Nonterritorial Autonomy in Northern Eurasia: Rooted or Alien?

Abstract

The article examines the ideas and arrangements referred to as nonterritorial autonomy (NTA) in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the post-Soviet states. Many scholars regard NTA as a theoretical breakthrough and as a way to drastically rearrange diversity policies. The author seeks to clarify whether NTA had been a groundbreaking innovation and an area of political contestations. Two short periods of NTA-related initiatives after 1917 and in the late 1980s–1990s may look like attempts (albeit ineffective) to replace the earlier forms of diversity governance. The author shows that the ideas of group societal separateness, differential treatment of individuals, group agency, and cohesiveness, as well as a group’s running of its internal affairs, were present in varying degrees in imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet governments’ thoughts and practices. Academia and civil society were also appropriating and developing these views, and group self-rule on a nonterritorial basis was their logical extension. However, the practical implementation was, in most cases, on a top-down basis, and group agency and self-rule were affirmed mostly rhetorically. The continuity of discourses and practices demonstrates that NTA was an integral part of “normal” and broad ethnopolitical developments across the major historic divides in Northern Eurasia.

This article aims to assess the role played by the ideas of so-called nonterritorial autonomy (NTA) for ethnic groups in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and post-Soviet states. The major question to be considered is whether NTA had a ground-breaking potential for a drastic rearrangement of diversity politics and policies, or was an extension and continuation of broader developments without breakthroughs.

NTA occupies a specific place in scholarly debates about the governance of ethnic and religious diversity. The idea gained currency as a normative one at the turn of the 20th century among left-wing nationalists and social democrats in Central and Eastern Europe; the priority is habitually given to Austro-Marxist theorists who put forward a masterplan denoted as “national-cultural autonomy.” Since then, this idea of ethnic corporations—based on individual membership independent of residence and governed by democratically elected bodies—figures as a beacon showing the way to effective solutions of nationalities’ claims and contestations.

The idea is valued, on the one hand, as a theoretical innovation (although it is much more than one hundred years old), a challenge to the tradition of centering diversity governance on the creation of a territorial nation-state or territorial autonomous entity by the majority ethnicity (Nimni 2013; Pierre-Caps 2004; Smith 2011). On the other hand, the normative ideal of national-cultural autonomy as a democratically governed quasipolity that enables the groups in question to run their own affairs, simultaneously participate in broader public life, and eschew conflicts over territorial domination serves as a benchmark for practical measures or a tool for assessing certain normative and political frameworks (Brunner and Küpper 2002; Ghai 2005; Malloy, Osipov and Vizi 2015; Nimni 2007). Although not many scholars see NTA as a universal tool allowing for the resolution of major systemic contradictions and stalemates, many would regard nonterritorial mechanisms as a significant innovation and rupture in thinking about ethnic diversity and nation-building. My task is to judge using concrete country cases whether such a normative outlook entailing far-reaching expectations and high evaluation grades might be justified.

The territory earlier occupied by the Russian Empire and later by the Soviet Union is a place where the ideas of national-cultural autonomy and broader nonterritorial autonomy have played a role in politics and public administration; until recently “cultural autonomy” and similar notions figure in national legislations and public debates as well as match some practical arrangements. This geographical area can thus serve as a case for tracking the origins, trajectories, and outcomes of NTA ideas as well as their correspondence with local practices. This article examines the contexts, linkages, and effects of the ideas referred to as nonterritorial autonomy in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the post-Soviet states. The questions addressed are (1) whether the ideas of NTA entailed activities aimed at a drastic revision of the earlier diversity governance and (2) whether NTA had been a matter of political contestation and mass mobilization.

The Concept in Question: Nonterritorial Autonomy

As mentioned before, probably the most known version of NTA is the so-called national-cultural autonomy (NCA). It was put forward by Austrian social democrats more than a century ago and envisaged the reshaping of the major nations of Austria into vertically integrated but democratically self-governed corporative bodies based on personal membership (Bauer 2000; Renner 2005). NCA often serves as a normative ideal and a benchmark, although it had almost never been realized in full in practice.

