Europe-Asia Studies

ISSN: 0966-8136 (Print) 1465-3427 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ceas20

Was There a Soviet Nationality Policy?

Jeremy Smith

To cite this article: Jeremy Smith (2019) Was There a Soviet Nationality Policy?, Europe-Asia
Studies, 71:6, 972-993, DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2019.1635570

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2019.1635570

Published online: 23 Jul 2019.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 484

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ceas20
 EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES, 2019
Vol. 71, No. 6, July 2019, 972–993

Was There a Soviet Nationality Policy?

JEREMY SMITH

Abstract
The essay challenges the frequent references to the concept of Soviet nationality policy by historians and social
scientists. The argument proceeds, first, by unpicking some of the logic in the use of the term; second, by
examining the evidence for the existence and nature of such a policy; and third, by considering alternative
explanations for major decisions and events concerning non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union. The
essay concludes that, at least after the 1920s, there was no Soviet nationality policy, and the processes of
negotiation and nation-promoting practices pursued by republic leaders were, instead, the key influences on
decision-making.

THE PHRASE ‘ SOVIET NATIONALITY POLICY’ APPEARS IN MORE or less any discussion
related to national identity concerning the non-Russians of the Soviet Union or the post-
Soviet states and is held largely responsible for contemporary developments. To give just
one out of many possible recent examples: ‘the underlying ethnic diversity of the [Central
Asian republics is] itself a consequence of Soviet nation-delimitation, Soviet nationalities
policy, and forced migrations to the region in the 1930s and 1940s’ (Isaacs & Polese
2015, p. 373). Relatively few authors have studied the actual content of Soviet nationality
policy, and those who have tend to end up asking more questions than they have
answered. There appear to be different versions of what the policy actual entailed; no clear
official text of it after the early 1920s exists; and there is no chronology of different stages
of policy development as there is in other major policy areas. This lack of clarity has not
prevented numerous authors from referring to the concept without further elaboration. It is
often ascribed enormous influence in shaping the national development of dozens of
ethnic groups and assigned responsibility for a wide range of phenomena, from territorial
conflicts in the Caucasus (Cornell 2002), to mismatches between identity and language
use in Ukraine, which have then shaped the current conflict there (Kulyk 2014).
One approach would be for historians to research the development of the policy over a
longer period. This has only been done for the 1920s and early 1930s, notably by Martin
(2001). The aim of this contribution is to suggest an alternative approach: to reject
altogether that there was any meaningful nationality policy in the Soviet Union, at least
after the 1920s. The argument proceeds first, by looking at initial reasons for being
suspicious of the existence of such a policy despite ubiquitous references to it; then, by

© 2019 University of Glasgow

https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2019.1635570
 SOVIET NATIONALITY POLICY 973

considering the evidence for the non-existence of such a policy. After rejecting the concept of
a nationality policy, an alternative explanation of decision-making with regard to nationality
is advanced. Even on the most fundamental questions concerning nationality, decisions seem
to have been based less on policy—understood as a clear programme or set of principles from
which decisions can be derived—and more on negotiation between representatives, often in
disagreement with each other, of the nationality concerned, regional Communist Party and
Soviet organs, and central authorities.1 In place of a centrally determined and directed
policy, then, crucial decisions concerning non-Russians depended on the outcome of a
process of negotiation, which may have involved several national groups, national and
central leaders, various regional authorities, or simply different factions within a particular
nationality or the central leadership, or any combination of these. On other questions, the
lack of central direction left considerable leeway for republic leaderships to decide their
own agendas and resolve key issues themselves.
In conclusion, I argue that the over-use of a concept which at best is poorly understood and
at worst a pure illusion can lead to serious mistakes in understanding historical and
contemporary phenomena. I provide some examples of outcomes that have been attributed
to the nationality policy, which might lead to missing the real causes of the phenomenon,
or where superfluous agency is ascribed to a development which might be considered
normal outside of the Soviet context.

Doubting Soviet nationality policy

The first reason for doubting the existence of a Soviet nationality policy is the official Soviet
use of the term. Following publication of the 1919 programme of the Russian Communist
Party (RCP) (Programma 1919), official statements—speeches, Party programmes—
consisted of little more than platitudes concerning the ‘friendship of peoples’, expressed in
varying forms. The 1961 Party programme, for instance, talked of ‘a further drawing
together of nations and achieving their complete unity’. Soviet nationalities were ‘all
united in one family by common vital interests and together march towards the single
purpose—communism’ (Programme 1961). The programme went on to acknowledge that
national distinctions were not going to disappear imminently, leaving little in the way of
concrete guidance as to what policies communists and Soviet institutions should pursue
with regard to nationality (Titov 2009). Towards the end of the Soviet era the 1985 draft
of Gorbachev’s new Party programme did not depart much from this formula, referring to
the ‘further flourishing of nations and ethnic groups and their steady drawing together’
(Nahaylo & Swoboda 1990, p. 236). Both programmes, like most earlier statements, were
declarations of an idealised understanding of the current situation, not a guide to action.
The second reason for questioning the relevance of ‘Soviet nationality policy’ and seeing
it as little more than an empty phrase is the frequency with which it is prefaced with the words
‘contradictions of … ’. It is not unreasonable to suppose the policy was riven with

1
Blauvelt (2014b) first discusses negotiation as the central approach to the resolution of the Mingrelian
question. However, as described later in this essay, he sees such negotiation as leading to a departure from
Soviet nationality policy rather than, as argued here, the main determinant of nationality questions.
974 JEREMY SMITH

contradictions, given the official stress on simultaneously preserving difference while striving
towards unity implied in the two Party programmes cited above. The phrase ‘contradictions
of nationality policy’ (or something very close to it) can be found in the writings of such
prominent scholars as Mark Beissinger, Dmitry Gorenburg, Henry Huttenbach, David
Laitin, Peter Rutland and Valery Tishkov, as well as being repeated by authors who do not
specialise in nationality policy (Osipov 2016). For example, a scholar who understands
Soviet nationalities issues probably better than anyone, Ronald Suny laid out the nature of
this presumed contradiction in stark terms in an early work: ‘these contradictions went
unresolved in official nationality policy and were reflected in the formula designed for the
arts “national in form, socialist in content”—and in the confusion over whether the goal of
Soviet policy was to solidify the national or to assimilate the minorities’ (Suny 1989,
p. 300). Apparently, one and the same policy may have had two goals, which were each
the diametric opposite of the other—to promote national difference, and to eliminate it.
The treatment of different nationalities in different ways at different times and by different
levels of the Party or state was indeed a feature of the Soviet system. My argument here is not
that such contradictory trends did not exist, but that it does not make sense to ascribe them to
a policy or set of policies. As I shall go on to show, individual decisions were taken with
regard to altogether contingent influences which had nothing to do with any general
guidelines over nationality. It was precisely a vacuum of policy which allowed these
contradictions to appear.
The perceived contradictions inherent in Soviet nationality policy have also been
explained from a historiographic point of view. Researcher interest in the nationality
question in the Soviet Union increased markedly following the eruption of national
movements in the last years of the Soviet Union, and many authors noted the gulf
between characterisations by Western scholars of the question which predominated during
the Cold War and those that informed most research from the beginning of perestroika.
Much of the earlier literature, with some notable exceptions such as Carr (1950), pursued
a paradigm of Russification, which posited that the Soviet regime was from the beginning
intent on eliminating national differences and creating a monolingual, culturally and
ideologically homogenous population. By contrast, studies conducted since the end of the
Cold War have emphasised the nation-building proclivities of the regime, based on what
one of these authors, Yuri Slezkine, has called the ‘earnestness of Bolshevik efforts on
behalf of ethnic particularism’ (Slezkine 1994, p. 415). An article by Kolstø (2013)
addresses this dichotomy head-on, and succinctly describes the two opposing
characterisations. Although he apologises for his article’s failure to pursue ‘systematic
discussion of why or how these [Cold War] misconceptions were established’, Kolstø
explains them as being based on the politically informed pursuit of hostile
characterisations of the Soviet regime, and the fact that ‘totalitarianism theory served as
ideological blinkers that precluded other explanations’ (Kolstø 2013, p. 42). To this can be
added the fact that, in the face of restrictive controls on information from the Soviet Union
itself, much of what we learnt about non-Russians in the USSR was informed by émigré
or diaspora groups who had their own agendas; more accurate information could be
obtained only once the Soviet archives were opened up to independent evaluation.
Whatever the reasons for the difference, the fact that over time scholars could describe
nationality policy in such starkly opposed terms is, again, cause for suspicion. The core
 SOVIET NATIONALITY POLICY 975

