The Wilder House Series in Politics, History and Culture

Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939

Terry Martin

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781501713316
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

The Soviet Union was the first of Europe's multiethnic states to confront the rising tide of nationalism by systematically promoting the national consciousness of its ethnic minorities and establishing for them many of the institutional forms characteristic of the modern nation-state. In the 1920s, the Bolshevik government, seeking to defuse nationalist sentiment, created tens of thousands of national territories. It trained new national leaders, established national languages, and financed the production of national-language cultural products.This was a massive and fascinating historical experiment in governing a multiethnic state. Terry Martin provides a comprehensive survey and interpretation, based on newly available archival sources, of the Soviet management of the nationalities question. He traces the conflicts and tensions created by the geographic definition of national territories, the establishment of dozens of official national languages, and the world's first mass "affirmative action" programs. Martin examines the contradictions inherent in the Soviet nationality policy, which sought simultaneously to foster the growth of national consciousness among its minority populations while dictating the exact content of their cultures; to sponsor national liberation movements in neighboring countries, while eliminating all foreign influence on the Soviet Union's many diaspora nationalities. Martin explores the political logic of Stalin's policies as he responded to a perceived threat to Soviet unity in the 1930s by re-establishing the Russians as the state's leading nationality and deporting numerous "enemy nations."

1

The Soviet Affirmative Action Empire

The Soviet Union was the world’s first Affirmative Action Empire. Russia’s new revolutionary government was the first of the old European multiethnic states to confront the rising tide of nationalism and respond by systematically promoting the national consciousness of its ethnic minorities and establishing for them many of the characteristic institutional forms of the nation-state.1 The Bolshevik strategy was to assume leadership over what now appeared to be the inevitable process of decolonization and carry it out in a manner that would preserve the territorial integrity of the old Russian empire. To that end, the Soviet state created not just a dozen large national republics, but tens of thousands of national territories scattered across the entire expanse of the Soviet Union. New national elites were trained and promoted to leadership positions in the government, schools, and industrial enterprises of these newly formed territories. In each territory, the national language was declared the official language of government. In dozens of cases, this necessitated the creation of a written language where one did not yet exist. The Soviet state financed the mass production of books, journals, newspapers, movies, operas, museums, folk music ensembles, and other cultural output in the non-Russian languages. Nothing comparable to it had been attempted before, and, with the possible exception of India, no multiethnic state has subsequently matched the scope of Soviet Affirmative Action. This book is devoted to an analysis of this novel and fascinating experiment in governing a multiethnic state.

The Logic of the Affirmative Action Empire

Why did the Bolsheviks adopt this radical strategy? When they seized power in October 1917, they did not yet possess a coherent nationalities policy. They had a powerful slogan, which they shared with Woodrow Wilson, of the right of nations to self-determination. This slogan, however, was designed to recruit ethnic support for the revolution, not to provide a model for the governing of a multiethnic state. Although Lenin always took the nationalities question seriously, the unexpected strength of nationalism as a mobilizing force during the revolution and civil war nevertheless greatly surprised and disturbed him. The Bolsheviks expected nationalism in Poland and Finland, but the numerous nationalist movements that sprang up across most of the former Russian empire were not expected. The strong nationalist movement in Ukraine was particularly unnerving. This direct confrontation with nationalism compelled the Bolsheviks to formulate a new nationalities policy.2

This did not occur without contestation. On the one side were the nation-builders, led by Lenin and Stalin; on the other side were the internationalists, led by Georgii Piatakov and Nikolai Bukharin. At the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919, the two sides clashed over the question of the right of national self-determination.3 Piatakov argued that “during a sufficiently large and torturous experience in the borderlands, the slogan of the right of nations to self-determination has shown itself in practice, during the social revolution, as a slogan uniting all counterrevolutionary forces.”4 Once the proletariat had seized power, Piatakov maintained, national self-determination became irrelevant: “It’s just a diplomatic game, or worse than a game if we take it seriously.”5 Piatakov was supported by Bukharin, who argued that the right to self-determination could only be invested in the proletariat, not in “some fictitious so-called ‘national will.’ ”6

Lenin had clashed with Piatakov and others on this issue before and during the revolution.7 He now answered this renewed challenge with characteristic vigor. Nationalism had united all counterrevolutionary forces, Lenin readily agreed, but it had also attracted the Bolsheviks’ class allies. The Finnish bourgeoisie had successfully “deceived the working masses that the Muscovites [Moskvaly], chauvinists, Great Russians want[ed] to oppress the Finns.” Arguments such as Piatakov’s served to increase that fear and therefore strengthen national resistance. It was only “thanks to our acknowledgement of [the Finns’] right to self-determination, that the process of [class] differentiation was eased there.” Nationalism was fueled by historic distrust: “The working masses of other nations are full of distrust [nedoverie] towards Great Russia, as a kulak and oppressor nation.” Only the right to self-determination could overcome that distrust, Lenin argued, but Piatakov’s policy would instead make the party the heir to Tsarist chauvinism: “Scratch any Communist and you find a Great Russian chauvinist. . . . He sits in many of us and we must fight him.”8