After Austro-Marxists, the conception of cultural autonomy used to figure in other contexts on other occasions (Eide, Greni, and Lundberg 1998; Nimni 2005; 2007); its interpretations have gradually proliferated and lost clarity. NTA is a relatively new and the broadest denominator that reflects and represents the notions of group subjectivity and boundedness (Osipov 2018). One can barely talk about a single conception; there is rather an array of notions or even ambiguous perceptions (Coakley 2016). The tags of NTA, “cultural” or “personal” autonomy (often used interchangeably with NCA), have been attributed to smaller-scale and lesser-ambitious arrangements envisaging ethnically distinct educational and cultural institutions or self-government schemes (Malloy and Salat 2020; Prina 2020b). These naming exercises and practical suggestions rest on two usually unreflective assumptions. The first one is the regarding of ethnic politics as processes centering on territorial domination and its contestation; the second one is the tacit perception of ethnic or similar groups as entities possessing agency and cohesion, hence the view that these entities can manifest autonomy in a variety of forms.

Since there is no sole and uniform interpretation of NTA, one can talk about a framework that encompasses an array of practices that do not necessarily coexist in the given time and within the given phenomenon. Among the major ones are (1) the framing of ethnic groups as separate and cohesive social entities; (2) personal regimes, or the distinguishing and treating of individuals because of their ascribed group belonging; (3) organizational settings on an ethnic basis; and (4) autonomy in a narrow sense—that is, the treatment of groups as entities that can run their own affairs.

One can look at the evolution of NTA in political practice from two compatible perspectives. The first one is to address the issue as the structure and content of elites’ normative thought. Social imagination and the phenomena of social imaginary have been productively analyzed in a range of disciplinary areas, such as Marxist political philosophy (Castoriadis 1987; Lefort 1988), social psychology (Tolman 1948), social geography (Kitchin 1994), and macrohistory (Burbank and Cooper 2010; Wolff 1994). Over the last two decades, this approach enriched the studies of nationalism and imperial governance (Blitstein 2006b; Miller 2004, 2008; Tolz 2001). Generally, the issue under consideration is “a complex web of discursive practices that included ideological motivation, symbolic, toponymic, artistic exploration and familiarization” (Miller 2004, 14).

The other perspective rests on the study of practices of government, and it is also tested in the research of nation building and imperial rule (Blitstein 2006b). According to Foucault and his followers who studied governmentality, practices and the regimes of practices exist independently of a certain state and government. Practices do not emanate from “state” as such; rather, “state” can be conceived as a “composite reality,” a combination of phenomena filled in with practices (Foucault 1982; 2009, 109).

The consideration of group-based autonomy as a referencing notion and an array of political motions against the background of elites’ imagination and practices of governance may help clarify NTA’s role and effects. Were these ideas a rupture in elites’ and activists’ worldview and a driving force of social movements and changes, or were they merely an epiphenomenon or by-product of the already established imaginaries and practices?

On the surface, there were two peaks of NTA politics and policies in Northern Eurasia throughout the 20th century. The first one took place immediately after the collapse of the monarchy and until the final Bolshevik takeover in most of the former empire. It included extensive scholarly and partisan debates about NTA (at that time mainly named as “cultural-national autonomy,” or merely cultural autonomy) as a way of restructuring the multinational country and then several attempts of some social movements and governments of breakaway entities to adopt legislation and set up organizational structures that in their view qualified as cultural autonomy.

The second peak period began in the late 1980s during the overall liberalization in the USSR and during the first years of the independent statehoods; alternatively, one can say that it is not over yet. It started with the public debates about national-cultural autonomy and brought about respective legal provisions in a few successor states as well as certain organizational settings.

Round One: 1917–1922

Developments

From the early 1900s, most all-imperial left-wing parties and nationalist organizations of non-Russian peoples in varying degrees adhered to the idea of “cultural-national autonomy” (Bowring 2005, 166; Carrère d’Encausse 1992, 22–43; Mikhailov 1997, 165–174; Nam 2016), as it was predominantly termed at that time. Basically, these ideas were imported from Austrian social democrats; in part, they were elaborated inside the empire (Bowring 2015, 145–146). The liberals were generally skeptical about all autonomy propositions but endorsed equality to all nationalities, the public usage of minority languages, and separate minority institutions. The radical left (the Bolsheviks) rejected the idea as favorable to “bourgeois nationalism” and detrimental to the unity of the working class (Khripachenko 2012; Natsional′nyi 2016).

In the immediate aftermath of the monarchy’s downfall in February 1917, most liberal and socialist parties reaffirmed their commitment to “cultural-national autonomy” while the Bolsheviks kept declaring exclusively the unlimited peoples’ right to self-determination, assuming the right to secession (L’vova, Nam, and Naumova 1993; Osipov 2004, 47–48).

