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Marxist thinking which had anticipated that, with the construction of socialism, national identities would wane and be superseded by class.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

Urbicide: (Re-)conceptualising Urban Annihilation through History

In September 1941, the German Wehrmacht put the Soviet city of Leningrad under siege. It would not be lifted for almost 900 days.

By that time, the toll on the city and its inhabitants had become immense. Shortly before the siege began, around 400,000 people, mostly children, were hurriedly evacuated. Those left behind were subjected to daily bombardment, starvation, and chronic fuel shortages.

By the end of the siege, in January 1944, some 800,000 people had died of starvation and up to 200,000 more had been killed by military attacks or in fighting to defend the city.

The Empire Strikes Back? How Ethnic Violence Became a Part of Soviet Communism

At the height of the Great Terror (c. 1937-1938), Stalin’s secret police began systematic campaigns targeting certain ethnic minorities in the USSR. Poles, Latvians, Estonians, ethnic Germans, Romanians, Greeks, Afghans, Iranians, Chinese, Bulgarians, and Macedonians were arrested en masse, deported, or executed.

According to official statistics, 335,500 people were arrested and almost 250,000 killed in what became known as the National Operations. These were not soldiers, spies, or traitors; they were ordinary civilians. Before the Second World War, this was a high-point for repression of ethnic minorities in Russia and the USSR.

This event is almost as troubling analytically as it is morally. As Marxists, Soviet Communists should have (and generally portrayed themselves as doing so) judged socioeconomic class to be the principal identity determining treatment by the state.

When we teach Russian and Soviet History, it makes (some kind of) sense to explain to students that the USSR targeted the “rich” peasant kulaks, the bourgeoisie, and the old nobility. By contrast, campaigns targeting ethnic minorities seem distinctly out of place. It was in the Tsarist Russian empire before 1917, after all, that repression against non-ethnic Russians was committed as part of “Russification” campaigns.

So why did a Communist state target its ethnic minorities? It's tempting to view this as a return to age-old imperial policy, embodied in the Russification and persecution of Tsarist Russian Empire. But Soviet ethnic violence had its own logic and patterns of development.

This post traces Soviet ethnic violence back to the Russian Civil War and the little-known case, studied by historian Shane O'Rourke, of the Terek Cossacks, simultaneously linking this policy further back to the Tsarist imperial legacy and forward to the Stalinist "National Operations".

Exploring the Symbolism of Protest in Tsarist and Soviet Russia

On 2 June 1962, workers at the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Works marked out of their factory workshops and set off to the party headquarters. Protesting against cuts to their wages (a result of Khrushchev’s policy of wage reforms) and rises to food prices, theirs was one of the boldest and clearest examples of worker unrest in the USSR since the 1920s.