FORMATION OF THE MOUNTAIN ASSR AND THE PROBLEMS OF THE NATIONAL SELF-DETERMINATION OF THE KABARDA AND BALKARIA (1920-1921)

Abstract

The article analyzes the problems of the national and state development of the mountain peoples in the conditions of the initial stage of Soviet Nazi construction in the North Caucasus in 1920-1921. This was a period of active search for effective forms of rooting of the Russian state in the region in the new political-ideological conditions of the postwar period. The Soviet government, in order to find support among the mountain peoples and bring them to their side, made a historic decision on the formation of autonomies in the North Caucasus, which resulted in the proclamation of a multinational Mountain ASSR. However, national autonomy in the form of precisely collective autonomy was not a consequence of socio-political processes in the region and national self-determination. The proclamation of the Mountain ASSR was influenced more by the inertia of the perception by the Soviet authorities of national-state al ternatives during the years of the revolution and the Civil War in 1917-1920. Having liberated the ideology and practice of the mountain statehood of this period from the most unrealistic elements, it proclaimed the Mountain ASSR. As it turned out, not all the peoples of the North Caucasus were ready to adopt a collective model of mountain autonomy. In particular, the ethno political processes in Kabarda assumed a different vector of state-political development. It was also important that the representatives of most of the peoples that were supposed to be included in the Mountain ASSR actually turned out to be on the sidelines of the process of its institutionalization. All this affected negatively the further prospects for the functioning of the mountain collective autonomy.