A few national movements raised immediate claims about NTA and started practical arrangements. Notably, already during the 1905 revolution, some national movements, the Buryats first (Montgomery 2011), elaborated such forms of self-organization and collective decision-making as nationality congresses, and their convening reemerged in 1917. In the summer–autumn of 1917 there were two all-Russian Moslem congresses that declared the national-cultural autonomy of the Moslem (assumingly Turkic) population and started forming the all-imperial National Council (Khabutdinov 2010, 163; Khabrieva 2003, 25–26). Lower-level congresses of Moslems and individual Turkic peoples were convened also in the Volga region, Central Asia, and other areas (Lysenko et al. 2017, 197–205). Among them were provincial and all-national conventions of the Kazakhs (Amanzholova 2009, 167–182).

After the Bolshevik takeover, some independent polities within the former empire were declaring their adherence to the ideas of NTA and partly took practical steps. The most productive initiatives took place in the Baltic States. ¹ Estonia enacted a constitutional provision about cultural autonomy and in 1925 passed a comprehensive law about the corporate organization of minorities (Smith 2005; 2016). Two ethnic corporations (the Jewish and the German ones) were functioning up until the Soviet annexation of Estonia (Smith 2016). Latvia established semiautonomous units governing minority schools within the system of public education (Saleniece and Kuznetsovs 1999; Smith 2010). Lithuania declared the government’s plans to set up a ministry on Jewish affairs and a corporate organization for minorities, but the 1926 coup put an end to this development (Dohrn 2003, 162–166).

The Ukrainian Central Rada (Council) included the NTA provision into independent Ukraine’s constituent declaration (The Third Universal) of November 1917 and then, in January 1918, adopted a special law termed as the law on “national-personal autonomy.” However, the republic was short-lived and unstable, and the plans regarding minority protection remained on paper (Goldelman 1968; Frankel 1990; Liber 1987). The Country’s Council (Sfatul Ţării) placed two provisions on NTA into its declaration of December 1917, establishing the Moldovan Democratic Republic, which also did not exist long (Deklaratsiia 2000).

The democratic but fragile and short-lived anti-Bolshevik governments of Siberia in 1918 also had plans regarding cultural autonomy for minorities (Cherniak 1998, vol. 1). The Far Eastern Republic, which the Bolsheviks established in 1920 as a parliamentary democracy and a temporary “buffer” between Soviet Russia and Japan, included a provision about cultural autonomy in its constitution. The constitution envisaged the self-organization of minorities as public law corporations (Osnovnoi 1998), but the local Bolsheviks effectively obstructed the adoption of the respective legislation, and in 1922 the Far Eastern Republic was absorbed into the Russian Federation (Sablin 2019; Nam 2009, 383–430).

Assessment

The debates and arrangements fitting in the framework of NTA in the aftermath of the Romanov monarchy’s collapse fall into two unequal parts. The first—the smaller one—were claims and respective attempts from the grass roots. There were only several undertakings of civil society organizations aimed at the creation of ethnicity-based corporate public bodies. It is noteworthy that they took place in the time when most nationalist groups in the empire’s borderlands were seeking a reassembling of common multinational statehood rather than its partition (Gerasimov 2017). The overall situation changed rapidly, and these initiatives were doomed to be short lived. The largest one was the 1917 Moslem Congresses and the establishment of the all-Russian Moslem Council. However, it was shortly dissolved and lost the competition to other Turkic movements (like Tatars and Bashkirs) that sought territorial autonomy or independent statehoods (Khabrieva 2003, 25–26). Only a few conventions of national minorities at the regional level were tending to become recurrent and pursued the goal of coordinating their activities instead of setting up permanent governing bodies and recorded membership (Lotkin 2006, 30–37; Nam 2009, 118–170, 188–282; Sablin 2016, 68–89, 116–140), but this experiment was ultimately ceased by the Bolsheviks. Most nationalities’ congresses (like the Kazakh ones) aimed at the arrangement of territorial autonomy.

Most initiatives related to NTA were the manifestations of allegiances to party programs and top-down activities of the authorities in the empire’s splinters. The constitutional provisions, declarations, and pieces of legislation that stipulated nationalities’ rights and nonterritorial autonomy followed the fashion of that time and turned out to be either unviable (as well as the respective new statehoods) or adopted for gaining minorities’ loyalty rather than for a full-fledged implementation.

The Background and Earlier Developments

The ideas and practices fitting in the NTA framework were not unknown to the empire’s governing elites and to the public, including academics and political activists. The Russian imperial rule ² rested on a complex and fluid institutional mosaic that included separate governance regimes and public institutions designed for different population categories and territories (Burbank 2006, 2018; Khoury and Glebov 2017; Morrison 2012). The government was striving to rationalize the system of rule in accordance with the ideals of Polizeistaat and thus was transforming normative and organizational settings for the purpose of better governability and social integration (Kappeler 2007).