assumption shared by both Cold War and post-Cold War approaches is that the Soviet Union
had a nationality policy. Far from being a semantic argument, unpicking this assumption
opens up the possibility of interpreting the nationalities experience in the Soviet Union in
different ways. The apparent arbitrariness evident in state activities, which varied across
time and in relation to different nationalities, can then be explained according to criteria
other than the self-contradictions of ‘policy’ or the personal inclinations of local and state
leaders.
In a rare departure from the general pattern, Radio Free Europe’s Jaan Pennar noted in
1981 that ‘it would seem, on the basis of the evidence on hand, that the Soviet Union is
currently somewhat short on nationality policy’ (Pennar 1981, p. 13). In the Brezhnev
years, the ‘era of stagnation’, a drift in all areas of policy compared to the activism
associated with Khrushchev was not a remarkable finding. However, most authors of the
time detected a clear nationality policy, one that was based on Russification. Characteristic
is the claim of Bohdan Nahaylo and Victor Swoboda that ‘non-Russian writers would
point out that in nationalities policy there was anything but inertia during this [the
Brezhnev] period. Far from simply muddling through in this area, during the 1970s the
Kremlin stepped up Russification’ (Nahaylo & Swoboda 1990, p. 186). Later opponents
of the Russification paradigm also continued to talk in terms of a nationality policy or
nationality policies. Slezkine began his seminal article with the claim that ‘Soviet
nationality policy was devised and carried out by nationalists’ (Slezkine 1994, p. 313).
Kolstø argues that ‘while Soviet nationality policies went through sometimes rather abrupt
changes certain basic features remained throughout’ (Kolstø 2013, p. 31).
In certain respects it is already clear that the ‘drift’ from any coherent policy came about
much earlier than the Brezhnev era of stagnation. Ben Fowkes has written that ‘in practice,
the policy of nation-building did not last beyond the early 1930s’ (Fowkes 1997, p. 61),2
while Martin (2001, pp. 302–8) is more precise in dating a ‘decisive turning point in the
evolution of the Soviet nationalities policy’ to two decrees of the CPSU Politburo in
December 1932 which modified and partially reversed the policies of ‘Ukrainisation’,
meaning promoting the Ukrainian language in the administration of the republic, which
had predominated up until then. What both refer to is the relaxation or abandonment of
the policies of korenizatsiya and nation-building that were actively pursued in the 1920s
and which have been described in detail by post-Cold War researchers both for the Soviet
Union as a whole and for individual nationalities.3 As we shall see, this has not, however,
prevented historians and social scientists claiming a basic continuity in nationality policy
throughout the lifetime of the Soviet Union.

Soviet nationality policy in the 1920s and 1930s

The early Soviet regime did seek to clarify and pursue a coherent nationalities policy.4 It was
addressed directly in early Soviet constitutions and the programmes of the RCP and CPSU in

2
Fowkes (1997) is a rare example of bridging both schools by positing a nation-building policy for the
1920s and a Russification policy for the 1960s and 1970s.
3
For example, in addition to authors already cited, Hirsch (2005) and Edgar (2006).
4
The remainder of this section is based on my analysis in Smith (1999, 2013).
976 JEREMY SMITH

a more concrete and nuanced way than in the later programmes and widely debated at Party
gatherings. The last of these debates took place in the first half of 1923, at the Twelfth
Congress of the CPSU and the subsequent secret session of the CPSU Central Committee,
which was convened specifically to discuss the fall-out and implications of the perceived
nationalist treachery of the Muslim communist Mirsaid Sultangaliev (Gibaduli 1992). At
both of these meetings, discussions centred around not questions of principle or ideology,
but on how best to combat the ‘twin dangers’ of local nationalism and Great Russian
chauvinism. The conclusion reached at the second of these meetings by Trotsky and
(reluctantly, it seems) Stalin, was that Great Russian chauvinism was currently the greater
danger (Gibaduli 1992, pp. 76–85). This fell in with the much more strongly expressed
sentiments in Lenin’s final notes on the national question, dictated at the end of 1922
(Lenin 1958, pp. 356–62; Lewin 1975). While this conclusion appalled many of the
delegates to both of the 1923 meetings, it gave a significant boost to the policies already
underway. The intensive nation-building of the 1920s was, then, largely a matter of
temporary expediency: not so much a necessary compromise needed in order to win the
support of non-Russians for Soviet power, as much of the older literature would have it
(Pipes 1964), but as an ideologically informed response to the persistence of great power
attitudes which characterised not only former servants of tsarist rule, but also some of the
most enthusiastic builders of communism under the guise of Marxist internationalism. As
Lenin put it, the Bolsheviks had inherited tsarist attitudes and ‘lightly anointed them with
Soviet oil’ (Lenin 1958, p. 357).
It is important to note that at this point, the early 1920s—regarded as the height of Leninist
nationality policy—much of the discourses concerned the struggles of the ‘national lefts’ and
the ‘national rights’, groups that opposed each other within the CPSU in most non-Russian or
mixed regions, and whose struggles were particularly acute in places like Crimea, Tatarstan,
Georgia and Bashkiria. These factions did not generally form along national lines but both
included Russians and non-Russians. In places such as Tashkent, an ethnic division within
communist party organisations was more apparent. The ‘rights’ were more supportive of
korenizatsiya and other nation-building policies while the ‘lefts’ were inclined to argue
that nationality should be seen as irrelevant in a period of intense class struggle (Smith
1999, pp. 233–38). While these positions implied different policy directions, in the eyes of
leaders such as Trotsky, Stalin, Frunze, Kamenev and (to a certain extent) Lenin before his
incapacitation, it was the factional balance of forces that mattered more than the policies
themselves. Thus, even in the early phase when a preferred approach to nationality was
made explicit, it was based not so much on a firm principle or policy as on perceptions of
the ‘greater danger’ presented by different forms of nationalism to the socialist project.
Although the supporters of korenizatsiya insisted it was a long-term project, the ‘greater
danger’ prognosis was not a secure basis for a permanent policy (Martin 2001, pp. 212–18). It
did not require much of a U-turn for Stalin to conclude at a later date that local nationalism
had now supplanted Great Russian chauvinism as the ‘greater danger’, a conclusion that was
implied when the Muslim communist Veli Ibragimov was arrested in January 1928 and
subsequently shot along with thousands of others in Crimea, the Tatar Republic,
Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The show trial of the so-called Union for the Liberation of
Ukraine in 1930 presented for public consumption a picture of a conspiracy of nationalists
bent on overthrowing the achievements of Soviet rule. The 1932 decisions to abandon
 SOVIET NATIONALITY POLICY 977

‘Ukrainisation’ referred to by Martin (2001) and mentioned above were a response to the
impossibility of implementing korenizatsiya to its fullest extent, but the basis of earlier
policies had already been undermined. The subsequent rehabilitation of the russkii narod
by Stalin, the rewriting of national histories, the succession of purges in the republics, the
official status given to the Russian language in 1938, and a series of language and
alphabet reforms were all developments of the 1930s that signalled an end to the
unambiguous approach of 1922–1923. So clear was this shift that it is hardly surprising
that scholars took the view that Stalin was now embarking on a full-scale policy of
Russification, or some other means of subordinating or eliminating national differences.
The deportation of entire nationalities before and during the Great Patriotic War appeared
to confirm this impression (Conquest 1970).

Federalism and institutionalised nationality

Later scholars have responded by pointing to the persistence of certain features which can be
traced back to the early Bolshevik years, and by referring to the substantial evidence that, in
the post-Stalin era in particular, nation-building flourished. Whether this amounted to any
kind of nationality policy as such is another question. To take Kolstø’s article as an
example, it summarises a continuous nationality policy based on ‘some crucial institutions
[which], once established, were never abolished. This was true of the ethnic federation
that was put in place under Lenin as well as the system of internal passports that was
introduced under Stalin [in 1933]’ (Kolstø 2013, p. 32). In a nutshell, here we have the
two features which are commonly referred to, especially by political scientists, as the
‘Soviet nationality policy’: first, the multi-tiered federal structure of the USSR, from
Union Republics down to autonomous regions; and second, the institutionalisation of
ethnicity itself which, after 1932, was ascribed to individuals and entered in their passports
based on the nationality of their parents, and which had profound effects on entitlement to
education and career prospects. Whether an ascribed nationality was an advantage or a
hindrance would depend on where in the Soviet Union the citizen lived.
These two features—an ethno-federal structure and ascribed nationality—are regularly
noted by those authors who refer to Soviet nationality policy and at least try to describe
some content to it, as well as, for example, Rutland (1984), Huttenbach (1990), Gorenburg
(2006) and Kolstø (2013). As the federal structure established in 1923 survived in
principle—albeit with several new configurations—until 1991, and the ascription of
nationality in passports was never changed, these planks of nationality policy are assumed
to apply to the remainder of the Soviet period. Thus, Siegelbaum and Moch adopt a
similar characterisation of Soviet nationality policy in their discussion of internal
migration in the late Soviet period: ‘a central feature of the Soviet Union, it is now widely
recognized, was the assignment of nationality to every part of the country and each
individual, as inscribed on line five of the internal passport’ (Siegelbaum & Moch 2016,
p. 975).
The federal structure for the Soviet state was decided on, against expectations, in the
autumn of 1922. Not only had the Bolsheviks consistently spoken out against federalism,
at least up until 1917, but Stalin had been advancing an alternative plan which had the
backing of most leaders in the national regions throughout the course of the year (Smith
978 JEREMY SMITH

