incorporate such important nationalities on the same basis as the smaller ones of the RSFSR and to subject them to the authority of a state whose title implied they would become a part of Russia. Instead, he proposed that they should join a new formation on the same footing as the USSR, in a federative union of equals. The title of the new federation was eventually decided on as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or Soviet Union. Lenin was by this time almost entirely incapacitated by illness, but had time to win this argument and then had to rely on others to carry his policy through. Until recently, most historians have taken this episode as evidence that Lenin stood for a more liberal position in regard to the non-Russians, while Stalin was a ruthless centralizer. More recently it has been argued either that in reality there were no significant differences between the two, or at least that they were not so far apart on this particular point.
The USSR officially came into being on January 1, 1924, consisting of the RSFSR, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Belorussian SSR, and the Transcaucasian Federation, itself made up of the Georgian, Armenian, and Azerbaijani SSRs (which were later given entirely separate status). In 1925 Central Asia, previously part of the RSFSR as the Turkestan and Kirghiz Autonomous Republics, was divided into separate republics, with further later reorganizations resulting in the five Central Asian SSRs, the Kazakh, Uzbek, Tadzhik, Turkmen, and Kirghiz. Following World War II, newly acquired Soviet territory formed the Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Moldovan SSRs, making a total of fifteen union republics and dozens of autonomous republics and regions for the remainder of the Soviet period. Federalism between a number of national territories, which had been rejected outright by Lenin and others before 1917, thus became the central organizing principle of the Soviet state by 1924.
Within this constitutional framework, for most of the 1920s the Soviets pursued a range of policies aimed at promoting the national, economic, and cultural advancement of the non-Russians: priority to the local language, a massive increase in native language schools, development of national cultures, and staffing the Soviet administration as far as possible with local nationals. Collectively, these policies were known as korenizatsiya, or “rooting.” Although widely opposed by local Russian (and some non-Russian) communists, these policies were generally successful in establishing local national leaderships and strengthening national identities associated with particular territories that
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formed the basis for what later became the post-Soviet independent states.
Economic investment in the non-Russian regions, with the aim of creating or reinforcing a native proletariat and raising the general level of development of the minorities, was one of the key elements of policy emerging from the discussion at the Twelfth Congress of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) in April 1923. During the period of the New Economic Policy (1921-1929), some progress was made in this direction, with the construction of a number of factories and processing plants in Central Asia providing an important impetus to the industrialization of the region. Overall, however, levels of economic investment in the borderlands did not significantly exceed those in central Russia. During the more rapid industrialization of the 1930s, a pattern emerged of concentrating the production of raw materials in the republics, such as cotton in Central Asia and coal in Ukraine, which were then processed in plants and factories in the RSFSR before the final goods were distributed across the Soviet Union. Some commentators have interpreted this as evidence of a deliberate colonial policy, based on comparisons with British practices in India, which served to tie the republics irrevocably into a state of economic dependency on the Soviet Union.
THE STALIN ERA
Stalin did little to change this system during the early years of his power. However, there were early signs of a change in policy direction. In 1928 and 1929 a series of show trials and purges affected leading intellectuals and politicians in Ukraine, Be-lorussia, Tatarstan, Crimea, and Kazakhstan. Many of those arrested or demoted had been beneficiaries of the policies of korenizatsiya, and were now charged with fuelling anti-Soviet nationalism directly or indirectly. A more profound shift was evident in 1930 and 1931 when two leading historians, the Marxist Mikhail Pokrovsky and the Ukrainian national historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, were discredited. Both were associated with an approach to history that had portrayed the Russian Empire as the unremitting oppressor of the non-Russians. As the 1930s progressed, the official version of history shifted to one where the Russian Empire had brought progress and civilization to backward peoples, and where for the first time former Russian tsars and military leaders could be portrayed as national heroes. Whereas previously nationality policy had discriminated against Russians and frequently denied them national rights allowed to others, now the superiority of the Russian culture and people was increasingly celebrated. This ideological shift was reflected on the ground in the partial abandonment of korenizatsiya policies from 1932 onward and an increasing dominance of Russians in the non-Russian regions. By the end of the decade all of the national leaders of the 1920s had been purged and in many cases replaced by Russians. The semiofficial position of Russian as the lingua franca of the Soviet Union was acknowledged by a law of 1938 that made the study of Russian as a second language compulsory in all non-Russian schools.
These changes have often been interpreted as evidence for a policy of outright Russification. But national cultures continued to be celebrated, albeit in a more “folky” form, the constitutional status of republics remained untouched, and local national politicians and the national language continued to play a major role in the life of the republics. In fact, the historian Terry Martin (2000) has identified a shift to a “primordial” view of nations during the 1930s, which implied that nations were permanent and could therefore never merge or be subsumed by the Russian nation. The emphasis in propaganda was rather on a Brotherhood of Nations in which the Russians would play the leading role. This emphasis gained ground during and immediately after World War II, when Stalin famously proposed a toast to “the health of our Soviet people, and in the first place the Russian people . . . the most outstanding nation of all the nations of the Soviet Union” (Stalin, vol.16, p.54).
The shift in nationality policy of the 1930s has to be seen in the broader context. It was a period of massive upheaval for all the peoples of the USSR. The collectivization of agriculture meant the destruction of traditional peasant cultures, most keenly felt by those such as the Kazakhs who had previously been nomadic and were now forced to settle. Huge numbers of people moved from the countryside to the towns and from one region to another in the course of industrialization, with the consequence that territories where one nationality had earlier been dominant in the overall population now found their numbers diluted by an influx of people from other national backgrounds, particularly Russians and other Slavs. In addition, the threat of a major war raised the fear among the leadership of the Soviet Union splitting along national lines in the event of an invasion, which required a propaganda shift emphasizing the unity
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rather than the diversity of Soviet nations. A final factor in the change was the clearly expressed disillusionment of Russians living in non-Russian areas, who had felt discriminated against in the allocation of jobs and land.
The new identification of nations as primordial had further implications. If nations were primordial, then all members of a particular nation shared collective traits and characteristics, which could be positive or negative. In the tense international situation of the late 1930s these traits could include a tendency to be unreliable or treacherous in the event of war. Already in Stalin’s Great Terror, specific actions had been targeted against Poles, Germans, and Finns. In 1937, as tensions with Japan rose, every single ethnic Korean was deported from a large area of the Far East. Between 1941 and 1944, the Germans of the Volga region and the Karachai, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, and Meshketian Turks of Transcaucasia, together with the Tatars of the Crimea, were labeled as treacherous and were deported from their homelands. Every man, woman, and child was loaded into cattle trucks and transported by train to Siberia or Kazakhstan where they were deposited with little provision for their livelihood. Some one and one-half million people in all were treated in this way. Lacking food, water, and sanitation for days or weeks on end, up to half died during the journey, while others perished of disease or hunger soon after arrival at their new destinations. The territories from which they had been deported were simply renamed or disappeared, as if these nations had never existed. But far from eliminating these nations, the experience provided them in many cases with a deeper identity and a myth of survival and hatred of the Soviet system that characterized them later on. Many were rehabilitated by Khrushchev in 1956 and gradually returned to
