Soviet Union - Empire of Positive Action

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

How the Soviet Melting Pot Was Worked: A Harvard professor, while researching nomenklatura internationalism, came to unexpected conclusions that few people in Russia know about.

The book by Harvard University professor Terry Martin “The Empire of Positive Action.

Nations and Nationalism in the USSR, 1923–1939 "overturned the idea of the" Stalinist empire ", the image of which was formed for decades by the legions of Western historians and political scientists, and since the late 1980s - by auxiliary cohorts of Russian colleagues.

Already because of this, they could not fail to notice this work in the West - professional historians often quote it. They did not notice him, however, in Russia. It would be nice to understand why.

Finds of Professor Martin

The abundance of documents confirming each thesis of the monograph is the best evidence of how gratefully and scientifically strictly the Harvard professor disposed of the knowledge that he could glean from the state archives of Ukraine and Russia.

The monograph covers the entire pre-war Stalinist era and all nationalities of the USSR, but its main outline is the relationship between two key republics of the Union: the Ukrainian SSR and the RSFSR. And the personal motive (“I, whose ancestors left Russia and Ukraine just two generations ago”) clearly confirms the scientist's conclusion: the strength of the Soviet foundation depended primarily on the strength of Ukrainian-Russian relations.

An important innovation of the work is that Terry Martin decisively translates the party style and century-old attitudes into the language of modern politics. “The Soviet Union as a multinational entity is best defined as an Affirmative Action Empire,” he proclaims.

And he explains that he borrowed this term from the realities of American politics - they use it to denote the policy of providing benefits to various, including ethnic, groups.

So, from the point of view of the professor, the USSR became the first country in history where programs of positive activities in the interests of national minorities were developed.

It's not about equality of chances, but about Affirmative Action - preferences, “positive (positive) action” were included in the concept. Terry Martin calls it a historic premiere and stresses that no country has yet matched the scale of the Soviet endeavors.

In 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power, they did not have any consistent national policy, the author notes. There was only an "impressive slogan" - the right of nations to self-determination. He helped mobilize the masses of the national outlying areas to support the revolution, but he was not suitable for creating a model for managing a multinational state - the state itself was then doomed to collapse.

The fact that the first to try to "drive away" Poland and Finland (which were in the empire, in fact, on a federal basis) was expected.

But the process did not stop there - it went further, and the surge of nationalist movements in most of the former Russian Empire (especially in Ukraine) took the Bolsheviks by surprise. The answer to this was a new national policy formulated at the XII Party Congress in April 1923.

Terry Martin, based on the documents, formulates its essence as follows: "to maximally support those forms of national structure that do not contradict the existence of a unitary centralized state."

Within the framework of this concept, the new authorities declared their readiness to support the following "forms" of the existence of nations: national territories, languages, elites and cultures. The author of the monograph defines this policy with a term that has not previously been used in historical discussions: “territorialization of ethnicity”. What is meant by it?

Ukrainian locomotive

“Throughout the entire Stalinist period, the central place in the evolution of Soviet nationality policy belonged to Ukraine,” the professor says. It is clear why.

According to the 1926 census, Ukrainians were the largest titular nation in the country - 21.3 percent of the total population of its inhabitants (Russians were not considered as such, since the RSFSR was not a national republic).

Ukrainians, on the other hand, constituted almost half of the non-Russian population of the USSR, and in the RSFSR they exceeded any other national minority at least twice.

Hence all the preferences that the Soviet national policy assigned to the Ukrainian SSR. In addition, in addition to the internal one, there was also an “external motive”: after millions of Ukrainians, as a result of the Riga Treaty of 1921, found themselves within the borders of Poland, Soviet national policy for another good ten years was inspired by the idea of a special relationship to Ukraine, an example of which was to become attractive for related diasporas abroad.

“In the Ukrainian political discourse of the 1920s,” writes Terry Martin, “Soviet Ukraine was viewed as the new Piedmont, Piedmont of the twentieth century.” Piedmont, we recall, is the area around which the whole of Italy was unified in the middle of the 19th century. So the allusion is transparent - a similar perspective was drawn for Soviet Ukraine.

This attitude, however, alarmed the politicians of neighboring states and the West as a whole. An active struggle against the "Bolshevik contagion" in all its manifestations developed, and counter-game arose - a counter-stake on nationalism.

And it worked: if in the 1920s the ethnic ties of Soviet Ukraine with the large Ukrainian population of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania were considered a Soviet foreign policy advantage, then in the 1930s they were regarded in the USSR as a threat.

Correction was also required by “internal practices”: referring to the same Piedmont principle, the Ukrainian, and after it the Belarusian leadership aimed not only at their foreign diasporas, but also at the diasporas within the Union. And this meant claims on the territory of the RSFSR.