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the government was gradually shifting from religious, estate, and “tribal” to ethnonational interpretations of pluralism and was seeking new modes of the population’s loyalty. Discourses of race, ethnicity, and nationhood in imperial Russia developed in line with the pan-European circulation of knowledge (Raffass 2012, 183; Tolz 2019, 48).

The emerging civil society contributed to the evolution of public perceptions of peoplehood and cultural distinctness. From the mid-19th century, the Russian intellectuals launched and advanced public debates about nationhood as the basis of state legitimacy (Bakhturina 2004, 5; Hirsch 2005; Karnishina 2011; Knight 2000). Academia provided for the elaboration of ethnonational categorizations in the framework of ethnographic studies (Hirsch 2005). From the 1870s, public intellectuals boosted the understanding of the Russian Empire as a constellation of peoples who required progressive “development” as culturally distinct social entities and whose separate identities deserved support as the fundament of the empire’s cohesion (Hirsch 2005, 30–51; Tolz 2005).

Political parties and movements that emerged in the early 20th century, along with academia, engaged in public debates about the “nationalities question.” From that time, NTA (“cultural-national autonomy”) became one of the most discussed issues, and the political spectrum, as mentioned, demonstrated a variety of approaches.

The modes of categorizing of the subject population were evolving; the distinction based on estate and religion was gradually gaining new meanings as ethnic, racial, and national divides. Moreover, the officialdom was gradually reinterpreting estate and religious belonging as a proxy for ethnic nationality (Crews 2009; Slocum 1998; Werth 2014). In some cases, the establishment of estate groups led to the formation of nationalities (Cadiot 2005; Khoury and Glebov 2017, 51). A good example would be the Bashkirs who were governed as a military service corporation with special duties and privileges; the group boundaries after the lifting of the corporate status in the 1860s became the basis for the formation of a distinct ethnonation (Steinwedel 2016).

The government operated the concepts of peoplehood and nationality; the officialdom considered the country as a combination of groups, as distinct social entities (and sometimes as adversary agents) that in principle required differential treatment. Policies on the ground throughout the 19th century were increasingly dependent on security concerns and the need for better governability. Security considerations related to the treatment of potentially disloyal groups (first and foremost Poles and Jews) (Campbell 2001, 210–212) and were theoretically underpinned by “military statistics,” a part of strategic military planning (Dameshek and Remnev 2007, 63; Holquist 2001; Rich 1996).

The major official category for the non-Russian groups was “aliens” (inorodtsy) which denoted categories deemed as unassimilable (Jews) or socially “backward” and thus required state paternalism (basically the indigenous populations of Siberia and the steppe nomads) (Korkunov 1909, 355–366; Shternberg 1910). The meaning of inorodtsy in public discourses and administrative practices was expanding over time and gradually covering all non-Russian groups (Cadiot 2005; Slocum 1998; Steinwedel 2000). Administratively, the tsarist authorities failed to elaborate an effective mechanism for determining individual ethnic nationality; personal status was generally regulated through confessional and estate institutions or administrative discretion (Gorizontov 1999, 100–118; Slocum 1998; Weeks 1996). However, the usage of nationality in the practices of governance was gradually widening. A remarkable development was the introduction of nationalities curia into the municipal electoral system (zemstvo) in the empire’s Western regions in 1907–1911 (Weeks 1994; 1996, 145–171).

The plans for social integration rested on the ideas of “state-sponsored evolutionism,” (Hirsch 2005, 7–8) aimed at “civilizing” assumingly “backward” inorodtsy and providing for their social and cultural rapprochement with the Slavonic Orthodox core (Campbell 2001; Lysenko et al. 2017). This policy occasionally included the creation, maintenance, and transformation of temporary and transitional structures for self-administration or mixed administration based on personal rather than purely territorial principles (Rieber 1989; Suny 1993, 23–26).

In certain cases, the government tolerated, established, or maintained institutions and practices of self-administration based on individuals’ belonging to ascriptive categories. The grounds were (1) previously acknowledged confessional and estate privileges and (2) transitional settings for upbringing new, more loyal local elites and increasing the civic consciousness of the subject population (grazhdanstvennost’, “civicness”) (Campbell 2001, 214; Jersild 1997; Uyama 2007, 43; Yaroshevski 1997). The first type comprised the self-administration of confessional groups ³ and culturally distinct estate self-government. ⁴ The second type can be denoted as the self-rule of inorodtsy (“aliens”) and mixed rule. Some categories of non-Slavic and non-Orthodox population were subject to a special legal order whereby some issues were in the jurisdiction of the tsarist executive and some of the indigenous institutions. Some groups (primarily, the nomads of Siberia and Kazakhstan) from the end of the 18th century enjoyed the right of electing councils and officials at the local and regional levels, even though the design of this self-administration was changing, and the practice was gradually curtailed (Agadzhanov et al. 1998, 61–84, 250–259; Bobrovnikov 2001; Dameshek and Remnev 2007, 228–237; Glebov 2009, 145–148; Jersild 1997).

