Finding the national in the communist: Soviet ethnic policies in the 1920s

A second teach of a topic can always help clarify thoughts, as can a good book.

This week, I finally returned to a part of our A-Level Russia/USSR course that has fascinated me, and had sparked considerable debate amongst our outgoing Year 13s – Soviet nationalities policy.

Brigid O’Keeffe’s fantastic recent book, The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise has helped clarify and challenge my thoughts over the past year. The book is aimed primarily at undergraduate students but gives a superb introduction to any teachers wanting more context and clarity on this topic. It builds on a number of other works, notably including a seminal 1994 article by Yuri Slezkine and ground-breaking 2001 book by Terry Martin, which are referenced below.

This summary narrative, which provides the basis of this independent reading resource for students, is drawn from the ideas in one of the chapters in Brigid O'Keeffe's book. It aims to provide another way in which the questions of class and ethnicity could become conflated in a socialist state, something I explored in a previous post.

Soviet Nationalities Policies under Lenin

By the early 1920s, Lenin and other leading Communists had made an astonishing decision. Although class was the most important category, and the new Soviet Union had to give power to the working class, another social category was also vital: nationality.

The Russian Empire before 1917 had been made up of many different ethnic groups, many of them ruthlessly repressed by the last two tsars’ Russification policies. Now, Lenin and the Communists sought to undo this repression. It was not enough that they had already repealed all discriminatory laws against non-ethnic Russians. They would go further. Each non-Russian group would be supported to become its own, fully-fledged nationality.

It had not been easy to get to this point. The most radical Bolsheviks and Communists had always expected that national differences would disappear after the revolution. Why, they argued, should they now be encouraging nationalism?

Lenin, however, insisted that they had no choice.

Non-Russians had been oppressed under the tsars and resented being ruled from Moscow. If their rights as nationalities were not recognised and supported, they would break away from the Soviet Union and destroy the revolution. He had a point – by the 1920s, a host of nationalities in the west of the former Russian Empire had already become independent, including Poland and Finland.

Lenin argued that not all nationalism was bad. Although in the past Russia had been an oppressor nation, non-Russians who simply wanted their freedom had been oppressed nations.

Surely, a revolution that sought equality for all would set them free as well?

The Communists settled on a policy under the catchphrase “national in form, socialist in content”. According to this policy, many areas of the Soviet Union would be organised around particular “nationalities”. The largest would even have their own national “republics”. Each nationality would have its own, particular culture, including language, art, music, literature, and education. But this popular culture would be used to support the ideas of socialism.

 

A Break from the Past?

This was a long way away from the policy of Russification under the tsars, where non-Russian culture had been actively uprooted and replaced with Russian. Indeed, the one nationality whose national identity Lenin did not want to promote was the Russians! Nevertheless, the (mostly Russian) Communists carried some rather condescending assumptions about non-Russians.

Whereas Russians were felt to have the “highest level” of culture in the Soviet Union, many non-Russian ethnic groups were felt to be backward, meaning they were stuck with old-fashioned, conservative cultures (or even a “lack” of culture!). This, the Communists tried to emphasise, was not these people’s fault – under the tsars, it had been impossible for them to advance and develop, because of cultural oppression.

The most “backward” peoples were felt to be in the east of the Soviet Union, including in Muslim Central Asia and remote parts of Siberia. To their horror, the Communists (most of whom knew almost nothing of these peoples) realised that some ethnic groups held on to ancient religious and tribal beliefs, lacked a formal education, and didn’t even have a written language!

This would have to change.

 

Promoting National Identity (or Forcing It?)

A policy of indigenisation (sometimes called “nativisation”) was begun, bringing non-Russian ethnic groups into local government so they could rule themselves (provided, of course, they followed socialist policies). This, though, was just the start.

The reality was, of course, that the Communists themselves were no experts on non-Russian ethnic groups. They relied on the help of people who had dedicated their lives to studying non-Russians, including ethnographers, linguists, statisticians, and economists who had been involved in research long before the Bolsheviks came to power.

These specialists and academics helped Communist policies take shape by drawing lines on maps to show where (they believed) national territories should be, developing written language scripts, and organising census taking in order to count and categorise the population.

In 1926, the first census for the whole of the Soviet Union was held. It asked everyone to give their “nationality” (what we could likely call "ethnicity" in Britain today). So many different “nationalities” were written down by Soviet citizens that, the following year, 172 different ethnic groups were recognised as nationalities of the USSR. They ranged from the large and powerful – Russian, Ukrainian, and Belrussian – to the small and marginalised – Jewish, Gypsy, and Nanai.

This number would later drop, as Communist nationalities policy changed in the 1930s, but it remained high: for the 1939 census, 62 different nationalities were recognised.

It was in Central Asia that the Communists’ nationalities policy unfolded most dramatically. This was a predominantly Muslim area of the Soviet Union. For years before the revolution of 1917, a group of reformist Muslim intelligentsia called Jadids had argued that Islam should be combined with modernity to bring about “progress” for the peoples of Central Asia.

The Communists rejected all religions. However, they agreed with the Jadids’ ideas about bringing modernity and progress to Central Asia and continued some of the policies and ideas of the Jadid movement. In particular, they promoted girls’ and women’s education, gender equality, and a unified Uzbek nation.

The Bigger Picture

The curious endorsement of nationalism by Soviet leaders in the 1920s would have a profound effect on the USSR throughout subsequent decades, all the way up to its demise after 1989.

Under Stalin, Russian culture and nationalism would find new official favour, while the "Great Patriotic War" (World War Two) would do a great deal to promote the image of a unifying Russian-centric Soviet national identity. Yet the USSR, with its national republics and other ethnically-defined territories, would remain a "multi-ethnic empire" in key ways.

In future posts, I will return to this question, considering nationalities policies under Stalin and the question of Jewish nationalities policies in particular.

 

Further Reading

Brigid O’Keeffe, The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise, Bloomsbury (2022)

Brigid O’Keeffe interview with Slavic Connection podcast, on her book: https://www.listennotes.com/da/podcasts/the-slavic-connexion/the-demise-of-the-fp0kwbSmGQx/

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

Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism”, Slavic Review, 53: 2 (1994)