FEATURES OF ADMINISTRATIVE-TERRITORIAL DIVISION IN THE RSFSR IN THE 1920s (based on the materials of the Chuvash Autonomy)

Abstract

The article examines the features of the administrative-territorial division in the RSFSR in the 1920s, which influenced the evolvement of the national-territorial autonomy of the Chuvash people and its transformation into the Chuvash Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. This theme contains a regional value, and a the comparative historical approach enables us to explore both general patterns and features of the processes that took place. In this regard, the scientific novelty of the presented work is determined by the undertaken study of the Soviet state’s national policy peculiarities on the materials of the Chuvash autonomy, the relationship between the central authorities and the local management system; the study of numerous sources. Relying on historiography and sources, the author tries to analyze and generalize the historical experience: organization and reconstruction of the national association; solving the issue of establishing borders; confrontation of the Chuvash leaders in the issues concerning territory expansion, development of numerous projects. The article presents a historical picture of the central socio-economic and cultural policy, the difficulties of the recovery period, solving the problems of the national personnel formation, indigenization of the administrative apparatus, development of the native language and culture. The study shows that all the transformations of the Chuvash autonomy in the area under study took place in connection with changes in the form of power organization as well as with the change in the principles of regional policy and the direction of economic development of the country’s territories. In the modern period, opinions about incompetence of the Chuvash authorities have increasingly begun to appear in the research literature, issues about the fallacy and short-sightedness characteristic for the organization of national construction are being discussed, which became the subject of a detailed analysis by the author of this article, which substantiates interconnection of administrative-territorial division and economic regionalization in Russia.