their homelands, while others, like the Crimean Tatars, Meskhetian Turks, and Volga Germans had to wait longer and could only return illegally.
Policy towards other nationalities was more positive during the war years, although Jews, Ukrainians, and Belorussians suffered disproportionately from the Nazi invasion and occupation. The need to mobilize the entire Soviet population for the war effort led to a number of concessions. National units in the Red Army, abolished only in 1938, were restored, and the heroic exploits of some of them were particularly prominent in propaganda. National heroes, especially military ones, who had been discredited in the official histories of the 1930s, were praised. A looser attitude to religion and culture restored the symbols and practices associated with many nationalities. In general Soviet propaganda stressed the unity and brotherhood of all the nations of the Soviet Union, but with the important qualification that the leading role was assigned to the Russians.
The settlement agreed by the Allies at the end of the war brought substantial new territory under Soviet control. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which had been independent since the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922, were first occupied by the Red Army and incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940 under the terms of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact. Rapid steps towards the Sovietization of these republics were taken, and were resumed after the interruption of the Nazi occupation of 1941-1945. The nationalization of industry, redistribution of landed estates followed by collectivization, introduction of Soviet school and university curricula, and imposition of the Soviet political system were all carried out with no regard for the independent traditions of the region. The process involved the deportation or execution of more than 300,000 individuals of suspect backgrounds-former members of political parties, army officers, high-ranking civil servants, clergymen, estate owners, or political opponents from the pre-independence period. These deportations were followed up by a deliberate policy of immigration of Russians into Latvia and Estonia in particular, significantly shifting the demographic makeup. In response to Sovietization, national partisan units, some of which were formed to fight against the Nazi occupation, continued to trouble the Soviet authorities until as late as 1952.
During the postwar years, appeals to Russian national sentiment took a further twist in the form of overt anti-Semitism. In 1948 a propaganda campaign against “cosmopolitanism” made little secret of the identity of the real targets. Over the next five years, thousands of Jewish intellectuals, cultural figures, and political leaders were arrested and imprisoned or executed. In 1953 a number of leading doctors, most of them Jewish, were arrested and charged in the so-called Doctors’ Plot to kill off Soviet leaders. There is some evidence that at the same time plans were being laid to deport Jews from the western parts of the Soviet Union in an operation similar to, but on a larger scale than, the wartime national deportations. These plans were shelved, and most of the doctors’ lives spared, only by the death of Stalin on March 5, 1953. The rapid abate1014
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ment of anti-Jewish activities and propaganda from this date gives some persuasiveness to the argument that the campaign was based primarily on Stalin’s personal anti-Semitism, but Soviet policy in the Middle East and the suspicion that Jewish organizations would gain in influence at home and abroad as a result of the sympathy arising from the Holocaust have also been offered as explanations. In any case anti-Semitism was deeply ingrained in large sections of Russian society, and could easily be mobilized again, as it was during the 1960s and 1970s, though to a lesser extent than during the late Stalin years. During the Brezhnev period, the status of Soviet Jews received international publicity through the fate of the refuseniks- those Jews who had been refused permission to emigrate to Israel.
The non-Russian nationalities of the USSR played an important role in the competition to succeed Stalin as leader. NKVD (secret police) head Lavrenti Beria, like Stalin a Georgian, gained the ascendancy initially, and one of his first acts was to privately condemn Stalin for departing from Leninist principles in nationalities policy. He replaced the Russian Konstantin Melnikov with the Ukrainian Aleksei Kirichenko as party leader in Ukraine, and made several other personnel changes that established the principle that the first Party secretary in each Union republic should belong to the local nationality, a policy that was generally observed until 1986. “Activating remnants of bourgeois-nationalist elements in the Union republics” was one of the charges laid against Beria on his arrest during the summer of 1953, but nevertheless the republics continued to enjoy a position of relative advantage. Nikita Khrushchev, as general secretary of the CPSU, used his powers of appointment to promote former colleagues from Ukraine, where he had served during the 1930s, into important positions at the center. He also showed favoritism toward Ukraine in granting it control of the Crimean peninsula in 1954, and increased the number of Ukrainians on the Central Committee of the CPSU from sixteen in 1952 to fifty-nine in 1961. Their votes ultimately proved important in defeating Khrushchev’s rivals in the Politburo. Khrushchev also gave all of the republics more say over economic matters by decentralizing a number of economic ministries, as well as the Ministry of Justice, to the republic level. Having beaten off his rivals in 1957, Khrushchev turned many of these reforms on their head. Economic ministries were reorganized once more to the detriment of the republics. A new form of words creeping into the regime’s Marxist-Leninist ideology signaled a clear shift in nationalities policy. Instead of describing relations between the nationalities of the USSR as a “Brotherhood of Nations,” Khrushchev now began to talk about the “merger of nations” into one Soviet nation. This nation would be based around Slavic culture and the Russian language. Khrushchev took care not to alienate entirely the Ukrainian population, who were easily the second largest nationality, by including them (and to a lesser extent Belorussians) alongside Russians as the more important of the nationalities.
An important policy change was taken in this direction in the context of a general reform of the education system, which Khrushchev introduced in theses announced in November 1958. Article 19 of the theses, while acknowledging the longstanding Leninist principle that each child should be educated in his or her mother tongue, insisted that the question of which languages children should learn or be instructed in was a matter of parental choice. This move was widely opposed in the republics, especially those of Transcaucasia and the Baltics. It meant that Russian immigrants into the republics no longer had to study the local language as a second language, while it also opened the door to Estonians, Azerbaijanis, and others to send their children to Russian schools. Nevertheless, Khrushchev insisted on all the republics introducing legislation to reflect this change. In those republics that failed to do so, Latvia and Azerbaijan, broad purges of the Communist Party leadership were carried out on Moscow’s instructions and new legislation forced through.
What the republican leaders feared was that the status of the republic’s language would be eroded, provoking an initial popular backlash and opening the door in the long term to the abolition of the national federal system. It is perhaps no coincidence that the republics that displayed most opposition to the reform-Latvia, Estonia, and Azerbaijan- were those where the numerically dominant position of the local nationality in the population as a whole had come under the most pressure. Following the first major period of internal migration in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, several further waves of migration occurred. Immediately after World War II, as thousands of Estonians, Latvians,
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and Lithuanians were deported from their republics, even greater numbers of Russians moved the other way over a number of years, especially into Latvia and Estonia, where the proportion of Estonians in the total population fell from 88 percent in 1939 to 61.5 percent in 1989. Under Khrushchev, large-scale internal migration was associated with the Virgin Lands campaigns and other policies, while the dominance of republican nationalities was further undermined by later waves of migration.
The changing demographic structure of the USSR might help to explain Khrushchev’s new emphasis on the “merger of nations.” If particular policies and the demands of modernization entailed a geographically more mobile population, it made sense for everyone to have command of a single language and to owe their primary loyalty to the Soviet state rather than to a particular republic or nationality. The sum total of Khrushchev’s policies, then, could be regarded as aiming at a more systematic Russification of the entire population than had ever been attempted by Stalin.
If this was the intention, at least in the short term the actual impact of Khrushchev’s policies was minimal in the Union republics. Schools continued to operate much as they had before. For the smaller nationalities of the RSFSR, the impact was more telling. The number of languages used in schools in the RSFSR declined from forty-
