1112596
SSI0010.1177/05390184221112596Social Science InformationDinç
research-article2022
Article
Rethinking early Soviet
nationality policies within
the poststructuralist context:
Marxist legacy, Soviet nationbuilding, and contingency
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https://doi.org/10.1177/05390184221112596
DOI: 10.1177/05390184221112596
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Deniz Dinç
Final International University, Northern Cyprus
Abstract
Early Soviet nationality policies determined the framework of the ethnicity regime of
the Soviet state and largely continued within the same context until the collapse of the
Soviet state. While reevaluating early nationality policies, this study argues that structural
analysis is not sufficient to understand the social reality of the nationality policies in the
Soviet context. Hence, there is an urgent need to add the conditional, unclear and
unpredictable aspects to the structural analysis of Soviet nationality policies. By analyzing
through the amorphous nationality legacy of the classical Marxist thought, which highly
affected the contingent Bolshevik nationality policy orientation, this study shares the
concept of Soviet nation-building against the conventional Cold War approach. While
analyzing the foundational dynamics of the early Soviet nationality policies, this study
attempts to further improve structural analysis through poststructuralist intervention
taking into account contingent case study examples.
Keywords
Bolsheviks, Central Asia and Caucasus, contingency, Marxism, poststructuralism,
Soviet nationality policies
Résumé
Les premières politiques soviétiques en matière de nationalité ont déterminé le cadre
du régime ethnique de l’État soviétique et se sont poursuivies jusqu’à l’effondrement de
l’État soviétique. En réévaluant les premières politiques en matière de nationalité, cette
étude avance qu’une analyse structurelle n’est pas suffisante pour comprendre la réalité
Corresponding author:
Deniz Dinç, Final International University, Political Science and International Relations, Çatalköy, Kyrenia,
Mersin 10, Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.
Emails: denizyeniden@gmail.com; deniz.dinc@final.edu.tr
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sociale des politiques de nationalité dans le contexte soviétique. Il est donc urgent d’
ajouter les aspects conditionnels, peu clairs et imprévisibles à l’analyse structurelle des
politiques soviétiques en matière de nationalité. En analysant l’héritage de la nationalité
amorphe de la pensée marxiste classique, qui a fortement affecté l’orientation
contingente de la politique bolchevique en matière de nationalité, cette étude partage
le concept de construction de la nation à rebours de l’approche conventionnelle de la
guerre froide. Tout en analysant la dynamique fondamentale des premières politiques
soviétiques en matière de nationalité, cet article tente d’améliorer l’analyse structurelle
par une intervention post-structuraliste prenant en compte des exemples d’études de
cas contingentes.
Mots-clés
Asie centrale et Caucase, bolchéviques, contingence, Marxisme, politiques de
nationalité soviétique, post-structuralisme
Introduction
It has been claimed that the framework of Soviet nationality policy(ies) was established
during the early Soviet era in the periods of Lenin and Stalin (Brubaker, 1996; Gorenburg,
2003; Slezkine, 1994b; Suny, 1993).1 The nationality issue was consistently a challenge,
not only for the Bolsheviks, but also for other newly emerged nation states at the beginning of the 20th century. The Bolsheviks could not derive a well-guided policy of nationality issues to follow from the works of Marx and Engels. Thus, they were forced to
constitute their own policies against the challenge of nationalism ideology. The framework of the policies adopted in Lenin’s and Stalin’s time ostensibly remained in place,
with only minor revisions. Both before and after the Cold War, many scholars attempted
to understand the logic underlying Soviet nationality policies. The Cold War era studies
highlighted the Russification and cultural and linguistic sufferings of the non-Russian
Soviet citizens under the minorities hostile policies of the Bolsheviks.2 In contrast, the
post-Cold War era studies emphasized the Soviet style nation-building and development
of the non-Russian ethnic groups’ culture and language through the implementation of
affirmative action policies by the Bolshevik leadership. Despite all this progress in Soviet
Studies literature, many of the post-Cold War era works overemphasized the Soviet
nationality policies as if they were a certain set of principles or a list of well-established,
certain and clear programs. Most of the post-Cold War era Eurasian Studies literature has
omitted the contingent nature of the Soviet nationality policies, rather attempting to
understand the features of the Soviet nationality policies within the limits of the structural analyses of the early Soviet period policy implementations. The robustness of the
structural analyses, however, is not sufficient to evaluate the challenge of nationalism in
the Soviet context. The contingency contribution was still historically highly related to
the debates on nationalism ranging from Marx and Engels to those among Austrian
Marxists, Rosa Luxemburg, the Jewish Bund, and the Bolsheviks during the revolutionary periods. The multiplicity of the considerations on nationalism allowed the Bolsheviks
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to approach nationalism ideology through a resilient perspective. The contingency of the
Soviet nationality policies was highly related to the elite leadership, patron–client relationship and the negotiations of Moscow with the local elites to determine the particular
problems of nationality issues during the 1920s and 1930s. In other words, indeterminacy, conditionality and uncertainty were also foundational features of the early Soviet
nationality policies, which were generally neglected under the supremacy of the structural analyses through considering contingencies as errors or deviations.3 This article
attempts to reevaluate the early Soviet nationality policies taking into account its contingent characteristics. The combination of the Marxist legacy, Soviet nation-building and
contingency seems to present effective ground to balance and not overemphasize the
radical contingency centric evaluations, although such an approach is limited in the literature.4 This article proposes the notion that the formation of the Soviet nationality policies evolved through the combination of a territorially institutionalized ethnicity model
and ascribed nationality within a structural framework as well as with contingent, flexible and uncertain policies, which might be evaluated within a poststructuralist context as
the neglected constitutional dimension of the previous works of Soviet nationality policy
analysis. The uncertainty of the early Marxist discussions on nationalism contributed to
the resilient implementation of the nationality policies. This article is divided into six
sections. The second section discusses the theoretical framework after the introduction
section, which summarizes the content of the article. In the second section, I will clarify
how I understand the term poststructuralism and its relation to structuralist analysis. The
third section explores the contingent legacy of Marxist nationality policies as well as
their impacts on Bolshevik political thought. The fourth section explores the formation
of the multinational Soviet state, while the fifth section highlights how the contingency
changed the implementation of the early Soviet nationality policies taking the case studies into account. Finally, the conclusion section summarizes the argument of the study
and emphasizes the necessity of finding a bridge between foundational and antifoundational aspects of the Soviet nationality policies literature.
Poststructuralism, contingency, and the eventful historical
sociology
Although social theorists who are critical of poststructuralist approaches mostly use the
term ‘poststructuralism’ in a negative manner, I would like to state that I use the term
positively in this article (Sim, 2001: 3–14). I agree with the succinct explanation that
‘Poststructuralism is a fragmentary assemblage of diverse social, political, philosophical
thought that not only engages with but also questions the structuralist tradition’ (Peoples
and Vaughan-Williams, 2010: 63). In this regard, the crucial point is that I do not perceive poststructuralism as an antagonistic opposite of structuralist tradition. On the
contrary, I contemplate that poststructuralist intervention develops and complements
structuralist approaches by being critically engaged. By doing so, it significantly
improves the structuralist approaches. Since the discussion of poststructuralism and
structuralism is beyond the scope of this article, I will highlight some contextual points
that are more directly related to this study. To make the conceptual framework of the
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article more evident, I will initially focus on the ‘Saussure-Derrida discussion’ on linguistic structuralism. I will highlight Saussure’s linguistic structuralism and Derrida’s
deconstruction to create analogies between structuralist and contingent aspects of the
Soviet nationality policies. At the end of this theoretical section, I will propose ‘eventful
historical sociology’ to constitute theoretical correlations with contingent case study
examples of the Soviet style nation-building, which will be discussed in the last part of
this article.
Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1986 [1916]), in his posthumously published
seminal book Course in General Linguistics, focused on the production of meaning and
he developed a theory of structure of language, which would become the basis of causal
reasoning in different fields. Saussure’s major point with regard to language is that it is
above all a system. This system consists of rules and regulations; in other words, a form
of internal grammar (Sim, 2001: 4). The structure of any language involves two foundational elements: the ‘signifier’ (e.g. the sound of the word ‘table’) and the ‘signified’ (e.g.
the idea of ‘table’) which creates the linguistic structure ‘sign’ (e.g. ‘Table’). What is
significant is that there is no intrinsic relationship between the signified and signifier.
Meaning is simply based on differences, and it is because of the very structure of language that there is such a thing as ‘meaning’ (Peoples and Vaughan-Williams, 2010: 64).
