Viewpoint: No. The Soviets essentially reconstructed the tsarist empire and imposed de facto Great Russian rule.' >
Viewpoint: No. The Soviets essentially reconstructed the tsarist empire and imposed de facto Great Russian rule.' >
Viewpoint: No. The Soviets essentially reconstructed the tsarist empire and imposed de facto Great Russian rule.'>
Viewpoint: No. The Soviets essentially reconstructed the tsarist empire and imposed de facto Great Russian rule.' />
Viewpoint: No. The Soviets essentially reconstructed the tsarist empire and imposed de facto Great Russian rule.' />
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Порталус

Soviet Nationalities Policy

Дата публикации: 20 сентября 2007
Публикатор: Научная библиотека Порталус
Рубрика: RUSSIA (TOPICS) DEMOGRAPHICS →
Источник: (c) http://russia.by
Номер публикации: №1190296703


The Soviet Union inherited the Russian Empire's multiethnic character. Composing just over half the population, ethnic Russians shared the world's first socialist state with more than 100 minorities, some numbering in the millions, and others numbering in the low thousands. Some, such as the Poles, were Westernized and urbanized. Others, such as the peoples of the Caucasus and Siberia, lived in small villages and tribal-based societies. Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Jews all inhabited Russia and had needs that presented challenges to any state.
This chapter evaluates the Soviet nationalities policy. Following on Terry Martin's recent book, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (2001), the first essay argues that the Bolshevik regime was by and large an improvement for minorities. Cultural and linguistic rights were affirmed at levels undreamed of under the tsars, while minorities could expect recruitment into the Communist Party and the organs of state, that is, into the ruling elite, which had previously been almost monolithically Russian.
An older and opposing argument holds, however, that changes in nationalities policy were superficial. In the end the political, social, and cultural lives of the peoples of the Soviet Union were dominated by a mostly ethnic Russian Communist Party and bureaucracy. Religious rights, often a major feature defining nationalities, were nonexistent. Resistance from members of certain nationalities was punished with punitive expeditions, genocidal campaigns, deportations, and other forms of collective sanction. Minorities advocating autonomy or independence in anything more than the most literal sense permitted by the state usually disappeared. Nationalities policy in the U.S.S.R., in other words, was hardly fair or balanced.



Viewpoint: Yes. The Soviets largely fulfilled Lenin's promises of national autonomy and nondiscrimination.

One of the basic ideological premises of the Soviet communists was that nationalism had been a tool of the capitalist imperialist classes, used to create and then exploit artificial tensions between the workers of different states, and thus prevent them from seeing their natural interests in bonding together against the exploiting class. World War I seemed to prove beyond a doubt the inability of only lukewarm disciples of Karl Marx to read the master's works: when it came time to vote for war credits, the German socialists lined up dutifully behind the kaiser, and no significant opposition was heard from organized labor in Britain, France, the United States, or even Russia in the early years of war. Even when the utter devastation of modern warfare became clear to all, communist, anarchist, and radical socialist agitators who questioned the governments' lines were likely to face not only state persecution for treasonable activities, but also ostracism from workers themselves. The success of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 offered an opportunity to try to erase the detrimental uses to which ethnic nationalism had been put in the past, while still allowing for the celebration of cultural differences. And although changes in policy occurred as time went on, Soviet nationalities policy can be said to be largely fair, fulfilling reasonable demands for autonomy and working toward the elimination of discrimination.

The Russian Empire was a multiethnic empire. Although dominated by Great Russians, the number of nationalities that fell under the tsar's protection was staggering by today's standards. The Russian Empire included well over one hundred distinct nationalities speaking more than 150 languages and dialects. The Soviet state inherited all the headaches of the empire: wars that had bubbled in the Caucasus for decades; disgruntled Central Asian populations that had risen against the tsar as recently as 1916; separatist Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Baltic nationalism in the country's western borderlands; restive indigenous populations in the Far East; and so on. The collapse of tsarist authority in 1917 had only reinforced tendencies toward autonomy and independence among the empire's minority nationalities.

In keeping with the principle of pure equality among the workers of the world, the Bolshevik leaders adopted a policy, articulated by no less a personage than Vladimir Lenin himself, of complete equality of all ethnicities and languages within the new state. Although as a matter of practicality Russian was to be used as a lingua franca, the idea that the average citizen of the state had the right to work and be educated about his responsibilities to the revolution in his own language was considered fundamental. Under Lenin's leadership the Soviet state reversed the Russian Empire's oppressive cultural and linguistic policies and opened education, literary culture, local administration, and media to local languages in the place of Russian.