1999, pp. 180–89). A late intervention by Lenin, based on a diagram sketched by Lev
Kamenev and aimed primarily at avoiding any offence to non-Russians, established the
new structure (Smith 1999, pp. 172–212). The principles of the Soviet federation were
unchanged after 1924, although borders and the number of federal units were subject to
several revisions up to the immediate post-war years, and less frequent but (as we shall
see) highly significant revisions later on. Ascribed nationality was never removed from
Soviet passports, even in the perestroika years. However, the very permanence of these
features, and the fact that they were never seriously challenged, suggests that at an early
stage they had moved out of the realm of policy and became part of a formal institutional
setting. They provided a framework within which nationality issues were worked out, but
this in itself tells us little about the content of that framework. Wide divergences between
the experiences of formally equal nationalities alerts us immediately to this—Georgia was
a very different republic from Ukraine in terms of, for example, interference by Moscow
and the status of its language, while the Tatar and Bashkir republics within the RSFSR
benefited from considerably higher status than smaller autonomous republics of the USSR.
Members of non-Russian but Slavic nationalities enjoyed greater prospects at the all-
Union level than did, for instance, members of Muslim nationalities (Goryachev 2005). A
glance at the history of Soviet Abkhazia shows that the formal changes to its status in
1925 and 1936, while significant in their own way, are not sufficient to explain the
enormous variations in the region’s actual situation over time (Blauvelt 2014a).
Thus, it is not very convincing to describe the ethno-federal structure of the USSR as a
policy. Many of the implied consequences of a model of a hierarchy of territories do not
stand up to any scrutiny. Raffass (2012) has shown, moreover, through a meticulous
theoretical and empirical comparison of Soviet and US federalism, that it is difficult to
characterise the Soviet federation as in any way exceptional in terms of being a federation.
While it differed from the United States in placing ethnicity at the heart of its federal
structure, this has equally been a characteristic of other federations in history and today,
such as Belgium, Czechoslovakia and Ethiopia.
The second assumed feature of nationality policy, ascribed nationality, clearly did matter.
Although how exactly it mattered varied enormously and, as the case studies will show,
ascribed nationality was as much manipulated by the recipients of national ascription as it
was a tool of the authorities.
If Soviet nationality policy boils down to ethno-federalism and ascribed nationality, then
the final official acts in Soviet nationality policy were the decrees against korenizatsiya of
1932 and the passport law of 1933. Nothing changed after that. Despite the 1932 decrees,
both Slezkine (1994) and Martin (2001) suggest that key elements of korenizatsiya
continued to operate indefinitely. This fact in itself should raise two intriguing concerns:
historians have long characterised major areas of policy as subject to clear periodisations:
Soviet economic policy went through War Communism, the New Economic Policy (NEP),
forced industrialisation, and various phases of the later five-year and seven-year plans
through to perestroika; foreign policy went through revolutionary internationalism,
peaceful coexistence, socialism in one country, the ‘third period’, the Grand Alliance,
Cold War, détente and the ‘common European home’; and gender policy went through
several evolutions. If nationality policy, which affected the lives of, arguably, a majority or
at least a large minority of the Soviet population, was unchanged while these other major
 SOVIET NATIONALITY POLICY 979

determinants were shifting around them, then this fact of exceptional constancy itself is
worthy of further investigation and comment (of which to date there is none). Second, if
the evolution of nationality policy ended in 1933, how can major episodes in the lives of
the non-Russian nationalities be explained?
In fact, we find that the most striking episodes are rarely, if ever, discussed in terms of
nationality policy. The Ukrainian Holodomor of 1932–1933 is the object of intense and
often bitter debate as to whether it was a deliberate attempt at genocide, or a natural
disaster caused primarily by climate conditions. Neither side in this controversy mobilises
the accepted understanding of nationality policy in support of their claims. In the latest
full-scale treatment of the topic, Anne Applebaum includes no specific discussion of
nationality policy, but blames Stalin’s actions against the Ukrainian nation variously on his
wish to destroy any peasant national movement which might present a threat to Soviet
power (Applebaum 2017, pp. 22, 104); or as a more specific prejudice against the
Ukrainian language and other manifestations of separate Ukrainian culture (Applebaum
2017, pp. 70–1); or as a reaction to the consequences of Ukrainisation, a policy introduced
in order to buttress Soviet power (Applebaum 2017, pp. 92–8). Thus, the Cold War and
post-Cold War interpretations are combined, without explicit reference to either the
Russification or nation-building paradigms.
Another series of events profoundly affecting a number of smaller non-Russian
nationalities—the whole-scale deportation of nations in the late 1930s and the war years—
are mostly discussed as individual episodes. Where the context of the deportations is
broadened, it again veers into a debate over genocide.5 Late Soviet attempts to promote a
non-national Soviet identity and individual episodes such as the purge of Petr Shelest as
head of the Communist Party of Ukraine in 1972 or the move to change the provisions of
Georgia’s constitution on language in 1978 all await serious attention in terms of the
Soviet nationality policy.
To some extent, this is a problem of a historiography which has not yet paid the same level
of attention to these episodes of late Soviet history as has been paid to the pre-war period. One
exception is a recent study (in which the present author was deeply involved) of events in
Georgia in 1956, when young people demonstrating on the third anniversary of Stalin’s
death were met with gunfire by detachments of the Soviet Army, prompting a subsequent
surge in Georgian nationalism and anti-Soviet (and anti-Russian) sentiment (Blauvelt &
Smith 2015). The findings of this collection of articles are that, in the case of Georgia, the
dynamics of national identity and nationalism are driven by a number of factors which are
independent of the policies of Moscow.
Many of the authors who assign causality to Soviet nationality policy cite authors who did
not seriously make such claims of a causal framework. One of the two most influential and
widely cited studies of Soviet nationality policy, Slezkine (1994) clearly uses the image of a
Soviet communal apartment as a metaphor, which illustrates the complexity of Soviet
national development in terms of a series of interactions rather than as a straightforward

5
See, for example, the contributions in the special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 4, No. 3,
2002. For the argument that the deportations were instances of genocide, see Pohl (2000). For the counter-
argument, see Statiev (2009).
980 JEREMY SMITH

result of central policies. The second, Martin (2001) employs, as Gerasimov (2005) has
shown, a concept of ‘affirmative action’ which is anachronistic and which Martin does not
mean to be taken literally, while ‘empire’ is also used metaphorically. Metaphors are not
realities, and they are the creations of scholars not policy-makers. While both of these
authors posit a clear nationality policy, as discussed above, the central concepts so often
cited by others, of ‘Communal Apartment’ and ‘Affirmative Action Empire’ have
illustrative, not explanatory, power.
Nor do normative attempts to evaluate Soviet policies bring us any nearer to an
understanding of their essential nature. Soviet nationality policies as now understood are
generally held to be benign (Suny 1993; Martin 2001; Suny & Martin 2001; Hirsch 2005).
Audrey Altstadt, however, challenges this, pointing out that ‘post-Soviet works that
generalise “nation-building” to all Soviet peoples … stress the positive-sounding “nation-
building” without considering the destruction which characterized Bolshevik efforts’
(Altstadt 2016, p. xiv). And as Connor (1972) pointed out, nation-building in ethnically
diverse states tends to have strong negative consequences. If Soviet practices could create
or reinforce nationalities, equally, they could damage or destroy them. While it is quite
possible for a policy to have some benign and some damaging outcomes, confusion over
the evaluation of Soviet policies, even where there is agreement as to their nature and
intent, creates further confusion over this supposed policy. As I shall argue, the decision
whether to promote or undermine a given nationality was, in fact, dependent on a number
of contingent factors.
To sum up so far: it has become widely accepted in Western historiography that Soviet
nationality policy played a significant role in promoting the national and cultural
development of non-Russian nationalities (nation-building) on a territorial basis. However,
that policy went undebated after 1923 and unamended after 1933. The principle authors
dealing with the evolution of Soviet policy have not claimed, or at least have not
demonstrated, a coherent framework for understanding the sustained application of that
policy. There is a lack of clarity as to the content of this supposed policy; it was never
clearly articulated by leading Soviet politicians after Stalin; and, unlike other major policy
areas, it did not pass through different periods. What is considered Soviet nationalities
policy seems to amount to an ethno-federal structure, haphazardly arrived at in 1922, and
the ascription of nationality, instigated in the course of the 1926 census and cemented in
the passport decrees of 1932 and 1933. Nevertheless, this policy is seen as laying the basis
for both the nation-states and the contested borders that have emerged from the rubble of
the Soviet Union.
A causal connection between Soviet nationality policy and national development is an
especially important feature of discussions in both history and social science. Under the
Cold War version, resilience to efforts at Russification proved the strength of nations in
general and the heroism of Soviet national dissidents in particular. In more recent
historiography, national resilience is directly ascribed to Soviet policy. Given the weak
basis for making this connection, it is reasonable to suppose that its popularity rests on the
fact, which became self-evident in the 1980s, that the major groups in the world’s first and
largest communist state, including several which had no developed sense of national
identity in 1917, had embraced fully a sense of nationhood. However, when we consider
that this situation was similar for many other countries in the course of the twentieth
 SOVIET NATIONALITY POLICY 981