Poststructuralist criticism of structuralist linguistics highlights the overall tidiness of
structural analysis in which there is no loose space and everything falls neatly into place.
This point is the main argumental framework of this article, which illustrates the necessity of the contingent aspects to understand Soviet nationality policies. Apart from the
analytical techniques being used by the structuralist explanations which simply determine the results, the fallacious point is the issue of contingency. As Sim (2001) states,
‘What structuralism seems to allow little scope for is chance, creativity or the unexpected’ (p. 5).
Jacques Derrida’s (2002) contribution demonstrating the instability of the meaning
and limits of Saussure’s structuralism is highly important for conceptualizing contingency in Political Theory. Derrida’s point is that meaning is slippery, on the move and
endlessly differing and deferring. In contrast to Saussure’s emphasis on spatial differentiation within the linguistic structure, Derrida argued that Saussure neglected the time
and deferral dimensions of meaning. Derrida further argued that meaning is secured in
the Western political thought through binary oppositions, which is constituted through
hierarchy. He offered a critical deconstruction of the texts to reveal the hierarchical constitution of the binary oppositions in which meaning is secured and fixed (Peoples and
Vaughan-Williams, 2010: 64–65). Hence, Derrida revealed the inherent indeterminacy
of meaning. Signs were not predictable entities according to him. Derrida’s contribution
will help to overcome the shortcomings of structuralist analyses of Soviet nationality
policies in the context of the concept of contingency. In other words, structuralist
approaches, which seem to agree on passport ethnicity and the territorial codification of
ethnicity in the Soviet state, did not take into account the extent to which events and
individuals affect and transform the system. This neglected ‘unpredictability’ dimension
has led me to the understanding of ‘eventful history’ against the structuralism of historical sociology, which did not involve contingent aspects.
Dinç
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In his seminal article, Three Temporalities: Toward an Eventful Sociology, William H.
Sewell (1996) attempts to conceptualize the eventful historical sociology idea while
criticizing the teleological and experimental structural analysis in historical sociology
(pp. 245–280). Sewell’s theoretical background provides an important framework for
re-evaluating Soviet nationality policies. The content of Sewell’s theoretical article is in
line with my attempt to develop a structuralist analysis of Soviet nationality policies in a
poststructuralist context. In this sense, Sewell’s contribution in political theory makes the
new perspective that I am attempting to create regarding the concept of nationality in the
Soviet context more evident. Sewell (1996) argues that dominant historical sociology,
including the works of Immanuel Wallerstein, Theda Skocpol and Charles Tilly is under
the influence of the dominant teleological and experimental concepts of temporality,
which are seriously deficient and fallacious since these scholars’ theoretical framework
was not open for the articulation of contingent events (pp. 245–280). Sewell believes that
a much more eventful notion of temporality is required since the course of history is
determined by a succession of largely contingent events. For Sewell, not only classical
sociologists under the influence of overdeterminism, in other words, under the influence
of teleology (to understand the present through future events), but also all 20th century
modernization schools as well as Wallerstein’s (1974) grand structural theory to a large
extent can be evaluated as teleological. As he points out: ‘In Wallerstein’s analysis, contingencies, choices and consequences are foreordained by the necessity built in the
world-system from the moment of creation’ (Sewell, 1996: 248–251). Furthermore, he
also criticizes that in his work The Vendée, Tilly (1964) applied linear urbanization teleology which spoiled his comparative study which explained political effects of regional
social structures. By casting the subject of his work as a local instance of a universal
process, Tilly simply destroyed the contingency aspect of politics. Finally, Skocpol’s
(1979) seminal book, States and Social Revolutions, was criticized for destroying path
dependency in political analysis by Sewell. In the context of finding a structural logic of
revolution, Skocpol claimed that all events, conjectures and stages are connected to each
other in an experimental logic. According to Sewell (1996), this ends the capacity of
events to transform and affect the structure (pp. 254–262). Criticisms of the important
figures of historical sociology are briefly mentioned here in the context of contingency.
In this regard, Sewell attempts to explain the integration of structure and contingency
with his eventful historical sociology theory. Sewell (1996), in his proposition of eventful sociology, argues that social processes are inherently contingent, dis-continuous, and
open-ended (p. 272). Grand transformations are never immune to the change dynamic of
small-scale incidences. Structures, social formations, and social systems are continually
shaped and reshaped by human actions. What is significant with respect to my argument
in this article is that Sewell also highlights that adopting an eventful approach would not
require the works of historical sociology to be jettisoned. Instead, structural analysis
must be rethought and appropriated by the eventful, contingency oriented analysis
(Sewell, 1996: 273).
Contingent cases in Central Asia and the Caucasus discussed in the last part of the
article will embody the theoretical framework explored in this section. Nevertheless, I
would like to illustrate this theoretical framework more concretely with an example.
Although this article focuses on early contingent cases, contingency-related events can
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in fact be encountered in every period of Soviet nation-building. One of the most important of these concerns Latvia. Korenizatsiya (nativization) policies, for example, were
never properly implemented to the advantage of Latvians. When prominent party officials of the Latvian Communist Party began to prioritize local interests in education,
attempted to reduce the rate of Slavic migration to Latvia, promoted Latvian personal
interests and highlighted concerns on economic autonomy between 1957 and 1959,
Moscow chose to suppress the demands ruthlessly, even in the course of Khrushchev’s
de-Stalinization campaign. Khrushchev purged two thousand party functionaries, including the movement’s leader. The strategic importance of the region as well as Moscow’s
suspicion of locals due to their geographical and ideational proximity to the Western
countries motivated Moscow to act in an exceptional way (Commercio, 2010: 45–46). If
the Latvians had not persisted in their demands, policies accelerating Russification might
not have occurred. This might have lessened the hostility toward the Soviet establishment. Briefly, in contrast to the post-Cold War era scholarship, which attempted to
explain Soviet nationality policies in a positive manner and structurally well-established
context, the neglected contingency dimension is still waiting to be explored. Hence, a
poststructuralist theoretical intervention will provide a better understanding of policy
dynamics by articulating the role of events, deviations, and individuals. For example,
could Stalin’s policies of quick and harsh collectivization have been implemented if
Lenin had not died prematurely? Or, could more democratic results have been achieved
in the functioning of Soviet democracy if Lenin had continued? Undoubtedly, these
questions cannot be answered without considering the limits of structural explanations.
In the next section, the roots of the contingent policy-oriented aspects regarding the
Soviet context will be explored taking Marxist nationality policies into account.
The contingent legacy of Marxist nationality policies and
their impact on the Bolsheviks
The Bolshevik’s approach to nationalism ideology was relatively ambiguous with regard
to the works of Marx and Engels. Therefore, it is even controversial to claim that Marx
and Engels created a Marxist nationalism theory (Löwy, 1998). The writings of Marx and
Engels mainly emphasized the class struggle and the significant transformations of
modes of production. Hence, a reductionist and instrumentalist view emerged concerning the issue of nationalism. In fact, the instrumentalist understanding of nationalism of
Marx and Engels was one of the reasons for the contingent nature of the early Soviet
nationality policies. On numerous occasions, Lenin made strategic decisions, such as
NEP and the establishment of alliances with the peasantry before the October Revolution,
which might be reflected as deviance from the classical Marxist texts. Nevertheless, the
nationalism issue enhanced the flexibility of the Bolsheviks through their contingency
based policies without the fear of inconsistencies with the thoughts of Marx and Engels
since no well-shaped, firm and established guidance had been offered by the philosophers regarding nationalism ideology. In other words, although structurally bound within
a progressive understanding, Marx and Engel’s stance of nationalism comprised many
contingent characteristics. It would be more useful to focus on the classical Marxist
approaches on nationalism over two main periods.
Dinç
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The early writings of Marx and Engels can be traced to their famous work, the
Communist Manifesto. Marx and Engels praised the bourgeois because of its revolutionary role in enabling the proletarian revolution. The bourgeoisie was evaluated as revolutionary to the extent that it unified the world market, but it also abolished local customs,
traditions, and created a new world culture (Marx and Engels, 2020: 35–36). Marx and
Engels considered that the process through which national differences would disappear,
which had already started through the spread of capitalist production relations, would be
completed in the era of proletarian revolutions. The failure of the 1848 revolutions led
the philosophers to revise their optimistic points of view with regard to the temporality
of the national question. The disillusionment regarding the failure of centralization and
revolution in Germany led to the revision of the nationality question. Engels divided
nations into two categories: ‘Historic Nations’ and ‘Historyless Nations’. By doing so, an
instrumentalist point of view was articulated in the initial conceptualization of nationality. The Western developed capitalist countries such as Britain, France and Germany
were defined as historic nations. The countries that were not connected to the capitalist
mode of production were defined as historyless nations, including the Slavic nations in
Eastern Europe. The philosophers praised the American expansion in California through
the antagonism of ‘Energetic Yankees versus Lazy Mexicans’. With regard to the French
invasion in Algeria, Marx and Engels expressed similar humiliating antagonism against
historyless nations using the label ‘Civilized French versus robber Bedouins’ (Dinç,
2022: 70; Löwy, 1998: 17–18; Marx and Engels, 2010: 365; Munck, 1986: 13).