The failure of the revolution to make headway against nationalist tendencies outside of Russia was first demonstrated by the inability of Russian soldiers to infect their German foes with awareness of the shortsightedness of their officers' exhortations, and the red tide of revolution failed to move westward. The Russian Civil War (1917-1921) and the Soviet-Polish War (1920-1921) naturally meant that the situation was too unstable for the Bolsheviks to develop an effective policy, but it is a sign of their dedication to Lenin's vision of a discrimination-free workers' paradise that these events did not prevent the creation of a system of staggered autonomy that attempted to balance the needs of the state with the rights of the nationalities.

The creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself was, at least on paper, a case in point. The union's fifteen constituent republics were officially independent states that had voluntarily entered the Soviet Union, and could theoretically withdraw from the arrangement, an action they all took in 1991. In Soviet times they were largely left alone to deal with educational and cultural matters. There were also, however, autonomous republics within these (sixteen of which were located in the Russian republic alone), which maintained significant economic and cultural rights. One need only look to the Muslim character of Tatarstan within contemporary Russia, as well as the ability of the region to control oil revenues, to see that the foundations laid in the 1920s did not crumble along with communism. Eight autonomous districts and ten autonomous subdistricts were created in recognition of their populations' ethnic and cultural differences from the usually Russian majority surrounding them but were more limited in scope to local cultural preservation measures. For the most part, these units provided a structural framework that ensured at the very least that consideration of national differences in the new workers' state would be taken into account in the creation of policy. Major universities and institutes, both in the historic capitals of Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and provincial cities, all reflected the regime's commitment to the preservation of cultural identity, with the creation of specialized study centers, museums, and linguistics departments to preserve and promote ethnic harmony.

The main claims against the assertion that the Soviet Union promoted national reconciliation in a meaningful way usually center around the activities of Josef Stalin, who had been commissar of nationalities before rising to become general secretary of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union's unchallenged leader. The most common examples of ethnic injustice are the Ukrainian famine, and the resettlement and persecution of whole ethnic groups during World War II. It is debatable, however, whether the famine specifically targeted the Ukrainians because they were Ukrainians. Many have argued that Stalin's agricultural policies, however murderously misguided, were aimed more at "kulaks," an elastically defined group of potential opponents among the peasantry, than at an ethnic group. His motivation in allowing the famine in the Ukraine to occur was to fight forces of opposition to his economic plans.

Claims of wartime persecution of various ethnic minorities are also easy to place in context without in any way underemphasizing the misery and horrors suffered by the affected groups. Ultimately, in wartime, countries round up innocents to protect against potential fifth columnists. American citizens of Japanese origin, children among them, were sent to internment camps during the same time, for similar reasons, only in their case it was their Japanese roots that provided the pretext for the assault on their rights. Likewise, Britain and France interned German and Austrian citizens upon the outbreak of World War II even though many of them were ethnic, political, or religious refugees from the Nazi regime. One cannot compare the practical manifestation of the Soviet approach to what happened in these countries, where most of those interned survived, but the principle remains the same: an ethnic group was identified as a potential threat to national security, and its individual members were made to suffer for it. These wartime decisions were aberrations, and not reflective of peacetime policies.

The Soviet Union was not a workers' paradise. It was a dictatorship in which millions were killed or suffered horribly. This cannot and should never be forgotten. Simply castigating everything done there as misguided, however, is an oversimplification made possible only by post-Cold War arrogance. In creating a system of autonomy for ethnic and national divergences, in instituting procedural changes to the study of these groups for their cultural and linguistic preservation at every level, it is clear that the Soviet nationalities policy, while not perfect, was in fact reasonably successful in promoting diversity.

-- Vasilis Vourkoutiotis, University of Ottawa


Viewpoint: No. The Soviets essentially reconstructed the tsarist empire and imposed de facto Great Russian rule.

When the Soviet state emerged from civil war as the successor state of the Russian Empire, it seemed as if the era of ethnic Great Russian rule had come to an end. Soviet leaders promoted a new system of national republics that differed greatly from the imperial model, in which a Russian core governed a largely non-Russian periphery that had been conquered. Under the new system non-Russian regions voluntarily joined the Russian core in a "federation of sovereign and equal states." While on paper the Soviet Union's nationalities policy may have been fair and balanced, in practice it promised one thing and delivered another, giving it more continuity with tsarist Russia than change. Despite its rhetoric of equality, the Soviet government continued tsarist Russia's practice of unequal treatment of minorities, with the core of ethnic Russians ruling over the non-Russian periphery, and with many of the other nations and nationalities, numbering more than a hundred, relegated to a lesser status. The Soviet Union was simply the old tsarist empire given new life by communist ideology.

