National policy

Communist policy towards the non‑ Russian nationalities was very different from that of the Tsars. Communists believed that nationalism was a powerful but transitory sentiment, which could be harnessed for revolution, but which would in due course give way to a supra‑ ethnic all‑ Soviet consciousness.

Initially, the Communists utilized national identity as a way of promoting modernization. They created a federal state, with a hierarchy of ethnically named constituent republics, in which, at least theoretically, power devolved to indigenous elites trained for the purpose – a policy known as korenizatsiia (indigenization). The party specifically set out to encourage the development of non‑ Russian national languages and cultures. A campaign of likbez (liquidation of illiteracy) provided elementary education in local languages.

In principle, this was an enlightened policy, but from the outset it suffered from its own contradictions. First of all, given the intermingling of peoples throughout the former Russian Empire, designating a certain territory as belonging to a particular people entailed considerable over‑ simplification. Those who did not belong to a titular nationality felt discriminated against: local cadres tended to favour their co‑ nationals in housing, education, and employment. This sometimes handicapped Russians. In the Mordvin republic on the Volga, for example, 60% of the population was Russian, but their republic was named after a non‑ Russian minority. In Ukraine, many Russian parents bitterly resented their offspring having to study Ukrainian, which they considered a ‘farmyard dialect’.

Besides, many Soviet practices directly undermined korenizatsiia. The party, the armed forces, and Gosplan were all tightly centralized, so that the non‑ Russians’ scope for self‑ rule was in practice extremely constricted. In any case, during the 1930s, the practical application of korenizatsiia was changed. Internal passports were introduced, in each of which ‘entry no 5’ designated an individual’s nationality. The entry could not be changed, and it gradually became a more important determinant of life chances than social origin.

Moreover, since no socialist revolutions had occurred elsewhere, commitment to world revolution now implied defending Russia at all costs: ‘Socialism in One Country’, as Stalin called it. During the 1930s, party propaganda increasingly emphasized the Russian identity of the Soviet Union as a whole. The Tsars were no longer condemned outright as exploiters of the people, since their conquests had created the great state which was now the Soviet Union. Stalin declared:

We have inherited that state. . . [and] have consolidated and strengthened it as a united and indivisible state, not in the interests of landowners and capitalists, but for the benefit of the workers, of all the peoples who make up that state.

Schools in all republics were required to teach the Russian language. Russian literature, especially Pushkin and Tolstoy, was extolled as the standard for all Soviet writers to emulate. Ethnic units were abolished in the Red Army, and Russian was made the universal language of command. Many nationalities were required to reformulate their written languages using the Cyrillic alphabet. The Soviet peoples were still in principle equal, but the Russians were definitely ‘more equal’ than the others.

Actually, though, this was imperial and not ethnic Russian‑ ness. It envisaged the Russians primarily as the bearers of a great state. Stalin had little interest in the ethnic customs of the Russian people, which were being destroyed even as the new Russification took hold. In particular, the Russian village commune and the Orthodox Church were being deliberately undermined as an objective of Communist policy.

Soviet educational and economic policies transformed the consciousness of all nationalities, including the Russians. Mass primary education and likbez produced a generation of young people, literate in their own language, and at the same time becoming urbanized. This was the Soviet Union’s greatest long‑ term achievement. At the beginning of the Second World War, the average Russian Red Army soldier was far more aware of his national traditions than his counterpart only a quarter of a century earlier. But the same was true of non‑ Russians: thus, the Ukrainians who sought urban employment during the 1930s–1950s were nationally aware, and transformed what had been Russian, Polish, and Jewish towns into Ukrainian ones, centres of a conscious Ukrainian culture.

As the threat of war grew during the 1930s, Stalin perceived some nationalities as potentially treacherous. Poles and Germans were deported from areas near the western borders. In 1937, when Japan invaded China and seemed to threaten the Soviet Union, all Koreans were deported from the Far East. This was not just removal from a sensitive region: after they reached their destinations, Koreans were forbidden to attend Korean‑ language schools or to read Korean newspapers. For the first time, the Soviet authorities were endeavouring to extirpate the cultural existence of a whole nationality.

They continued such policies during and after the war. As they occupied eastern Poland and the Baltic republics under the terms of the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939, they deported many local elites – anyone capable of organizing national resistance – to Siberia and Kazakhstan. In the Polish case, this was accompanied by the deliberate mass murder of some 20, 000 army officers and professional people. In some cases, entire peoples were deported: notably the Germans, the Chechens, Ingush and Balkars of the North Caucasus, the Kalmyks, and the Crimean Tatars. The legacy of these attempts to destroy whole peoples was their bitter and irrevocable hostility towards the Soviet Union, Communism, and Russians – a legacy which played a decisive role in the ultimate disintegration of the USSR. The first declarations of secession from the USSR came from the Baltic republics, the defection of the Ukrainians in 1991 completed the process, and the Chechens have provoked the most destructive of Russia’s post‑ Soviet wars.