Comrade Stalin, Destroyer of Nations? Approaching the Complexities of Soviet Nationalism(s) in the 1930s

Given the avowed internationalism of the communist movement, it’s surprising how favourably Soviet politicians viewed the idea of nationalism.

As I’ve previously written, in the early 1920s the Soviet Communist Party had decided – after much internal wrangling – to embark on a policy of promoting national identity amongst the non-Russian peoples of the USSR. National cultures, including language, dress, and literature, would now be promoted amongst non-Russian peoples, especially inside their own designated territories within the USSR. Non-Russians would be actively promoted as Communist cadres within the Soviet state.

This policy reversed the old Tsarist policy of Russification, in which Russian cultural and ethnic identity was imposed on non-Russian ethnicities in an imperialist attempt to assimilate and control. It also reversed much Marxist thinking which had anticipated that, with the construction of socialism, national identities would wane and be superseded by class.

From the 1930s, however, important aspects of these policies appeared to be shifting. Our school textbooks commonly indicate a swing away from the promotion of minority, non-Russian nationalisms, and back towards the kind of Greater Russian chauvinism seen under the Tsars.

According to one textbook, “Stalinist policy in the 1930s veered towards greater centralisation and less tolerance of the ethnic groups [of the USSR] as he [Stalin] sought to create a single ‘Soviet identity’. Nationalism meant Russian nationalism and the leaders of the different republics that formed the USSR were purged as ‘bourgeois nationalists’ if they deviated from the path laid down in Moscow.”

Another, summarising Stalinist nationalities policies after the Second World War, states even more baldly: “Stalin was as keen on Russification as the Tsars.”

Was he?

I was struck, reading historian David Hoffmann’s account from his excellent 2018 book, The Stalinist Era, by the layers of complexity to this question. As Hoffmann put it (The Stalinist Era, pages 66-67):

Officially the [USSR] was not an empire but a federation of sovereign national republics, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Major nationalities had their own territorial units – union republics in the case of the largest nationalities, and autonomous republics or regions for some of the smaller national minorities. In theory, nationalities had the right to self-rule and even secession. In practice, non-Russian peoples had no real sovereignty or right to secede, as power remained in the hands of rulers in Moscow. In this sense, the Soviet Union was an empire. At the same time, the Soviet Union different considerably from the tsarist empire as well as from western European colonial empires. Soviet officials did not try to Russify non-Russian subjects. And they did not seek to subjugate the peoples they ruled. On the contrary, the Soviet government actually fostered the development of non-Russian languages and cultures and sought to integrate all nationalities into the Soviet polity.

 

The evidence does indeed indicate a shift in nationalities policy under Stalin, including a greater emphasis on Russian national pride and some extremely unpleasant chauvinistic trends. But it also contains a great many complexities which hinder any effort to identify Stalin straightforwardly with a return of old Tsarist policies of Russification.

This post will consider several aspects of Soviet nationalities policy from the late-1920s to Stalin’s death in 1953, in order to highlight some of these complexities, in particular: politics and ‘indigenisation’; language and national cultures; Russian cultural attitudes; and the case of diaspora nationalities.

 

Politics and ‘Indigenisation’

The USSR practiced a policy of what is often rather clumsily translated into English as “indigenisation” or “nativisation” (korenizatsiia: denoting setting down of roots amongst non-Russian peoples, drawn from the Russian for “root”, koren). Under this policy, non-Russians were promoted as local Communist leaders and officials amongst their own peoples and territories.

This policy was possible in large part because the USSR was a federation, divided into different national territories, including – by 1936 – eleven fully-fledged “Union Republics”. These officially had considerable autonomy over their internal politics including the right to secede from the USSR altogether.

In principle, this policy was to turn the USSR into, as the Lithuanian Communist Iosif Vareikis formulated it, a large communal apartment in which “national state units, various republics and autonomous provinces” represented “various rooms” (quoted by Slezkine, 1994, p. 415). It was a utopian but energetic policy which went as far as to designate and delineate national territories for some groups, most notably Soviet Jews, who as yet had no territorial homeland on Soviet territory (the Soviet experiment to create a Jewish homeland, called Birobidzhan, was something I discussed in an earlier post).

1933 Soviet postage stamp, promoting the Jewish Autonomous Region, Birobidzhan. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In practice, there were severe limits to indigenisation. While non-Russian political elites were promoted, national republics and territories were obliged to follow political policy set down centrally by the Communist Party in Moscow, in accord with the constructively ambiguous phrase “national in form, socialist in content”. There was, of course, no question of any Union Republics ever leaving the USSR.

Stalin and other Soviet leaders became increasingly concerned in the 1930s by the possibility of growing “bourgeois nationalism”, a category that broadly encompassed ideas which might have been “national in form” but privileged national identity over the wider needs of the USSR and which were therefore not “socialist in content”. In a number of cases, the spectre of “bourgeois nationalism” was plainly used to put local politicians back in their place and ensure the implementation of central policies. In 1932, when Ukrainian Communists objected to high grain quotas which were contributing to devastating famine in the country, Stalin absurdly denounced them as anti-Communist agents of the Polish nationalist leader Pilsudski. By the end of the 1930s, national territories and their leaderships would – along with the rest of Soviet politics – undergo thorough and devastating purging, destroying much of their original indigenous leadership.

