as one of the most serious threats to national unity and was severely suppressed.
The population of the Baltic republics, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, often expressed their anti-Russian and anti-Soviet sentiments during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev times. Soviet authority
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used a “stick and carrot” policy toward these countries. The active nationalists from these countries were imprisoned and sent to exile. At the same time the Soviet government made larger investments in the economic development of the Baltic countries compared with those of the other national republics. The authorities attempted to maintain higher standards of living in these countries and thus decrease the dissatisfaction of the population. However, the people of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia looked at Russians as occupiers and were usually hostile toward the Soviet regime. The Baltic countries were the first to declare their independence during the time of perestroika (1985-1991).
The nationalist-oriented part of the Jewish population participated in the Zionist movement and fought for the right of emigration to Israel. A small percentage of the Jewish population of the Soviet Union emigrated to Israel, the United States, and other countries during the 1970s and early 1980s. However, this emigration was severely restricted by Soviet authorities, who treated the emigrants as traitors to the Motherland.
In the last years of the Soviet Union national conflicts increased in the Caucasus republics. Bloody anti- Armenian pogroms occurred in the Nagorno Karabakh region and in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. In Georgia violent conflict occurred between the Georgian and Abkhazian population.
The Soviet nations never harmoniously coexisted. Brezhnev’s slogan of Friendship of Nations was an empty propaganda claim. The Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics was cemented by the military power of the communist government, and by fear of repression and persecution of the most active national elements in the Soviet regime. As soon as liberalization appeared with Gorbachev’s pere-stroika policy, the Soviet republics one by one declared their independence. Still the central Soviet government strongly resisted decentralization of the country during the late 1980s. By the order of Soviet leaders, troops were used against civilians in Latvia and Lithuania. But the end of the Soviet empire was fast approaching. The Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991 and many nations of the former union began a new chapter in their history as independent countries. See also: EMPIRE, USSR AS; LANGUAGE LAWS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATION AND NATIONALITIES; RUSSIFICATION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hosking, Geoffrey, and Service, Robert, eds. (1998). Russian Nationalism, Past and Present. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kostyrchenko, Gennadi. (1995). Out of the Red Shadows: Anti-Semitism in Stalin’s Russia, tr. from Russian. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Martin, Terry. (2001). The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pipes, Richard. (1980). The Formation of the Soviet Union; Communism and Nationalism 1917-1923, 3rd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rancour-Laferriere, Daniel. (2000). Russian Nationalism From an Interdisciplinary Perspective: Imagining Russia. Slavic Studies. Vol. 5. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Rubenstein, Joshua, and Naumov, Vladimir P., eds. (2001). Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, tr. Laura Ester Wolfson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Service, Robert. (1998). A History of Twentieth-Century Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Simon, Gerhard. (1991). Nationalism and Policy toward the Nationalities in the Soviet Union: From Totalitarian Dictatorship to Post-Stalinist Society, tr. Keren Forster and Oswald Forster. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Subtelny, Orest. (2000). Ukraine: A History, 3rd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Suny, Ronald G. (1998). The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States. New York: Oxford University Press.
VICTORIA KHITERER
The Russian Empire penetrated Europe as Europe’s age of nationalism began. The retreat of Napoleon Bonaparte after his failed invasion brought Russia into the heart of Europe. The Congress of Vienna (1815), which reestablished a European order after Napoleon’s defeat, brought Russia’s border’s farther west than ever before. The ancient Polish capital, Warsaw, was added to the Polish lands taken by Russia in the partitions of the late eighteenth century. The diplomatic settlement established Russia as a great European power, if not as a great European nation. Although Tsar Alexander I was then something of a liberal autocrat, national legitimation would never have entered his mind. The mod1003
ern idea of the nation as a people inhabiting a territory and deserving of a state ruling in their name was alien at the time, and would long remain so. Between 1815 and 1917, national ideas reached Russia from its western and southern frontiers, providing some with the hope of change, and others with a tool of reaction.
TENTATIVE CONSTITUTIONALISM, 1815-1830
Nationalism can be a method of rule by those who already hold power. Yet during the early nineteenth century, even the suggestion of popular sovereignty was inimical to the tsars’ prerogative of absolute personal power. Any emphasis on the Russian peasantry as a political class would have challenged the right to rule of the Romanov dynasty, as well as the prerogatives of the largely foreign elite that administered the growing imperial state. In any event, as seen from St. Petersburg, nationalism was a force associated with revolution, a challenge to traditional rule rather than a way to bolster it. This was the lesson of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars.
As an ideology of change, nationalism was a challenge to the monarchies and empires of ancien r?gime Europe, yet it found few adherents in Russia during the first half of the nineteenth century. The uneducated peasantry was tied to the communal system of land ownership, an isolated world of limited horizons. Few were able to see the peasants as people, let alone as a political nation, before the emancipation decree of 1861. The church, an agent of national revival elsewhere in imperial Europe, was subordinate to the Russian state and aligned with the principles of dynastic and autocratic rule. The nobility, elsewhere in eastern Europe the bearer of historical national consciousness, was in Russia associated with the state, for the Russian state created by Peter I and Catherine I had transformed it into a new cosmopolitan service class.
After 1815, the Russian Empire held the absolute majority of the world’s Poles, and about 10 percent of the Polish population was noble. Napoleon, exploiting Polish hopes for statehood, had established a duchy of Warsaw. This quasi- state was revived and enlarged at the Congress of Vienna as the Kingdom of Poland. Although Poland’s former eastern lands were absorbed by the Russian Empire, Polish nobles even there held social and economic power. Institutions of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, such as the university at Wilno, the Lithuanian Statutes, and the Uniate Church, functioned with little interruption. Alexander ruled these eastern lands as tsar, but the Kingdom of Poland as constitutional monarch.
The Polish gentry, the leading class in the departed Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, considered itself a historical nation. Before the commonwealth was dismembered by the partitions, much of the middle gentry had been resolutely conservative, perceiving central power as the greatest threat to their traditional rights. In Russia, the same inclination turned the middle gentry into radicals, attentive to the constitution as the source of the tsar’s right to rule Poland as king. The 1830 uprising was premised on social-contract thinking: Since the tsar (Nicholas I) was not fulfilling his obligations as king of Poland, his subjects had the right and duty to rebel. The uprising was national in some sense, since the gentry saw itself as the nation; it was certainly democratic, in that the Polish Diet saw itself as representing a European republic struggling against despotism; but it was not modern nationalism, for its participants neither legitimated their claims on a popular basis nor aroused passions against an enemy nation.
ROMANTIC AND OFFICIAL NATIONS, 1831-1855
The defeat of the 1830 uprising created the conditions for a sophisticated discussion of the nation by Russian subjects. Poland’s ten thousand political emigr?s were highly literate, politically engaged, and determined to explain their military and political defeat. Many of the emigr?s, and most of the leading figures, were of historical Lithuanian
