Fatal identities

How affirmative action brought down the USSR

and threatens the contemporary world

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Contents

A chilling warning from the steppes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

The Russian melting-pot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
The success story of Russia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Nationalism, the first spark of division . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Ecce homo sovieticus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
When power walks hand in hand with ideology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Universalistic communism, the “maker” of the indigenous . . . . . 17
Affirmative Action, a communist invention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
In case of disagreement, please repent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Cancel culture and the promotion of minorities:
the never-ending story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
The truth behind the tale of “friendship among peoples” . . . . . . . . . 27
Affirmative action, the maker of perpetual victims . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
When affirmative action turns brothers into enemies . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Affirmative action, the disguise of social purge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
A recipe for self-censorship and hypocrisy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Sitting on the volcanoof identities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Nationalistic vengeance is a dish best served cold
(the return of nationalities?) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
The endless dismantlement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Yesterday, today, tomorrow: affirmative action,
a one-way ticket to endless identity conflicts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

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 A chilling warning
from the steppes
The American media recently echoed a series of events which says a lot
about what the US have become. In 2015, a group of brilliant American
students of Asian descent claimed that their applications to some of the
most prominent American universities were rejected, on the ground that a
certain number of places were kept for Black and Hispanic students. A few
years later, following an investigation report, the federal state supported
their claim by suing the university of Yale for racial discrimination. This
decision was hailed by President Trump, engulfed as he was in a cultural
war aimed at exposing the inconsistencies of the progressists by any means
necessary. Last February, however, President Biden decided to cancel the
lawsuit filed during his predecessor’s presidency. Apart from what this case
says about both the current and the former American Presidents, there
is something surreal about seeing Asian-American students attacking an
affirmative action system aimed precisely at promoting minorities.

Beyond its absurdity, this case reveals the mechanism of a society which
only assert the relationships between individuals through the prism of
identity. This is not an isolated case: American, and to a lesser extent, Euro-
pean societies, are now pervaded with minority activism of various kinds,
whose purported goal is the emancipation of any category deemed “op-
pressed” because of its gender or race.

In Europe, we have come to think that whatever trend we see in the US

will eventually reach us. But we could just as well turn to the East, and to a
time not so distant, to see that these stories are nothing new. Like John Le
Carré’s “Spy who came in from the cold”, there is a lot we can learn from
Russia about the way things are in the West.

Anyone familiar with USSR and its history would notice the similarities
between certain so-called “progressive” practices and the way Soviet lead-
ers attempted to mould society into their ideology. Throughout its history,
the USSR has been ridden by controversies akin to those we currently see

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around “minorities”. It was even the laboratory of a vast affirmative action
policy centred on local nationalities. The reason this policy is barely ever
mentioned today is that its failure was merely a drop in the ocean of the
disastrous Soviet experiment. I purposefully use the word “experiment”
because the whole project was to profoundly transform people along ideas
of happiness, progress, and emancipation.

What makes this story still worth recounting today? History, in Nietzsche’s
words, is an “eternal return”. In this case, the eternal return of evil. Not to
say that these young progressive activists, in their quest for ideological pu-
rity, intend to fill the US with gulags and re-education camps (although the
self-flagellation displays of professors on university campuses are some-
what reminiscent of Stalinian trials, or of China under Mao’s rule…). The
point here is to bring certain shared thinking patterns to light, to show,
through a quick historical detour, what happens when affirmative action
policies are enacted by a small number of cultural leaders in the spotlight,
in the name of a seemingly generous ideology. To show how ideas similar
to those being defended today gave rise to catastrophes in the past.

One of its most valuable lessons is that promoting identities is a power-

ful incentive for social dissent, if not the crumbling of social order. It is a
destructive force whose effects are felt in the long run. Suffice it for now
to recall a conflict that I will take a closer look at hereinafter, the one be-
tween Armenia and Azerbaijan. This territorial feud of long-lasting, albeit
varying, intensity, which recently saw yet another bloodshed, goes back to
a Soviet policy from the 1920’s. A century later, people are still trying to
settle the score of these century-old meanderings.

This is a history I personally know quite well. I was born in the time of com-
rade Stalin, in what was still known as the Soviet Union. When I was young,
the propaganda behemoth was operating at full speed to conceal the failure
of a project that was doomed by its own ideological foundation. An ideolo-
gy that was still, at the time, religiously defended by its promoters, although
it had already suffered some serious damage. It is now just as religiously
defended by the promoters of a Messianic progressivism rallying racial,
sexual and gender issues under the banner of individual and collective lib-
eration, a movement we now call wokeness. And since nowadays, everyone

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is obsessed with identities, and always want you to specify where your
opinions are coming from, let’s just say that I was born in the Urals, in
an atheistic Jewish family. Now I only need to add that I am a white, mid-
dle-aged, heterosexual man (I think the word is now “cisgender”), and it
should be enough to contextualise my opinions in the eyes of some people
(he-she-they is how you must now refer to them, apparently).