The congress supported Lenin and retained a qualified right of national self-determination.9 Of course, the majority of the former Russian empire’s nationalities were forced to exercise that right within the confines of the Soviet Union. The period from 1919 to 1923, therefore, was devoted to working out what exactly non-Russian “national self-determination” could mean in the context of a unitary Soviet state. The final result was the Affirmative Action Empire: a strategy aimed at disarming nationalism by granting what were called the “forms” of nationhood. This policy was based on a diagnosis of nationalism worked out largely by Lenin and Stalin. Lenin had addressed the national question repeatedly from 1912 to 1916, when he formulated and defended the slogan of self-determination, and again from 1919 to 1922, after the alarming success of nationalist movements during the civil war.10 Stalin was the Bolsheviks’ acknowledged “master of the nationalities question”11: author of the standard prerevolutionary text Marxism and the Nationalities Question, Commissar of Nationalities from 1917 to 1924, and official spokesman on the national question at party congresses.12 Lenin and Stalin were in fundamental agreement on both the logical rationale and the essential aspects of this new policy, although they came into conflict in 1922 over important issues of implementation. Their diagnosis of the nationalities problem rested on the following three premises.

The Marxist Premise

First, the point on which Piatakov and Lenin agreed, nationalism was a uniquely dangerous mobilizing ideology because it had the potential to forge an aboveclass alliance in pursuit of national goals. Lenin called nationalism a “bourgeois trick”13 but recognized that, like the hedgehog’s, it was a good one. It worked because it presented legitimate social grievances in a national form. At the Twelfth Party Congress in 1923, Bukharin, by then a fervid defender of the party’s nationalities policy, noted that “when we tax [the non-Russian peasantry] their discontent takes on a national form, is given a national interpretation, which is then exploited by our opponents.”14 Ernest Gellner has parodied this argument as the “wrong-address theory” of nationalism: “Just as extreme Shi’ite Muslims hold that Archangel Gabriel made a mistake, delivering the Message to Mohammed when it was intended for Ali, so Marxists basically like to think that the spirit of history or human consciousness made a terrible boob. The wakening message was intended for classes, but by some terrible postal error was delivered to nations.”15

The Bolsheviks viewed nationalism, then, as a masking ideology. Masking metaphors recur again and again in their discourse about nationality. Stalin was particularly fond of them: “The national flag is sewn on only to deceive the masses, as a popular flag, a convenience for covering up [dlia prykrytiia] the counter-revolutionary plans of the national bourgeoisie.” “If bourgeois circles attempt to give a national tint [natsional'naia okraska] to [our] conflicts, then only because it is convenient to hide their battle for power behind a national costume.”16 This interpretation of nationalism as a masking ideology helps explain why the Bolsheviks remained highly suspicious of national selfexpression, even after they adopted a policy explicitly designed to encourage it. For example, in justifying a wave of national repression carried out in 1933, Stalin characteristically invoked a masking metaphor: “The remnants of capitalism in the people’s consciousness are much more dynamic in the sphere of nationality than in any other area. This is because they can mask themselves so well in a national costume.”17

This understanding of nationalism led Piatakov to support the only apparently logical response: attack nationalism as a counterrevolutionary ideology and nationality itself as a reactionary remnant of the capitalist era. Lenin and Stalin, however, drew the exact opposite conclusion. They reasoned as follows. By granting the forms of nationhood, the Soviet state could split the above-class national alliance for statehood. Class divisions, then, would naturally emerge, which would allow the Soviet government to recruit proletarian and peasant support for their socialist agenda. Lenin argued that Finnish independence had intensified, not reduced, class conflict.18 National self-determination would have the same consequences within the Soviet Union. Likewise, Stalin insisted it was “necessary to ‘take’ autonomy away from [the national bourgeoisie], having first cleansed it of its bourgeois filth and transformed it from bourgeois into Soviet autonomy.”19 A belief gradually emerged, then, that the above-class appeal of nationalism could be disarmed by granting the forms of nationhood. This was the Marxist premise.

The Modernization Premise

This conclusion was buttressed by a second premise: national consciousness was an unavoidable historic phase that all peoples must pass through on the way to internationalism. In their prerevolutionary writings, Lenin and Stalin argued that nationality emerged only with the onset of capitalism and was itself a consequence of capitalist production.20 It was not an essential or permanent attribute of mankind. Piatakov understandably interpreted this as meaning that nationality would be irrelevant under socialism and therefore should be granted no special status. Both Lenin and Stalin insisted, however, that nationality would persist for a long time even under socialism.21 In fact, national self-awareness would initially increase. Already in 1916, Lenin stated...

Table of contents

• List of Tables and Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Footnote Abbreviations
• A Note on Style
• 1. The Soviet Affirmative Action Empire
• Part One Implementing the Affirmative Action Empire
• Part Two The Political Crisis of the Affirmative Action Empire
• Part Three Revising the Affirmative Action Empire