century, why should a special policy be seen as necessary for this to be achieved and
sustained? What is required is either an explanation showing that nationhood ought to
disappear under conditions of communism, or a serious counterfactual to illustrate what
may have followed had the Bolsheviks and their successors pursued different policies. The
former would not seem to be in line with most recent theorising about nations. For the
latter, Rogers Brubaker has at least suggested the outlines of a counterfactual:

It [the regime] might have abolished national republics and ethnoterritorial federalism; it might have
abolished the legal category of personal nationality; it might have ruthlessly Russified the Soviet
educational system; it might have forcibly uprooted peripheral elites and prevented them from
making careers in ‘their own’ republics. It did none of the above. (Brubaker 1996, p. 37)

But why should it? Such behaviour, it is now recognised, was rarely displayed by empires,
and only a dogmatic reading of Marxism would suggest the Soviet Union should be
different. In any case, this is not sufficient to show that such moves would have succeeded
in eliminating national categories, nor does it make the case that managing to ‘do none of
the above’ itself constitutes a policy.

Some dissenting voices

While there now exists a wide consensus among contemporary scholars about the nation-
building nature of Soviet policy, there are also some dissenting voices that further
undermine the notion of the existence of such a policy. Gorenburg (2006) highlights a
different version of Soviet nationality policy by applying much the same logic as the
proponents of ‘nation-building’ policies. His frame of reference is the later Soviet period,
but implicit in Gorenburg’s argument is that the later developments were based on the
policies devised in the 1920s. In this case, it is the acceleration of rates of linguistic
assimilation among certain national minorities that leads to the conclusion of an
assimilationist Soviet nationality policy. Gorenburg explicitly repeats the fallacy of
attributing everything that happens in later Soviet history to policies formulated earlier.
His argument is based on taking seriously the ‘contradictions of nationality policy’ which
other authors mention but do not work through. The assimilationist tendency was implied
in Soviet nationality policy from the beginning, even though it contradicted the other,
nation-building, trend of nationality policy; the shift in emphasis from one tendency to the
other, Gorenburg argues, was reinforced by Khrushchev’s school reform implemented in
1959. This reform allowed non-Russian children to study in Russian language schools,
opening the way for the replacement of local native language schools with Russian
language ones and subsequent linguistic Russification.
Leaving to one side the fact that no clear explanation has been uncovered as yet of
Khrushchev’s motives for this aspect of the reform—a small part of an ambitious project
linking the education system to his vision of modernisation (Smith 2017)—there are two
drawbacks to attributing the assimilation evident in the late Soviet period to a nationality
policy. Firstly, the fact that, on Gorenburg’s analysis, the assimilation process was
confined to certain regions—minority regions of the RSFSR, Belarus and Ukraine, and in
all cases more in urban areas than in the countryside—suggests a degree of latitude in
982 JEREMY SMITH

local implementation which does not fit well with the notion of a Moscow-created policy.
Secondly, tracing these late developments to the tensions in policy developed in the
writings of Lenin and Stalin at the time of the Russian Revolution and the early 1920s
entails ignoring the ideological shifts among sections of the communist leadership in the
post-Khrushchev years, which were increasingly Russian nationalist (Mitrokhin 2003;
Cosgrove 2004).
More recently, Altstadt (2016) has also highlighted another contradiction: if the aim of this
policy was to overcome the inequality attributed to the economic and cultural ‘backwardness’
of many of the peoples of the Russian Empire, it had quite opposite, culturally destructive,
effects when applied to a nationality with a strong pre-revolutionary national cultural
tradition like that of Azerbaijan. Thus, Gorenburg and Altstadt share the common
assumptions about Soviet nationality policy but come to very different conclusions about
their effects. The differences are, it has to be noted, in part explained by the impact on
different groups of nationalities. For Gorenburg, the nationalities not represented as titular
in union republics were more likely to assimilate, while for Altstadt it was the more
culturally developed nationalities that suffered cultural assault. Such a differentiation
serves, however, to militate against the very notion of a coherent set of policies.
My conclusion, then, is that not only was there no formally declared Soviet nationality
policy after the early period, but also there was no informal set of policies or traditions
that might inform practice in relation to the non-Russian nationalities at any level. What,
then, determined concrete practices?

Alternative explanations

The role of leadership

One important factor in the treatment of non-Russian nationalities was what was happening
within the top Soviet leadership. In an authoritarian system, the character and inclinations of
the people at the very top, as well as the relations between them, can have a profound impact
on what happens ‘down below’. To take the example of the leadership changes in the 1950s,
when Stalin died in March 1953, the situation of the major non-Russian republics
immediately changed in response to several initiatives of Lavrenti Beria. Beria promoted
locals above Russians in the republican communist parties, brought non-Slavs into leading
positions in Moscow, and promoted language rights in most of the republics before he
himself was arrested in June the same year. Following Beria’s arrest, changes were
introduced in ethnic relations in the South Caucasus; however, the broad trends initiated
by Beria continued elsewhere up until 1957 (Pikhoya 2007, pp. 241–46). Nikita
Khrushchev was able to consolidate his own position through his defeat of the anti-Party
group and the period 1958–1959 saw attempts by Khrushchev to rein in some of what he
saw as nationalist excesses in the republics. When his efforts failed to have the anticipated
impact, the laissez-faire inertia mostly associated with the Brezhnev years in fact became
characteristic of the last four years of Khrushchev’s tenure. In the sequence of changes
from Stalin to Beria to collective leadership to Khrushchev, we can see at least two factors
at work. One is the personal inclinations of leaders, whether informed by ideology,
experience, rational calculations of expediency or prejudice. The other is the development
 SOVIET NATIONALITY POLICY 983