To sum up, the imperial administration and intellectuals throughout the 19th century were familiar with the categorization that currently would be deemed ethnonational; group agency, institutions separated along ethnic lines, and the possibility of group self-government were part of their worldview. Such practices also were part of the government repertoires. By the beginning of the 20th century, autonomy arrangements in a narrow sense became a topic for public debates and a component of party politics.

Round Two: 1988–2021

Developments

During the “restructuring” and overall liberalization of the USSR in 1987–1991 and the debates about nationalities issues, numerous intellectuals and oppositional activists commenced promoting the ideas of NTA ⁵ as an alternative to the assumingly flawed Soviet nationalities policy (Osipov 2004, 62–64). The leadership of the Soviet constituent republics, which rapidly started claiming sovereign rights and thus opposing the USSR central authorities, was also resorting to the concept of NTA for gaining the support of their own ethnic minorities (Osipov 2004, 60–62). For example, the 1990 Sovereignty Declaration of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) promised “the self-determination of peoples in national-territorial and national-cultural forms”; in 1991, Latvia enacted the law about the cultural autonomy of national minorities.

The leadership of the Communist Party (CPSU) and the central government were reluctant to defend Lenin’s dogma about the unacceptability of NTA. In 1989, the CPSU policy documents (Natsional’naia 1989, 212–235) ⁶ and publications of the mainstream scholars (Bromlei 1989; Zubov and Salmin 1989) ⁷ were still avoiding the concept of cultural autonomy but in fact offered solution based on nonterritorial organization, special mechanisms of group representation, and corporate self-government. The USSR law “On free national development of the USSR citizens residing outside of their national-territorial units or not having such in the USSR” of 26 April 1990 (Zakon 1990) did not contain the term “cultural autonomy” but proposed the creation of “national-cultural centers” (art. 13) and “nationalities societies” (art. 14) that could be coordinated by public umbrella organizations (art. 17). The 28th (the last) CPSU Congress convened in June 1990 already openly debated national-cultural autonomy (particularly, as a promising option for Germans and other formerly deported peoples) and included the concepts of “self-government” and “cultural autonomy” into its resolution on nationalities issues (Rezolutsiia 1990, 171). At the same time, the officialdom reportedly started discussing NTA as a solution for the Crimean Tatars who were returning to their homeland and an alternative to the Crimean Tatar territorial autonomy in Crimea (Guboglo and Chervonnaia 1992, 206–207). Thus, all the contributors to the late Soviet politics demonstrated a similar vision of nationalities issues and a high degree of flexibility and pragmatism.

After the Soviet breakdown, four countries (Estonia, Latvia, Russia, and Ukraine) employ the concepts of “cultural autonomy” or “national-cultural autonomy” in their legislation. In Latvia and Ukraine, the mentioning of cultural autonomy is merely a hollow declaration (Osipov 2013; Yupsanis 2017). In Estonia, entities that can be established under the 1993 law on cultural autonomy do not gain legal personality and are devoid of any guarantees of public support (Lagerspetz 2014; Poleshchuk 2013). In Russia, organizations set up according to the 1996 law on “national-cultural autonomy” (NCA) are civil society organizations that enjoy less rights and face more restrictions than “ordinary” nongovernmental organizations (Osipov 2013, 10–11; Prina 2020a).

Both in Estonia and Russia the respective national laws follow the idea of facilitating the creation of minorities’ corporate organizations on a ground-up basis. It is supposed to be either by voluntary enrollment to the minority roster set up by civil society organizations (Estonia) or by setting up large ethnicity-based organizations from below—first by uniting local entities into regional ones and then regional ones into the federal corporation (Russia) (Osipov 2004, 112–135). However, bureaucratic restrictions, shortage of financial resources, and limited functionality make these organizational schemes impractical.

In the late 1980s through the early 1990s, there were two or three bottom-up motions within the USSR boundaries aimed at the creation of a centralized corporate structure under the banner of NTA, but they all failed (Osipov 2004, 62, 73–74). Besides, the institution of “peoples’ congresses” resurrected in Russia. Initially, the “congresses” sought to accumulate bottom-up movements of the eponymous ethnicities within Russia’s constituent republics (such as Tatars, Bashkirs, and Mordva). Shortly thereafter they were hijacked by republican governments and are currently funded and orchestrated by the regional officialdom (Osipov 2011).

