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tory, sometimes common religion and laws, as exemplified by the German tradition; and economic materialist-nations are a modern construct typical of capitalism, as maintained by Marxists. Rubakin also separately mentioned two other definitions, one equating nation and state, and the other defining nation racially as a community of individuals related by blood. In his view, all of the definitions, except for the psychological one, were expounded in the writings of Russian thinkers. The most influential of them were the concept of nationality based on language and the view that the Europeanized upper classes did not rightfully belong to the national community.
How nation and nationality were defined became exceedingly important in the Soviet period, because, from the earliest days of the communist regime, nationality became a central category of policy-making for the new government. The founders of the Soviet state, Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin, followed Karl Marx’s perception of nations as historically contingent and modern rather than primordial communities. In 1913, Stalin affirmed that “a nation is not racial or tribal, but a historically constituted community of people” (Hutchinson and Smith 1994, p. 18). Yet the Soviet leaders admitted the reality of nations and recognized their aspiration for self-determination. Although Lenin and Stalin followed Marx’s belief in the eventual disappearance of nations in the post-capitalist world, they accepted that nations would continue to exist for some time and that their aspirations would need to be satisfied during the construction of socialism. In an unprecedented experiment, the Bolshevik government institutionalized ethnoterritorial federalism, classified people according to their ethnic origins, and distributed privileges as well as punishments to different ethnically defined groups.
These policies required criteria for defining nations and nationalities more specific than those in effect before the October Revolution. The new criteria were developed in the 1920s and 1930s in preparation for the all-union censuses of 1926, 1937, and 1939. In 1913, Stalin had described a nation (natsiya) as “a stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture” (Hutchinson and Smith 1994, p. 20). In the 1920s, it became apparent that the application of this definition would exclude certain distinct groups from being recognized and recorded in the census. Therefore, in 1926 the less precise category of narodnost was accepted for the census. Given that various groups were seen as denationalized (i.e., they used Russian rather than the original native language of their community), a narodnost could also be defined by customs, religious practices, and physical type. At the same time, people’s self-definitions in relation to nationality were taken into account. By 1927, 172 nationalities had received official status in the USSR. Policies aimed at satisfying their “national aspirations” were central to the communist reconstruction of society.
In the 1930s, the number of officially recognized nationalities was drastically reduced, on the grounds that the adoption of the narodnost category had allowed too many groups to receive official recognition. The 1937 and 1939 censuses used a different category, nationality (nationalnost); in order to qualify for the status of natsionalnost, communities had not only to possess a distinct culture and customs but also to be linked to a territory and demonstrate “economic viability.” In turn, narodnost began to refer only to smaller and less developed communities. By 1939, a list of fifty-nine major nationalities (glavnye natsionalnosti) was produced.
In an another important development, the 1930s were marked by a departure in official discourse from the view of nations as modern constructs toward an emphasis on their primordial ethnic roots. This development was a result of the government’s “extreme statism.” By using sociological categories as the basis for organizing, classifying, and rewarding people, the communists were obliged to treat as concrete realities factors that, as they themselves recognized, were actually artificial constructs. This approach, in which nationality was not a voluntary self-definition but a “given” determined by birth, culminated in the introduction of the category of “nationality” (meaning not citizenship but ethnic origin inherited from parents) in Soviet passports in 1932.
The view of nations as primordial ethnic communities was reinforced in the 1960s and 1970s by the new theory of the “ethnos,” defined by the Soviet ethnographer Yuly Bromlei as “a historically stable entity of people developed on a certain territory and possessing common, relatively stable features of culture . . . and psyche as well as a consciousness of their unity and of their difference from other similar entities” (Tishkov 1997, p. 3). For Bromlei, the ethnos attains its highest form in
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the nation. Only communities with their own union or autonomous republics were considered socialist nations.
The same period was marked by a debate about the “Soviet narod,” whose existence as a fully formed community was postulated by Leonid Brezhnev in 1974. The Soviet narod was defined as the historical social unity of the diverse Soviet nationalities rather than a single nation. Some ethnographers claimed, however, that a united nation with one language was being created in the USSR.
In the post-communist period, the view of nations as primordial ethnosocial communities continued to be strong. Also widespread was the perception that only one nation can have a legitimate claim on any given territory. Views of this kind are at the root of the ethnic conflicts in the post-Soviet space. At the same time, a competing definition of the nation as a voluntary civic community of equal citizens, regardless of ethnic origin, is gathering strength. Constitutions and citizenship laws in the newly independent states of the former USSR reflect the tensions between these conflicting perceptions of nationhood. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, IMPACT OF; ETHNOGRAPHY, RUSSIAN AND SOVIET; LANGUAGE LAWS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; SLAVOPHILES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hirsch, Francine. (1997). “The Soviet Union as a Work-in-Progress: Ethnographers and the Category Nationality in the 1926, 1937, and 1939 Censuses.” Slavic Review 56 (2):251-278. Hutchinson, John, and Smith, Anthony D., eds. (1994). Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kara-Murza, A., and Poliakov, L., eds. (1994). Russkie o Petre I. Moscow: Fora. Martin, Terry. (2000). “Modernization or Neo-Tradi-tionalism? Ascribed Nationality and Soviet Primor-dialism” In Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick. London: Routledge. Suny, Ronald, and Martin, Terry, eds. (2001). A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. New York: Oxford University Press. Tishkov, Valery. (1997). Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in and After the Soviet Union. London: Sage. Tolz, Vera. (2001). Russia. New York: Oxford University Press.
NATO See NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION.
The Battle of Navarino on October 20, 1827, resulted from a joint Anglo-French-Russian effort to mediate the Greek-Ottoman civil war. The three countries decided to intervene in the increasingly brutal conflict, which had been raging since 1821, and on October 1, 1827, British vice admiral Edward Codrington took command of a combined naval force. Codrington ordered his squadron to proceed to Navarino Bay on the southwestern coast of the Peloponnese, where an Ottoman-Egyptian fleet of three ships of the line, twenty-three frigates, forty-two corvettes, fifteen brigs, and fifty transports under the overall command of Ibrahim Pasha was moored.
Before entering the bay, the allied commanders sent Ibrahim an ultimatum demanding that he cease all operations against the Greeks. Ibrahim was absent, but his officers refused, and they opened fire when the allies sailed into the bay on the morning of October 20. In the intense fighting that ensued, the Azov, the Russian flagship, was at one point engaged simultaneously by five enemy vessels. Commanded by Mikhail Petrovich Lazarev, the Azov sank two frigates and damaged a corvette. The battle was over within four hours. The Ottoman-Egyptian fleet lost all three ships of the line along with twenty-two frigates and seven thousand sailors. Only one battered frigate and fifteen small cruisers survived. The Russian squadron left fifty-nine dead and 139 wounded.
In the aftermath, the recriminations began almost immediately. The duke of Wellington, Britain’s prime minister, denounced Codrington’s decision to take action as an “untoward event.” From the British standpoint, the annihilation of the Turkish-Egyptian fleet was problematic, because it strengthened Russia’s position in the Mediterranean. Shortly after the battle Codrington was recalled to London. Tsar Nicholas I awarded the Cross of St.
