National delimitation in the Soviet Union

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National delimitation (or nation-building) in the Soviet Union refers to the process of creating well-defined nations from the ethnic diversity of the Soviet Union and the corresponding autonomous regions (republics, oblasts, etc.)[1] The official Russian term was natsionalnoye stroitelstvo (Russian: национальное строительство, which literally means "nation-building").

Unlike most European countries, the Soviet Union was not a nation-state, nor was the Soviet leadership committed to turning their country into it.[2] In the early Soviet period, even voluntary assimilation was actively discouraged, and the promotion of the national self-consciousness of the non-Russian populations was attempted. Each officially recognized ethnic minority, however small, was granted its own national territories enjoying a certain degree of autonomy, schools, elites and often a written national language, if it was lacking, language planning and native-language press. The attitudes towards many ethnic minorities changed dramatically in the 1930s-1940s under the leadership of Joseph Stalin with the advent of a repressive policy featuring abolition of the national institutions, ethnic deportations, national terror, and russification (mostly towards those with cross-border ethnic ties to foreign nation-states in the 1930s or compromised in the view of Stalin during the Great Patriotic War in the 1940s), although nation-building often continued simultaneously for others.[3]

After the establishment of the Soviet Union within the boundaries of the former Russian Empire, the Bolsheviks, began the process of “national delimitation” or nation building, which lasted from 1922 until 1936[citation needed]. The project attempted to build nations out of the various ethnic groups. Defining a nation or politically-conscious ethnic group was in itself a politically-charged issue in the Soviet Union. In 1913, Joseph Stalin, in his work Marxism and the National Question, which had become the cornerstone of the Soviet policy towards nationalities, defined a 'nation' as a ”historically developed stable community with a common language, territory, economic life and psychological makeup manifested in a community of culture.”[citation needed] Many of the subject nations or communities in the Russian Empire did not fully meet these criteria. Not only cultural, linguistic, religious and tribal diversities made the process difficult but also the lack of a political consciousness of ethnicity among the people was a major obstacle to this process.

Besides national republics and oblasts, several hundred national districts (population 10,000-50,000) and several thousand national townships (population 500-5,000) were established. In some cases this policy required voluntary or forced resettlement in both directions to create a compact population. Ethnic left immigration and return of non-Russian émigrés to the Soviet Union during the New Economic Policy, albeit perceived as an easy cover for espionage, were not discouraged and proceeded quite actively, contributing to nation-building.[3]

Soviet fear of foreign influence was given momentum by sporadic ethnic guerilla uprisings along the entire Soviet frontier throughout the 1920s. The Soviet government was particularly concerned about the loyalty of the Finnish, Polish, and German populations. However, in July 1925 the Soviet authorities felt secure enough and in order to project Soviet influence outwards, exploiting cross-border ethnic ties, granted national minorities in the border regions with more privileges and national rights than those in the central regions.[3]

However, in the 1920s a massive influx of poor Korean peasantry in the Russian Far East, dispersed among Russians and at some places representing about a quarter of the local rural population, created ethnic tensions and could form a basis for territorial claims by Imperial Japan. After long debates, in 1925 the Soviet government, which felt politically and militarily weak in the Far East, rejected the possibility of a Korean national republic, although smaller Korean national territories and cultural institutions were established. Already in December 1926 the government started secret preparations to resettle Koreans further to the north. The first forced transfer of Korean immigrants to the north, except for those who were explicitly proven loyal, began in 1930 and is sometimes considered the first Soviet ethnic cleansing, although took on a small scale and was delayed further until 1937 out of the fear that Japan would make it casus belli.[3]

The policy of national delimitation was implemented especially successfully in the Ukrainian SSR, which at first indeed succeeded in attracting the population of Polish Kresy. However, some Ukrainian communists claimed neighboring regions even from the Russian SFSR.[3]

With the grain requisition crises, famines, troubled economic conditions, international destabilization and the reversal of the immigration flow in the early 1930s, the Soviet Union became increasingly worried about a possible disloyalty of diaspora ethnic groups with cross-border ties (especially Finns, Germans and Poles), residing along its western borders, which eventually led to the start of Stalin's repressive policy towards them.[3]

Each adult citizen's ethnicity (Russian: национальность) was necessarliy recorded in his passport after the introduction of the passport system in the Soviet Union in 1932 and was determined by his choice between his parents' ethnicities (practice that didn't exist in Imperial Russia and is abolished in the Russian Federation).

However, the important question is: why did the communist rulers of the USSR need to create a national consciousness among people, given that it is generally used by the bourgeoisie to curtail the class struggle? The reason lies in both the pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary policies of the Bolshevik Party. Before the revolution, Vladimir Lenin used demands for national autonomy by the non-Russian communities as a tool for gaining power against the tsarist regime; he promised autonomy to these communities, even the right to secede. After the revolution, reifying national identities was seen as a solution for local administrative problems.[citation needed] Sovietization was the ultimate goal behind the nation-building process. In local administrative units, the “rulers” needed to be natives in order to make the non-Russian populations feel that they had been granted national self-determination, and this was accomplished via the politics dubbed korenization ("indigenization"). Autonomous states like Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, etc... had their own ruling communist parties and native elites, although they were actually under the explicit control of the overall Communist Party of the Soviet Union. There was also another aspect of this project: it was not aimed at the differentiation of nations but at unifying them over time. The implicit assumption was that after a short (10-20 year) period, bourgeois nationalism would be abandoned and support for a worker-state would follow. The Bolsheviks' aim was not a loose federation but a completely unified modern socialist state.

The Bolsheviks’ plan was to identify the total sum of all national, cultural, linguistic, and territorial diversities under their rule and establish scientific criteria to identify which groups of people were entitled to the description of 'nation'. This task relied on the existing work of tsarist-era ethnographers and statisticians, as well as new research conducted under Soviet auspices. Because most people did not know what is meant by a nation, some of them simply gave names when asked about ethnicity. Many groups were thought to be biologically similar, but culturally distinct. In Central Asia, many identified their "nation" as "Muslim." In other cases, geography made the difference, or even whether one lived in a town versus the countryside. Principally, however, dialects or languages formed the basis for distinguishing between various nations. The results were often contradictory and confusing. More than 150 nations were counted in Central Asia alone. Some were quickly subordinated to others, with communities which had hitherto been counted as "nations" now deemed to be simply tribes. As a result, the number of nations shrunk over the decades.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Тархов, Сергей. Изменение административно-территориального деления России в XII-XX в.
  2. ^ Slezkine, Yuri (1994). The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism. Slavic Review 53 (2), 414-52.
  3. ^ a b c d e f Martin, Terry (1998). The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing. The Journal of Modern History 70 (4), 813-861.

[edit] Further reading