Assessment

The second round of NTA debates, politics, and policies, which started in the late 1980s, differs from the first one of 1917–1922 because the latter had been interrupted by the Bolsheviks’ coming to power in the most part of the former empire, and no one knows how far the developments could otherwise go. Indeed, the topic of NTA, or NCA, was a significant part of public debates in the dissolving Soviet Union and then in the newly independent states. Some scholars praised NCA as a significant turn in official nationalities policies and an innovative approach leading to the prevention of conflicts and providing for the participation of all ethnicities in public life and state-building (Drobizheva 2003, 10–29; Zorin 2003, 223–262). The outcomes, however, deserve a more modest assessment.

There have been very few bottom-up claims and initiatives aimed at NTA as bodies endowed with public competencies and functions; in Russia, before the adoption of the NCA law in 1996, the idea had no practical demand (Saveliev 2010, 164). The number of NCAs in Russia has been growing despite this form’s impracticability, and the reason is that ethnic activists have been following the rules of the symbolic game imposed by the government (Osipov 2013; Prina 2020a).

Such organizational form as “peoples’ congresses” resemble the full-fledged idea of “national-cultural autonomy” because it includes publicly elected self-governing bodies acting on behalf of their constituencies—ethnic groups as such. However, the rationales for the creation and running of these institutions are far from cultural self-government. Initially they included deliberations and lobbying before public authorities; after a short evolution, the “peoples’ congresses” have become the support groups of the regional governments.

Most initiatives resembling NTA or represented as such were part of top-down state policies or propositions of political parties, individual politicians, or public opinion makers. Most of these motions were of symbolic character: they voiced the ideas of NTA or analogues for delivering certain messages to the target audiences. Among these messages were the critical attitude towards the Soviet-style ethnicity-based federalism and territorial autonomy; the desire to stress the multiethnic character of the country and to please minorities by acknowledging their status as part of the polity; and the interest in minorities’ self-organization at their own expense for carrying out nonpolitical activities. In terms of practical achievements, the legislation primarily serves as a vehicle for delivering these messages. Estonia and Russia have entities that bear the official label of cultural or national-cultural autonomy, but they enjoy no substantive advantages before other civil society organizations. Notably, the post-Soviet governments are striving to limit the activities of ethnicity-based civil society organizations to the cultural sphere and to obstruct their engagement in politics.

Within a broader context, one can see the persistence of discursive elements and institutional settings fundamental for nonterritorial arrangements that were inherited from the earlier period. After the Soviet Union’s dissolution, most governments and legislatures of the newly independent states use the languages of group subjectivity and group “development”; ethnicities are still framed as social entities composed of individuals with ascribed group belonging. Some post-Soviet constitutions refer to ethnicities as separate entities, social actors, and even right holders. The constitution of Russia postulates the “equality and self-determination of peoples”; the constitutions of Russia and Ukraine guarantee the rights of indigenous peoples and national minorities; the constitutions of Belarus, Turkmenistan, and internationally unrecognized Transnistria in Moldova mention “relations between ethnic groups.” Over the last 30 years, the old mainstream vision of group and individual categorizations has been still in place. The post-Soviet polities have mainly (but not fully) abolished the institution of officially recorded ethnicity (Aktürk 2012, 229–258), but individual ethnic nationality remains a practically recognizable characteristic, and informal discriminatory practices persist.

The Preceding Developments

Prior to 1917, the Bolsheviks were against all kinds of ethnicity-based substate arrangements and stood for either regional autonomy or self-determination as secession (Bowring 2015, 147–148; Tadevosian 1970, 65–81). Lenin and his associates vehemently opposed the ideas of NTA. After the 1917 takeover, they demonstrated a pragmatic turn to ethnicity-based territorial autonomy as a political tool (Pearson 1991; Leonov 1997, 128–129; Slezkine 1994b, 419–420); the negative attitude to NTA basically remained intact. However, the rhetoric and practical arrangements require a more nuanced approach.

The Bolshevik “nationalities policy” was not uniform from 1917 to 1991; respectively, the attitudes toward institutional arrangements and the official rhetoric were volatile. However, some elements relevant to the NTA framework persisted throughout the communist rule—namely, the rhetoric of ethnonational sovereignty and group rights, personal ethnic nationality independent of territory, and separate institutions divided along ethnic lines. In certain periods before perestroika, the Bolshevik rulers partly acknowledged the acceptability of nonterritorial self-governance.