The later writings of the philosophers on the issue of the conflict between Ireland and
Britain influenced the Bolsheviks, especially Lenin. By 1860, Marx had already started
to support the Irish in the Irish-British conflict. Marx claimed that the hatred between the
Irish and British would continue if they lived together, so the British proletariat would
accuse the Irish of decreasing the wages. From the perspective of the British proletariat,
the Irish proletariat would become the cause of poverty. Munch and Löwy contended that
the Irish issue represented a total break for the philosophers in comparison to their initial
approaches on nationalism. The new paradigm presented the seeds of the distinction
between oppressed and oppressor nations (Dinç, 2022: 71; Löwy, 1998: 33–36).
According to Marx, a nation that suppresses another one can never be evaluated as free
(Özkirimli, 2015: 50).
Briefly, the failure of the revolutionary upheavals forced the philosophers to make
tactical changes, in which they attempted to locate the nationality question on the side of
revolutionary movements. In this context, the Irish case was prominent as this was where
Lenin found the seeds of his distinctive argument of nationalism, such as the distinction
between oppressor and oppressed nationalisms. Lenin’s optimistic approach to minority
nationalism would lead to the constitution of the ethno-federalism and Korenizatsiya
policies in the early Soviet era. Lenin and Stalin’s territorial autonomy model and tolerance for the minority nationalisms as opposed to the majority nationalisms or ‘Great
Russian Chauvinism’ could be evaluated as one of the major influences of classical
Marxist texts on the Bolshevik leadership, which would result in structural implementation. The tangible reflection of this influence was the ethnically codified hierarchical
territorial administration of the Soviet state, albeit with several contingent variations
formed through complex relationships between the elites of Moscow and the peripheries.
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Marx and Engels’s Irish case influence did not suddenly emerge; in fact, the Bolsheviks
were required to compete with various theoretical nationalism discourses among prominent Marxist figures and actors before the Bolshevik revolution.
The legacy of tsarist nationality policies and the Marxist
debate on self-determination before the Bolshevik
Revolution
During the 19th century, Russia was faced with a serious identity crisis. On the one hand,
it was necessary to produce policies that included different ethnic identities in order to
protect its great empire, while on the other hand, Russia wanted to complete its mission
of creating a nation-state. Ruskiy and Rossiyskiy ethnic identity labels emerged as a
result of this identity crisis. Ruskiy was associated with ethnic Russians and Rossiyskiy
was associated with people living in Russia. In other words, if I draw analogies from
Brubaker’s concepts, Ruskiy can be categorized as an ethnic dimension of the Tsarist
nation-building policies and Rossiyskiy fits into the civic dimension of the nationality
policies in the period of late 19th century Russian Tsardom (Brubaker, 2011: 1785–1814;
Dinç, 2022: 66). The rise of nationalism around the world meant that priority was given
to policies that promoted ethnic nationalism in the Russian state at the end of the
19th century. The last two tsars, Tsar Alexander III and Nicholas II, intensified their
Russification policies. In line with the Russification policies, all minority languages
were forbidden in schools and Russian remained the mandatory language for all ethnic
groups living in the Russian Tsardom. Even in the first Duma elections, ultra-nationalist
Russian parties started to become a visible force. The rise of Russian nationalism and the
exclusionist, assimilationist discourse it used soon led to the rise of nationalist demands
from non-Russian minorities as a reaction, so the ethno-centric, assimilationist solution
to the national question in the Russian Empire enhanced the centrifugal tendencies of the
non-Russian people (Dinç, 2022: 67–68). Among the non-Russian ethnic groups, there
was only one group, the Jews, which could directly and shockingly affect not only the
ethnic issue of Russia, but also the Bolshevik revolution (Slezkine, 2004: 110–206).
At the end of the 19th century, most of the European Jewish population (5.2 out of 8.7
million) was living in Russia, constituting approximately 4% of the Russian Empire. In
all, 90% of Jews resided in the pale of settlements to which they were officially restricted
and they were not permitted to live out of the settlements borders, which included partial
territories of Western Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Moldova, Poland and Ukraine.
The Jews traditionally concentrated on providing middleman services between the overwhelmingly Christian population and several urban markets (Slezkine, 2004: 110). The
abolition of serfdom in 1861 began to change the sociological status of the Jews as a
result of rising discrimination against them. In fact, as Slezkine (2004) states ‘Everyone,
except for the tsar himself, belonged to a group that was, one another, discriminated
against’ (p. 115). Therefore, from Kyrgyz pastoralists to the aliens of the small nations of
the North, even the large population of Russian peasants belonged to the very large
‘prison-house of nations’ of the Tsar’s domain (Slezkine, 2004: 115, 95–129).5 When
industrialization destroyed the traditional Jewish economy and Jews began to be expelled
Dinç
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from the governmental jobs, the Jews in Russia experienced an existential crisis. The
Jewish response to the pressure from the imperial government and the pogroms that the
government allowed was emigration. Between 1897 and 1915, approximately 1,288,000
Jews of the Russian Empire, almost 80% of the immigrants, went to the United States.
The remaining Jewish population, who chose to remain in Russia, joined populist and
then Marxist movements, particularly the younger generations (Slezkine, 2004: 121).
Jewish Bund (Union), which had reached 30,000 supporters by the time of the Russian
Revolution of 1905, was founded in 1897 even before the Russian Social Democratic
Labor Party (RSDLP). The Bund was a secular organization, which opposed tsarism and
capitalism through a Jewish minority nationalist perspective. The Bund, whose ideology
was initially more Marxist than minority nationalist, began to emphasize the protection
of Jewish rights more in the months before 1905. The Bund adopted national-cultural
autonomy political demands and wanted Jews to be recognized as a national minority,
particularly after 1905. In fact, the Bund became independent from Russian Marxists
when they chose to leave the RSDLP in their congress, during which the division between
the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks emerged. Members of the Bund also contradicted
Lenin’s model based on strict party membership. In this sense, they supported the criticisms of the Mensheviks against the Bolsheviks (Zimmerman, 2003: 29). As Zimmerman
(2003) highlights, the Bund was a minority national movement party rather than a Jewish
nationalist party. The Bund opposed Zionism and rather wanted every place where the
Jews lived to be accepted as their homeland. Thus, the model that would best support the
national aspirations of the Jewish population dispersed throughout many regions within
Russia was non-territorial autonomy, which contradicted the Bolshevik model of territorial autonomy. In 1910, Yiddish replaced Russian for the first time at the Bund’s Congress.
The rising pressure of Zionism pushed the Bund to intensively focus on mother tongue
(Yiddish language) education and Jewish cultural rights on the brink of the revolutionary
year of 1917. The Bund participated actively in the February Revolution. However, they
opposed the Bolshevik’s seizure of power in the October Revolution, which would trigger their dissolution in 1921 (Rosenblum, 2009: 1915). The proportion of Jews was
20%–30% in the Russian Narodniks, and approximately 20% in the Bolshevik party. In
this sense, they provided considerable mass support to the Bolshevik revolution. An
attempt was made to use this support to discredit the Bolsheviks with the discourse of the
white army in the Civil War, based on the rhetoric that Bolshevism equals Judaism
(Slezkine, 2004: 182–190).
Besides Jewish minority nationalism’s foundational influence on the Russian revolutions, the issue of nationalism was vigorously debated among prominent Marxist thinkers after Marx and Engels, which resulted in three main approaches. These are as follows:
the right of nations to self-determination, an approach identified with Lenin; national
nihilism, which is associated with Rosa Luxemburg; and extra-territorial national autonomy, a program developed by Austrian Marxists which was also ideologically shared by
Jewish Bund.6 Rosa Luxemburg claimed that the unifying political struggle of the proletariat should not be superseded by a series of fruitless national struggles. In her doctoral
thesis, Luxemburg highlighted that the Russian and Polish market had already integrated,
and the Polish economy could not exist in isolation from the Russian economy. For
Luxemburg, those who supported Poland’s right to self-determination were the feudal
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Polish nobility of the old order (Löwy, 1998: 31). The national nihilist considerations of
Luxemburg remained unrevised until her imprisonment by the German authorities in
1915. The economic centrist arguments of Luxemburg were universally pessimistic
against the small nations. According to Luxemburg, ‘The independence of small nations
in general, and Poland in particular, is utopian from the economic point of view and
condemned by the laws of history’. Luxemburg (1976 [1909]) was concerned that the
small nations could play a role as pawns on the imperialist chessboard (Chapter 5; Löwy,
1998: 33).
