National divisions in government bodies of Tersk district (1920–1930)

The article is devoted to the activities of national divisions in the power structures of the Tersk province, which was transformed into a district that was part of the North-Caucasus Region in 1924. The administrative center of the Tersk province (district) was the city of Pyatigorsk. The article examines the system of power in this region of the North Caucasus and the place occupied in it by national units that resolved issues on the problems of national minorities: national party sections, councils of national minorities under the departments of public education, commissioners for national minorities, and others.
During the years of the new economic policy, the Soviet government was forced to use, without officially recognizing, the idea of cultural and national autonomy, which the ideologists of Bolshevism considered incompatible with the idea of «proletarian internationalism». The most important element of this extraterritorial autonomy was the system of representation of national minorities in government bodies. National structures were called upon to take into account the cultural and everyday characteristics of representatives of dispersed ethnic groups living in the region, to assist the authorities in carrying out measures to involve them in Soviet, cultural and economic construction.
The most active on the Terek were district and province Armenian sections. They worked among the 25,000 Armenian population of the district, which was second only to Russians and Ukrainians in number. The reasons for the creation, forms and methods of work of national sections, the reasons for their liquidation are analyzed. At that time, the Armenian sects were assigned the tasks to neutralize religious organizations and national parties that operated in the pre-Soviet period, to reorient the Armenian population from «bourgeois organizations» towards the Bolsheviks and the Soviet government. It is analyzed how the abolition of the Tersk District and the liquidation of national sections coincided in an amazing way, not only in the Terek and the North Caucasus, but also throughout the country.

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