First, the Soviet state formally institutionalized ethnicities as an official category for the purposes of statistics and administration. In the 1930s, they introduced the institution of prescribed and officially recorded individual ethnic belonging independent of the place of residence (Aktürk 2012, 197–228; Brubaker 1996, 30–40; Simonsen 1999). Much was done for the institutionalization of individual ethnicity as part of governance and the daily life of people (Blitstein 2006a; Brown 2004; Slezkine 1994a).

The Bolsheviks looked upon the subject society as a combination of ethnic groups existent in principle across territorial divides and as entities requiring state-sponsored development. This rhetoric portraying the new statehood as a union of “nations” was present in the policy declarations and in the first Soviet constitution. The Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia adopted by the Council of Peoples Commissars on November 2 (15), 1917, ⁸ just one week after the Bolshevik coup, introduced several concepts that until the breakdown of the USSR served as a basis for the official Communist rhetoric. This vocabulary included “voluntary union of peoples,” “equality and sovereignty of peoples,” and “free development of national minorities and ethnic groups” (Dekrety Sovetskoi Vlasti 1957, 39–41). According to the Declaration of the Rights of Working and Exploited People (adopted on January 12, 1918, at the III Congress of Soviets, at that time formally the supreme body of power), the Russian Soviet Republic constituted a “free union of free nations” (Dekrety Sovetskoi Vlasti 1957, 321–323). In July 1918, the declaration was incorporated into the first constitution of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) as its first chapter. ⁹ The preamble of the first USSR constitution of 1924 described the Soviet Union as a “voluntary association of equal peoples” but without referring to the national (ethnic) statehood of the constituent republics.

The official discourse of the country as a union of “peoples” in principle decoupled from the territory and of ethnic groups’ “development” was surviving all evolutions of the domestic policy. For example, the 1961 Program of the Communist Party operated the concepts of all nations’ “sovereignty,” “equal rights,” and “development” (Programma 1961, 112–116). Concurrently, vilification of the very concept of national-cultural autonomy was an obligatory element of almost all academic and propaganda publications concerning “nationalities question” (Kutafin 2014, 724–726; see Chernov 1984, 11–24).

Although ethnicity-based territorial autonomy was the core element of state-building, the Bolsheviks almost 15 years after the coup widely used public organizational settings divided along ethnic lines (Amanzholova 2010; Mikhailov 1997, 279–287; Musaev 2004, 96–97; Slezkine 1994b, 422; Suny 1993, 86). Interestingly, even Vladimir Lenin himself acknowledged the acceptability of NTA under certain conditions (Lenin 1970, 462). Most well documented are the national sections of the Communist Party, primarily the Jewish ones (Gitelman 1972, 250–252, 321–440; Pinkus 1988, 56–64), and separate educational and cultural institutions created irrespective of “national-territorial” entities (Amanzholova 2010; Blitstein 2006a; Chebotareva 2008).

The Bolsheviks also employed the institution of people’s congresses as ethnic groups’ elected representative bodies (Osipov 2011, 6, 21). The 1925 RSFSR constitution envisaged that new autonomous territorial entities can be established “on the basis of the respective nationalities’ congresses.” In fact, the Bolshevik authorities shortly after 1917 resorted to such procedures in the course of establishing the Chuvash, Marii, Udmurt, German, and some other territorial autonomous entities (Chistiakov 2003, 303; German 2007, 19–31; Ivanov and Klementiev 2010, 22–27; Mineeva 2009).

“Nationalities’ congresses” ended in the late 1920s; separate ethnicity-based public institutions survived up until the early 1930s (Donninghaus 2011, 153; Gitelman 1972, 487). In these frameworks, the Bolsheviks resorted to electoral procedures but preferred direct party control; the degree of independent decision making and real self-administration was low (Donninghaus 2011, 136–137, 142–148).

In the late 1940s, the official legal theorists put forward the doctrine of “national” ethnic sovereignty (Levin 1948); the authorities had been recurrently using the rhetoric earlier, from 1917 (Donninghaus 2011, 142–143; Tadevosian 1970, 127). Assumingly, sovereignty is threefold: it included popular, state, and “nationality” outfits; each type was not restricted to one another, and “national” sovereignty was enjoyed by all ethnic groups regardless of territory but could materialize in different ways and forms of “self-determination” (Shevtsov 1978; Sudnitsin 1958). This approach survived to date in Russian academia (Porfir’ev 2009).