An observation that had not been heard before: until 1925, the professor from Harvard continued between the Soviet republics, "a fierce struggle for territory," in which the losing side invariably turned out to be … the RSFSR (Russia).

Having studied the history of the movement of internal Soviet borders, the researcher concludes: “Throughout the USSR, borders were drawn in favor of the territories of national minorities and at the expense of the Russian regions of the RSFSR.

There was not a single exception to this rule. This compliance continued until 1929, when Stalin admitted that the constant redrawing of internal borders contributed not to a fading out, but to an aggravation of ethnic conflicts.

Rooting in assortment

Further analysis leads Professor Martin to a paradoxical conclusion. Revealing the miscalculations of the Bolshevik project, which began with the wonderful ideals of “positive action,” he writes: “The Russians in the Soviet Union have always been an“inconvenient”nation - too big to ignore, but at the same time too dangerous to give it such the same institutional status as other major nationalities of the country."

That is why the founding fathers of the USSR "insisted that the Russians should not have their own full-fledged national republic, or all other national privileges that were given to the rest of the peoples of the USSR" (among them - the presence of their own Communist Party).

In fact, two federal projects have emerged: the main one - the union one and the subcontracting one - the Russian one (only formally equated to other republics).

And in the end (and the professor defines this as the main paradox), placing on the shoulders of the "great-power" Russian people the historical blame for the oppression of the national outskirts, the Bolshevik Party in this way managed to preserve the structure of the former empire.

It was a strategy for retaining power in the center and at the local level: to prevent the centrifugal nationalism of non-Russian peoples at any cost. That is why, at the XII Congress, the party declared the development of national languages and the creation of national elites as a priority program. To make the Soviet power seem like its own, root, and not “alien”, “Moscow” and (God forbid!) “Russian”, this policy was given the general name “indigenousization”.

In the national republics, the neologism was redesigned after the titular nations - "Ukrainization", "Belorussianization", "Uzbekization", "Oirotization" (Oirots - the old name of the Altaians.- "O") etc.

From April 1923 to December 1932, central and local party and Soviet bodies issued hundreds of decrees and thousands of circulars developing and promoting this directive.

It was about the formation of a new party and administrative nomenclature in the territories (based on the national emphasis in personnel selection), as well as the immediate expansion of the sphere of using the languages of the peoples of the USSR.

Project misfire

As Professor Martin notes, indigenousization was popular among the population of the non-Russian periphery and relied on the support of the center, but still … it failed almost everywhere. The process was slowed down to begin with (including the directive, too - along the party-administrative line), and then eventually curtailed. Why?

Firstly, utopia is always difficult to fulfill. In Ukraine, for example, the goal was to achieve one hundred percent Ukrainization of the entire administrative apparatus in a year, but the deadlines for the implementation of the plan had to be postponed many times, without reaching the desired one.

Secondly, forced indigenousization gave rise to the resistance of influential groups (the professor lists them in the following sequence: city workers, party apparatus, industrial specialists, employees of branches of all-union enterprises and institutions), who were worried not at all by utopia, but by the real prospect that up to 40 percent of the republic's employees would have to be fired.

And the memory of the recent turbulent years was still very much alive; it was not for nothing that the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) U, Emmanuel Kviring, publicly expressed concern that "communist Ukrainization could develop into Petliura Ukrainization."

To rectify the dangerous bias, the Politburo sent Lazar Kaganovich to Ukraine, giving him the title of General Secretary (!) Of the Central Committee of the CP (b) U.

As part of the "course correction", the party was satisfied with the Ukrainian nomenklatura majority of 50-60 percent, and on this unfinished note, on January 1, 1926, the successful completion of the indigenization in the republic was announced.

Its result, among other things, was the "re-Ukrainianization of the Russified masses", albeit incomplete (the historian, citing documents, writes about 80 percent of the population recorded as Ukrainians). What did the transformation of Russians in Ukraine into a national minority meant (following Ukraine and following its example, the status of a national minority to its Russian fellow citizens - “disadvantaged Russians”, as Terry Martin puts it, was also appropriated by Belarus).

This provoked the emergence and strengthening of a national-communist deviation in the party and Soviet management structures of Ukraine, which, according to the Harvard professor, progressed at such a pace and became so widespread that it finally caused Stalin's "growing concern."

All the way to the outskirts

What "scale" are we talking about? About all-Union, nothing less. And a lot of amusing pages are devoted to this in the monograph of the Harvard professor, which read almost like a detective story. Judge for yourself.

The Bolshevik leaders, writes Terry Martin, "did not recognize either the assimilation or the extraterritorial existence of nationality." With these standards, they began to build the Soviet state: each nationality has its own territory.

