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Marxist thinking which had anticipated that, with the construction of socialism, national identities would wane and be superseded by class.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?

Of Gods, Demons, and Devils: Popular Religion and Church Power in Imperial Russia

When Belarussian-born US journalist, Maurice Hindus visited the USSR in 1929-30, he expressed his amazement at the transformation of peasants’ beliefs. After interviewing young people in one village, he noted, dumbstruck, that “peasant boys and girls should not even know what a rusalka was!”

Hindus’ account, given in his memoir Red Bread (1931), can be read as an attempt to explain how the Russian revolution was transforming the Russian peasant from a superstitious, pre-modern being rooted in backward beliefs into an enlightened citizen. Yet the reference to rusalkas – water-nymphs long believed to inhabit rural rivers, lakes, and ponds – can be read in a rather different way. In revealing the non-belief in these magical creatures of local youth, Hindus was also offering a glimpse into the recent past of what might be called Russia’s “popular religion”.

Hindus recalls that “in my days, children…were afraid of the rusalkas…who were supposed to be the lost souls of drowned girls… With the very milk of our mothers we imbibed the notion that there was no resisting the rusalkas.”

The rusalkas were, in fact, only one rather strange and surprising aspect of the religious world of Russian Orthodox peasants, a religious world which was (for most peasants) Orthodox Christian but which maintained its own idiosyncrasies. This world would be understood by many writers and academics at the time and afterwards to constitute one of “dual faith”, in which ancient pagan and Orthodox Christian faiths coexisted. But the idea of “dual faith” has fallen out of favour since the 1990s, as historians have begun to reconceptualise the Christianity of Russia’s peasants.

Ivan Kramskoi, Rusalki (1871). Credit: Wikimedia Commons. 

In this post, I’ll consider what this peasant Christianity looked like by the early 1900s and this means for one question in our teaching of Russian history in particular: the power of the Orthodox Church in late-Imperial Russia.