seven during the early 1960s to seventeen by 1982, most of which were only used in the early grades before instruction switched to Russian. In the longer term, mother-tongue education eventually declined in the larger republics as well, especially Ukraine and Be-lorussia, and the constitutional status of republican languages was also undermined in a number of cases.
During Leonid Brezhnev’s tenure as general secretary of the CPSU (1964-1982), the republics were nonetheless subjected to less drastic policy and personnel changes than under Khrushchev. Typically, republican leaders remained in office for much longer, as illustrated by Uzbek first secretary Sharaf Rashidov, who retained his position from 1959 to 1983. This longevity allowed the republican leaders to build up their own networks of power, which were often associated with endemic corruption, but also meant they could pursue the interests of their republics without interference, so long as they did not cross acceptable boundaries. This happened in Ukraine in 1963, when First Secretary Petr Shelest was dismissed for allegedly pursuing a policy of over-zealous promotion of Ukrainian identity and culture. The regime continued to pursue Russification policies to an extent sufficient to provoke the creation of numerous underground nationalist groupings, which were to emerge at the head of much broader movements at the end of the 1980s.
GORBACHEV AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION
Shortly after assuming the general secretaryship of the CPSU in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev declared that the Soviet Union had decisively resolved the national question. Events were to disillusion him quickly. When he tried to replace the Kazakh first secretary, Dinmukhamed Kunaev, with a Russian, Gennady Kolbin, in December 1986, the response was widespread rioting on the streets of Alma Ata, the capital of the Kazakh Republic. Gorbachev’s reaction was to tread a more cautious line, repealing a number of unpopular language laws, and reforming the Council of Nationalities, which represented the republics at the highest level. Initially, he even gave encouragement to national-minded intellectuals in the Baltic republics, hoping to use them to help force through experimental market reforms in the region. But his failure to instigate an overall consistent policy towards nationalities only served to fuel the explosion of national unrest, which erupted in violent conflict between Az-eris and Armenians in Azerbaijan in 1988, and the emergence of national “Popular Fronts,” which arose in the Baltic republics during the same year and spread across almost all major nationalities by the end of the decade.
This eruption led to varying responses from Gorbachev, who at times seemed to be making concessions to the national movements, but at other times resorted to repression, leading to bloodshed by government forces in the Georgian capital Tbilisi and the Lithuanian capital Vilnius (although Gorbachev’s direct involvement in these events has never been established). The Popular Fronts won spectacular successes in Soviet elections and came to dominate the government in Armenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Georgia. These republics declared first sovereignty, then independence. Other republics followed with declarations of sovereignty (meaning that their own republican laws would take precedence over the laws of the USSR). The decisive blow against the federal USSR came during the summer of 1990 when the RSFSR itself, led by Boris Yeltsin, declared sovereignty. In his rivalry
1016
with Gorbachev, Yeltsin was prepared to give every encouragement to national movements, including the Russian one.
Although a referendum organized by Gorbachev early in 1991 showed overwhelming support for maintaining some form of Union among most non-Russians, and Gorbachev himself was working on the terms of a new, much looser, Union Treaty aimed at holding the republics together at the time of the failed coup in August of that year, he was probably already resigned to the independence of the Baltic republics, and it was likely that other republics would follow them. The coup proved the final nail in the coffin as it encouraged other republican leaders to pursue their own paths, and the USSR was formally dissolved at midnight on December 31, 1991.