All jokes aside – although humour, be it “boomer humour”, is a tempting

weapon when facing those who lack it so desperately –, these precisions
only serve to let the reader know that I was personally impacted by the
story that I am about to recount. A story which starts a long time ago, with
the creation of the Russian State…

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 Soviet poster from 1932, reads:
“Workers from all countries and oppressed colonies raise the banner of Lenin.”

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 The Russian melting-pot
One of the most enduring memories I have of my younger days in the
Soviet Union is the vision of festivities organised to celebrate the diversity
of this gigantic country, spanning over eleven time zones. Baltics, Arme-
nians, Georgians, Azeris, Kyrgyz, Yakuts, Eskimos, Tajiks, Tatars…Repre-
sentatives of every Soviet province would parade in traditional outfits, with
their local musical instruments and dances. It was a sight to behold! The
Soviet Union’s population was a huge patchwork which almost felt like it
contained all human diversity. The Soviets had their own American melting
pot. Something of a Russian salad, to use another food analogy. But behind
these celebrations of fraternity and diversity organised by the Party, there
lay, just like in the US, a much darker reality: that of forced multicultural-
ism.

I do not think I need to explain that the cohabitation of individuals from

various cultures and traditions is one of the greatest challenges faced by
today’s societies. The fact alone that you were kind enough to start reading
this essay shows that you are very much aware of it. But what you might not
know is how a country we usually associate with the stereotypical blond
with blue eyes came to take hold of a territory extending from the Cauca-
sus to the Arctic circle, from the plains of eastern Europe to the Chinese
border, with all the human diversity that it encompasses. To understand it,
I must take you on a little tour of Russian history. A history which, as we
are about to see, bore the seeds of many issues we still face today.

The success story of Russia

“Little Russia will grow bigger, if God gives it life”. I use this French phras-
ing because I feel like it encapsulates quite well the way Russia’s imperial
scope unravelled: gradual, continuous territorial expansion from a small
stronghold around Moscow, all under God’s perhaps unsuspecting guid-
ance.

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Indeed, the Russian State has long been synonymous with the Ortho-
dox Church, which saw in Moscow the new Rome, the authentic centre
of Christianity, and in the Tsar (a name which was derived from Cesar)
the rightful successor to Roman Emperors. Enough to give the most
faint-hearted king imperialistic ambitions!

And Ivan the Fourth, also known as the Terrible, was anything but
faint-hearted. The reason I mention him is that he was the precursor of
modern Russian expansionism, by conquering the Turkish-Mongolian
cities of Kazan and Astrakhan. Why is this event relevant to our story?
Because this is the first recorded instance of Russians being confronted to
cultural difference: the newly conquered populations were mostly Mus-
lims. This raised a question which imperial elites had struggled with since
the days of the Roman Empire, and even of Alexander the Great: how can
we integrate them into the burgeoning Empire? Should we seek to convert
them? Assimilate them by force? Exterminate them (not a big deal for Ivan,
who lived up to his name)? The solution that they found to create a bond
between these populations and the Russian monarchy was to make their
elite a part of the imperial system. In exchange for their allegiance to the
Tsar, the Tatar leaders were granted a political role in the conquered terri-
tories. Most of them even ended up converting themselves to orthodoxy,
eventually becoming some of the most prestigious families in the Russian
aristocracy.

Following Ivan’s conquering streak, his successors carried on his mission by

sending their troops in three directions: to the West, in the Baltic and Polish
territories, to the South, in the Caucasus, and to the East in Siberia (the Rus-
sian Far East!). This fascinating period, spanning three centuries, is the rise
of what is still Russia’s defining trait today: it is a European political power
to be reckoned with, while at the same time it has a firm grasp over Asia.

Diversity in the Russian population increases along with the extension of

the imperial territory. On the brink of modernity, the diversity of the Rus-
sian Empire is already remarkable. At the end of the eighteenth century,
the proportion of Eastern Slavs in Russia was 84%. This proportion fell to
68% by the first decades of the nineteenth century. Not exactly a country
populated by blonds with blue eyes!

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Every time a new population fell within the Tsar’s range of influence,
the same questions were raised: how can the community retain its inner
consistency? How can we ensure that the inhabitants maintain peaceful re-
lations with each other, and more importantly with Moscow, and later with
Saint-Petersburg? The response of the Russian elite was to assign various
statuses, based on their respective degrees of autonomy, to the conquered
territories, as well as try to win over the local elites. Catherine the Sec-
ond, one of our most well-advised rulers (strangely enough, the preachers
of armchair feminism hardly ever mention her in their lists of “powerful
women”), managed to win the German aristocracy’s support by offering
them prominent positions in her court. Meanwhile, she granted titles of
nobility to Ukrainian Cossacks who fell under her influence. Russian unity
was bought with little toys and privileges.

Far be it from me to deny the bickering, the protestations, the rebellions:

the example of Poland, catholic, brave, and disobedient, is enough to show
it. But in truth, during the heavily feudalism-based first centuries of its ex-
istence, the issues surrounding the outer territories of the Russian empire
regarded, for the most part, the relationships between the crown and the
local aristocracies. It all changed in the nineteenth century, when the rise of
nationalism brought in a new variable in the equation: the nation.