 

Language and National Cultures

Whereas the old Russifying policy of the Tsars had actively suppressed the cultures of non-Russian peoples, including their languages, Soviet policy turned this on its head. A central component of Soviet nation building was promoting the use of non-Russian languages, along with ethnically distinct culture, from literature and dress to music and theatre.

Language policy is particularly instructive, since having a distinct language was considered essential to the construction of a national consciousness. Beginning in the 1920s, the USSR endorsed the use of non-Russian languages in local newspapers and cultural works, and even went so far as to codify some languages which previously had no written script. Yet this policy also had its own ambiguities and limitations.

In line with Soviet anti-religious campaigns, religious aspects of non-Russian national culture and language were repressed. This, it should be noted, was in many ways the same for Russians as non-Russians, since Orthodox Christianity, the state religion of Tsarist Russia to which some 70% of subjects pre-1917 belonged, was also fiercely repressed by the Communists. However, it had peculiarities for some non-Russian ethnic groups. For example, Jews were discouraged from using Hebrew, the religious language of the Torah, and instead instructed to adopt Yiddish, the Jewish vernacular language. Similarly, amongst Soviet Muslims, the use of Arabic script, associated with the Quran, was discouraged for writing in local languages in favour of the Latin alphabet, a move dubbed “Latinisation”.

Anti-religious campaigns delineated acceptable Soviet nationalisms from “bourgeois” nationalism, yet they could also interfere with the process of “indigenisation” by provoking local non-Russian Communists to oppose Soviet cultural policies. In Central Asia, from 1927 onwards a campaign called the Hujum attacked Islamic traditions, including that of veiling women, holding public ceremonies in which women tore off and burned their veils. The policy produced a dramatic and violent backlash from the local population – directed especially against women who unveiled – with even many Communists opposing the unveiling of their female family members.

Veil burning in Andijan (Uzbekistan), on International Women's Day 1927. Credit: Great Soviet Encyclopedia (public domain). 

The promotion of non-Russian culture and especially language became increasingly diluted as the 1930s wore on, as Russian culture was increasingly placed on a higher footing than non-Russian. In February 1936, an editorial in the Communist Party newspaper Pravda declared Russian culture to be “first among equals”, legitimising its growing dominance over some aspects of Soviet culture more widely.

In language, Russian culture being placed “first among equals” signified a move towards actively promoting Russian language (although not, it should be noted, the attempt to repress or destroy non-Russian languages which had been typical of late-Tsarist Russification under Alexander III and Nicholas II). In 1937, the teaching of Russian language was made compulsory in schools across the USSR. Meanwhile, the move towards “Latinising” the scripts of non-Russian languages stalled and were in many cases thrown into reverse, as the Latin alphabet was replaced by the Russian Cyrillic. By 1939, thirty-five languages had shifted to Cyrillic script.

 

Russian Cultural Attitudes

In many ways, in fact, this apparent shift in state policy was built on a continuity in political attitudes. A degree of haughty cultural condescension towards non-Russian and non-European peoples had always lurked behind the attitudes of many Soviet leaders, whose own Russian (or at least European urban) upbringing had instilled in them a sense of superiority over non-Russian, and especially Asian, cultures.

As the historian Sheila Fitzpatrick puts it, this attitude was in many ways akin to that of imperialist European great powers by the early 20^th century, which had aimed to “civilise” their subject peoples by inculcating in them an appreciation of their own, supposedly superior, culture. In this, Fitzpatrick links Soviet cultural and ethnic policies to questions of gender and urban culture (Everyday Stalinism, page 10):

While backwardness was a problem for the Soviet Union as a whole, some people were obviously more backward than others. The Soviet Union was a multiethnic state, but the “friendship of peoples” that linked its different ethnic groups was often represented in terms of an elder brother, Soviet Russia, leading and teaching younger siblings. The Muslim peoples of Soviet Central Asia and the reindeer-herding “small peoples” of the north, regarded as the most backward in the Union, were the archetypal beneficiaries of the Soviet civilizing mission, which tapped veins of idealism that were Russian as well as Communist. But ethnicity was not the only determinant of backwardness. Peasants were backward compared to town-dwellers. Women were backward, generally speaking, compared to men. The Soviet civilizing mission was raising the cultural level of all these backward groups.

 

The principle that it was Russians as “leading and teaching” the other peoples of the USSR can be seen in Soviet propaganda posters, which frequently portrayed European figures striding ahead of, or instructing, Asian and sometimes African compatriots into a brave new future.

