To Settle and Civilise? Roma and Soviet Nationalities Policy

One of the most remarkable and counter-intuitive developments in the early Soviet Union was the promotion of nationalism.

From the early 1920s onwards, formerly oppressed ethnic groups were encouraged to develop a national consciousness by fostering their own cultures, languages, and indigenous political leaders. Just so long, of course, as they didn’t stray from the official dogmas of the Communist Party.

The policy, known as indigenisation (or nativisation), was encapsulated by the mantra ‘national in form, socialist in content’. While nationalism in much of Europe after 1918 therefore veered towards the political far right and fascism, in the USSR it became indispensable to Communist ideology.

Large national groups were given their own territories, where their language was given official status and local elites given power to manage state and Communist Party affairs. In many places, this process assumed the name of the national groups themselves (thus, indigenisation in Ukraine became Ukrainianisation, and so on). Even under Stalin in the late-1930s, where whole ethnic groups were placed under suspicion and national elites purged in the face of the supposed threat of ‘bourgeois nationalism’, the policy was never actually reversed.

Beyond ‘A Male Dominated Society’: Interrogating the Concept of Patriarchy in Russia and the USSR

Big words with big meanings are powerful – if you know how to use them.

Among the biggest, and most frequently used, of these words I’ve found students using is ‘patriarchy’. Behind the word lies a highly complex concept, which students tend to reduce to the startling simple formula of ‘a male dominated society’.

Like all simple formulas, this has a very large element of truth to it. Like all simple formulas, it also overlooks the inherent complexity of the concept.

From the perspective of Russian and Soviet history, what did patriarchy look like in practice? Here, I’ll pick up on three elements of a dynamic patriarchal society that come through clearly in this context.