of national feelings on the part of key constituencies of non-Russians; these were allowed to
evolve more openly in the aftermath of the repression of the Stalin years, until it appeared to
go too far, with popular national feelings being expressed openly in the Baltic republics and
also, more worryingly for the regime, being reflected in official discourses and positions in
Latvia. Azerbaijan also pursued an agenda increasingly favouring purely national interests
in this period. Khrushchev was ultimately provoked into a response, conducting
widespread purges in both Azerbaijan and Latvia in 1959. This response, however, failed
to quell national aspirations (Smith 2011).
The last point illustrates that the USSR was not a totalitarian state in which the general
secretary determined everything. As in many areas of Soviet policy, the pronouncements
and actions of leaders were many but inconsistent and often did not result in the intended
consequences. Beria’s 1953 actions encouraged leaders in Lithuania, Azerbaijan and
Latvia, for example, to pursue exclusivist national agendas surely not intended by the
leaders in the Kremlin, while more conservative forces in Western Ukraine and Belarus
ignored or undermined central directives (Smith 2011). Khrushchev’s gift of Crimea to
Ukraine in 1954, an apparently casual gesture on his part, led immediately to largely
unfounded fears of threat to identity, language and culture among the peninsula’s
population, as well as growing impudence in its dealings with the centre on the part of the
Ukrainian leadership (Smith 2011; Wojnowski 2014). The 1957 economic decentralisation
under the sovnarkhoz programme further encouraged political mestnichestvo (localism),
especially in Ukraine (Kibita 2011). Meanwhile, in 1956 students had taken to the streets
of Tbilisi and other Georgian cities in response to certain aspects of de-Stalinisation,
leading to a bloodbath in the short term and the growth of a Georgian nationalism
alienated from Soviet power in the long term.
These are all examples of cause and effect which do not usually follow lines that were
either foreseen by the leadership or which can be explained retrospectively by a single
theory or framework. The shifts and turns of the 1950s were more frequent than at other
times, thanks to a combination of relative relaxation of central control and changes in the
configuration of the leadership of the Soviet state and the CPSU. However, these shifts
present, in a concentrated form, tendencies that were also apparent at other times.
For most of the Brezhnev period, the key actors in the development of the major
nationalities of the Soviet Union were the leaders of the union republics. Although
variations were considerable, republic leaders who were charged with a dual role tended to
act as national leaders rather than as representatives of Moscow and successfully deployed
patronage networks, often based on kinship, clan or ethnic ties (Suny 1993). Especially in
the South Caucasus but also elsewhere, language and cultural policies favoured the titular
nationality. The appearance of republican leaders as national leaders makes the process of
the apparently sudden dissolution of the USSR rather more comprehensible. Indeed, the
structures over which they presided bore many of the hallmarks of nationhood (Martin
2001, p. 1), and therefore the post-Soviet nation-states were not being built entirely from
scratch.
While trends, turns and counter-turns can be discerned, it is hard to explain this variegated
picture in terms of a policy or set of policies. The character and capability of republic leaders
seem to have mattered as much as the inclinations of general secretaries and other top
Moscow officials. Accounts of the Russian language campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s
984 JEREMY SMITH

suggest a certain impotence of the centre in the face of national opposition (Georgia in 1978)
or reluctance, as in many parts of rural Central Asia where the Russian language did not really
take hold. There appear to have been lines across which republic leaders could not cross,
which lay behind the purges in Latvia and Azerbaijan in 1959, and Ukraine in 1972.
However, the fact that these selective purges (as opposed to the pervasive one under
Stalin) took place at all indicates that there was never clarity as to where these lines lay.
Much of what happened to Soviet nationalities was determined, then, by these republic
leaders, as long as they acted within certain limits. Philip Roeder made the point on the
eve of the Soviet collapse that if there was an instrumental purpose to the ethno-federal
structure of the Soviet Union, it was to reinforce Soviet rule in the peripheries by creating
‘a cadre of party and state officials drawn from the indigenous ethnic group but dependent
upon Moscow for its members’ positions’ (Roeder 1991, pp. 197, 199). For this strategy
to work, the regime also needed to have a means for ‘constraining the behaviour of this
new ethnic cadre by creating an incentive structure that deterred the expression of
unsanctioned, particularly primordial ethnic agendas’ (Roeder 1991, p. 203). Nevertheless,
republic leaderships did express ‘primordial ethnic agendas’ long before perestroika. There
were the episodes in Latvia and Azerbaijan in the 1950s, and Armenia and Ukraine in the
1970s which, in line with Roeder’s argument, were punished through purges. However,
there was also, from the 1950s onwards, the almost exclusive direction of academic
research in the USSR across a range of disciplines towards justifying primordial ethnic
claims in the South Caucasus (Shnirelman 2001). In the post-Stalin years, the republics
had sufficient control of resources that they were able to promote particular cultural and
intellectual agendas through the creation of academies of science, the control of various
cultural unions, and even the creation and promotion of architectural styles (Ter Minassian
2007). These initiatives went largely unchecked by Moscow, allowing republic leaders,
most of the time, to express ethnic agendas and to create the basic characteristics of
nation-states in each republic (Smith 2013, pp. 238–44).
To some extent, what characterised centre–republic relations in the late Soviet period was
a situation in which the republics were pushing up against non-defined limits. While a
Russifying tendency certainly existed in sections of the CPSU and had considerable
influence at the centre (Mitrokhin 2003), republic leaders and activists were able to
counter it by appeals to the inertia implied by Brezhnev’s overriding concern for stability,
buttressed by the classic Soviet tactics of paying lip service to official policy while
providing misinformation to the planning agencies and supreme political bodies in
Moscow. Grybkauskas (2013) has shown how Lithuanian leaders went further,
successfully exploiting Moscow’s fears of local nationalism to make the case for
themselves as indispensable to maintaining order in the republic. Such inertia and
manipulation, and the lack of interference from the centre, reinforce Pennar’s assertion
that the Soviet Union was ‘somewhat short of a nationality policy’ (Pennar 1981, p. 13).
While the focus so far has been on the Union republics, where ties to the centre were
maintained both at the informal level of personal links and at the more formal level of all-
Union legislation and CPSU direction, the next part of this essay will focus on smaller
nationalities and the question of the award, denial, exploitation and extension of
nationality and territorial status.
 SOVIET NATIONALITY POLICY 985

Negotiating nationality
If there was a Soviet nationality policy, it was focused on one or more of ethno-federal
territoriality, nationality ascription, and subsequent rights in education, language and
cultural development. The status of being a nationality was the most fundamental question
addressed by such policies. A recent trend in historiography has suggested that this
primary question was decided not by reference to Stalin’s definition of nationality,
ethnographical investigation, or some other clear set of principles, but rather by the
relative ability of ethnic groups and their regional opponents to negotiate over their status.
The first example of this is provided by Jääts (2012) in his study of the ‘Permiak question’
in the early 1920s. The Komi-Permiak national okrug, created in February 1925, in the end
was a compromise between those who argued that the Komi-Permiak were a part of the Komi
nation and therefore deserving of their own, single, autonomous region and, on the other
hand, those who argued that the Permiak regions were too distant from the Komi
autonomous region to be united with them. The issue appears to have been decided by the
relative political weakness of the Permiak leadership when pitted against the Perm,
Sverdlovsk and Urals communist leaders. Although Jääts discusses the possibility of a
central ‘divide and rule’ strategy at work here, it seems more pertinent to consider the
political power of the regional leaderships who were, moreover, able to appeal to
economic principles in successfully opposing the emasculation of their territories in the
name of nationality policy.
The second example is the study by Blauvelt (2014b) of the Mingrelians of Georgia. Here,
in contrast to the Permiaks, it was Mingrelian leaders, chief among them Lavrenti Beria, who
successfully opposed the categorisation of Mingrelians as a nationality separate from
Georgians. Blauvelt explicitly addresses the issue of status as a matter for negotiation
between Georgian central and regional elites. While some Mingrelian nationalists lobbied
for separate national status, this bid failed largely because of the opposition of other
Mingrelian elites, who recognised that their own position as representatives of a small
national minority might provide a glass ceiling to their political careers. On a number of
objective counts, Mingrelians had a stronger case for nationality privileges than many
others that were less deserving, but their claims were seen as a threat by Georgian elites,
who were already confronted with a territory—Abkhazia—which remained in many ways
beyond their control at the time. Co-opting other local elites through the gerrymandering
of borders was one tactic used by the Georgian leaders; the support of Beria also seems to
have been decisive. In another study, Blauvelt (2014a) discusses the case of Soviet
Abkhazia which, while also overtly framed in terms of Soviet nationality policy, had a
similar emphasis on ‘contestation’ within elite circles.
A third example can be found in the study by O’Keeffe (2013) of the Roma minority in the
Soviet Union. O’Keeffe, in common with many other authors, refers frequently to Soviet
nationality policy without providing a clear outline of what that policy was. The central
point is nevertheless valid: by ‘performing gypsiness’, whether in appeal to nationality
policy as O’Keeffe has it, or merely following other precedents in the 1920s, self-
appointed representatives of the Roma were able to obtain recognition of the Roma as a
nationality, and subsequent official support and funding for societies, the Roma language
and schools. At one point, there was even discussion of finding a suitable piece of
986 JEREMY SMITH

