Excerpt from Sverdlov by Robert Service
Under the Russian Empire there was officially one ethnicity: Russians. All other ethnicities were classified as aliens. As such the Russian Empire attempted to eliminate local cultures and make Russians out of them. The Bolsheviks reversed this policy, instead declaring a policy of korenizatsiya (literally “putting down roots”). Under korenizatsiya the Bolsheviks encouraged the use of a national language and culture in an republic, even going so far as to force Russian cadres in these republics to learn the local language and culture. As a Jew Sverdlov was especially sensitive to the concerns of “Greater-Russian Chauvinism.” In particular he was disgusted by anti-Semitism; often quoting a phrase variously attributed to August Bebel, Friedrich Engels, and Ferdinand Kronawetter: “anti-Semitism is the Socialism of fools.” Naturally this made Sverdlov one of korenizatsiya's greatest proponents. Under his leadership the Party's membership grew massively and the number of minorities in national positions grew exponentially.
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One of the most ambitious national projects of the 1930s was the latinisation of the various Soviet scripts. Many Bolsheviks felt that the Latin alphabet was “modern” while Cyrillic was, as Kirov wrote, “One of the many primitive legacies of Tsarism.” This sentiment was, at least subconsciously, based on the shame that many Bolsheviks felt about Russia. Lenin had even describe the country as “one of the most benighted, medieval, and shamefully backward of Asian countries.” Following the then popular theory that language equals thought the Bolsheviks thought that by writing in a more “modern” script then the Soviet people would become more modern. Already by 1930 the Chechen, Tartar, and Kazakh alphabets had been latinised and several more languages were being worked on. In 1932 Soviet linguists began work on the two most ambitious and far reaching linguistics projects: the latinisation of the Russian and Ukrainian alphabets. After the alphabets were finished in 1934 the task of getting the populace to use them began. Signs and public notices were published in both scripts, while newspapers began printing two editions. In schools across the republics young children were taught only the new script, older children were taught in both scripts, and special classes were created for literate adults to learn the new script. Starting in 1939 all government documents, which due to the nature of the Soviet state included paychecks, shipping orders, and ration cards, had to be written in the new script.
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While the vast majority of Russians learned the new alphabet and abandoned Cyrillic a few resisted the change. The Bolsheviks dragged a rural, agrarian nation kicking and screaming into the modern world. Along the way they tried to destroy private property, religion, and traditional family life. Many people, shocked and confused by all these changes, continued to use Cyrillic as a form of resistance. There was both a religious element and a political element. In a series of meetings in 1937 Sverdlov bullied Metropolitan Sergius into declaring that the Orthodox Church would no longer use Cyrillic. Already angered by the Church's declaration of loyalty and its many concessions to the Bolsheviks some believers kept their Cyrillic Bibles, icons, and crosses, even though ownership of such artifacts carried a sentence of 3 years in the Gulag. [1] On the political front, as the great dissident Mikhail Gorbachev [2] wrote: “Cyrillic is a part of Russian culture from before it was twisted and perverted by Bolshevism.”
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Culture was very important to Sverdlov. He believed that “Without art the masses are voiceless. Soviet art and culture must echo their sentiments and express their deepest desires.” In 1931 Sverdlov declared that “a new era of Soviet culture has begun.” To start off this new era Sverdlov convinced Maxim Gorky, then Russia's greatest living writer, to return from his Italian exile. It had not been easy but since Gorky was a family friend (he had even adopted Sverdlov's brother) Sverdlov was able to convince him. Part of this new era involved major government subsidies of the arts. Even during the height of the First Five Year Plan and militarization money was found to pay for the arts. The result was an explosion of new works, particularly in cinema. The most famous Soviet filmmaker of this period was Sergei Eisenstein, but there were many others. For instance Mikhail Romm came to prominence after his 1935 film The Jewish Cobbler's Union. The film focused on the life of a Jewish cobbler's family in Kiev during the Russian Civil War. The climatic scene, where the titular cobbler begs for his family's life during a White Army pogrom, has been referenced in dozens of films. Under Kirov's patronage Igor Savchenko prospered. His film The Exile of Ivan Denkanzy (1934), about one revolutionary's loneliness and alienation during his Siberian exile, earned a rare honor. Kirov told him that “it is the only movie I have ever seen bring Yasha [Sverdlov] to tears.”
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June 3rd, 1935 was Sverdlov's 50th birthday. To celebrate a massive parade was held in Red Square. Massive posters of Lenin and Sverdlov were hung on the eastern part of the Kremlin Wall and thousands of people turned out with pictures of Sverdlov. This was that start of Sverdlov's cult of personality. There were two emphases of this cult. The first was that Sverdlov was the epitome of Communist virtue. He was the imperious chairman: a man completely dedicated to revolution whose calm and genius had helped sustain the Soviet Union and would eventually help liberate the world. The second part was his ruthlessness towards the enemies of the Soviet people. A popular image of the period showed him as Saint George slaying the dragon of counterrevolution (this was a common religious image). Sverdlov was privately dismissive of the cult, calling it “completely non-Marxist and foolish,” but felt that it was a useful tool to cement Communist rule; commenting “We have taken their Little Father [the Tsar] and they need something to hold onto.” He was very careful about what honors he would accept; for example he allowed the city of Yekaterinburg (where his early revolutionary activities were based) to be renamed Sverdlovsk and allowed the creation of the Sverdlov Prize for “scientific and technological advances that further the cause of Socialism,” but refused to accept the title “Great Architect of Communism” calling it “something an egomaniac like Stalin would call himself.”
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The new era of culture came to an end in 1937. Following Hitler's Anchluss of Austria [3] the Politburo decided that culture should stress “patriotic, socialist, and pro-war themes” so that the Soviet people could be prepared for war with the West. To oversee this new policy Sverdlov replaced the State Committee for the Arts with the People's Commissariat for Culture, and made Andrei Zhdanov commissioner. Zhdanov had joined the Party in 1915 and became Party boss of Leningrad in 1934. Zhdanov was a dogmatic Communist who Bukharin later remarked “Had knowledge of several subjects, although most of it was from reading Marxist literature.” Sverdlov soon came to admire his competence and philosophical interests; the two of them became very close. Any work that failed to show the correct values was censored; for example Boris Pasternak's masterpiece Ivan's Wall (1938) wasn't published until 1948 due to its pacifist themes while Alexander Fadeyev's far inferior Eastern Thunder (1939), about a Napoleonic cavalryman, became a bestseller. Also banned were surreal or “otherwise inaccessible” works. The main result was that Soviet art went from daring and masterful works to (as Gorbachev wrote) “hollow works who's message, while screamed at the viewer, are devoid of thought or meaning.” Soviet art wouldn't recover from this campaign until the early 1950s.
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[1] This law was created as part of the anti-religious campaigns of the Soviet Union.
[2] ITTL Mikhail Gorbachev was arrested in 1953 after writing a letter to a friend in which he criticized Sverdlov's conduct before The Second Great War. The friend gave the letter too the authorities and Gorbachev was sentenced to 5 years in the Gulag. In 1961 he defected to America, where he wrote several book critical of the Soviet Union.
[3] Which occurs pretty much like IOTL.
Certainly the nationalities policy will be far different and the Volga Germans are going to cause problems in the future.