The Russian Empire treated its minorities unequally while trying to keep its large and diverse empire intact. As it expanded, the Russian Empire faced a strategic problem; it had to govern non-Orthodox Christian and non-Russian-speaking populations. The Russian response was to grant non-Russian populations limited autonomy and to try to assimilate them. Alexander III, whom some scholars call the first nationalist tsar, marked a specific change in the Russian Empire's nationalities policy. Whereas previous tsars had used Russification in selected areas for specific purposes, such as in Ukraine to suppress emerging nationalism and in Poland after the rebellions of 1830-1831 and 1863, Alexander III made Russification a general policy. During his reign, Russification extended to the Georgians and Armenians and even to the Finns, who had been loyal to the Russians. Alexander III also put increased religious pressure on non-Orthodox peoples. His government maintained restrictions on where Jews, considered a nationality in Russia, could live, established discriminatory quotas against Jewish students in institutions of higher learning, encouraged Jewish emigration, and turned a blind eye to deadly pogroms against their communities. Under Nicholas II, Alexander III's son, religious persecution continued, with Jews' rights further restricted as they were forbidden to acquire real estate (except in the "Jewish Pale"), pogroms continued, land and funds of the Armenian church were confiscated, and other non-Orthodox denominations were harassed. These are but a few of the many injustices committed against the Russian Empire's minority nationalities.

Officially, one big difference between the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union was the claim that the Soviet Union was a "federation of sovereign and equal states." Proponents of the true equality of the nationalities argue that fifteen national republics made up the Soviet Union and that this was more autonomy than nationalities had during the Russian Empire. They fail to consider that the boundaries of many republics and autonomous regions did not coincide with the ethnic populations that they were meant to represent or that the republics diluted the power of specific ethnic groups by dividing their populations or merging them with other rival ethnic groups. Perhaps the best two examples are the cases of the Chechen-Ingush autonomous republic and the Karachay-Cherkess autonomous oblast (formed in 1956). Josef Stalin's deportation of nationalities to other regions of the Soviet Union exacerbated the impact of these policies. Outside of some local cultural policies, the republics were not truly sovereign; this was a sham to try to keep the newly reconstituted Soviet empire whole. Installing local leaders loyal to the central government and Communist Party perpetuated the guise. All important decisions and policies were handed down from Moscow, leaving the local governments with no political or economic independence, autonomy, or, in most cases, initiative. Moscow directly controlled matters as important as economic plans, education, resource distribution, and political policy. Yet, even the cultural autonomy was not real. After Great Russian nationalism began to be more accepted in the Soviet Union, the central government in Moscow said that Great Russians and the Russian language were the binding element of the diverse country, thereby elevating the Russians above the Soviet Union's other nationalities. In order to keep the Soviet Union unified, during World War II and the postwar period, many peoples of the Soviet Union were forced to change their languages' alphabets from Latin or Arabic to Cyrillic. At the same time, to further the effort to make a Soviet man, the Russian language began to be reemphasized in schools. These language policies marked a deterioration of the non-Russians' cultural autonomy, since indigenous languages had previously been used in education and other public spaces.

The first indication that the Soviet Union was not a "federation of sovereign and equal states" as it claimed to be, was the manner by which many of its national republics were incorporated into the Soviet Union. The incorporation of Georgia into Soviet Russia in 1921 was especially brutal, a direct military conquest undertaken by the Red Army after Moscow had signed a treaty guaranteeing Georgia's sovereignty. A year earlier the Red Army had attempted to conquer Poland, which had recovered its independence from the Russian, German, and Austrian Empires. Conquest was also the only means of installing Soviet rule in the Ukraine, Central Asia, and other parts of the Caucasus. In 1939 eastern Poland was incorporated into the Soviet Union as part of a secret agreement with Nazi Germany; in 1940 the same agreement allowed the Soviets to annex the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, while independent Soviet initiative reasserted control of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, territories that had become part of Romania after World War I. These regions were fully communized; thousands were killed; their upper and middle classes disappeared; their native institutions were completely abolished; and huge numbers of Russian colonists settled in them.

