Nationalities Become Nations

Once mass terror eased, the first secretaries of non-Russian republics had impres­sive powers of patronage. Under Brezhnev’s slogan of “stability of cadres,” they tac­itly authorized their own ethnically based nomenklatura networks to dominate the educational system, the media, culture, and in some respects the economy, too.

In the later decades of the Soviet Union, ethnic identity, recorded on everyone’s passport, became a more important marker than social class. Russians gradually became aware that in the non-Russian republics they no longer automatically re­ceived preference in the allocation of jobs, housing, or higher education for their children. The “fusion” (sliianie) of nationalities slowed, then halted, then began to go into reverse, as more and more citizens retreated to their titular republics.^[2761]

The contradictions of nationality policy were graphically exemplified in Ukraine, which was the key non-Russian republic, partly because of its size, and partly be­cause most Russians regarded it (along with Belorussia) as essentially part of Russia. Up to the 1920s the majority of the rural population was Ukrainian. The smaller towns were both Ukrainian and Jewish, while in the larger towns there was some class stratification: the masses were Ukrainian and Jewish, while the elites tended to be Russian, Polish, or German. There seemed little likelihood of a Ukrainian na­tion emerging, with its own urban elites. During the 1930s, however, a transfor­mation began, as younger Ukrainian peasants received primary education in their own language and then moved into the towns to find employment in the enterprises of the Five Year Plans.

The sense of a discrete national identity developed in different ways in different ethnic regions. In those republics which had suffered most during the annexations and deportations of the 1940s—the Baltic republics, Western Ukraine, the North Caucasus—popular sentiment was always bitterly anti-Russian, anti-Soviet, and anti-Communist. The Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians looked back to their experience of national independence and constitutional government before 1940. They regarded the Sovietization of their countries as a foreign occupation and the subsequent influx of Russians as an alien and unwelcome intrusion. They discreetly cultivated their own history and culture, and their ties with other north European countries. West Ukrainians looked to their underground Uniate Church, a product of the Polish period of their history, as a repository of their distinctive national values. Khrushchev gave Chechens and other north Caucasian Muslim peoples the theoretical right to return to their homelands, but in practice officials did every­thing possible to obstruct that return, and in any case those who attempted it found immigrant Russians living in their former homes.

In the Transcaucasus, small nations which had long led a jeopardized exist­ence on the fringes of others' empires now seized the chance to promote their own cultures. They also exploited the economic resources of their region to mit­igate the asperities of the Soviet economy, allocating the benefits through ethnic networks. The shadow economies sponsored by the local Communist Party became too brazen even for the lenient Brezhnev leadership. In 1969 the Azerbaijani first secretary was dismissed and replaced with the republic’s KGB head, instructed to root out nepotism and corruption. In 1972 the same happened in Georgia.^[2764]

In Central Asia there was no pre-Soviet national existence to celebrate. The no­menklatura system had, however, discreetly revived traditional tribal networks in reconfigured form. During the Brezhnev period, local elites, well educated as a re­sult of korenizatsiia, began to emphasize in articles, books, and radio broadcasts the Persian, Arabic, and Turkic roots of their culture, implying that Russians were latecomers to their homeland. The political leaders, especially in Uzbekistan, played a double game with Moscow, encouraging local underground enterprises to diver­sify the economy, while also obtaining generous Gosplan funding for their cotton fields. Much of this found its way into the pockets of party-state apparatchiks, from where it filtered out into the broader economy. The cotton monoculture thus promoted proved to have disastrous effects. The plantations required massive ir­rigation, for which purpose most of the waters of the Amu-Darya and Syr-Darya rivers were drawn off. The Aral Sea, one of the largest inland seas in the world, denied most of its feeder flow, shrank catastrophically: by 1987 it was reported to have lost 66 percent of its original volume. Its former shores became salty deserts, polluting cultivable land for hundreds of square miles around, while the summer temperatures rose and high winds removed much of the topsoil. Disease and mor­tality increased markedly, especially among young children.^[2765] The worst fears of Khodzhaev and Ikramov had been exceeded. In the long run, nationalist and ec­ological sentiment coincided in the belief that the Soviet Union was damaging to their ideals.