territory for the establishment of a Roma national okrug along the lines of those enjoyed by
similarly sized national minorities. This point was reached in spite of initial official
indifference and unpromising premises: not only were the Roma by nature non-territorial,
they were seen as decadent and associated with the entertainment of the upper classes in
tsarist Russia. Roma activists turned these disadvantages on their heads, stressing
nomadism as an essential feature of Roma nationality, and dance and musical
entertainment as a key part of the Roma culture. In the end, the recognition of the Roma
came down to the untiring efforts of a handful of activists: the founders of the Gypsy
Union in 1925, N. A. Pankov, A. S. Taranov and I. I. Rom-Lebedev; Moscow’s only
Roma-speaking qualified teacher, N. S. Dudarova; and the writer Aleksandr Germano.
O’Keeffe’s detailed account of their lobbying and its reception by different sections of
authority is perhaps the clearest illustration of the contingent outcome of applications to be
recognised as a nationality, regardless of any official definition or policy.
At a higher level, and with more lasting consequences, recent scholarship provides a
further example of how key aspects of nationality—in this case, national borders—arose
from activities and influences far removed from any central Soviet policy. There is a
widely held misconception, evident in respected non-scholarly publications, that the more
idiosyncratic and therefore contentious borders of Central Asia’s Fergana Valley—
especially the enclaves and exclaves of the Kyrgyz, Tajik and Uzbek Soviet republics
dotted around the region—resulted from Stalin sitting down in front of a map of Central
Asia and drawing more or less random lines to serve as the borders of the new territories
within the ethno-federal structure. To give just one recent example: ‘Stalin divided the
region into different Soviet republics. The borders were drawn up rather arbitrarily without
following strict ethnic lines or even the guidelines of geography. … Some of these borders
were redrawn several times until 1936’.6 This characterisation of Stalin drawing random
borders persists, even though it has been comprehensively debunked (Morrison 2017).
One aspect of this myth has been well dealt with by, for example, Hirsch (2000) who
shows the carefully considered and complex process of drawing borders in the mid-1920s,
involving the efforts of hundreds of ethnographers, cartographers and local representatives.
Anomalies remained, for sure, either because borders could not be drawn to follow ethnic
demographies closely, or for reasons of economics or communications.
More recent research has shown how these borders were redrawn much later than the
Stalin years, leading to some of the greatest anomalies. Drawing on work by Bichsel
(2009) and Alamanov (2010), Madeleine Reeves summarises some of these changes and
documents their consequences ethnographically (Reeves 2014, pp. 82–6), as well as
showing that local populations have much more awareness of the history of these borders
than do many historians. The ground for border changes was laid with the collectivisation
campaigns of the 1930s, specifically a 1935 decree which gave farms rights over land they
had brought into agricultural use. By the late 1940s, this had led to a number of anomalies
where collective farms run by the Kyrgyz or Tajik republic authorities had extended their
land onto neighbouring republics’ territory. Such anomalies were generally corrected by
adjusting borders to reflect de facto land usages. A commission recommended such border

6
‘Stalin’s Harvest’, The Economist, 17 June 2010.
 SOVIET NATIONALITY POLICY 987

changes in 1949, but further encroachments led to the convocation of subsequent

commissions in 1958, 1975, 1986 and 1989. In some cases, uncultivated land was
transferred from one republic to another, which had the available population to cultivate it.
Changes recommended by commissions could be ratified locally, by republic governments,
or by central Soviet authorities, but the processes were haphazard, leading to continuing
disagreement over where the actual republic borders, now state borders, lay. Mobility
across these borders was not a problem as long as the Soviet Union existed as a single
state: thus Kyrgyz, Uzbek and Tajik authorities traded land use, built tractor stations and
other enterprises on each other’s territories and struck deals over water usage with little
restriction. The impact of such deals and the uncertainties they caused were magnified
significantly by the break-up of the USSR, but they were not without problems earlier. As
one of Reeves’ interviewees noted, in one 1975 deal ‘the Kyrgyz people swapped 1,000
hectares of land for 450 litres of water!’ in a transfer that led to immediate and later ethnic
tensions (Reeves 2014, p. 85). Although republic borders did not operate as borders in a
securitised sense in the Soviet Union, they did affect the rights and privileges that
members of particular nationalities enjoyed. Such deals, whether motivated by economic
and demographic rationalisation, land-grabbing tactics on the part of one republic, or graft,
were carried out by officials with little regard for the fates of populations who found
themselves on a different side of the border than previously. The Kyrgyz republic was
particularly active in such land grabs, in some cases gaining central ratification for border
changes in spite of opposition from other republics (Alamanov 2010).
These and other examples suggest that local politics, or a balance between local and
national politics, were the key factors in determining the most basic aspect of ethno-
territorial federalism and national rights—the status of nationality and the borders which
lay at the heart of the ethno-federal structure. Blauvelt concludes that

the victory of the Georgian central leadership in the Mingrelian question [in the early 1930s] was an
early demonstration of this change of emphasis in Soviet nationality policy. The Mingrelian case
demonstrates the ultimate limitations of the promises of Soviet nationality policy to encourage the
national development of small ethnic groups when larger and more powerful groups perceived
such development as a threat to their own national projects, even at those times when the
centrally-directed policy line favoured precisely the smaller groups. (Blauvelt 2014b, p. 1012)

Such considerations might lead us to question whether anything remains that can
meaningfully be called a Soviet nationality policy. If there existed a ‘closed shop’ of
major Soviet nationalities already in the early 1930s, what was there left for a policy of
ethno-federalism and nationality ascription to do? There were, of course, exceptions to this
rule, such as the Lezgins of Azerbaijan, who gained recognition in the 1950s, but such
exceptions again underline the contingent outcomes and lack of a policy behind the most
basic premise of the Soviet nationality structure.
A somewhat different recent departure from standard nationality policy based accounts
suggests yet another approach, which relegates nationality to a less central position, even
in Central Asia. Kassymbekova (2016) argues that Soviet officials in Tajikistan in the
1920s were defined more by their institutional position than by their nationality
(Kassymbekova 2016, p. 46), and explicitly tackles the significance of ‘affirmative action’
988 JEREMY SMITH

(Kassymbekova 2016, p. 67). Thus, in many respects, the Soviet national republics can be
seen as similar to Russian regions of the USSR, and nationality status makes much less
difference in Kassymbekova’s account than in most others.
This section has presented a small number of cases in which nationality policy clearly had
no bearing on outcomes which ought to be at the core of any programme for nationalities. It
has argued that the concept of nationality policy as used by the vast majority of authors is
vague, ill-defined and contradictory—or rather, is described as contradictory to an extent
that no coherent policy can be held to exist. Nevertheless, there continues to be a
pervasive assumption in academic literature that a Soviet nationality policy not only
existed but has deeply influenced highly important post-Soviet developments. In
conclusion, I point to a number of significant recent and current developments where this
assumption might lead to serious misunderstandings as to the origins, and therefore the
very nature, of contentious issues.

Final examples and concluding thoughts

Nagorno-Karabakh
In a recent article, Cheterian (2017) has shown how the Turkish genocide against the
Armenians in 1915 led, through a connected chain of developments, to the conflict
between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh which began in the 1980s. This
was not a direct causal relationship. Several things needed to happen in between in order
for the two events to be linked: Mustafa Kemal’s release and reappointment of people
responsible for the 1916 Armenian genocide; subsequent Turkish denial; a surge in
Kurdish terrorism which was linked to Armenians; the final reinforcement of Turkish
policy in the 1980s; the end of the Cold War undermining Turkey’s NATO role; the re-
emergence of Armenian demands over Karabakh at a specific juncture; and a turn in
Azerbaijani national rhetoric at the same time. While perhaps not providing a fully
comprehensive explanation, and placing a clear emphasis on Turkish–Armenian relations,
such a historically coherent account, when backed up by historical evidence, speaks more
to reality than an ascription of the Karabakh dispute to the ethno-territorial framework
established by Soviet nationality policies, or other aspects of Soviet nationality policy
(Geukjian 2012). To be sure, Nagorno-Karabakh had to exist for the conflict to occur, but
Cheterian’s account suggests that such a conflict may have emerged regardless of the
organisational form that territory had taken.
One part of the Nagorno-Karabakh story may be opened up for reinterpretation, given the
new emphasis outlined in this essay: the very decision that Nagorno-Karabakh should be part
of Soviet Azerbaijan rather than Armenia. This is often, especially in official Armenian
discourse, assigned to an unexplained whim of Stalin. Branding it as simply ‘Stalin’s
decision’7 is a calculated attempt to delegitimise it and alternative explanations have not
been convincingly advanced. From the perspective of Soviet nationality policy, the

7
For example, a speech by Armenian Foreign Secretary Edward Nalbandian at the University of Helsinki, 2
May 2016.
 SOVIET NATIONALITY POLICY 989

decision does indeed seem arbitrary, since most of the available precedents would have
suggested drawing Armenia’s borders to include Nagorno-Karabakh along with the
relatively small Lachin strip which joined it to Armenia, even if this area were not
populated by Armenians. An intervention by Stalin, or someone else, even if we do not
understand the motives, seems to make sense from this perspective.
A perspective based on negotiation suggests a different story. What we do know is that the
decision over Nagorno-Karabakh’s status was taken at a two-day meeting of the Caucasian
Bureau of the Russian Communist Party (as it was then still known) in July 1921. The
decision appears to be based on a change of heart between the first and second days of
this meeting. From the list of participants, it might be possible to deduce why the
pendulum swung from a solution favouring uniting Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia to
one granting it autonomous status within Azerbaijan. The case for Azerbaijan was
presented by the leader of the Azerbaijan Communist Party, Nariman Narimanov, an
Azerbaijani intellectual previously associated with the national cultural and educational
movement. Narimanov had once threatened widespread unrest if Nagorno-Karabakh were
transferred to Armenia. Representing Armenia were two otherwise unknown Armenian
communists (Libaridian 1988, p. 36). Armenian communists such as Anastas Mikoyan
and the Chairman of the Armenian Soviet government in 1922, S. L. Lukashin, were, in
any case, known for not supporting Armenian causes, with Armenia at that stage classified
as a ‘bourgeois nation’ in some communist circles. Seen from the perspective of
negotiation, therefore, it is not surprising that the cause favoured by Azerbaijan should
prevail at such a meeting, notwithstanding the presence of luminaries such as Stalin and
Sergo Ordzhonikidze. The existence of a Soviet nationality policy, by contrast, offers little
insight into this decision.