The practice of deporting and executing nationalities occurred in other areas and underscored that the Soviet government did not trust many non-Russian nationalities and did not treat them in the same way as the Russians were treated. In the 1930s and 1940s the Soviet government deported seven entire ethnic groups, whom Aleksandr Nekrich named the "punished peoples," from their homelands to Central Asia and Siberia. Deportees, including everyone from the designated nationality--even the elderly, sick, disabled, women, and those fighting for the Soviet Union in World War II--were surrounded by NKVD (the KGB forerunner) troops and given little time to gather their belongings. They were taken to waiting railroad cars where they were transported to remote parts of Central Asia, taken off of the trains, and left to survive on their own. Large numbers, in some cases as many as half, died during the trip, and even more died of hunger or disease after their deportation.

The rationale, in the cases in which one was given, for the relocation of the punished peoples was that the particular nationalities targeted had betrayed the Soviet Union during World War II and could not be trusted. Even if one could rationalize such a brutal policy, this justification is suspect since most of the punished peoples had loyally defended the Soviet Union and many of them had died defending their country during the German invasion. Furthermore, the deportations occurred after the Germans had already retreated from the areas in which the punished peoples lived, or had never even reached them in the first place. Instead, Stalin used fear and collective guilt to brand whole nationalities as collaborators for the crimes of the few (or none), even though other nationalities, including the Great Russians, also had collaborators but escaped punishment. In Stalin's eyes, pitting one nationality against others helped him sow fear throughout the Soviet Union, thereby discouraging people from devoting themselves to the Soviet cause with anything other than complete loyalty.

The hypocritical nature of the Soviet nationalities policy was underscored by the deportation of the punished peoples and the official reaction to it. In February 1956 Nikita Khrushchev gave a "secret" anti-Stalin speech, in which he exonerated five of the seven "punished peoples" and allowed them to return to their homelands. If the Soviet Union had been serious about the equality of its nationalities, later rulers would have allowed all of the nationalities of the punished peoples to return home, and provided a public apology and some compensation to the "punished peoples." Because of this inadequate reaction, to this day, many deportees and their descendants suffer from their deportation, and many of the nationalities have not been allowed to return to their ancestral homelands. For some, returning to their homelands would have been impossible since a number of autonomous republics were disbanded after World War II for sympathizing or helping the Germans and their populations were transported to the outlying periphery of the Soviet Union.

In addition to deporting non-Russian nationalities, the Soviet government also used man-made famines to punish certain nationalities. In 1932-1933, Stalin orchestrated the mass starvation of Ukrainians. He did this by setting their grain quotas far higher than was feasible, confiscating all of the food from the farmers, and then not allowing aid into Ukraine to help those starving. As millions of Ukrainians starved, armed and well-fed Soviet guards stood watch in fields to ensure that nobody stole any grain or other farm products, which were decreed state property. Penalties for stealing grain were extremely harsh; those guilty of committing crimes, even if they were starving, were to be shot or, in extenuating circumstances, imprisoned for at least ten years and their property confiscated. At the same time, Communist Party officials ate well. Villages that could not meet the unrealistic quotas were not allowed to receive city products, which sent the price of scarce food skyrocketing. Stalin's reaction to the famine was to pretend that it did not exist and allow millions of Ukrainians to starve to death.

That local and republic governments were powerless to stop devastating economic and political policies imposed on the periphery by the center, such as the Ukrainian famine and the deportation of the punished peoples, further strengthens the argument that the constituent republics of the Soviet Union were neither free nor sovereign states and were not treated equally. Despite Russians' dominant position in the Soviet Union, the Russian republic was in a paradoxical position. When Lenin conceptualized the Soviet Union, he worried that "Great Russian chauvinism" would threaten the unity of the country, so he put in place safeguards that he thought would hold Russian nationalism in check. On the one hand, Russians were the dominant national group in the U.S.S.R. and were disproportionately represented in party and state institutions. On the other hand, the Russian Republic within the U.S.S.R. was the only republic without a separate Communist party organization, a separate Academy of Sciences, and its own trade union council, Komsomol, or KGB.

The effects of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union's unfair nationalities policies exist well after the fall of Communism. In the periphery of the Soviet Union there has been a backlash against ethnic Russians, with a movement toward indigenous people in power. The backlash has been so big that several million ethnic Russians have left the fourteen non-Russian former republics for a better life elsewhere, with many returning to Russia, while those that remain face discrimination. Official policy toward other minorities is also discriminatory. For years, Russians with darker skin, such as Chechens, have faced increased and often violent scrutiny when trying to enter big cities and have been looked upon as terrorists. The ongoing discrimination in Russia against non-Orthodox religious communities is a legacy of the enormous gap between Soviet rhetoric and policy regarding minority populations.