Conclusion

Indeed, the ideas of NTA are part of ethnopolitical history in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the post-Soviet states. The related practical initiatives and arrangements took place within short periods following the empire’s collapse and have been taking place in Eurasia since the late 1980s liberalization in the USSR. In terms of utilitarian outcomes and effectiveness, NTA in a narrow sense is far from being a decisive factor in law making and administration or a matter of political contestations.

In both periods of burgeoning NTA initiatives, there were few grassroot motions and mass claims of NTA’s potential beneficiaries. Most initiatives were parts of top-down state action or party politics, and most activities belonged to the symbolic domain (often governmental gestures aimed to please minorities) and did not entail significant institutional changes.

Against a broader background of elite imagination and practices of government, the rhetoric of NTA and related practical initiatives do not look like a revolutionary turn but rather an extension of broader and continuous trends of thought and action. This general approach can be termed, following Rogers Brubaker, as “deterritorialized groupism,” ¹⁰ or imagining and treating the society as a combination of internally cohesive groups, composed of individuals with a common identity and, in principle, independent of territory. An outcome is the circulation of discursive forms aimed at reconciling the country’s integrity and cohesion with the recognition of ethnic plurality. One should add that in this regard the authorities can frame, evaluate, and treat diversity positively or negatively, for a variety of reasons ranging from security considerations to “state-sponsored evolutionism” (Hirsch 2005, 7). The perception of groups as separate entities and potentially social agents can generate the rhetoric of “autonomy” that serves multiple purposes of framing diversity and communicating with the subject constituencies.

Such perceptions are linked to a set of relatively stable regimes of practices, such as the differential treatment of individuals according to ascribed group affiliation or even the establishment of differentiated personal regimes, and the creation of separate or specific organizational frameworks for different groups (Burbank 2018). In certain cases, such arrangements amounted to self-governing settings or were framed as an embodiment of group will and self-determination.

If one uses NTA as an optic for assessing diversity politics and policies in the transits between the major types of statehood in Eurasia, this study speaks for a continuity more than for a rupture. The modes of imagination and practices of government described above are relatively independent of political regime and display no straightforward linkage with bottom-up mobilization on ethnic grounds. There are also no reasons to distinguish between imperial or national policies (Blitstein 2006b); both include the consolidation of the cultural core and, to a certain degree, preservation of separate groups’ cultural traits. Within the overall period in question, nationalities policy was never toleration of the ethnic mosaic taken as a given or the accommodation of group claims through bargaining. It was subject to broader considerations of social engineering, in turn aimed at the rationalization of government, progressive social change, and broadly understood security.

Along with the common patterns across historic divides, there were significant changes. While the imperial authorities did not secure a coherent and effective practice of individual and group identification, the Bolsheviks achieved this objective through “scientific” categorization, censuses, indoctrination through education and propaganda, and, finally, obligatory passport nationality. All these institutions except for the recorded individual ethnicity have basically survived, albeit the idea of personal ethnic belonging as an issue of public interest persists in politics and administration.

The major change in transit from imperial to Soviet rule was the drastic revision of official rhetoric. While the imperial authorities overtly denied group claims, the Soviet rules extensively used the language of group rights and even sovereignty; this vocabulary survived to date in numerous constitutions, laws, and policy statements. The Bolsheviks promoted “nations’ right to self-determination” and national statehood in an ethnic sense, but the real practices of government did not envisage any manifestations of group agency if not authorized and orchestrated by the state. Respectively, autonomy on a territorial and nonterritorial basis has existed merely as a discursive frame rather than an organizational setting. A similar gap between rhetoric and action persists in the post-Soviet diversity policies: some countries employ the language of group rights, but independent bottom-up claims and other activities are either suppressed or marginalized.

In other words, the major novelty that the Soviet power brought about is the patterns of “decoupling” substantive activities from ceremonial representation (Meyer and Rowan 1977, 356-357), or of “systemic hypocrisy” (Brunsson 1989)—the gap between rhetoric and action of an organization. However, the tsarist government was also not sterile in this respect—certain ethnic categories were recurrently regarded and treated as collective agents but in the capacity of a potential or actual adversary. All the governments have also demonstrated a varying degree of pragmatism and flexibility in both talks and action.

Finally, the analyzed case prompts a question as to the value of the concept of NTA both as an analytical tool and normative ideal. First, the practices identified as group self-governance cannot be clearly distinguished from a broader political context and from adjacent arrangements and rhetoric; thus, the concept of NTA can blur the issue under consideration. Second, the practices resembling NTA neither predetermine nor obstruct emancipation and the dismantling of power hierarchies.