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Cultural Diversity and the Interwar Conjuncture: Soviet Nationality Policy in Its Comparative Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2017

Peter A. Blitstein
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Abstract

Soviet nationality policy was one of several political responses to cultural diversity in the interwar period. Peter A. Blitstein situates that policy in its comparative context, contrasting the Soviet Union to its eastern European neighbors and to British and French rule in Africa. Contrary to the nationalizing policies of the new states of eastern Europe, which sought national unity at the expense of ethnic minorities, Soviet nationality policy was initially based on practices of differentiation. Contrary to the colonial policies of Britain and France, which were based on ethnic and racial differentiation, Soviet policy sought to integrate all peoples into one state. In the mid-to-late 1930s, however, Soviet policy took a nationalizing turn similar to its neighbors in eastern Europe, without completely abandoning policies of ethnic differentiation. We should thus understand the Soviet approach as a unique hybrid of contradictory practices of nationalization and differentiation

Type
Forum: The Multiethnic Soviet Union in Comparative Perspective
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 65 , Issue 2 , Summer 2006 , pp. 273 - 293
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2006

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References

This is a revised version of a paper first presented at the National Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in Pittsburgh, in 2002 and later at the Colloquium of the Institut fur Osteuropaische Geschichte und Landeskunde, Universitat Tubingen in June 2004. I appreciate the responses of the participants there. I also thank Barry Blitstein, David Brandenberger, Adrienne Edgar, Natasha Gray, Amy Randall, Monica Rico, and Jonathan Zatlin. Comments of two anonymous reviewers for Slavic lieview helped significantly in clarifying the argument and, especially, the claims about African history.

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36. In Romania, young nationalist radicals “and their more moderate, more conservative elders shared … the idea of using the state for the Romanian nation, not for a society of equal citizens, and a commitment to creating an ethnic Romanian elite large enough to administer the expanded state and pure enough to do it in the Romanian way.” Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania, 304. In Poland, despite initial differences on the contours of nationhood, the socialist left and the national democratic right ultimately agreed on the nationalizing stance. After the 1926 coup, Józef Piłsudski's regime accepted similar discriminatory policies toward Jews. See Mendelsohn, Ezra, Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars (Bloomington, 1983), 39 Google Scholar.

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57. Of course, in the process of determining which communities could be “nations” and which “ethnic minorities,” the regime and its expert anthropologists left some possibilities out. Some small peoples never made it to the official list of groups; as Francine Hirsch argues, “from the start Soviet policies were oriented toward the amalgamation of ethnohistorical groups.” Hirsch, Empire of Nations, 9–10n21, and chap. 3 (emphasis in the original). No less important, in certain republics and regions the local Russian minority could be subject to nationalization as Ukrainians, though this was a very short-lived possibility, limited to the late 1920s. See Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 282–91.

58. As the prime minister of Romania, Ion Bratianu, complained, establishing the minority treaties created two different classes of membership in the League of Nations itself. “Preliminary Peace Conference Protocol, No. 8, Plenary Session of May 31, 1919,” 3:400. Efforts to universalize the minority protection regime failed twice in the League Council. Azcárate, League of Nations and National Minorities, 26.

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71. Conklin, Mission to Civilize, 253.

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78. Ibid., 23, 169.

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83. On these issues, see Peter A. Blitstein, “Stalin's Nations: Soviet Nationality Policy between Planning and Primordialism, 1936–1953” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1999), chap. 5.

84. As John Flint describes the British case, “The emergence of ‘classes,’ whether bourgeois or proletarian, betokened a failure of policy.” Flint, “Planned Decolonization and Its Failure in British Africa,” 394.

85. Lieven, Empire, 313.

86. Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 344–431. See also Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment,” 441.

87. Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, 179.

88. Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 244, 319–25. See also Ken, O. N. and Rupasov, A. I., Polilbiuro Tsk VKP(b) i otnosluniia SSSR s zapadnymi sosednimi gosudarstvami (konets 1920—1930-khgg.) (St. Petersburg, 2000), 508-14Google Scholar. Many Poles and Germans sought to emigrate to their eponymous homelands.

89. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 114, d. 633, 11. 3–4 (“O likvidatsii natsional'nykh raionov i sel'sovetov,” Protocol 75/6 of the Orgburo, 1 December 1937); RGASPI, f. 17, op. 114, d. 633, 1. 4 (“O natsional'nykh shkolakh,” Protocol 75/7 of the Orgburo, 1 December 1937).

90. N. Okhotin and A. Roginskii, “Iz istorii ‘nemetskoi operatsii’ NKVD 1937–1938 gg.,” in Shcherbakova, I. L., ed., Nakazannyi narod (Moscow, 1999)Google Scholar; N. Y Petrov and A. B. Roginskii, ““Pol'skaia operatsiia NKVD 1937–1938 gg.,” in A. E. Gur'ianov, ed., Repressii protiv poliakov i pol'skikh grazhdan (Moscow, 1997).

91. On this question see Blitstein, “Stalin's Nations,” 164–67. Nor were schools operating in Yiddish abolished at this point.

92. I examine this decision in detail in Blitstein, Peter A., “Nation-Building or Russification? Obligatory Russian Instruction in the Soviet Non-Russian School, 1938–1953,” in Suny, Ronald Grigor and Martin, Terry, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation- Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (New York, 2001), 253-74Google Scholar.

93. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 628, 11. 121–22 (12 October 1937).

94. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 997, 1. 103.

95. Stalin first formulated the idea of “socialist nations” in Natsional'nyi vopros i Leninizm, in Sochineniia (Moscow, 1949), 11:333–55. Dated 18 March 1929, the piece was presented as a response to letters inquiring into the fate of nations under socialism. On “Stalinist primordialism,” see Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 442–51, and Slezkine, Yuri, “N. Ia. Marr and the National Origins of Soviet Ethnogenetics,” Slavic Review 55, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 826-61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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97. I do not claim that Soviet nationality policy was a precursor to these colonial policies. But the logic of managing cultural diversity in modern conditions certainly offered limited options, and in choosing the available alternative, colonial powers moved in the direction of the Soviet approach.

98. For a fascinating discussion of the debate on the formation of the French Union, sec Dimier, “For a Republic ‘Diverse and Indivisible’?”

99. Cooper, Africa since 1940, 77–80.

100. Deák, István, “How to Construct a Productive, Disciplined, Monoethnic Society: The Dilemma of East Central European Governments, 1914–1956,” in Weiner, Amir, ed., Landscaping the Human Garden: 20th Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework (Stanford, 2003) , 206 Google Scholar.

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102. Lord Lugard, “Lugard's Political Memoranda (1918),” in Kirk-Greene, ed.,Principles oj Native Administration in Nigeria, 76.

103. Stalin, Sochinmiia, 11:348.

104. Margery Perham, Foreword, in Kirk-Greene, ed., The Principles of Native Administration in Nigeria, xii.

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