Ethnic Relations
The advancement of non-Russian ethnicites—korenizatsiia, or indigenization— was actively pursued in the 1920s. Formally, the Soviet Union was a federation of Union Republics, of which by 1940 there were 15, each bearing the name of a titular nationality.[2723] Below them was a hierarchy of Autonomous Republics, Autonomous Regions, and even lower-level units; the place of each in the hierarchy depended roughly on the numerical strength of the titular nationality.
Ethnic groups thus acquired an explicit administrative and territorial status they had never enjoyed under the Tsars. Non-Russian Union Republics received priority funding, to enable them to build their own economies, to train and put in place their own administrative cadres, to establish a national education system, to conduct likbez (liquidation of illiteracy) in local languages, and to publish books and journals in their own languages—even in some cases to create and systematize a literary language where none previously existed.From the outset, serious practical problems bedeviled these reforms, even though the Soviet leaders sponsored elaborate ethnological research expeditions to acquire information about the peoples of their inherited country. Given the scattered and intermingled nature of populations, no ethnically named territory contained exclusively members of the titular nationality. There would always be a minority of others, and often minorities within minorities. Central Asia raised special problems, since ethnic membership among nomadic peoples was normally determined by genealogical descent, rather than by language or the other markers considered relevant by Soviet ethnologists.[2724]
Soviet nationality policy also suffered from a basic mismatch with the overall political system. Korenizatsiia implied decentralization and could only have worked within a fully federal state.
The Soviet Union was certainly not that. Its politics were tightly centralized, beginning with the Communist Party itself, whose Union Republican organizations were essentially regional dependencies, at best lobby groups for their own local economic interests. From 1938 the language of command in all armed force units was Russian. Gosplan took an all-Union view of the economy, so that each republic developed its own specialities as required by the entire Soviet economy rather than the needs of its own people. In some republics there was resentment at being little more than Sovietized “banana republics.” In Uzbekistan, for example, whose main contribution to all-Union prosperity, according to Gosplan, was to be cotton, Prime Minister F. Khodzhaev and first party secretary A. Ikramov drew up alternative plans for economic development, grumbling that “you cannot eat cotton.” In 1937 they were both arrested and executed for trying to detach Uzbekistan from the Soviet Union and make it a British protectorate.[2725]Before and during World War II, even more brutal methods were deployed in the attempt to ensure that there was no “fifth column.” The Poles and the Baltic nations suffered the loss of most of their elites. Smaller nationalities were deported en masse. In 1937 Koreans were moved away from anywhere near the far eastern border after the Japanese invaded Manchuria. Volga Germans were deported after the outbreak of war with Germany. In 1944 several north Caucasus peoples were deported on suspicion of having collaborated with the Germans. In each case, at their destination in Siberia or Central Asia, those nationalities lost their right to publish in their own language or have their children educated in it. This was attempted genocide.[2726]
In this way, official policy simultaneously stimulated and suppressed national consciousness: an explosive mixture which helps to explain the speed with which the Soviet Union ultimately fell apart.
Besides, the policy created special difficulties for Russians. They constituted roughly half the population, and they were in many ways the backbone of the Soviet Union. The new state inherited most of the territory and the peoples of the former Russian Empire, and its principal language and dominant culture were Russian. When Soviet publishers issued a “History of the USSR,” the earlier chapters were devoted, without further explanation, to the history of Russia.
Yet in some ways, as we have seen, the Soviet Union was an anti-Russian project. Lenin frequently proclaimed his contempt for “Great Russian chauvinism,” as though the Russian people and the Russian Empire could simply be equated. During the 1920s the policy of korenizatsiia explicitly, and with considerable success, set out to raise the status of the non-Russian peoples.
In the People's Commissariat of Nationalities, set up to mediate in ethnic conflicts, Russians were not represented. Their own republic, the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic (RSFSR), was by far the largest Union Republic, containing roughly half the population and three-quarters of the territory of the USSR. It was not a Russian homeland, though, but rather a territorial residue, what was left over after all the various non-Russian Union Republics had been carved out. Not infrequently, moreover, a territory named after a non-Russian ethnos actually contained a majority of Russians, or at least Slavs (usually perceived locally as Russians). This was the case, for example, in the Autonomous Republics of Mordovia, Karelia,and Buriatiia, all inside the RSFSR.[2727]
Besides, Russians often had superior professional, administrative, or technical skills and resented being turned away while employment was offered to less well- qualified local personnel. In 1928, during the building of the Turksib Railway from Siberia to Central Asia, crowds of unemployed and indignant Russians went on the rampage in the labor exchange of Sergiupol, beating up all the Kazakhs they could lay hands on, then marched through the town and sacked Communist Party buildings.[2728]
The RSFSR was the puny giant of the Soviet Union.
It lacked its own capital city, Academy of Sciences, radio and television stations, and, most important of all, its own Communist Party. When it came to bargaining over economic resources in the Central Committee, the Ukrainians, Armenians, Uzbeks, etc., all had their own spokesmen to advance the claims of their republics; the Russians had none. One might argue that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was their patron: Russians and Slavs in general were over-represented in its Central Committee. All the same, it did not give them a distinct voice. When a Communist Party of Russia was at last created in 1990, it was a sign that the USSR was on its way to disintegration.Resentment was especially strong among Russians in Ukraine, where in the 1920s nearly all schooling was in Ukrainian—a language which Russians tended to look down on as a mere local variant of their own. Russian and Jewish parents took grave exception to having to send their children to be educated in what they regarded as a farmyard dialect. Even many Ukrainians normally used Russian for secondary and higher education and, like the future defector, Viktor Kravchenko, “referred to Russian textbooks on the sly and in private made fun of the opera bouffe nationalism.”[2729]
Stalin moderated the anti-Russian asperities of these policies and linked the Soviet Union more explicitly to the heritage of the Tsars. In 1936 the party newspaper Pravda proclaimed, “In the constellation of union republics, the RSFSR is the largest. And the Russian people are the first among equals.”[2730] The following year, at a celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the revolution, Stalin made a speech praising the Tsars for creating a great state. “We have inherited that state. And for the first time we, as Bolsheviks, have consolidated and strengthened it as a united and indivisible state, not in the interests of landowners and capitalists, but for the benefit of the workers and of all the peoples who make up that state.” Whoever attempted to undermine that state or to detach any part of it was, he warned, “a sworn enemy of the state and the peoples of the USSR.”[2731]
For Russians the implication of this view was that Russians were a great people— but above all as the raw material of empire, as a human reservoir to be exploited by the state. Stalin's actual policies made that very clear. Far from favoring Russian ethnic or cultural traditions, he did his best to weaken them. He suppressed the best of Russian literature, art, and music. He undermined the traditional Russian peasant community, replacing it with an exploitative caricature, the collective farm (kolkhoz). He did his best to destroy the Orthodox Church, and only halted his campaign on the outbreak of war, when he needed to encourage Russian patriotic sentiment. Stalin's favoring of Russians was instrumental: they were tools of empire, not a self-determining nation.