True, not everyone was lucky: having created 40 large national territories relatively easily, the Soviet government ran into the problem of national minorities, which in Russia alone are like sand in the sea.

And if for Soviet Jews, for example, it was possible to create the Birobidzhan Autonomous Region, then it did not work out with the Gypsies or, say, Assyrians.

Here the Bolsheviks showed the world a radical approach: to extend the Soviet national-territorial system to the smallest territories - national districts, village councils, collective farms.

On the front line of Ukraine, for example, it did not work out with the republic of Gypsy, but one Gypsy village council and as many as 23 Gypsy collective farms were created.

The algorithm started working: tens of thousands of national (albeit conditional) borders were stripped of the Russian Federation, and it was the Ukrainian system of territorial national councils that was taken as a model - in May 1925, the III All-Union Congress of Soviets declared it mandatory for the entire USSR.

Taking into account the fact that in the mid-1920s 7,873,331 Ukrainians lived in the RSFSR, the "Ukrainian Piedmont" extended its influence not outside the USSR, as planned, but to the regions of the USSR - to where significant masses of Ukrainian peasants-migrants were concentrated even before the revolution (Lower Volga, Kazakhstan, South Siberia, Far East).

The effect was impressive: according to Terry Martin's estimates, at least 4 thousand Ukrainian national councils appeared in the RSFSR (while the Russian minority in Ukraine did not achieve the right to form at least one city national council), which, in full agreement with the idea of “territorialization of ethnicity,” took up Ukrainization of the occupied territories.

It is no coincidence, the professor notes, that “teachers have become the most significant export items of Ukraine to Russia” (the historian confirms this thesis with statistics: in the 1929/30 academic year there were no Ukrainian schools at all in the Far East, but two years later there were 1,076 elementary schools and 219 secondary Ukrainian schools; in 1932, over 5 thousand Ukrainian teachers arrived in the RSFSR on their own initiative).

Is it worth it against the background of the development of such processes to be surprised at the "growing concern" of Stalin? In the end, it turned into a condemnation of "creeping nationalism, only covered by the mask of internationalism and the name of Lenin."

In December 1932, the Politburo adopted two resolutions directly criticizing Ukrainization: they, Terry Martin notes, heralded a "crisis of the empire of positive activity" - the project of indigenization was, in fact, canceled …

Why the Soviet people did not take place

The Bolsheviks began their policy on the national question with a wonderful utopia, on which, gradually sobering up, spent 15 years.

The project of the "international of nations", in which territories, population and resources were transferred "like brothers" from one to another, turned out to be a unique experiment - there was nothing like it anywhere else in the world.

True, this project did not become a precedent for humanity: the Soviet government itself reformatted its own national policy at the end of 1932, three months before fascism came to power in Germany (whose racial theory, by the way, did not left no room, no choice).

One can now evaluate that Soviet national project in different ways, but one cannot fail to note: if it consisted of only failures, the war against fascism would not have become Patriotic, and the victory would not have become a nationwide one. So the "Soviet childhood" of the peoples of the USSR was at least not in vain for their common destiny.

But still. Why didn't the “Soviet people” take shape, although for seven decades this term did not leave the pages of newspapers and sounded in official reports? It follows from the work of Terry Martin: there were attempts to establish a single Soviet nationality, the overwhelming majority in the party even stood up for it, but on the threshold of the 1930s Stalin himself rejected this idea.

His credo: the international of peoples - yes, internationalism without nations - no. Why did the leader, who did not stand on ceremony with either people or nations, made such a choice? Apparently, he believed: reality meant more than party directives.

But during the years of stagnation, other Soviet leaders nevertheless decided to reissue the old utopia: the third constitution of the USSR, adopted under Brezhnev in the 1970s, introduced into the legal field a "new historical community of Soviet people."

But if the initial project proceeded from naive ideas about the paths to the "bright future" of a multinational country, then its old copy looked like a caricature: it simply passed on wishful thinking.

Those national problems that were overcome at the level of the "empire of positive activity" sparked at the level of the national republics.

Andrei Sakharov said very accurately about this, commenting on the first interethnic conflicts in the post-Soviet space: they say, it is a mistake to think that the USSR has disintegrated into Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, etc.; it disintegrated into many small Soviet Unions.

Played a sad role and the problem with the "inconvenient" for the Bolsheviks nation - with the Russians. By starting to build the Soviet empire on what the Russians "owe everyone," they laid a mine for the future. Even after revising this approach in the 1930s, the mine was not neutralized: as soon as the Union collapsed, it turned out that the "elder brother" owed everyone.

Terry Martin, in his monograph, refutes these claims with a variety of evidence and facts.