Language and ethnicity in Ukraine

Another example illustrates how an insistence on nationality policy might predetermine the
reading of a phenomenon or event. In an article on the legacies of Soviet nationalities policies
and the discrepancy between ethnocultural identification and language practice in Ukraine,
Kulyk (2014) argues that the continuation of this discrepancy in post-Soviet Ukraine is a
clear case of a Soviet legacy, derived from Soviet nationality policy, influencing the
present. The phenomenon appears to unequivocally match the criteria established by the
editors of the volume in which Kulyk’s article is published, of ‘a durable causal
relationship between earlier institutions and practices and those of the present in the wake
of a macrohistorical rupture’ (Beissinger & Kotkin 2014, p. 11). While Kulyk does not
claim that the discrepancy between language and identity is a major factor in the current
Ukraine crisis, other commentators and, indeed, some of the rhetoric of Vladimir Putin
himself posit a clear link that gives Bolshevik and later Soviet policies explanatory power
in relation to the 2014 crisis (Putin 2014).
Kulyk’s argument is well made but suffers from the assumption that a phenomenon
observed in the Soviet period and recorded in Soviet censuses resulted directly and
intentionally from a Soviet policy. While illustrating the peculiarity of the Ukrainian case
and the continuities between Soviet and post-Soviet self-identification and language use,
the argument that this was a product of Soviet policies is at best a circular one. Even if
990 JEREMY SMITH

there was such a policy, it was unique to Ukraine and possibly Belarus. Hence it cannot
properly be labelled a Soviet nationality policy but at best a Ukrainian or Belarusan one.
Such assumptions are often made about the effects of Soviet nationality policy, but should
not consideration be given to other possible explanations? If a similar phenomenon is observed
in both Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine, might this not just as well be a product of Ukrainian
demography and its geographical situation, which could have persisted regardless of the
form of government or vaguely defined policies? Can we really assign Armenian–
Azerbaijani hostility to a particular institutional state structure rather than other factors,
when the same type of structure mostly failed to produce lasting enmity in other cases?
The concept of Soviet nationality policy is mostly used to explain an incongruity between
the phenomenon of the nation in the Soviet Union compared to the classic nation-state model.
Under the old paradigm of Russification, proponents believed that assimilation was
proceeding at a far faster pace than would be normal, proving that there was coercion
involved. Under the newer nation-building paradigm, Soviet nationality policy is used to
explain the flourishing of nationhood, the pressures which eventually led to the dissolution
of the USSR, and certain peculiarities which have resulted in persisting ethnic conflicts or
other contestations. It is true that there are complex questions around nationality in all
post-Soviet states, but this is true of most states. The ‘classic nation-state’ along the lines
of the French model is rare in Europe, and even rarer elsewhere (Dunkerley et al. 2002,
p. 25). Is Soviet nationality really so different that it needs such a specific explanation?
The idea of a Soviet nationality policy lacks explanatory power because there is little need
for such an explanation, most of all because such a policy did not exist for most of the Soviet
period. A look at recent historiography suggests that many researchers have grasped this but
nevertheless continue to refer to this non-existent policy while promoting different
explanations for national developments in the Soviet Union. In the hands of writers and
commentators who are not engaged directly in research on nationality, but who depend on
the findings presented by historians, the assumption of a nationality policy has had more
detrimental consequences, oversimplifying genuinely complex questions.
The studies mentioned in this essay have shown that negotiation between different interests
played far more of a role than policy in resolving the most important decisions concerning
nationality. Foremost among those interests were the leaderships of the Soviet union
republics, who were for long periods free to pursue preferential, primordialist and even
exclusivist practices within the borders of their republics. There were constraints on their
actions, but the limits of those constraints were not defined. Concepts such as clientelism
and blat figure highly in a number of recent studies of Soviet history across a range of areas
(Hosking 2000; Alexopoulos 2008; Baghdasaryan 2017), while negotiation over rights and
entitlement have also been found in other areas (Smith 2015). In the absence of an actual
nationality policy, focusing on similar approaches may prove more fruitful in understanding
the role nationality played and how it was negotiated in the Soviet Union.

JEREMY SMITH , Professor of Russian History and Politics, Karelian Institute,

University of Eastern Finland, Aurora, Yliopistokatu 2, 80100 Joensuu, Finland.
Email: jeremy.smith@uef.fi http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4799-771X
 SOVIET NATIONALITY POLICY 991

References
Alamanov, S. (2010) ‘Ob istorii, sovremennom sostoyanii i perspektivakh yuridicheskogo oformleniya
Kyrgyzsko-Tadzhiskoi gosudarstvennoi granitsy’, in Kerim, N. (ed.) Kyrgyzstan-Tadzhikistan: kurs na
ukreplenie partnerstva v kontekste regional’nykh svyazei (Bishkek, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung).
Alexopoulos, G. (2008) ‘Stalin and the Politics of Kinship: Practices of Collective Punishment, 1920s–1940s’,
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 50, 1.
Altstadt, A. L. (2016) The Politics of Culture in Soviet Azerbaijan, 1920–40 (London, Routledge).
Applebaum, A. (2017) Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (London, Allen Lane).
Baghdasaryan, M. (2017) ‘The Practice of Political Rights and Patron–Client Relations: A Case Study of a
Party in Armenia’, Citizenship Studies, 21, 8.
Beissinger, M. R. & Kotkin, S. (eds) (2014) Historical Legacies of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).
Bichsel, C. (2009) Conflict Transformation in Central Asia: Irrigation Disputes in the Ferghana Valley
(London, Routledge).
Blauvelt, T. (2014a) ‘The Establishment of Soviet Power in Abkhazia: Ethnicity, Contestation and Clientelism
in the Revolutionary Periphery’, Revolutionary Russia, 27, 1.
Blauvelt, T. (2014b) ‘The “Mingrelian Question”: Institutional Resources and the Limits of Soviet Nationality
Policy’, Europe-Asia Studies, 66, 6.
Blauvelt, T. K. & Smith, J. (eds) (2015) Georgia after Stalin: Nationalism and Soviet Power (London,
Routledge).
Brubaker, R. (1996) Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).
Carr, E. H. (1950) The Bolshevik Revolution A History of Soviet Russia 1917–1923, vol. 1 (London,
Macmillan).
Cheterian, V. (2017) ‘The Last Closed Border of the Cold War: Turkey–Armenia’, Journal of Borderlands
Studies, 32, 1.
Connor, W. (1972) ‘Nation-Building or Nation-Destroying?’, World Politics, 24, 3.
Conquest, R. (1970) Nation Killers (London, Macmillan).
Cornell, S. E. (2002) Autonomy & Conflict: Ethnoterritoriality & Separatism in the South Caucasus—Cases in
Georgia (Uppsala, Department of Peace and Conflict Research).
Cosgrove, S. (2004) Russian Nationalism and the Politics of Soviet Literature: the Case of Nash Sovremmenik,
1981–1991 (Basingstoke, Macmillan).
Dunkerley, D., Hodgson, L., Konopacki, S., Spybey, T. & Thompson, A. (2002) Changing Europe: Identities,
Nations and Citizens (London, Routledge).
Edgar, A. (2006) Tribal Nation: the Making of Soviet Turkmenistan (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press).
Fowkes, B. (1997) The Disintegration of the Soviet Union: a Study in the Rise and Triumph of Nationalism
(London, Macmillan).
Gerasimov, I. (2005) ‘Affirmative Action: Empire (On New Standards in Russian Imperial Studies)’, Ab
Imperio, 3.
Geukjian, O. (2012) Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in the South Caucasus: Nagorno-Karabakh and the
Legacy of Soviet Nationalities Policy (London, Routledge).
Gibaduli, Y. N. (ed.) (1992) Taini natsional’noi politiki TsK RKP. Stenograficheskii otchet sekretnogo IV
soveshchaniya TsK RKP, 1923g (Moscow, INSAN).
Gorenburg, D. (2006) ‘Soviet Nationalities Policy and Assimilation’, in Arel, D. & Ruble, B. A. (eds)
Rebounding Identities: the Politics of Identity in Russia and Ukraine (Washington, DC, Woodrow
Wilson Center Press).
Goryachev, Y. V. (ed.) (2005) Tsentral’nyi komitet KPSS, VKP(b), RKP(b), RSDRP(b): istoriko-biograficheskii
spravochnik (Moscow, Parad).
Grybkauskas, S. (2013) ‘Antisovietiniai protestai ir nomenklatūros partikuliarizmas. Sąveikos poveikis
lietuviško nacionalizmo kaitai’, in Laurinavičius, C. (ed.) Epochas jungiantis nacionalizmas: tautos
(de)konstravimas tarpukario, sovietmečio ir posovietmečio Lietuvoje (Vilnius, LII leidykla).
Hirsch, F. (2000) ‘Toward an Empire of Nations: Border-Making and the Formation of Soviet National
Identities’, Russian Review, 59, April.
Hirsch, F. (2005) Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY,
& London, Cornell University Press).
Hosking, G. (2000) ‘Patronage and the Russian State’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 78, 2.
Huttenbach, H. R. (ed.) (1990) Soviet Nationality Policies: Ruling Ethnic Groups in the USSR (London &
New York, NY, Mansell).
992 JEREMY SMITH

