sovereignty and territorial integrity, and sowed the seeds of Chinese anger that matured during the twentieth century. See also: AIGUN, TREATY OF; CHINA, RELATIONS WITH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Clubb, O. Edmund. (1971). China and Russia : The “Great Game.” New York: Columbia University Press . Mancall, Mark. (1971). Russia and China: Their Diplomatic Relations to 1728. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Paine, S. C. M. (1997). Imperial Rivals: Russia, China, and Their Disputed Frontier. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Quested, Rosemary. (1984). Sino-Russian Relations: A Short History. Sydney: George Allen and Unwin. Tien-fong Cheng. (1973). A History of Sino-Russian Relations. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press (reprint of Public Affairs Press, 1957).
(b. 1962), novelist and short-story writer.
Born in Moscow to a military family, Viktor Olegovich Pelevin received his education at the
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Moscow Energy Institute and the Gorky Institute of World Literature (Moscow). Praised and panned by critics ever since his work first gained public recognition during the early 1990s, Pelevin has been a controversial figure in the Russian literary establishment. Nonetheless, he is one of the most important figures in the world of post-Soviet letters. Pelevin is virtually the only serious writer in contemporary Russia to gain a wide readership, appealing in particular to the burgeoning youth counterculture.
Pelevin’s works can be classified broadly as satire, but the author’s concerns are more cultural and metaphysical than political. His first short novel, Omon Ra (1992), tells the story of a young man who dreams of being a cosmonaut, only to discover that the entire Soviet space program is a government-perpetrated fraud masking the country’s inability to launch a single rocket. Pelevin’s second novel, The Life of Insects (1993), reveals the preoccupation with Eastern mysticism and hallucinogenic drugs that characterize both his subsequent novels and many of the short stories collected in The Blue Lantern (1991) and The Yellow Arrow (1998). His 1996 novel Buddha’s Little Finger combines an absurdist approach to Soviet cultural heroes with an equally ironic satire of Western popular culture (Arnold Schwarzenegger makes a brief appearance). In 1999 he published Babylon, which reflects his ongoing fascination with computer culture and virtual reality. Babylon is populated both by real human beings and digitally constructed simulacra, and the resemblance between the two is enhanced by Pelevin’s longstanding rejection of the traditions of Russian psychological realism. See also: SCIENCE FICTION; SOCIALIST REALISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dalton-Brown, Sally. (1997). “Ludic Nonchalance or Ludicrous Despair? Viktor Pelevin and Russian Postmodernist Prose.” Slavonic and East European Review 75(2):216-233. Genis, Alexander. (1999). “Borders and Metamorphoses: Viktor Pelevin in the Context of Post-Soviet Literature.” In Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture, eds. Mikhail Epstein, Alexander Genis, and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover. New York: Berghan.
While the tsarist empire had no specific ministry to deal with the non-Russian peoples, upon coming to power the Bolsheviks established a People’s Commissariat of Nationalities, with Josef Stalin at its head, in its first government. Soviet policy toward the nationalities was based on both ideology and pragmatism. Both Vladimir Lenin and Stalin upheld the Marxist (and liberal) principle of the right of nationalities to self-determination, even in the face of opposition from many of their comrades. Lenin and Stalin believed that nationalism arose from non-Russians’ distrust (nedoverie) of an oppressive nationality, such as the Russians. Secure in their faith that “national differences and antagonisms between peoples are vanishing gradually from day to day” and that “the supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster,” the Bolshevik leaders were prepared to grant autonomy, cultural and language rights, and even territory to non-Russian peoples in order to stave off separatism and chauvinist nationalism. Even as national Communist leaders in Ukraine, Transcaucasia, and elsewhere took over the development of their national populations, the Commissariat of Nationalities (abbreviated as Narkomnats) managed the affairs of dozens of peoples in the Russian Soviet Socialist Federation and beyond.
Immediately after taking power, the Bolsheviks issued a series of declarations on “the rights of the toiling and exploited peoples,” “to all Muslim toilers of Russia and the East,” and on the disposition of Turkish Armenia. Most importantly, with little real ability to effect its will in the peripheries, the Soviet government made a strategic shift in response to the growing number of autonomies and accepted by January 1918 the principle of federalism. In each national area the government promoted programs to favor the local indigenous peoples, a kind of cultural affirmative action. Not only were native languages supported, but indigenous leaders, if they were loyal to the Communist enterprise, were also supported. Within the Commissariat there were separate sub-commissariats for Jewish, Armenian, and other nationalities’ affairs-even a Polar Subcommittee for the “small peoples of the north.” The newspaper Zhizn’ nat-sional’nostei was the official house organ of the Commissariat.
As commissar, Stalin was often absent from the affairs of his Commissariat. Yet on important
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occasions he settled decisive issues, as in 1921 when he supported the inclusion of the Armenian region of Mountainous Karabakh in the neighboring state of Azerbaijan. Stalin favored the formation of a Transcaucasian Federation of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, against the desires of many local Bolsheviks, particularly among the Georgians. On this issue, and the even more important question of how centralized the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics would be, Stalin came into conflict with Lenin, who was far more suspicious of the “Great Power chauvinism” of the Russians and favored more rights for the non-Russians. Both men, however, supported the general line known as kor-enizatsya, which sought to indigenize the areas in which non-Russian peoples lived by developing local cultures, political elites, and national languages.
Activists from Narkomnats were involved in setting up autonomous regions for non-Russian peoples, establishing newspapers, publishing pamphlets, and fostering literacy. Many of them saw themselves as protectors of the weak, a bulwark against the potential destruction of native cultures. But at the same time the government’s policies betrayed a kind of paternalism directed toward “backward” or “primitive” peoples who were, in many cases, not considered able to run their own affairs. Officials in Moscow acknowledged at times that they knew little about the peoples in more remote reaches of their vast country. Much linguistic and ethnographic work had still to be done to evaluate just which group belonged to which nationality, and Narkomnats assisted in developing Soviet anthropology and ethnography. In a real sense government intervention and the work of intellectuals helped draw the lines of distinction that later took a reality of their own between various peoples.
With the formation of the Soviet Union in early 1924, the Commissariat of Nationalities was dissolved, and its activities shifted to the new Soviet parliament. But by that time the broad and lasting contours of Soviet nationality policy had been worked out. Only during the 1930s, with the growing autocratic power of Stalin, the radical social transformations of his “revolution from above,” and the fear of approaching war in Europe was the policy of korenizatsya moderated in favor of a more Russophilic and nationalist policy. See also: KORENIZATSYA; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blank, Stephen. (1994). The Sorcerer as Apprentice: Stalin as Commissar of Nationalities, 1917-1924. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Martin, Terry. (2001). The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. Slezkine, Yuri. (1994). Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. Smith, Jeremy. (1999). The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917-23. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Suny, Ronald Grigor. (1993). The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Stanford, CA: Stanford
