title: A Double-edged Sword: The Political Use of National Heterogeneity in the Soviet Union during the Interwar Period*
abstract: In the aftermath of two revolutions and after the civil war that shook the former Russian Empire from 1918 to 1921 and led to the Red victory, the process of reshaping the Soviet territories took the opposite direction from that of the newly independent states of Eastern Europe. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) foregrounded its federative status, and the ruling Bolsheviks deliberately rejected the model of homogeneous, assimilatory nation-states espoused by its neighbors to the wes