Another significant approach among Marxists before the Bolshevik revolution was
that of Austrian Marxists’ extra territorial cultural autonomy. Unlike the Marxist orthodoxy, the Austrian Marxists, Otto Bauer and Karl Renner, contemplated the nation as a
permanent and positive phenomenon (Smith, 1999: 15–17). The Austrian Marxists highlighted not only the territorial autonomy, but also non-territorial cultural autonomy
demands of the various nations in multiethnic/multinational states. Undoubtedly, the
Austrian Marxists were heavily influenced by the ethnic structure of the Austrian
Empire.7 The Austrian Marxists were aware that the issue of nationalism was not a temporary phenomenon and they strove to find a solution to accommodate national differences. However, their arguments were harshly criticized by the Bolsheviks.
The third main approach among Marxists before the Bolshevik revolution was Lenin
and Stalin’s proposal of ‘the right of nations to self-determination’. The articles of the
program adopted by the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party at its second congress
that took into account the national question accepted ‘The rights of all nations in the state
to self-determination’, broad local self-rule as well as mother tongue education (McNeal,
1974: 42). The party program was approved by both the Bolshevik and Menshevik fractions. However, there was no reference to federalism or national cultural autonomy in the
program. The national minority parties such as the Jewish Bund, Georgian Socialists
Federalists, Armenian Dashnaktsutium, and Belorussian Hromada together with Russian
Socialist Revolutionaries opposed the program. Essentially, they demanded the division
of Russia into federal units. The Menshevik faction of the RSDLP came close to the
national cultural autonomy approach of the Austrian Marxists by 1912. Moreover, there
was strong support for Luxemburg’s national nihilist arguments among Marxists (Smith,
1999: 15–17). Under these conditions, Lenin urged Stalin to write a polemical work
against Austrian Marxists regarding the national question. In 1913, Stalin completed his
book Marxism and the National Question. In this book, he defined the nation on the basis
of four factors: territory, language, economic life and psychological makeup (Stalin,
2013: 14). According to Stalin, Bauer’s approach on nationality encouraged nationalism,
which was considered a bourgeoisie phenomenon. Stalin was concerned about the overshadowing impact of nationalism vis-a-vis proletarian revolution. Stalin vehemently
criticized Otto Bauer’s concept of nation, particularly the concept of ‘unity of fate’. He
claimed that the nation definition of Bauer was not sufficient to include the Jewish communities who were separated into various areas and spoke different languages. Stalin, as
a spokesman for the Bolshevik nationality policies both before and after the revolution,
generally followed the position of Lenin. However, some elements of Stalin’s arguments
were occasionally disapproved by Lenin. When compared to Stalin, Lenin obviously
displayed a tolerant, pro-minority stance. These seeds of conflict would be revealed after
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the revolution, when the Bolsheviks were challenged by the implementation of their
nationality theories, particularly in the case of Georgia (Lenin, 1966: 606; Pipes, 1954:
270–275).
In 1914, Lenin finished his work, named ‘the right of nations to self- determination’
(Lenin, 1964: 393–454). Lenin (1964) emphasized the main tenets of Bolshevik nationality policy. One of the important legacies that Lenin received from Marx and Engels was
the distinction between oppressor and oppressed nations. Lenin built his nationality
approach on this foundation. Marx’s famous remark, ‘a nation which suppresses another
one cannot be free’ was adopted by Lenin, who observed that minorities in Russia were
suppressed by the monolithic Russification policies, which led to the start of minority
ethnic mobilization under the Russian Tsardom. Therefore, there was a large political
space to mobilize and articulate the minorities in the revolutionary struggle. Lenin’s
main aim was a global socialist revolution, and the status of minorities in Russia would
also become important in the post-revolutionary era. Hence, Lenin was enthusiastic to
make compromises for the minorities unlike the important cadres of the Bolshevik party.
Lenin (1964) emphasized the territorial autonomy and voluntary secession rights of all
nations in Russia (pp. 393–454). Although he was in favor of unity, he was very sensitive
against great Russian chauvinist national suppression. Therefore, he adopted a prominority oriented nationality policies approach, which led to polemics with Luxemburg
concerning the issue of independence of Poland8 (Lenin, 1964: 45–51, 393–454).
According to Lenin, the right to self-determination was similar to the right of divorce of
couples. However, as Lenin (1964) pointed out, ‘the right of divorce is not an invitation
to all wives to leave their husbands’ (pp. 422–423).
In brief, the three main tenets of the nationality question were debated among Marxists
together with the nationalist federation demands of national minority parties, such as the
Jewish Bund. To a large extent, Rosa Luxemburg had a strong influence on the Bolshevik
cadres. However, with the help of Lenin, Stalin successfully imposed his pro-minority
nationalism approach with his high standing in the party. The influences of the debate
among the three main approaches on nationalism would affect the Bolshevik cadres and
shaped the content of the nationality policies after the Bolshevik Revolution in both structural and contingent dimensions. Leninist-Stalinist nationality policy was shaped by classical Marxist texts and debates against Luxemburg, Austrian Marxists, and the Jewish Bund.
Nationality policies after the revolution: Formation of the
ethno-federal Soviet state
The initial years of the Soviet nationality policies from the beginning of the 1920s until
1939 can be considered as the most important period in the creation of the multiethnicmultinational Soviet ethnicity regime. The formation of the USSR was dependent on the
linkage between territory and ethnicity. Therefore, the federal structure of the USSR can
be considered as a form of ethnic federalism. The multinationalist structure of the Soviet
Union was also hierarchically institutionalized and this institutionalization provided an
efficient framework for sine qua non Soviet nation-building. The enormous state-led
effort was implemented to support various non-Russian republics’ nation-building projects. Martin labeled the early Soviet nationality policies as an ‘Affirmative Action
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Empire’ (Martin, 2001: 1–2). Territorial codification of ethnicity was the most significant
peculiarity of the affirmative action policies. The four-tier, Matryoshka doll-style hierarchy of the administrative structure of the Soviet Union was organized in a top-down
manner as: union republics, autonomous republics, autonomous provinces and autonomous districts. At the top of the hierarchy were union republics, which were officially
measured fully sovereign units, while at the bottom of the hierarchy were autonomous
districts, which had low autonomous administrative capabilities. As Slezkine (1994b)
highlighted, these districts were created in order to provide ethnic homelands for the
indigenous population of the Soviet far North (p. 34). The levels of mother tongue education, cultural institutions, native academies of sciences as well as the spending of budgets
for cultural activities in these autonomous units were hierarchically determined based on
the autonomous levels of the titular republics (Gorenburg, 2003: 31). This four-level
hierarchical administrative institutionalization of the ethnicity and nationness that was
seeded in the early Soviet period forged cultural nationalism, which would rise to the
surface during the political and economic crises in the 1980s. During the entire Soviet
era, the non-Russian nations that had no ethnically federal units were exposed to the
strongest assimilation. Hence, the ethnic federal system of the Soviet Union hindered the
speed of assimilation of the non-Russian populations considering the particular national
hierarchical positions. The individual conception of ethnicity and its concomitant product ‘passport ethnicity’ can be labeled as the second significant dimension of the ethnically codified nationality policies of the Soviet Union. The Soviet regime not only
recognized various nations individually, but also acknowledged them as a group and
codified them into the internal passports. Therefore, the passport ethnicity regime can be
assessed as the instutionalization of multiculturalism. In the 1926 census, citizens were
recorded according to their ethnicity. The passport ascription of ethnicity was initiated in
1932 (Aktürk, 2012: 197; Gorenburg, 2003: 197). After that time, every citizen was
required to bear their national identity from birth to death except for certain special cases
involving mixed marriages.
Affirmative action policies and Soviet nation-building
As explained previously, the administrative structure was only an important institutional
part of the wider Soviet nation-building process. As Martin (2001) highlighted, the
Soviet Union systematically promoted the national consciousness of its ethnic minorities
and established many of the characteristic institutional forms of the modern nation state
for them. In addition to the ethno-codified territorial administration, the Soviet State created and trained new national elites. In most of the various non-Russian territories,
national languages were declared as the official languages of the local-titular governments. The Soviet State financed the mass production of native language books, journals,
newspapers, operas, movies, museums, folk music ensembles and the other cultural and
historical outputs (Martin, 2001: 1–2).