While the Bolsheviks and their successors were guided by general principles in their treatment of non-Russian nationalities, no single coherent nationalities policy existed for the Soviet period as a whole. Not only did the guiding principles change over time, but they were applied to different degrees to different nationalities, creating a picture far more complex than it is possible to describe here in detail. The size of the nationality, its proportion in the overall population of each republic, the historical strength of national identity, the existence of co-nationals or coreligionists outside the borders of the USSR, and their proximity to Moscow or strategic borderlands were all factors contributing to these differences. Perhaps most important of all, especially in the later Soviet period, was the closeness of individual leaders to the key figures in Moscow and their adeptness at the kind of bargaining that characterized the later years. Ultimately, one of the reasons for the demise of the USSR was the attempt to apply general nationalities policies to the three Baltic republics, which had a quite different historical experience from the other nationalities. But from the earliest days there was an inconsistency in the application of policies that favored national development on the one hand and the demands of a centralized, ideologically and culturally unified state on the other, causing tensions that contributed in no small part to the instability that preceded the downfall of the system. See also: COMMONWEALTH OF INDEPENDENT STATES; EMPIRE, USSR AS; KORENIZATSYA; NATIONALISM IN THE SOVIET UNION; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; OFFICIAL NATIONALITY; RUSSIAN SOVIET FEDERATED SOCIALIST REPUBLIC; RUSSIFICATION; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allworth, Edward A., ed. (1998). The Tatars of Crimea: Return to the Homeland. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Altstadt, Audrey L. (1992). The Azerbaijani Turks. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Bennigsen, Alexandre, and Lemercier-Quelquejay, Chan-tal. (1967). Islam in the Soviet Union. London: Pall Mall. Bilinsky, Yaroslav. (1962). “The Soviet Education Laws of 1958-59 and Soviet Nationality Policy.” Soviet Studies 14:138-157. Bremmer, Ian, and Taras, Ray, eds. (1997). New States, New Politics: Building the Post-Soviet Nations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Broxup, Marie Bennigsen, ed. (1992). The North Caucasus Barrier: The Russian Advance towards the Muslim World. London: Hurst. Carr?re d’Encausse, H?l?ne. (1992). The Great Challenge: Nationalities and the Bolshevik State, 1917-1930. New York: Holmes and Meier. Denber, Rachel, ed. (1992). The Soviet Nationality Reader: The Disintegration in Context. Boulder, CO: Westview. Fowkes, Ben. (1997). The Disintegration of the Soviet Union: A Study in the Rise and Triumph of Nationalism. London: Macmillan. Huttenbach, Henry R. (1990). Soviet Nationaltity Policies: Ruling Ethnic Groups in the USSR. London: Mansell. Kaiser, Robert J. (1994). The Geography of Nationalism in Russia and the USSR. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kappeler, Andreas. (2001). The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History. London: Longman. Karklins, Rasma. (1986). Ethnic Relations in the USSR. Boston: Allen and Unwin. Kreindler, Isabelle. (1986). “The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities: A Summary and Update.” Soviet Studies 38:387-405. Lenin, Vladimir Ilich. (1964). “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination.” Collected Works. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Levin, Nora. (1990). The Jews of the Soviet Union since 1917. London: I. B. Tauris. Martin, Terry. (2000). “Modernization or Neo-Tradi-tionalism? Ascribed Nationality and Soviet Primor-dialism”. In Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick. London: Routledge. Martin, Terry. (2001). The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Nahaylo, Bohdan, and Swoboda, Victor. (1990). Soviet Disunion: A History of the Nationalities Problem in the USSR. London: Hamish Hamilton.
1017
Nekrich, Aleksandr Moiseevich. (1978) The Punished Peoples: The Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of the Second World War. New York: Norton. Pipes, Richard. (1997). The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923, rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Simon, Gerhard. (1991). Nationalism and Policy Toward the Nationalities in the Soviet Union. Boulder, CO: Westview. Smith, Graham, ed. (1996). The Baltic States: The National Self-Determination of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. London: Macmillan. Smith, Jeremy. (1997). The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917-1923. London: Macmillan. Subtelny, Orest. (1989) Ukraine: A History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Suny, Ronald Grigor. (1992). The Making of the Georgian Nation. London: I.B. Tauris. Suny, Ronald Grigor. (1993). The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Suny, Ronald Grigor, and Martin, Terry, eds. (2001). A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin.
