The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism

Slavic Review ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 414-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuri Slezkine
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Conceptual Foundation ◽  
Nationality Policy ◽  
Socialist State ◽  
Successful Attempt ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet Nationality Policy

Soviet nationality policy was devised and carried out by nationalists. Lenin's acceptance of the reality of nations and "national rights" was one of the most uncompromising positions he ever took, his theory of good ("oppressed-nation") nationalism formed the conceptual foundation of the Soviet Union and his NEP-time policy of compensatory "nation-building" (natsional'noe stroitel'stvo) was a spectacularly successful attempt at a state-sponsored conflation of language, "culture," territory and quota-fed bureaucracy.

scholarly journals Cultural Diversity and the Interwar Conjuncture: Soviet Nationality Policy in Its Comparative Context

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-46
Author(s):  
Peter A. Blitstein
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Nationality Policy ◽  
Soviet Policy ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
New States ◽  
Soviet Nationality Policy

Soviet nationality policy was one of several political responses to cultural diversity in the interwar period. The author situates that policy in its comparative context, contrasting the Soviet Union to its eastern European neighbors and to British and French rule in Africa. Contrary to the nationalizing policies of the new states of eastern Europe, which sought national unity at the expense of ethnic minorities, Soviet nationality policy was initially based on practices of diff erentiation. Contrary to the colonial policies of Britain and France, which were based on ethnic and racial diff erentiation, Soviet policy sought to integrate all peoples into one state. In the mid-to-late 1930s, however, Soviet policy took a nationalizing turn similar to its neighbors in eastern Europe, without completely abandoning policies of ethnic diff erentiation. We should thus understand the Soviet approach as a unique hybrid of contradictory practices of nationalization and diff erentiation.

Cultural Diversity and the Interwar Conjuncture: Soviet Nationality Policy in Its Comparative Context

Slavic Review ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter A. Blitstein
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Nationality Policy ◽  
Soviet Policy ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
New States ◽  
Soviet Nationality Policy

Soviet nationality policy was one of several political responses to cultural diversity in the interwar period. Peter A. Blitstein situates that policy in its comparative context, contrasting the Soviet Union to its eastern European neighbors and to British and French rule in Africa. Contrary to the nationalizing policies of the new states of eastern Europe, which sought national unity at the expense of ethnic minorities, Soviet nationality policy was initially based on practices of differentiation. Contrary to the colonial policies of Britain and France, which were based on ethnic and racial differentiation, Soviet policy sought to integrate all peoples into one state. In the mid-to-late 1930s, however, Soviet policy took a nationalizing turn similar to its neighbors in eastern Europe, without completely abandoning policies of ethnic differentiation. We should thus understand the Soviet approach as a unique hybrid of contradictory practices of nationalization and differentiation

“Socialist in content, national in form:” the making of Soviet national art and the case of Buryatia

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 393-409 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Tagangaeva
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
Institutional Practices ◽  
Nationality Policy ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
Cultural Divide ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Scientific Institutions ◽  
Soviet Nationality Policy

This article examines the fine art of the Soviet national republics and its discourse in the Soviet Union, which were considerably shaped under the influence of socialist realism and Soviet nationality policy. While examining the central categories of Soviet artistic discourse such as the “national form,” “national distinctness,” and “tradition,” as well as cultural and scientific institutions responsible for the image of art of non-Russian nationalities, the author reveals the existence of a number of colonial features and discursive and institutional practices that foster a cultural divide between Russian and non-Russian culture and contribute to the marginalization of art. Special attention is paid to the implications of this discursive shaping for the local artistic scene in Buryatia.

scholarly journals Nomads under arrest: The nation-building and nation-destroying of Kalmyk nomads in Russia

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 375-385
Author(s):  
Saglar Bougdaeva ◽  
Rico Isaacs
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Hierarchical Model ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Narrative Construction ◽  
Dalai Lama ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
National Imagination ◽  
Cultural Strategies ◽  
National Imaginary ◽  
Intellectual Milieu

Nomads are positioned outside of the modern conception of nations, which is based on a traditional or modern hierarchical model (Kuzio, 2001) which tends to “dehistoricize and essentialize tradition” (Chatterjee, 2010: 169). Using an analysis of the narrative construction of nomadic Kalmyk nationhood, particularly through historiography and culture, this article demonstrates that in spite of nation-destroying efforts from the Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union, the Kalmyk nation has been flexible with reinventing cultural strategies in charting the nomadic national imaginary from Chinggis Khan to the Dalai Lama. It argues that nomadic nationhood contains a deeply imaginary response to nomads’ cultural and intellectual milieu which provided a way of freeing itself from Tsarist and Soviet modular narratives of national imagination, demonstrating how nomadic nationhood exists as a non-modular form of nationhood.

Kto Kovo? Tribes and jihad in Pushtun Lands

2018 ◽  
pp. 33-58
Author(s):  
Mike Martin
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Interview Data ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
The Relationship

Based on interview data from Helmand Province, Afghanistan, this chapter explores the relationship between tribalism and jihadism from 1978-2015. The authors argue that local actors, predominantly tribal, have taken on the mantles of different jihadi organizations in order to gain funding as a way of increasing their leverage in local conflicts with other actors. This relationship holds true in Helmand through the ‘jihad’ against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the civil war, the Taliban era, and the post-2001 US-led nation-building period. The author concludes that jihadi organizations, or other external organizations, need to understand and work with tribal dynamics in order to achieve their aims in tribal territories.

scholarly journals Programming the USSR: Leonid V. Kantorovich in context

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-278
Author(s):  
IVAN BOLDYREV ◽  
TILL DÜPPE
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Distinct Form ◽  
Soviet System ◽  
Economic Prosperity ◽  
Socialist State ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Academic Politics ◽  
Academy Of Sciences

AbstractIn the wake of Stalin's death, many Soviet scientists saw the opportunity to promote their methods as tools for the engineering of economic prosperity in the socialist state. The mathematician Leonid Kantorovich (1912–1986) was a key activist in academic politics that led to the increasing acceptance of what emerged as a new scientific persona in the Soviet Union. Rather than thinking of his work in terms of success or failure, we propose to see his career as exemplifying a distinct form of scholarship, as a partisan technocrat, characteristic of the Soviet system of knowledge production. Confronting the class of orthodox economists, many factors were at work, including Kantorovich's cautious character and his allies in the Academy of Sciences. Drawing on archival and oral sources, we demonstrate how Kantorovich, throughout his career, negotiated the relations between mathematics and economics, reinterpreted political and ideological frames, and reshaped the balance of power in the Soviet academic landscape.

The Soviet Union

2021 ◽  
pp. 1187-1216
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Hosking
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Federal State ◽  
Nationality Policy ◽  
Security Services ◽  
Main Form ◽  
The Soviet Union

The USSR was a unique empire in the universality of its claims and its aim of complete equality between nationalities. Its strengths and weaknesses were indissolubly connected. It was formally a federal state, with extensive rights given to constituent nationalities; in practice it was tightly centralized through Gosplan, the armed forces, the security services, and the Communist Party, with its messianic ideology. The USSR’s tight centralization ensured that in wartime it could mobilize social energy to an unprecedented extent, but also that in peacetime localized patronage became the main form of social cohesion. The economy was so rigidly planned as to discourage innovation, which meant that the USSR could not maintain its superpower status. Its nationality policy both encouraged ethnic feeling and repressed it. The final collapse was precipitated by the clash between the largest republic, Russia, and the Soviet Union as a whole.

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