A significant aspect of the nation-building process was the promotion of national
elites and national languages. In each territory, the Bolsheviks not only declared national
languages as official languages, but also national elites were trained and promoted into
high-level bureaucratic positions such as leadership positions in the party, government,
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industry, schools and universities. These twin policies were called Korenizatsiya
(Nativization or Indigenization), as mentioned previously.9 Concerning the national culture dimension of Korenizatsiya policies, excessive usage of symbolic national identity
was observed throughout the USSR in the era of affirmative action policies. Stalin legitimized these policies and national cultures as being ‘national in form, socialist in content’
(Martin, 2001: 12). Similarly, Yuri Slezkine (1994b) compared the Soviet Union to a
communal apartment in which common spaces were filled by Russian identity, but the
private apartments were dedicated to the particular non-Russian ethnic groups or nations
(p. 430). Therefore, the aggressive promotion of symbolic markers of national identity,
national folklore, dress, food, costumes, opera, poets were implemented in each ethnically autonomous unit. However, the politization of national culture was strictly forbidden. The content of the national culture was required to be within the framework of
Soviet socialist ideology. The articulation of the national culture in different ideologies
was punished as a form of bourgeois nationalism, so the repressive state apparatus was
mobilized when the ideological limits of the state were exceeded.10 Indeed, the high
central ideological control of the state did not permit the devolution of economic and
political power to the periphery. Other than cultural autonomy, it is hard to claim that a
genuine federation existed within the USSR. ‘Although the 1922-1923 constitutional
settlement was called a federation, it in fact concentrated all decision-making power in
Moscow. National republics were granted no more power than Russian provinces’
(Martin, 2001: 394–413). Therefore, it is difficult to say that Soviet Korenizatsiya policies had an impact on the central government.
Although the political and ideological autonomy of the non-Russian populations was
highly restricted by Moscow, significant efforts were made by the Bolsheviks to reduce
the national-regional developmental gap throughout the USSR. Most Cold War oriented
scholars are keen to label the Soviet state as an imperial colonialist power.11 However,
the official archival documents demonstrate the exact opposite with regard to economic
equalization. For instance, the 1923 Nationalities Policy Decrees called for measures to
overcome the real economic and cultural inequality of the Soviet Union’s nationalities.
The relocation of factories from the Russian heartlands to the Eastern regions to overcome economic equalization was even considered (Martin, 2001: 14). However, most of
the planned sanctions with regard to economic equalization were never institutionalized,
and the achievements were modest. Although there was a discrepancy between discourse
and implementation, the ‘backward republics’ found the opportunity to lobby for their
benefits by distorting official documents in the era of Korenizatsiya. In line with economic equalization and the promotion of native regions, even illegal Slavic migration
was temporarily restricted. The Soviet State’s preferential treatment of its minorities in
most circumstances created resentment among the Communist Party officials. In fact, the
Soviet nationality policies called for Russian sacrifice at the expense of supporting
minorities. The majority of Russian territories were assigned to non-Russian republics
and ethnic Russians living there were asked to learn minority languages. Moreover, their
traditional culture was stigmatized as a culture of oppression. As a great power nation,
Russians lacked their own communist party and were not granted their own territory.
It is evident that contrary to the Cold War era cliché arguments, the Soviet state did not
even implement a neutral policy against its minorities.12 Conversely, it promoted and
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supported minority nation-building processes. The Communist party became the vanguard of non-Russian nationalisms and assumed the duty of guiding them from bourgeois primordial nationalism to Soviet international nationalism, similar to the role it
had played in leading the proletariat beyond trade union consciousness to revolution
(Martin, 2001: 449).
Revised nation-building and deportation of nations
During the NEP period (1923–1928), non-Russian citizens of the Soviet State enjoyed a
golden age in terms of national cultural development. However, throughout the 1930s,
the affirmative action policies of the Stalin era experienced a number of changes. From
1928 to 1932, forced collectivization, abolition of the market and industrialization campaign enhanced the centralization of the Soviet State. The resistance to the forced collectivization from various non-Russian ethnic groups together with the rapidly changing
atmosphere likely motivated the Bolshevik cadres to question the relevance of nationality. Some events involving non-Russian minority mobilization, such as the Sultan Galiev
affair as well as Ukrainian and Belorussian nationalist opposition to the center led to a
revision of the affirmative action policies of Stalin. One of the most important revisions
was the abolishment of thousands of tiny national territories that had been established
during the 1920s. They were either formally or informally abolished during the 1930s.
Nevertheless, 35 larger national territories were empowered in 1936 and most of these
territories still protect their ethno-territorial structure in the Post-Soviet space. Another
significant event was the rehabilitation of Russian national culture. In January 1934,
Stalin declared the abolishment of the ‘Great Danger Principle’, great power nationality
threat perception of Russian culture. By 1936, Russian nation and culture were praised
by Stalin. Consequently, Russians were raised to the rank of first among equals (Martin,
2001: 451–460). If the Russians were at top of the series of nations, there were the small
peoples of the North at the bottom. In other words, some of the peoples of the north, the
prospective nations, were the last among equals (Slezkine, 1994a: 301–336). This community, which had been discriminated against by Tsarist Russia for 400 years, created a
dilemma for Bolshevik policies, which gave importance to modernization and ethnic
rights. Providing ethnic rights to this classless community, which was seen as alien and
savage by Tsarist authorities, was conversely seen as a primitive communist lifestyle by
the 19th-century Russian intelligentsia, would cause the progress of modernism and history to be hindered. It can be said that during the Lenin period, tolerant policies that
protected ethnic rights were applied to the communal nomads of Siberia and the Arctic.
However, Stalin’s collectivization policies artificially created class divisions in these
unsettled, semi-settled nomadic societies. The collectivization of Stalin traumatized the
small nations of the Arctic and Siberia, similar to the nomads of the Kazakhstan. Coding
shamans and reindeer herders as oppressor classes and creating class implications from
tribal life subsequently damaged these communities’ autonomy and cultural rights
(Slezkine, 1994a: 200–217). Hence, before the deportation of the nations, Stalin’s collectivization created a rupture between Lenin and Stalin rather than continuity.
Another rupture between Lenin and Stalin may have emerged through the debate on
‘Socialism in one country’. In fact, Stalin’s deportations, revised nation-building, and the
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issue of demarcation in border areas are also closely linked to discussions of ‘Socialism in
one country’. Even if the early writings of Lenin and Trotsky were subject to constant
change and revision, the common argument is that socialism does not have a chance to
survive in one country. Therefore, the socialist revolution in Russia needed support, particularly from developed Western countries. In his 1906 work, Trotsky was confident that
socialism in one country would eventually turn into capitalist restoration. However, he
thought that this would mostly be the result of the resistance of the peasantry (Trotsky,
1978: 15). Likewise, Lenin also highlighted at the Fourth Party Congress in 1906 that ‘To
hold on to victory, to avoid restoration, the Russian revolution needs a non-Russian
reserve, it needs aid from that side [. . .] the socialist proletariat in the West’ (Lenin, 1962:
17). Between 1917 and 1923, there was a change in the ideas that Lenin shared with
Trotsky. Lenin put forward the thesis that socialism could exist in one country, but that it
would be an incomplete socialism. In fact, Trotsky also approached Lenin’s ‘Incomplete
Socialism’ thesis in 1920, but in 1926, he began to approach Lenin’s earlier ideas which
highlighted capitalist restoration due to the isolation of socialism in one country. In 1929,
Trotsky began to completely defend this thesis against Bukharin and Stalin’s political support for socialism in one country thesis (Van Ree, 1998: 113). After Lenin’s death, the
debate between permanent revolution and socialism in one country became even more
polarized. The thesis of capitalist restoration due to isolation supported by Zinoev and
Trotsky also emphasized the urgent necessity of abolition of the peasant economic autarky
through collectivization. However, for Trotsky, if it was not supported by a world revolution, socialism in one country would apparently become a type of etatism, total control of
the state over individual citizens, that was not truly socialist (Van Ree, 1998: 110). As for
Stalin, despite being problematic, the economic autarky of a non-socialist economy would
not damage the functioning of the economy of the socialist state. Furthermore, Stalin also
reduced Lenin’s incomplete revolution to an imperialist intervention, so Stalin removed
the problem of the socialism thesis in one country from the context of the development
of the productive forces. As a result of the acceptance of the thesis of socialism in one
country, the notion of international solidarity of socialism suffered a great blow. With the
withdrawal of the principle of spreading socialism, the Piedmont principle mentioned by
Martin could not be properly implemented. This also brought into question the thesis that
the structural framework in national politics in the Soviet Union was based on the continuity
of the policies of the Lenin and Stalin periods.
