Communist Party leaders for “ethnic chauvinism.” He was soon replaced by Afanasii Kim. Young educated Korean activists in the organization INKORPORE battled for equal land and rights for Korean farmers and settlers. Several regiments of local Red Army including one regiment led by Pen Khva Kim fought for the Red Army during the brief Sino-Soviet War (1929).

The focus of this chapter is on the difficult state-society relations in the North Caucasus developing during the 1920s. Despite the Bolsheviks’ disarmament campaigns and the purges of Muslim leaders, the rural and non-Russian-populated areas remained largely detached from the modernizing processes that characterized developments in the few Russian- and Slavic-populated cities such as Groznyi and Vladikavkaz. During most of the 1920s, Soviet state institutions and party organizations were still practically non-existent in the countryside. One way in which the Bolsheviks sought to establish their rule over the rural areas was through their program of korenizatsiia (“indigenization”), the promotion of national languages and cultures and the creation of a Soviet-trained indigenous elite. Another was to draw young North Caucasians into the industries of the cities and merge individual ethnic territories into larger units. Through the fate of a contemporary, Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, some aspect of life in Chechnia during the 1920s are exemplified.