KIZIL RUSYA’DA MİLLİYETLER SİYASETİ - Türkistan Örneği –

: Russia has been frequently called as "Prison of Nations". Although the February Revolution of 1917 made people believe that release from this prison could be possible, many nations still struggle to live in difficult conditions. One of the most important issues for Soviet Russia was the problem of nations. More than half of the population in the Soviet Russia struggled for independence and national policy of the Soviet government was to Russianize these nations, who strived to protect their own national identity. After the October Revolution in 1917, Bolsheviks tried to reconcile with the non-Russian communities living in the former Tsarist Empire. For this purpose, Lenin and Stalin signed the Declaration of Rights of the Peoples of Russia in November 1917 which stated the equality of nations in Russia. With regard to this declaration, non-Russian national groups in different regions of Russia started political and national activities. Sovereign and independent states were formed in Turkistan between 1917 and 1920. However, these self-governing states and independent republics were annihilated by Bolshevik forces in a short span of time. Fearing the idea of pan-Turkism, Stalin decided to divide the Turks into tribes and clans and separated their language and alphabet in an attempt to prevent a union in the future.The first stage of this plan was to divide Turkistan into five ethnic Soviet states. Based on the principle of "divide and rule”, Bolsheviks divided Turkistan into tribal states according to their national delimitation policy in 1924. They forbade the use of terms such as "Turk" and "Turkistan" as features of a national identity. This study examines the Bolsheviks national policy, following the Russian Revolution of 1917, towards non-Russian nations during the interwar period.