This article explores characteristics of Soviet colonialism in Finnish-speaking Ingria, located around the city of St Petersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad from 1918, when the Red Finns immigrated to the region from Finland, until the turn of the Soviet nationality policy of korenizatsiia in 1932. By utilizing primary sources produced by the Finnish immigrant communists, whose role has not been studied in the Ingrian context, this article discusses the divisions between Ingrians and non-Ingrians in terms of institutions, political positions, and public discourse. This article also argues that the Bolsheviks colonized Ingria through their nationality policy by using the Finnish communists as mediators between Soviet power and the Finnish-speaking peasantry. The Finnish communists settled in Petrograd/Leningrad and Ingria and became political leaders, creating literary content with colonial imagery and became involved in a wider colonial project to assimilate minority nationalities into the Soviet empire.

This article argues that between 1914 and 1924 the Bolsheviks’ conception and propagation of self-determination underwent a significant transition from already-contested beginnings. Initially, despite resistance from both within and beyond the party, Vladimir Lenin’s advocacy of national self-determination – including the right to secession – won out. However, though this was to some extent realized in practice after their seizure of power (after significant armed conflict about such matters), the upper echelons of the party, and Joseph Stalin in particular, sought to later decouple self-determination from the formation of the USSR. Partly the legacy of the turbulence of Russia’s Civil War and related documents of international law such as the Treaty of Tartu, by mid-1921 the right to self-determination was confusingly replaced by the right to secession in Bolshevik discourse, and for the colonized peoples of the world in particular – on paper, at least. This replacement was reaffirmed in 1922 with the founding of the USSR and again in its constitution of 1924. The article concludes by stating the consequences of this for intellectual and/or conceptual historians, as well as for legal scholars intrigued by the sudden absence of self-determination in Soviet legal texts from an initial position of such prominence.

The advocates of opposing versions of Russian conservatism during the First World War, Progressive Nationalism and the Far Right, saw the tsar’s figure as a symbolic expression of state power, and not its real carrier. Instead, state power was seen as being in the hands of the government, which could be either supported or opposed, depending upon its policies. The conservatives’ participation in public politics influenced their political creed. They embraced the idea of a limitation of the monarch’s influence in making political decisions, transferring the major role in this process to public officials, which were considered autonomous political figures in spite of their appointment by the tsar.

Bab'i bunty – women's riots - were a form of collective action in which women responded to crisis by making conscious and explicit use of their sex to achieve clear political goals. Owing to rapidly rising prices of food and manufactured goods from 1916 onwards the First World War saw widespread bab'i bunty across the Russian empire. In Semirech'e – the only region of Russian Central Asia with a substantial settler population - the class politics of these protests were complicated by questions of ethnicity and religion. This article explores a series of bab'i bunty which erupted in the towns of Lepsinsk and Vernyi and their surrounding districts, in which Slavic soldiers' wives (soldatki) targeted Muslim-owned businesses, but also those owned by their fellow settlers. In between these outbreaks in the summer of 1916 Semirech'e would become the centre of a violent uprising by Kazakhs and Kyrgyz against the Tsarist regime.