HIST 236 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic, Chauvinism, Yuri Slezkine
19 Jun 2018
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Professor
Bolsheviks don't like empires because they think that it is late-stage
capitalism
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"Proletarians of the world unite," it was supposed to be suprantationalist
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Internationalism
As Marxists, the Bolsheviks believed in internationalism, not nationalism
Lenin argued that socialism is impossible in one country
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The Communist International (Comintern) was set up to spread worldwide
revolution during WWI
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After communist revolutions failed to materialize and after Lenin's death,
the Comintern shifted to defending the USSR as a socialist state
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Need to make parts of the national empire that are feudalist go through
revolutions
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Great Russian Chauvinism
Martin: by the early 1920s, the Bolsheviks were engaged in nation building;
the concept of nation was seen as useful for developing support for
socialism
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The Bolsheviks (Lenin in particular) were critical of "Great Russian
Chauvinism" or the idea that Russians should dominate political, cultural and
economic life
Lenin was convinved the Communist Party had inhered this mentality
from the Tsarist past and it had to be rooted out after the revolution
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Oppressed minorities by keeping them ignorant and isolated, but the
Bolsheviks thought that this was exploitative
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Russian chauvinism needed to be rooted out of the government
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Union of Socialist Republics
In December 1922, the Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian and the Caucasians
SSRs (collectively as the Transcaucasian Republic) declared the creation of
the Soviet Union
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It is one country, but composed of different federal unions
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USSR stands for Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; within it, each republic
was a Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
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Each republic had government structure that mirrored that o the USSR's
government but certain things remained the domain of the Union or the
republics
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Council of republics and council of nationalities and people are voted in
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Stalin, Man of the Borderlands
Rieber: Stalin was a quintessential man of the borderlands hailing from
Eastern Georgia
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He served as Commissar of Nationalities in the first Soviet government and
was considered an expert on the national question
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He emerged as an opponent of the idea of defense nationalism (nationalist
as a response to Tsarist oppression and Great Russian chauvinism) and
national variants of socialism
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Lenin accused him and other non-narratives of the worst kind of Great
Russian chauvinism
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Advocated for a more Georgian-flavoured socialism, but moves more
towards an internationalist position
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Opposed Georgia entering the USSR as a republic
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What is Nationalism? (According to Stalin)
Stalin's famous 1913 tract "Marxism and the National Question" would
shape Soviet nationality policy for decades to come
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He saw the nation as defined by common language, territory, economy,
culture, etc. and as historically contingent
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He argued that nations and nationalism were manifestations of the
bourgeois-capitalist phase in history and national identity was a "masking"
ideology concealing class conflict that would be exposed with the advent of
socialism
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Jewish people try to build their own homeland on the border of Mongolia in
the USSR
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Drawing Borders
According to this logic, the minority ethnic groups of the UUSR had to go
through a process of becoming modern nations if not independent nation
states
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The government attempted to establish the borders of their common
territory
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The borders they came up with did not correspond to linguistic, religious and
cultural borders, and did not always reflect the complexity and intermixing
of these areas
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The republics would be national in form, socialist in content
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Drew a border around the most dominant nationality in a region, and
declared that the border
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Indigenization
During the early 1920s, the government embarked on a policy of indigenizing
(literally "taking roots")
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Korenizatsiia involved promoting representatives of titular nationalities (the
ones whose ethnic group became the name of that region) into local
government, management, bureaucracy and leadership positions in the
corresponding national entities
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Local languages and local cultures were promoted
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Tried to force different nationalities to go to school and work together
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Standardize the alphabets/spelling
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Trying to create a new elite/group of people loyal to socialism and will
participate in the process (but this changes in the 1930s)
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Celebrating National Cultures
In the 1930s, the process of indigenization came to an end and was replaced
by the celebration of peoples and their differences
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Popular art, theatre and culture were promoted through festivals,
publications, primary education, etc.
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Martin: Nationality was depoliticized and the teeth were taken out of
nationalism
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In 1932, domestic passports are introduced
In the internal passport, it would have your ethnicity marked in it
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Ethnic Particularism
Although nationalism was depoliticized, one's nationality remained very
significant in Stalin's Soviet Union, shaping one's relationship to the state
and access to education, opportunity, etc.
Nationality was marked in one's passport
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Yuri Slezkine: the USSR was supposed to be a "communal apartment" in
which every nationality got its own room and everyone lived together in
harmony…but in reality it didn't work out that way
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Russians did not have their own nationality until later because they were
perceived as the norm and they are already proletarians on the spectrum
while everyone else is still figuring it out
Russians did not like not having their own identity
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Bolsheviks did not think that national identity was a real thing - the
end goal was to shed the identity and become proletarians
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Lecture 18 -Soviet Nationality Policy
Wednesday, February 28, 2018
11:28 AM