By the end of the 1930s, the Latin alphabets used in non-Russian territories were
replaced by the Cyrillic alphabet. Initially, Latin alphabets had been chosen to demonstrate that the Soviet state was not a colonial power similar to the Russian Empire. In line
with the revisions of the affirmative action policies, bilingualism and reengineering of
non-Russian languages were officially supported. Therefore, the new policies represented an attempt to bring non-Russian languages to Russian language. These new developments heralded the dominance of cultural Russification (d’Encausse, 1995: 22).
Moreover, most of the tiny autonomous units were dissolved and bound to the higher
titular autonomous units of the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics (ASSRs) and
Soviet Socialist Republics (SSRs). Territorial gerrymandering worked in favor of populous titular nations. Although the scope of affirmative action policies was reduced to a
large extent to favor the more populous ASSRs and SSRs, they continued to be enforced
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silently. The new official nationalist discourse transformed into the ‘Friendship of the
People’. However, the Friendship of the People policy would soon be damaged as a
result of the deportations of Stalin.
During the Stalin era and particularly in the 1930s, the Soviet State began to resemble a
mincing machine that suppressed anyone who disagreed with official Stalinist orthodoxy.
As soon as Stalin’s Great Purges ended, the deportations of nations began. From 1937 to
1951, 13 nations of the USSR were systematically uprooted from their homelands and
deported to the remote lands of the Soviet State (Sakwa, 1998: 43–45). The total population
of these exiled nations was around 2 million. Chronologically, Koreans, Finns, Germans,
Karachays, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, Meskhetian Turks,
Georgian Kurds, Khemshils (Muslim Armenians), and Pontic Greeks suffered from the
systematic exile policies (Kreindler, 1986: 387–405; Pohl, 2000: 267–293). This represented the end of the Korenizatsiya conception of Soviet nationality policies. However, the
institutionalized ethno-codified federal structure of the Soviet Union continued. The speed
of the pro-minority oriented nation-building process slowed down. Thousands of nonRussian territories had already been abolished at the end of the affirmative action policies.
In this new phase of the nationality policies, the great danger principle of Russian nationalism was completely abolished. Moreover, the former oppressor nation perception of
Russian culture was rehabilitated. The Russian culture and even Russian nationalism began
to be seen as a glue that held the various nations of the Soviet State together. Due to the
collectivization policies, the Bolshevik cadres began to consider that the issue of ‘backward nations’ was finished. Thus, the demands for preferential treatment of the non-Russian
nationalities began to be regarded with high suspicion and from a security perspective. At
the same time, Russians became a support base for the Soviet regime. Returning to the
analogy of Slezkine (1994b), it is possible to say that the common spaces or corridors of
the Soviet apartment building were enlarging, and the doorman service provided for nonRussian flats was being removed. The common perspective in Soviet history generally
claims that after the period of Stalin had ended, to a large extent, nothing changed with
regard to nationality issues in Soviet history until the nationalist mobilizations of the
Perestroika period. In other words, the structure of the nation-building process continued
until the collapse of the Soviet State. However, a factor that has commonly been neglected
in the Soviet nationality policies literature is the lack of contingent policy-oriented analysis. Many events occurred that contradicted each other and this forces the cohesive understanding of Soviet nationality policies and even leads us to consider the question ‘Was
there a Soviet nationality policy?’ (Smith, 2019: 155–157). Hence, there is an urgent need
to add the contingency dimension to the analysis regarding the Soviet nationality policies,
albeit within a structural perspective, which this section of the study attempted to explore
from the formation of the ethno-federal state to the deportation of nations.
From structure to contingency: The contingent cases in
Central Asia and Caucasus
The territorial autonomy and codifying ethnicity through passports marked two structural foundational aspects of the early Soviet nationality policies. However, the implementation of the Soviet nationality policies resulted in contingency and unpredictability
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in many cases due to the limits of the structure, and even in some cases forcing the limits
of the structure. The instrumentalist understanding of nationalism in classical Marxist
thought, which I discussed in the initial part of the study, and the nomenklatura structure
of the Soviet State together with the role of the titular elite leaderships shaped the contingent characteristics of the early Soviet nationality policies. There are numerous examples that reveal the contingency factor in Soviet nationality policies. Indeed, all the cases
of non-Russian autonomous establishment involve contingent dimensions. In this study,
I will focus on the two most important cases among hundreds of examples. The cases of
Georgia and the border delimitation issue in Central Asia, particularly focusing on
Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, illustrate how the structural logics of the early Soviet
nationality policies were stretching case by case.13
In Georgia, the Mingrelian question and Abkhazia cases demonstrate the resilient and
flexible nature of the nationality policies under the guidance and interests of the ethnic
elites. Blauvelt used the Abkhazia case to show how the patron–client relationships of
the Titular Abkhaz elites directly impacted the nationality policies and autonomous status of Abkhazia (Blauvelt, 2014a). In the case of Abkhazia, the result of the Mensheviks’
pro-Georgian rule alienated the Abkhaz people and forced the local elites to accept the
autonomous republic status under the Georgian SSR (Jones, 1988: 617)). The Abkhaz
national elite leaders, Eshba, Lakoba and Arkitava, lobbied Moscow in order to achieve
Soviet Socialist Republic status. Abkhaz national elites demanded widespread linguistic
and institutional nation-building through deepening and enlarging of the implementation
of Korenizatsiya. However, the Georgian Bolsheviks were reluctant to accept an independent Abkhazia and they accused the Abkhazian elites of high-level clientelism in the
Abkhaz republic. Blauvelt showed the inspection reports of the Transcaucasian District
Committee (Zakkraikom) and their deeply critical content against the Abkhaz titular
leadership. The report simply claimed that Abkhaz ethnic leader Lakoba placed his relatives and supporters in all institutions of Abkhazia regardless of their qualifications, and
recruitment for governmental jobs consolidated his base through cliental networks. The
report also accused Eshba for his lawless stance against the implantation of court verdicts, the covering up of abuses and embezzlement and the use of official positions for
personal gain (Blauvelt, 2014a: 30). Blauvelt’s study also showed how the elite contestation between Eshba and Lakoba ultimately disrupted the unity of the Abkhaz elite and
resulted in the retreat from SSR demands due to Lakoba’s reluctance not to risk his client
networks and his acceptance of autonomy under the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic
(Blauvelt, 2014a: 46).14
The Mingrelian autonomy issue in Georgia also reveals the indeterminacy, conditionality and uncertainty of the Soviet nationality policy. Although many smaller nations
were privileged through the nation-building policies of Korenizatsiya, under the ethnic
leader Zhvania, the Mingrelians struggled even for cultural autonomy over their native
linguistic rights. The Georgian central leadership were significantly disturbed by the
demands of the Mingrelians since the nation-building process of Georgia directly contradicted with the nation-building attempts of the Mingrelians. Connor’s famous saying,
‘All nation-building projects were at the same time nation killings’ corresponded exactly
to the political dispute between the Georgians and Mingrelians. (Connor, 1972). Referring
to the Georgian archives, Blauvelt (2014b) identified that the Georgian central leadership
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initially omitted the native language demands of the Mingrelians and later how the
Georgians were under pressure when these demands spread to Moscow and were even
expressed to Stalin. From that moment, the Georgian leadership offered concessions
under the framework of native language publications. The Georgian elites implemented
district-based gerrymandering policies to divide and co-opt Mingrelian elites. In fact, the
Georgian leadership managed to undermine the territorial demands of Mingrelian nationalists through co-opting Mingrelians into Georgian bureaucracy (Blauvelt, 2014b: 993–
1013). The Mingrelian elites were seduced by the SSR level opportunities of Georgia and
began to oppose the Mingrelian autonomy demands expressed by Zhvania. The last revision of the affirmative action policies at the beginning of the1930s provided the Georgian
elites the self-confidence to liquidate Zhvania and gradually end the remaining cultural
nationalism demands of the Mingrelians (Blauvelt, 2014b: 993–1013).
Another case that reveals the unpredictability and conditionality aspects of the contingent policies is the issue of the Central Asian borders. The border delimitation of Central
Asia has been the subject of extensive debate in the Eurasian Studies literature and is one
of the leading examples of the contingent nature of the Soviet nationality policies.
Former pre-Soviet state entities Turkestan, Bukhara and Khiva were replaced by five
new Soviet Central Asian States, the ‘Stans’, after the establishment of the Soviet power.