While Soviet officials sought to distance themselves from their tsarist predecessors by proclaiming the equality of all Soviet citizens, their treatment of non-Russian populations differed little from that of previous Russian governments. Soviet authorities regularly killed, deported, and starved hundreds of thousands of non-Russians--often using tenuous arguments to justify their actions. These facts call into question any assertion that the Soviet nationalities policy was fair and balanced. Even Soviet historians recognized this fact: they rewrote Soviet history to show that the incorporation of the republics into the Soviet Union was a voluntary and positive experience for everyone. Today one has to ask: if the nationalities were treated so well by the Soviet Union, why did they insist on leaving the Soviet Union? Why are many in these nations strongly resisting Russian attempts to regain influence in the affairs of their newly independent states?

-- Kerry Foley, Georgetown University


DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLES OF RUSSIA BY THE COUNCIL OF THE PEOPLES' COMMISSARS

15 November 1917

The October Revolution of workers and peasants began under the common banner of emancipation.

The peasants are emancipated from landowner rule, for there is no landed proprietorship any longer--it has been abolished. The soldiers and sailors are emancipated from the power of autocratic generals, for generals will henceforth be elected and removable. The workers are emancipated from the whims and tyranny of capitalists, for workers' control over factories and mills will henceforth be established. All that is living and viable is emancipated from the hated bondage.

There remain only the peoples of Russia, who have been and are suffering from oppression and arbitrary rule, whose emancipation should be started immediately, and whose liberation should be conducted resolutely and irrevocably. . . .

This reprehensible policy of lie and distrust, petty persecution and provocation must be done away with. From now on it shall be replaced by an open and honest policy leading to the complete mutual confidence of the peoples of Russia.

Only this confidence can lead to a sincere and firm alliance of the peoples of Russia.

Only thanks to this alliance can the workers and peasants of the peoples of Russia be welded into a single revolutionary force capable of holding out against any encroachments on the part of the imperialist-annexationist bourgeoisie.

Proceeding from these premises, the First Congress of Soviets in June of this year proclaimed the right of the peoples of Russia to free self-determination.

In October of this year the Second Congress of Soviets reaffirmed this inalienable right of the peoples of Russia more resolutely and definitely.

Carrying out the will of these Congresses, the Council of People's Commissars has resolved to base its activity in the matter of the nationalities of Russia on the following principles:


1. EQUALITY AND SOVEREIGNTY OF THE PEOPLES OF RUSSIA.


2. THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLES OF RUSSIA TO FREE SELF-DETERMINATION, UP TO SECESSION AND FORMATION OF AN INDEPENDENT STATE.


3. ABOLITION OF ALL AND ANY NATIONAL AND NATIONAL-RELIGIOUS PRIVILEGES AND RESTRICTIONS.


4. FREE DEVELOPMENT OF NATIONAL MINORITIES AND ETHNIC GROUPS INHABITING RUSSIA.

Concrete decrees stemming herefrom will be worked out immediately after the establishment of the Commission for the Affairs of Nationalities.


In the name of the Russian Republic, People's Commissar for Nationalities Affairs, JOSEPH DZHUGASHVILI-STALIN.


Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, V. ULYANOV (LENIN).

Source: Martin McCauley, ed., The Russian Revolution and the Soviet State 1917-1921: Documents (London: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 191-193.

FURTHER READINGS


References


Edward Allworth, ed., Ethnic Russia in the USSR: The Dilemma of Dominance (New York: Pergamon, 1980).

Jeremy R. Azrael, ed., Soviet Nationality Policies and Practices (New York: Praeger, 1978).

Robert Conquest, ed., Soviet Nationalities Policy in Practice (New York: Praeger, 1967).

Human Rights Watch, "Punished Peoples" of the Soviet Union: The Continuing Legacy of Stalin's Deportations (New York: Human Rights Watch Report, 1991).

David M. Kotz and Fred Weir, Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System (New York: Routledge, 1977).

Anatol Lieven, The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001).

Nicholas Riasanovsky and Mark Steinberg, A History of Russia, seventh edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Gerhard Simon, Nationalism and Policy toward the Nationalities in the Soviet Union: From Totalitarian Dictatorship to Post-Stalinist Society (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991).

Опубликовано на Порталусе 20 сентября 2007 года

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