Soviet nation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Soviet nation (Russian: Советский народ[1]) was an ideological demonym and proposed ethnonym for the population of the Soviet Union. It first appeared in official usage in the 1970's.

Contents

[edit] History

Through the history of the Soviet Union, both doctrine and practice regarding ethnic distinctions within the Soviet population varied over time. Minority national cultures were not completely abolished in the Soviet Union. By Soviet definition, national cultures were to be "socialist by content and national by form", to be used to promote the official aims and values of the state.While the goal was always to cement the nationalities together in a common state structure, as a pragmatic step in the 1920's and early 1930's under the policy of korenizatsiya (indigenization) the leaders of the Communist Party promoted federalism and the strengthening of non-Russian languages and cultures (see national delimitation in the Soviet Union). By the late 1930's, however, policy shifted to more active promotion of Russian language and later still to more overt Russification efforts, which accelerated in the 1950's especially in areas of public education. Although some assimilation did occur, this effort did not succeed on the whole as evidenced by developments in many national cultures in the territory after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.[2]

Reinforcing the distinctions in national identities, the Soviet state maintained information about "nationality" on many administrative records, including school, work, and military records, as well as in the periodic censuses of population. The infamous "fifth record" (Russian: пятая графа, pyataya grafa) was the section of the obligatory internal passport document which stated the citizen's ethnicity (Russian: национальность, natsionalnost). In some cases, this official nationality served as a basis for discrimination.

[edit] Soviet "nation"

The new term "Soviet nation" (Советский народ) first appeared in official statements at the 24th Party Congress in 1971, and was later incorporated into the Soviet Constitution of 1977.[3] However, the concept of "Soviet nation" did not use the term that had heretofore been used for a "nation": natsiya (нация). Instead it used the word for a "people": narod (народ). Thus, it may be more appropriate to understand the new concept as "Soviet people" rather than as "Soviet nation."

This single all-Soviet entity – the Soviet people, Sovietskiy narod – was attributed many of the characteristics that official doctrine had formerly ascribed to nations (natsii – нации) and nationalities (natsionalnosti – национальности) composing the multi-national Soviet state. The "Soviet people" was said to be a new historical, social, and international community of people having a common territory, economy, and socialist essence; a culture that reflected the particularities of multiple nationalities; a federal state; and a common ultimate goal: the construction of communism.[4] This description echoed the well known definition of nation of Joseph Stalin, in his essay from 1913 entitled "Marxism and the National Question": "A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture."[5]

Although the word narod had an ethnic connotation, official doctrine had not yet reached the point that all prior Soviet nations and nationalities (Russians, Ukrainians, Estonians, Uzbeks, and so on) were to merge into a single all-Soviet nation (нация – natsiya). Even in the subsequent Soviet censuses of 1979 and 1989,[6] in which all Soviet residents were categorized by "nationality" (natsionalnost), none were classified as belonging to the "Soviet nation" or "Soviet nationality".[7] As a project, the construction of the "Soviet people" ended when the Soviet Union (the Soviet state) was dissolved in 1991.

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Ukrainian: Радянський народ; Belarusian: Савецкий народ; Kazakh: Совет халқы
  2. ^ Barbara A. Anderson and Brian D. Silver, "Some Factors in the Linguistic and Ethnic Russification of Soviet Nationalities: Is Everyone Becoming Russian?" in Lubomyr Hajda and Mark Beissinger, Eds., The Nationality Factor in Soviet Politics and Society (Boulder: Westview, 1990): 95-130.
  3. ^ Shtromas, A. (1978) The Legal Position of Soviet Nationalities and Their Territorial Units according to the 1977 Constitution of the USSR. Russian Review 37 (3), 265-272.
  4. ^ Советский народ – "Новая историческая, социальная и интернациональная общность людей, имеющих единую территорию, экономику, единую по социалистическому содержанию и многообразную по национальным особенностям культуру, федеративное государство и общую цель — построение коммунизма".
  5. ^ 1913: Marxism and the National Question
  6. ^ In the first all-union census of population of the USSR conducted in 1926, the operating concept for "nationality" was narodnost' (народность), perhaps best translated as an ethnic community or people. All later Soviet censuses, from 1937 to 1989, used the term natsionalnost (национальность). See Brian D. Silver, "“The Ethnic and Language Dimensions in Russian and Soviet Censuses,” in Ralph S. Clem, Ed., Research Guide to the Russian and Soviet Censuses (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986): 70-97.
  7. ^ "Nationality" in this context should be understood as an ethnic designation, and not as equivalent to the concept of citizenship. Although in many languages these two terms are conflated, in Russian a distinct word, grazhdanstvo (гражданство), stands for citizenship in a legal sense and is never confused with nationality in an ethnic sense. Thus, when people stated in the census that they were citizens of the Soviet Uniion, they were not declaring themselves to be members of a Soviet "nation" or "nationality."

[edit] See also