Before the Bolshevik revolution, the sense of national belonging was very weak in preModern Central Asian Muslim states. Naturally, in the early Soviet period, nation-building and demarcation of borders became a challenge for the Soviet central established
order. During the Cold war era, some Western scholars focused on the arbitrary content
of the newly conceived Central Asian states and the demarcation of the borders of these
states. Most of these scholars, such as Pipes (1954), d’Encausse (1995), Benningsen and
Quelquejay (1961) and Roy (2000), asserted that the Soviet central authorities drew the
boundaries of Central Asia superficially to divide certain nationalities in order to rule
them more comfortably. The simplification of border drawing reached the point where
Stalin single-handedly drew the borders of the Central Asian countries (Haugen, 2003:
179–183).
The Cold War-oriented Soviet studies literature is indeed quite distant from the social
and archival realities of the region. The Bolsheviks did not have a certain and decisive
political agenda concerning the demarcation of boundaries. First of all, the Bolsheviks
did not have the power to suppress a wide-ranging rebellion that could have emerged due
to border drawing issues in Central Asia after the Civil War. In connection with this situation, the border drawing issue among Central Asian countries was a combination of
structural and contingent elements. The Bolsheviks relied on tribal affiliations and they
sought the support of local cadres. They created a negotiation committee and attempted
to find common ground among different nations. By doing so, the early Soviet leadership
attempted to reduce and not to increase the pre-existing hostilities among Uzbeks,
Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Turkmens and Tajiks. In summary, the delimitation of borders was a
multidimensional issue that was progressed by the negotiations of the Bolsheviks with
local powers in Central Asia.15 By creating national republics in Central Asia, Moscow
institutionalized and deepened the divisions that already existed. During the 1920s,
national territories were springing up in all parts of the Soviet Union, and the interest in
a unified Turkestan was only supported by Uzbek oriented intellectuals. For the Kazakh,
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Turkmen and Kyrgyz elites, pan-Turkistani unity would mean Uzbek domination (Edgar,
2004: 23).
Francine Hirsch (2000) claimed that three principles guided the border drawing in the
Soviet State by late 1924 (p. 211). National (ethnographic), economic and administrative
were the three foundational principles of the demarcation of borders. The national and
economic principles seemed to be structural principles based on the understanding of
Hirsch, although not mentioned directly. The Bolshevik’s aim was to ascribe ethnicity to
the territoriality taking into account the national-ethnographic principle. The economic
dimension evolved in line with the progressive, modernist understandings of the
Bolsheviks. With regard to the underdevelopment of Central Asia, the backward and
oppressed nations phenomenon was the product of the tsarist oppression according to the
Bolshevik discourse. Hence, the Bolsheviks took the positive discriminatory policies into
account in favor of the economically backward parts of the Soviet Union. These first two
principles can be conceptualized through the structurally well-defined policy of the
Bolsheviks regarding the nationality question. However, the third principle, the ‘administrative principle’, reflects the relative and contingent character of the Soviet nationality
policies. The Bolsheviks were always sympathetic to the oppressed nations phenomenon
in line with their anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist ideological positions. Hence, when the
national and economic principles challenged each other, the Bolsheviks chose the national
principle over the economic one considering that there was not equal input from administrative lobbying activities, which I have chosen to define as the contingent principle.
The cases involving the drawing of the Turkmen-Uzbek, Uzbek-Kazakh and UzbekKyrgyz borders show the contingent characteristics of the early Soviet Nationality policy
and falsifies the ‘divide and rule’ arguments. The Soviet officials described Turkmenistan
as the most ethnically homogeneous republic in Central Asia. However, even in
Turkmenistan, the nation-building and border drawing issues revealed the competition
between the structural and contingent dynamics of the Soviet nationality policies. The
boundaries of the pre-Modern tribal identities in Turkmenistan were fluid and shifted
frequently in line with the historical power relations. The tribal Turkmens conceptualized community boundaries taking genealogy into account rather than boundaries. Fixing
the identity on territory would have been a challenging endeavor for the local and central
Soviet leadership. For example, the codification of the ethnicity of the tribe Khidir-Ali
revealed the competitive dynamics of delineating the boundaries. While the tribal members inhabiting the regions between the prospective Turkmen and Uzbek borders claimed
that they were Turkmen, the Soviet ethnographers and Uzbek regional communist elites
claimed that they were Uzbek in terms of language dialect, dress and way of life. In fact,
the tribe members desired to be close to the Turkmen market and Turkmen communists
were willing to increase the territory of Turkmenistan. As this conflict shows, the economic and ethnic dimensions, which Hirsch theorized as the two structural elements of
Soviet nationality policies, clashed with each other together with the lobbying activities
of the local communists to increase the territory of their prospective Soviet republics.
The lobbying activities of the local communists formed the contingent dimension of the
border delimitation since it depended on the elite leadership, patron-client relationship
and negotiations of Moscow with local elites to determine the boundaries of the prospective Soviet republics and their nation-building structures.
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Although the issues of Turkmen-Uzbek and Uzbek-Kazakh border drawing shared
similar challenges, the Bolsheviks implemented different policies in both cases. In the
Turkmen-Uzbek case, the border drawing problem focused on the ethnically Uzbek
dominated city of Dashhowuz. Likewise, with regard to the Uzbek-Kazakh border a
problem emerged in terms of whether Tashkent would be included in the Uzbek or
Kazakh (Kyrgyz) republic. The Central Asian Bureau and Territorial Committee of the
Bolsheviks ultimately decided that Dashhowuz would be incorporated into the Turkmen
republic, whereas Tashkent would be in the Uzbek republic. Both cities were urbanized
centers of Central Asia and both were also exclusively Uzbek. Interestingly, the incorporation of Dashhowuz into the Turkmenistan border revealed the subnational identity divisions among Uzbeks. The Khorezm Uzbeks protested the decision, but the Bukharan
Uzbeks voiced no protest since the center of gravity among the Uzbek communists was
Bukhara and Turkestan (Haugen, 2003: 179–183). In the Turkmenistan case, Atabaev
and the other members of the Turkmen national bureau noticed that Turkmenistan had no
cities of its own. For this reason, they successfully lobbied and insisted on the annexation
of Dashhowuz to Turkmenistan (Edgar, 2004: 62–63).
Splitting the Fergana Valley also caused the unexpected territorial division of the valley between the Kyrgyz (Kara-Kyrgyz) and Uzbek republics. The disputed claims mostly
concerned towns in this valley, such as Kokand, Ferghana, Andijan, Osh and Namangan.
The cotton resources of the region increased the complexity of border drawing while the
ethnically diverse characteristics of areas surrounding the cities made the delimitation
issue more formidable. Although, the Kyrgyz focused on incorporating Andijan and
the Uzbeks focused on Osh, the cities remained vice versa. In terms of the Tajik-Uzbek
border, the Tajiks claimed that the borders were generally drawn in favor of the Uzbeks.
The good relations between Uzbek leader Fayzullah Khojaev, who was a member of the
Central Asian Bureau, and the Central Soviet leadership is one of the reasons for the relatively advantageous positions of the Uzbeks in the delimitation of Central Asia (Haugen,
2003: 237). Even the Kyrgyz, Turkmen and Kazakh officials expressed their resentment,
accusing the Soviet leadership in Moscow of considering Uzbekistan as the main Central
Asian Republic and viewing the others as secondary (Edgar, 2004: 63).
Another example of the contingency in Central Asia is the establishment of the SSR
and ASSR republics. Initially, in 1924, the Turkmen and Uzbeks received SSR status
while the Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Tajiks received ASSR status and had to wait until 1936
and 1929, respectively to be considered as SSR, Soviet Socialist Republic. The Turkmens,
with their small, nomadic and scattered population, were put at the top tier of the nationality hierarchy, which reveals the contingent aspect of the Soviet nationality policies.
Why did the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz need to remain at the secondary status until 1936? If
the answer is that Turkmenistan had external borders, why were the Tajiks forced to wait
until 1929 considering that it bordered both China and Afghanistan (Edgar, 2004: 50).
The Tajikistan case is still another example of the contingent characteristics of Soviet
nationality policies. Internal resettlement of the Tajiks to the border regions was intentionally implemented in order to increase the Soviet influence and attract Persian speakers to the Soviet system in Afghanistan and Iran. The nation-building promotion of
titular nations with the hope of attracting co-ethnics of the titular nations was
explained under the ‘Piedmont Principle’ by Martin (2001: 14). Interestingly and
Dinç
21
beyond exception, the Piedmont Principle was not implemented on the borders with
Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan through other Soviet states (Polian, 2004: 64). Bolshevik
officials only selected Tajikistan as the focus region to attract Persian speaking co-ethnics of the Tajiks and implemented resettlement projects in the scarcely inhabited border regions of Tajikistan (Kassymbekova, 2016: 66).