And how can we not recall the recently opened new ones in the archives: in 1923, simultaneously with the development of its national concept, the Soviet government also established a subsidy fund for the development of the union republics. This fund was declassified only in 1991 after Prime Minister Ivan Silaev made a report to President Boris Yeltsin.

When the costs from it were recalculated at the 1990 exchange rate (1 US dollar cost 63 kopecks), it turned out that $ 76.5 billion were sent to the union republics annually.

This secret fund was formed exclusively at the expense of the RSFSR: out of every three rubles earned, the Russian Federation kept only two for itself. And for almost seven decades, every citizen of the republic gave 209 rubles annually to his brothers in the Union - more than his average monthly salary …

The existence of the endowment fund explains a lot. Well, for example, it becomes clear how, in particular, Georgia could bypass the Russian indicator by 3.5 times in terms of consumption. For the rest of the fraternal republics, the gap was smaller, but they successfully caught up with the "record holder" throughout the Soviet years, including the period of Gorbachev's perestroika.

***

About Terry Martin

Terry Martin began his research with a dissertation on the national politics of the USSR, which he defended with such brilliance at the University of Chicago in 1996 that he was immediately invited to Harvard as a professor of Russian history.

Five years later, the dissertation grew into a fundamental monograph, which we presented above. It is also available to the Russian reader (ROSSPEN, 2011) - although, unlike the original, the term “positive activity” on the cover of the Russian edition is enclosed for some reason in quotation marks. However, there are no such quotation marks in the text.

The author told a little about himself, just a paragraph, but he is key, and the book opens to him. The author admits: as a teenager, he spent ten years in a row with his maternal grandmother and forever absorbed her stories about pre-revolutionary life in Dagestan and Ukraine, about the Civil War in Russia.

“She happened to witness the merciless raids of the peasant gangs of Makhno on the rich southern Ukrainian colony of Mennonites,” the historian recalls, “and only later, in 1924, she finally left the Soviet Union and moved to Canada, where she became part of the local diaspora of Russian Mennonites. Her stories made me think about ethnicity for the first time."

This "call of blood" and determined scientific interests. While still a graduate student, he, together with political scientist Ronald Suny, conceived "to unite an increasing number of scientists studying the problems of nation formation and state policy in the first decades of Soviet power."

Two dozen Sovietologists, most of whom were debutants, responded to the invitation from the University of Chicago. The materials of the conference ("The State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Building in the Era of Lenin and Stalin", 1997) argue that its participants by no means set out to conduct a political revision of the "totalitarian Sovietology" that has reigned in America since the Cold War. it was not released. But the historical revision, nevertheless, took place.

Once again, John Arch Getty's diagnosis was confirmed: the historical research of the era when the USA and the USSR perceived each other as "absolute evil" are products of propaganda, it makes no sense to edit them in detail. The history of the twentieth century has to be written anew, in fact - from scratch. Terry Martin's generation got involved in this work.

Key findings of Professor Terry Martin

“Soviet policy was aimed at the systematic development of national identity and self-awareness of the non-Russian peoples of the USSR.

And for this, not only national territories were created, which were ruled by national elites using their national languages, but also symbolic signs of national identity were actively promoted: folklore, museums, national dress and cuisine, style, opera, poets, "progressive" historical events and works classical literature.

The goal was to ensure the peaceful coexistence of various national cultures with the emerging all-Union socialist culture, which was to replace the national cultures.

The national cultures of non-Russian peoples had to be depoliticized by showing ostentatious, deliberate respect for them."

“The Soviet Union was neither a federation, nor, of course, a mono-ethnic state. Its distinguishing feature was the systematic support for the external forms of the existence of nations - territory, culture, language and elites."

“The originality of Soviet policy was that it supported the external forms of national minorities to a much greater extent than the national majority. The Soviet government decisively rejected the model of a mono-ethnic state, replacing it with a model with numerous national republics."

“Soviet policy really demanded sacrifices from the Russian in the field of ethnic policy: territories inhabited by the Russian majority were transferred to non-Russian republics; Russians were forced to agree to ambitious programs of positive activity, which were carried out in the interests of non-Russian peoples; Russians were encouraged to learn the languages of national minorities, and finally, traditional Russian culture was condemned as a culture of oppressors."

“Support for external forms of national structure was the very essence of Soviet nationality policy. With the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922-1923. it was not the federation of autonomous national territories that received recognition, but the territorial form of national existence”.

“The Russians alone were not given their own territory, and only they did not have their own communist party. The party demanded that the Russians come to terms with their officially unequal national status in order to promote the cohesion of the multinational state.

Thus, the hierarchical distinction between the state-forming nation and the colonial peoples was reproduced, but this time it was reproduced upside down: it now existed as a new distinction between the previously oppressed nationalities and the former great-power nation."

Magazine "Ogonyok" No. 32 of 2019-19-08, p. 20