Empire and Its Nations

The Soviet experiment in constructing socialism in a multinational state consisted of at least two stages with markedly different imagery and vocabularies. The original Bolshevik project laid claim to a kind of global universality based on class.

A departure from Soviet identification with proletarian internationalism was an aspect of the general Stalinist turn towards conservative social and cultural values that the emigre sociologist Nicholas Timasheff famously diagnosed in 1946 as the ‘Great Retreat’ from communism Later scholars of the revisionist generation did not share Timasheff’s concept of communism, but adopted his term, albeit interpreting the process as the ‘Big Deaf between the Stalinist authorities and the new Soviet middle class ⁵ It is interesting, however, that practically all accounts of the ‘Great Retreat’ ignore the contemporary developments in non-Russian repub lies Nevertheless, as Yun Slezkine has recently noted, High Stalinism did not reverse the policy of nation-building in non-Russian regions In the mid-1950s ethnicity became reified, and all officially recognized Soviet nationalities were to possess their own ‘Great Traditions’ - founding fathers, literary classics, and folkloric riches ⁶ In other words, indigenous cultural agents were allowed, and often encouraged, to articulate their people’s heritage

Still, the message of the central media was unmistakably Russocentric In a recent, fundamental study of the Kremlin’s embrace of Russian nationalism, David Brandenberger argues that Stalin and his associates accepted ‘Russocentric etatism’ as the most effective way to promote state-building, popular mobilization, and legitimacy among the masses of ethnic Russians, who had been poorly educated and were finding it difficult to relate to more abstract Marxist ideas ⁷

The ‘Stalin Constitution’ of 1936 announced that exploiting classes no longer existed in the USSR In fact, the notion of‘class’ had long been losing its utility for the state as a classification tool precisely because the Bolsheviks had recast this sociological category to define individuals’ relationship to the state, as well as their political rights and obligations ⁸ In a ‘workers’ and peasants’ state populated exclusively, at least on paper, by workers and kolkhoz peasantry, the category ‘class’ lost its taxonomic value Nationality, then, became the only universal label for classifying - and ruling - the Soviet populace ⁹ It is not surprising that nationali­ties ceased to be considered equal those less important lost their territorial and cultural privileges, the remaining major peoples could be ranked in a hierarchy headed by the ‘great Russian people’, and a new category, ‘enemy nations,’ became possible ¹⁰ While in the 1920s the USSR was a state of equal nationalities and unequal classes, by the late 1930s it had become a state of equal classes and unequal nationalities, in which a party-state increasingly identified with the Russian nation

The question of whether or not the Stalinist and post-Stahmst USSR was an empire has generated considerable debate Most commentators agree that the Soviet Union was a composite state in which the centre dominated many distinct ethnic societies, and th.u the relations of control, inequality, and hierarchy be­tween the centre and the periphery qualified the USSR as an empire Never having been an ethnically ‘Russian empire,’ the Soviet Union nevertheless pursued famil­iar imperial strategies for ruling and exhibited recognizable imperial attitudes ¹¹ Although debate continues on the question of whether the USSR was a typically modern colonial empire, recent scholarship is more interested in finding out what new knowledge historians can generate by comparing the Soviet Union with other modern empires and what fundamental characteristics of the Soviet system they can reveal by comparing the ways in which it and other empires sought to civilize’ their dominions ¹² Such an approach transcends the contradiction between the traditional view of the USSR as fitting some objective definition of an empire and more recent suggestions that Soviet specialists use empire’ as a subjective category of analysis ¹³ In fact, literary scholars Marko Pavlyshyn and Myroslav Shkandrij have made a similar argument about the Russian-Ukrainian cultural interaction Regardless of whether Ukraine had ever been Russia’s classic colony in economic and political sense, they show that the relations between the two literatures are best analysed with the tools from post-colonial literary criticism ¹⁴

In this study of the Stalinist politics of memory I take the discussion a step further by drawing on the insights of post-colonial theory to interpret Soviet national ideology as an imperial discourse and to analyse the complex entangle­ment of the Kremlin, local bureaucrats, non-Russian intellectuals, and their audiences in the shaping of the Stalinist historical imagination

Recent work on empires and nationalism suggests that, far from being an assimilatory enterprise, an empire allows for the articulation of ethnic difference Moreover, imperial rule necessitates the development of homogenizing and essentializmg devices such as ‘India or ‘Ukraine’ that are useful both for imperial definitions of what is being ruled and for indigenous elites who can claim a broad domain that their cultural knowledge qualifies them to govern ¹⁵ Thus, Ukraine and the other non-Russian republics remained distinctly different, albeit decidedly ‘junior brothers,’ in a Soviet family of nations Soviet Ukrainian ideologues and intellectuals both guarded their own historical mythology and promoted the meta- narrative of Russian guidance In other words, understanding Stalinist historical memory as a subspecies of imperial discourse allows us to make sense of the hierarchy of national pasts within it

Such an approach also throws new light on the question of agency in Stalinist cultural production In spite of claims throughout post-Soviet Ukrainian histori­ography,¹⁶ the Stalinist variety of Ukrainian culture did not result from Moscow’s diktat and suppression of the local intelligentsia’s ‘natural’ national sentiment Bureaucrats and intellectuals in the republics who interpreted the vague yet powerful signals from the Kremlin emerge as major players in the shaping of the Stalinist historical imagination It was their interaction with Moscow, rather than simply the centre’s totalizing designs, that produced the official line on non­Russian identities and national patrimonies Furthermore, the local ideologues and intelligentsia occupied the ambiguous position of mediator between the Kremlin and their non-Russian constituencies, and their survival and well-being depended on producing a socialist ‘national ideology’ specific to their republic ¹⁷ This social group’s complicated relationships with the centre and their audiences, as well as the resulting cultuial products, defy explanation based solely on familiar models of totalitarian control or patron-client links Insights from post-colonial theory are particularly helpful in making sense of the limits and possibilities in the promotion of non-Russian historical memory under Stalinism

New archival evidence reveals that holding the party hierarchy in Moscow solely responsible for all ideological mutations in Ukraine has been an oversimplifica­tion, for the republic’s bureaucrats and intellectuals played an active role in developing and revising the official politics of memory Nor can the material sustain an opposition between local ‘servants of the regime’ and cultural agents presumably promoting their national cause Many, like Mykola Bazhan, Oleksandr Kornuchuk, and Pavlo Tychyna, alternated between ministerial positions and creative writing — and between elevating the national patrimony and denouncing it as nationalistic deviation In many respects, Ukrainian cultural agents of the time acted as classic indigenous elites who defined their difference and protected their cultural domain without challenging (and, in fact, facilitating and justifying) imperial domination itself

Although the party leaders would like to have seen them as simple cogs in the Stalinist ideological machine, many Ukrainian intellectuals in Stalin’s time (with the exception of the recently ‘reunited’ Western Ukrainians) were of the 1920s generation, for whom the construction of socialism and Ukrainian nation- buildmg were potentially compatible projects Both the private diary of the great filmmaker Oleksandr Dovzhenko, who was denounced in 1944 as a Ukrainian nationalist, and the later memoirs of the poet Volodymyr Sosiura, who suffered a similar fate in 1951, testify to their authors’ sincere belief in socialism - as well as their strong devotion to Ukraine ¹⁸ From scattered anecdotal evidence on scores of other, less prominent Ukrainian intellectuals of the time, one can safely say that while some faked their devotion to communist ideas, others internalized Stalinist ideology¹⁹ Significantly, though, they were not expected to choose between Ukraine and socialism, since these two allegiances were compatible in the official discourse as well