As shown in the examples, the border drawing and nation-building issues in Central
Asia combined various factors, which ultimately made the Soviet nationality policy
uncertain and context bounded. Even the affirmative action was not a solid set of principles but rather a situationally used strategy which oscillated according to the political
contexts, which I prefer to name in this study the contingent context (Kassymbekova,
2016: 67). The Soviet central authorities took into account national-ethnographical, economic, geographical and administrative/contingent factors, which were concretized
through the expressions of the local lobbying efforts made by prominent titular leaders,
such as Uzbek Khojayev, Turkmen Atabaev. Needless to say, Moscow did not have a
monopoly on knowledge; on the contrary, the information of ethnographers and local
cadres highly influenced the Soviet central leadership in shaping the routes of Soviet
nationality policies in all the different cases (Hirsch, 2005: 11). Furthermore, in many
cases, Moscow took into account the socioeconomic development or modernizationurbanization factors in favor of backward ‘nations’ at the expense of the more developed
ones. The inclusion of Dashhowuz and division of the Ferghana valley was shaped
through the impact of modernization and nationalism linkage, which was an influence of
classical progressive Marxist thought on the Bolshevik leadership.
Conclusion
This study aimed to highlight the foundational characteristics of early Soviet nationality
policies taking into account the Marxist heritage on the Bolshevik policy-makers. This
article argued that the early Soviet leadership implemented a sine qua non nation-building model, in which non-Russian ethnic groups of the Soviet State found the opportunity
to develop their cultural nationalism, albeit with many restrictions that prevented the
politization of ethnicity and nationality. In fact, the Soviet nation-building argument was
supported by many Russian/Eurasian studies scholars after the Cold War. Nevertheless,
in almost all of these studies, the contingent nature of the Soviet nationality policies was
either neglected or implicitly mentioned. In this article, I attempted to fill the neglected
antifoundational dimension of the Soviet nationality policy literature by focusing on the
contingent dynamics and its historical roots, which date back to classical Marxist thought.
Most Cold War era studies shared the common argument that the main framework of the
early Soviet nationality policies in general and Korenizatsiya in particular continued to
function until the collapse of the Soviet state (Martin, 2001: 14; Slezkine, 1994b: 430).
This article to a large extent supports the ‘continuity of the early Soviet nationality policies’ argument within a contingency-oriented focus. In this article, I attempted to reveal
that there is a neglected space in the Soviet nationality studies that should be studied
within a structural context. A bridge between structure and contingency can be a comprehensive framework for understanding nationality policies. The early nationality policies
in the Soviet State created a strong path dependency, which was significantly difficult to
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change. Even the post-Soviet Russia continues to operate an ethnicity regime that is
similar to that of the Soviet State (Aktürk, 2012: 32–37). For this reason, it would be too
assertive to claim that there is no Soviet nationality policy. Instead, there is a missing
argument of contingency in the literature. In this study, the neglected contingency dimension of the Soviet nationality policies has been analyzed through cases from Caucasus to
Central Asia. The Georgian cases and Central Asian border delimitation examples proved
how the early nationality policies were context bounded, and were implemented differently under the influence of local leaderships and their lobbying activities. In this study,
I found the influence of flexible and contingent nationality policies of the Bolsheviks in
early classical Marxist works. While the Bolshevik’s ideological guide, Marx, influenced
them through an instrumentalist and contingent view of nationality question, his famous
quote also points to the contribution of contingency to reevaluate the Soviet nationality
policies under the limits of structure. As Marx pointed out: ‘Men make their own history,
but they do not make it as they please, they do not. . . The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living’ (Marx, 1937: 5). The temptation
of contingency or post-foundationalism should not drag Soviet nationality policy studies
into the abolishment of structural analyses. However, structural analysis must be complemented by the critical engagement of poststructuralism and contingency.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
ORCID iD
Deniz Dinç
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7894-0439
Notes
1. Plural usage of policies rather than policy seems more inclusive for revealing the postructural
contribution of the contingency hallmark of early Soviet nationality policy.
2. During the Cold-War, it was difficult for Western scholars to gain access to archives in
Moscow and Leningrad. It was also almost impossible to conduct field work in one of the
non-Russian republics of the USSR. Due to the lack of knowledge under the ideological
rivalry of the time, most of the works written during the Cold War shared the Western centric anti-Soviet bias in which the nationality issue generally conceptualized that non-Russian
nations of the Soviet Union suffered significantly under Bolshevik rule. The paradigm shift
from ‘nation-killing’ to ‘nation-building’ had to wait until 1991 (Hirsch, 2005: 2). For one of
the pioneering examples of the Cold-War era academic works, see Richard Pipes (1954). For
some of the exceptions that resisted the undifferentiated Cold-War era approach with regard
to nationality and produced insightful works, see Kohn (1933) and Janowsky (1945). It is also
interesting to note that much of the literature after 1991 was influenced by the ‘construction
of nations’ approaches of Gellner (1983), Hobsbawn (1990) and Anderson (1991). These
three authors conceptualized the ‘nation’ as a product of the capitalist era, emerging through
industrialization and the print culture of capitalism (Hirsch, 2005: 3).
3. For a theoretical debate on contingency and usage of the term in the poststructural context, see
for example Shapiro and Bedi (2007: 1–18); Marchant (2007: 25–31); Peoples and VaughanWilliams (2010: 25–31).
Dinç
23
4. In his recent works, Jeremy Smith also attempted to fill the neglected contingency dimension of Soviet nationality policy and he implied that ‘continuity of the Korenizatsiya’ arguments shadow the contingent aspects of the nationality policy. Smith’s concern opens a new
path in the Soviet nationality studies literature and further contingency-oriented research.
Nevertheless, his position equalizes nationality policy with other policy areas, such as foreign
policy, gender and economic policy (Smith, 2019: 972–993).
5. There was a special category in the Russian Tsardom named inorodsty associated with
al-lochthon, alien peoples, which consisted of Jews, mountain tribes of the Caucasus, the
hunter-gatherers of Siberia, and nomadic herders of the Steppe. These groups were considered culturally alien or too backward to be eligible for full citizenship. They were given partial rights to administer their own affairs until they were assimilated or civilized as Russians
(Wimmer, 2018: 146).
6. For a four level division see Smith (1999: 12).
7. The Austria-Hungary Empire was also a significant case for the arguments of Ernest Gellner
who higlighted industrialization and its ongoing results of immigration from the periphery to
city centers. See Gellner (1983: 35–43).
8. See, for example, the debate in Stalin (2013: 5–29).
9. For further information on the root of the word Korenizatsiya see, Martin (2001: 10–12).
10. For a detailed discussion on the link between state and ideology, see for example Althusser
(2014).
11. See as examples the works of Oliver Roy (2000), Richard Pipes (1954), Nicholas P. Vakar
(1956), Alexandre Benningsen and Quelquejay (1961), Hélène Carrère d’Encausse (1995) are
some of the examples of the Cold War-oriented scholarship.
12. See the debate between Bukharin and Stain about the issue of neutrality in Martin (2001: 17).
13. The border delimitation and autonomous status of Tatarstan, and lack of Uighur autonomy
are also other interesting cases that prove the contingent nature of the Soviet nationality policies. Most of the ethnic Tatar population remained inside the borders of Bashkiria. The Volga
Tatars – as the most developed nation with regard to national consciousness among Muslim
nations – were given lower level ASSR status in contrast to the SSR status of less developed
Central Asian states. Likewise, the Uighurs in Kazakhstan were simply neglected without
gaining any territorial autonomous status. For more detailed information about the implementation of early Soviet nationality policy in Tatarstan, see the works of Indus Tagirov (2005:
50–78, 2008: 19).
14. See also the debates on patron-client relationship taking into account historical roots and
emergence of nomenklatura in the USSR (Harasymiw, 1969; Hosking, 2000).
15. See similar comments in Edgar (2004); Kassymbekova (2016).
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Author biography
Deniz Dinç completed his PhD in International Relations department of Middle East Technical
University (METU). He is an Assistant Professor at Final International University in the department of Political Science and International Relations. His research interests are Political Theory,
Theories of International Relations, Russian and Eurasian Studies. He is the author of the book:
Tatarstan’s Autonomy within Putin’s Russia: Minority Elites, Ethnic Mobilization, and Sovereignty
(2022, Routledge).