Soviet poster in Central Asia, from 1964. Caption reads "We are for peace". Note the implicit yet characteristic cultural hierarchy in the positioning of the representatives of different ethnic groups. Credit: Thomas Taylor Hammond (1920-1993), CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

1936 poster promoting literacy campaigns in Soviet Azerbaijan. Note the guiding hand of the European woman, sharing her superior level of cultural knowledge. Credit: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Viewed from this perspective, the principle of extending written language scripts and formal aspects of “national” culture to peoples may well appear less generous, and more sinister, representing a Soviet mission of cultural imperialism rather than promotion of ethnic minority interests. Indeed, there were cases of artificial “national” cultures were imposed from without. In Uzbekistan, for instance, tribes with no sense of “national” belonging were subsumed within the larger Uzbek nationality, drawing them into a new cultural world which had little or no prior meaning to them.

 

Diaspora Nationalities

Nonetheless, in many ways, Soviet policies towards non-Russians was markedly similar to policies towards Soviet Russians, representing an effort to equalise the situation of both.

For both Russians and non-Russians, a national language was promoted as a first language of instruction for local education and cultural activities. For both Russians and non-Russians, assertive and violent campaigns attempted to tear religion out of national culture and promote secular traditions in its place. For both Russians and non-Russians, legal provisions were put in place to ensure varying degrees of autonomy within the Soviet federation (however little this may have been respected in practice). In this regard, Stalinist nationalities policy did not overtly seek to subjugate ethnic minorities.

There was, however, one very clear exception to this rule under Stalin. And that was in the case of non-Russian diaspora nationalities; in other words, non-Russian peoples who shared a nationality with capitalist states outside the USSR.

Stalin’s paranoid mind led him to suspect entire national groups living inside the USSR of disloyalty, especially when they had a national state and territory outside the Soviet Union. Unable to control or shape the national cultures of these groups, Stalin and the Soviet leadership instead ruthlessly repressed them in the late 1930s, in a series of “national operations”.

According to David Hoffmann, from August 1937 to November 1938, a staggering 335,500 people from diaspora nationalities were arrested by the Soviet secret police, of whom 247,200 were executed. Groups targeted included Poles, Germans, Romanians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Finns, Greeks, Afghans, Iranians, Chinese, Bulgarians, Macedonians, and Koreans. These were peoples who had long settled peacefully and productively in Russia and the USSR; all had the misfortune of having a supposed other country to which they might owe loyalty outside the USSR.

The power of this perverse logic would be perhaps most dramatically revealed after World War Two, when official attitudes towards Soviet Jews suddenly shifted and vicious antisemitic campaigns began. Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, and the dramatic scenes of Moscow’s Jews pouring onto the streets to greet newly arrived Israeli ambassador, Golda Meir, in the city, the loyalty of Jews towards the USSR came under suspicion. Now with a nation state of their own outside Soviet borders, and one allied to Cold War enemy the USA to boot, Jews were suspected en masse of preposterous crimes and Jewish figures targeted, most notoriously in the case of the fabricated “Doctors’ Plot” in which Jewish doctors in the Kremlin were baselessly alleged to have plotted to murder Soviet leaders.

Golda Meir in Moscow, 1948. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The Doctors’ Plot and late-Stalinist antisemitism was a logical and particularly cruel outcome of pre-World War Two Stalinist policies. It was not obviously, however, an act of Russification akin to the actions of the last two Tsars. Repression of non-Soviet non-Russian nationalities had its own internal dynamics and driving forces.

 

Conclusions: Qualifying Stalin's Nationalism (but not the man himself)

In the end, despite a number of important shifts in Soviet nationalities policies under Stalin, the evidence is too complicated to clearly point towards the Soviet dictator as an avid Russifier, and certainly too ambiguous to suppose he was attempting to resurrect the ethnic policies of the Tsars.

Given this is the case, I’d suggest we carefully qualify the statements we present students with when teaching Stalinist nationalities policies, illustrating both their (supposedly) progressive, liberatory intentions and their frequently repressive realities. Doing so should not be seen as in some way rehabilitating Stalin; it is certainly not the purpose of this blog post to present him as a misunderstood liberator of nations. Not to be a straightforward Russifier does not in any way signify not being a tyrant.

Nevertheless, teaching the ambiguities and complexities of Stalinist nationalities policies requires us to think in terms of qualifications. Therefore:

1. all major Soviet nationalities and peoples were legally equal and autonomous, although this autonomy and equality had severe limits;
2. Russians had lost their ethnically superior status, although they came to be seen as “first among equals” in a “brotherhood of peoples” which afforded them and their culture inherent advantages;
3. non-Russian national cultures were encouraged and celebrated, although they had to be secular, depriving peoples of important religious traditions;
4. languages were acknowledged building blocks of national identity and autonomy, although the Russian language under Stalin increasingly became a universal cultural cornerstone for all Soviet peoples;
5. the Soviet Union was conceived as a genuine “brotherhood of peoples”, although national groups with supposed homelands outside its borders forfeited the rights and protections afforded to other peoples.

 

Selected Further Reading

Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, Oxford University Press (1999)

David L. Hoffmann, The Stalinist Era, Cambridge University Press (2018)

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

Douglas T. Northrup, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia, Cornell University Press (2004)

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

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