Isaacs, R. & Polese, A. (2015) ‘Between “Imagined” and “Real” Nation-Building: Identities and Nationhood in
Post-Soviet Central Asia’, Nationalities Papers, 43, 3.
Jääts, I. (2012) ‘“The Permiak Question”: Bolshevik Central Authorities, Russian and non-Russian Provincial
Elites Negotiating Over Autonomy in the Early 1920s’, Nationalities Papers, 40, 2.
Kassymbekova, B. (2016) Despite Cultures: Early Soviet Rule in Tajikistan (Pittsburgh, PA, University of
Pittsburgh Press).
Kibita, N. (2011) ‘Moscow–Kiev Relations and the Sovnarkhoz Reform’, in Smith, J. & Ilic, M. (eds)
Khrushchev in the Kremlin: Policy and Government in the Soviet Union, 1953–64 (London &
New York, NY, Routledge).
Kolstø, P. (2013) ‘Faulted for the Wrong Reasons: Soviet Institutionalization of Ethnic Diversity and Western
(mis)interpretations’, in Cordell, K. & Agarin, T. (eds) Institutional Legacies of Communism: Change and
Continuities in Minority Protection (London & New York, NY, Routledge).
Kulyk, V. (2014) ‘Soviet Nationalities Policies and the Discrepancy Between Ethnocultural Identification and
Language Practice in Ukraine’, in Beissinger, M. R. & Kotkin, S. (eds).
Lenin, V. I. (1958–1965) Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Vol. XLV (5th edn) (Moscow, Institute of Marxism–
Leninism).
Lewin, M. (1975) Lenin’s Last Struggle (London, Pluto Press).
Libaridian, G. J. (ed.) (1988) The Karabakh File: Documents and Facts on the Region of Mountainous
Karabagh 1918–1988 (Cambridge & Toronto, The Zoryan Institute).
Martin, T. (2001) The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939
(Ithaca, NY, & London, Cornell University Press).
Mitrokhin, N. (2003) Russkaya partiya: dvizhenie russkikh natsionalistov v SSSR 1953–1985 gody (Moscow,
Novoe literaturnoe obozrenoe).
Morrison, A. (2017) ‘Stalin’s Giant Pencil: Debunking a Myth About Central Asia’s Borders’, Eurasianet, 13
February, available at: http://www.eurasianet.org/node/82376, accessed 26 November 2018.
Nahaylo, B. & Swoboda, V. (1990) Soviet Disunion: a History of the Nationalities Problem in the USSR
(New York, NY, The Free Press).
O’Keeffe, B. (2013) New Soviet Gypsies: Nationality, Performance, and Selfhood in the Early Soviet Union
(Toronto, University of Toronto Press).
Osipov, A. (2016) ‘The Background of the Soviet Union’s Involvement in the Establishment of the European
Minority Rights Regime in the Late 1980s’, Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe, 15, 2.
Pennar, J. (1981) ‘Current Soviet Nationality Policy’, Journal of Baltic Studies, 12, 1.
Pikhoya, R. (2007) Moskva, Kreml’, Vlast’: Sorok let posle voiny 1945–1985 (Moscow, Ru’-Olimp, Astrel’
AST).
Pipes, R. (1964) The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923 (Cambridge,
MA, Harvard University Press).
Pohl, J. O. (2000) ‘Stalin’s Genocide Against the “Repressed Peoples”’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2, 2.
Programma (1919) Programma Rossiiskoi Kommunisticheskoi Partii (bol’shevikov) in VIII s”ezd (1919).
Programme (1961) Programme of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, adopted by the 22nd Congress of
the C.P.S.U. October 31, 1961 (Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House).
Putin, V. (2014) ‘Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club’, 24 October, available at: http://en.
kremlin.ru/events/president/news/46860, accessed 26 October 2018.
Raffass, T. (2012) The Soviet Union: Federation or Empire? (London & New York, NY, Routledge).
Reeves, M. (2014) Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia (Ithaca, NY, & London,
Cornell University Press).
Roeder, P. G. (1991) ‘Soviet Federalism and Ethnic Mobilisation’, World Politics, 43, 2.
Rutland, P. (1984) ‘The “Nationality Problem” and the Soviet State’, in Harding, N. (ed.) The State in Socialist
Society (Basingstoke, Macmillan).
Shnirelman, V. A. (2001) The Value of the Past: Myths, Identity and Politics in Transcaucasia, Senri
Ethnological Studies no. 57 (Osaka, National Museum of Ethnology).
Siegelbaum, L. H. & Moch, L. P. (2016) ‘Transnationalism in One Country? Seeing and Not Seeing Cross-
Border Migration Within the Soviet Union’, Slavic Review, 75, 4.
Slezkine, Y. (1994) ‘The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or how a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic
Particularism’, Slavic Review, 53, 2.
Smith, J. (1999) The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917–1923 (Basingstoke, Macmillan).
Smith, J. (2011) ‘Leadership and Nationalism in the Soviet Republics, 1951–1959’, in Smith, J. & Ilic, M. (eds)
Khrushchev in the Kremlin: Policy and Government in the Soviet Union, 1953–64 (London & New York,
NY, Routledge).
 SOVIET NATIONALITY POLICY 993

Smith, J. (2013) Red Nations: the Nationalities Experience in and after the USSR (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press).
Smith, J. (2017) ‘The Battle for Language: Opposition to Khrushchev’s Education Reform in the Soviet
Republics, 1958–59’, Slavic Review, 76, 4.
Smith, M. (2015) ‘The Withering Away of the Danger Society: The Pensions Reforms of 1956 and 1964 in the
Soviet Union’, Social Science History, 39, 1.
Statiev, A. (2009) ‘Soviet Ethnic Deportations: Intent Versus Outcome’, Journal of Genocide Research, 11, 2–3.
Suny, R. G. (1989) The Making of the Georgian Nation (London, I.B. Tauris).
Suny, R. G. (1993) The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union
(Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press).
Suny, R. G. & Martin, T. (2001) A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin
(Oxford, Oxford University Press).
Ter Minassian, T. (2007) Erevan; la construction d’une capitale à l’époque soviétique (Rennes, Presses
Universitaires de Rennes).
Titov, A. (2009) ‘The 1961 Party Programme and the Fate of Khrushchev’s Reforms’, in Ilic, M. & Smith, J.
(eds) Soviet State and Society Under Nikita Khrushchev (London & New York, NY, Routledge).
VIII s”ezd (1919) VIII s”ezd Rossiiskoi Kommunisticheskoi Partii (bol’shevikov). Moskva 18–23 marta 1919
goda. Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, Kommunist).
Wojnowski, Z. (2014) ‘Whose Crimea is it Anyway?’, Open Democracy, available at: https://www.
opendemocracy.net/od-russia/zbigniew-wojnowski/whose-crimea-is-it-anyway-soviet-khrushchev-
history, accessed 26 October 2018.