Nationalism, the first spark of division

As much as I love the French, I must ruefully (and jokingly) admit that
all the tensions which then ensued are a bit thanks to them, and to their
Revolution! It really started quite the trend, in that century and beyond.
The year 1848 is a testament to its influence, seeing the Spring of Nations,
a massive revolutionary wave which quickly overtook the entire European
continent.

Allow me to dwell on this specific era for a bit, because it binds together the
two main aspects of nationalism, a political ideal which always seemed quite
ambiguous to me. Nationalism is an exhilarating striving for freedom and
autonomy, while at the same time promoting an extremely narrow-minded
vision of the world, where everyone relishes in their own paltry specificity.

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Not to mention that the latter is sometimes rather ungrounded: histori-
an Eric Hobsawm (wonderful, albeit unapologetically Marxist author, to
the point that he insisted to be buried next to Marx’ grave) has brilliantly
shown that the concept of nation derives from a deconstructed imagery. In
most cases, nationalism is the token of an elite looking to legitimate their
grip on political power by capitalising on the notion of “people” (a tired old
tune if there ever was one). This was the era of poets glorifying the past,
and even more so when that past was filled with military defeats. This was
the era of archaeologists making out the tiniest barrow to be the equiva-
lent of Agamemno’s palace. This was the time when linguists, building on
the newly implemented scientific method, started gleaning here and there
from the local folklore to classify peoples like you would plants or insects.

But facts have a way of being stubborn, and although it was little more than
fabricated notions pieced together, this idea had an impact on the way di-
versity was dealt with in the old empires. Imperial subjects at first, people
living under the Tsar’s rule (although there were not that many of them)
found themselves quite enticed by the ideas of nationalism, and suddenly
discovered that they were in fact the nationals of an actual country, willing
to claim its rightful autonomy, if not independence. These ideas seemed
ludicrous to the elites, who remained true to the empire, and judged that
there was no point in trying to differentiate between its people, all equally
deserving of education and progress under the tsar’s benevolent guidance.
In Moscow, and in reaction to the rise of local nationalisms, a form of im-
perial nationalism quickly developed, looking to tackle this new issue in
the already established frame, with an obsessive emphasis on unity and
stability.

In essence, what was emerging at the time was a new relationship between
the centre and its peripheries. All other things being equal, I see many sim-
ilarities between these discussions and contemporary issues. In the mul-
ticultural societies of the twenty-first century, individuals from various
cultures and traditions gravitate around a cultural “core” that we ought to
call, without fear of political correctness, the “cultural majority”, i.e., the
descendants of those who built these nations in the first place. Seamless-
ly articulating the relations between individuals of various origins: this

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is the challenge faced by multicultural democracies. European empires
faced roughly the same challenge, especially after their own nationalistic
movements appeared. Comparisons, of course, are only correct to some
extent, but it is nonetheless interesting to notice how the relations between
the imperial centre and its nationalism-driven peripheries tied together.
This evolution sheds some light on the battle between two conceptions of
emancipation that are still very much relevant today, namely emancipation
through specificity on the one hand, and emancipation through universal-
ity on the other hand.

The beginning of the nineteenth century was marked by the aforemen-

tioned political endeavour to immerse as many imperial subjects as pos-
sible in the Russian culture and language. Here, “Russian” must not be
understood in an ethnical sense, but as a synonym for universalism. This
term is nowadays notoriously jeered by progressists, on the ground that it
hides a devious thirst for power. This is very much how nationalistic move-
ments perceived the imperial attempts at “bringing them Enlightenment”.
The empire was now giving every sign of an imminent collapse. Near the
Western borders, Polish and Finnish nationals, who had remained thus far
relatively autonomous, paving the way for nationalistic discourses of all
kinds, were being joined in their protest by Ukrainians and Belarussians,
as well as Baltic populations. In the East, the russification project stumbled
over Jadidism, a movement which focused on modernisation as well as the
promotion of Islam in the old Tatar kingdoms. In response to the upsurge
in protestations, the Empire striked back. Under the rule of Alexander the
Third, russification slowly turned into forced normalisation, which was
meant to undermine any dreams of emancipation. Among the political
elite of the country, the idea of a messianic mission of Russia was once
again brought up, claiming that Russia should not be afraid of owning up
to its cultural and religious domination. As a result, discriminatory meas-
ures were undertaken, mostly targeting the Jews and the Polish. In turn,
Nationalistic movements gained in resolve in reaction to these policies.

Quickly, the notion of ethnicity, biological criterium of sorts born from

the misinterpretation of Darwin’s work, added up to the cultural nation-
alism of the first era. The idea was that the competition between ethnic

12
groups mirrors the struggle for survival between species, the former being
conceived as distinct entities with unique traits. This theory discards en-
tirely the idea of assimilation, to replace it with the notion of endless social
struggle. Thus, during the nineteenth century, the gap gradually widened
between the various conceptions of “living together” of the era, divided by
increasing levels of disagreement, misunderstanding and mistrust.

This quick review is not meant to hand out good and bad grades in a “the
virtuous imperialistic defenders of universalism vs the bad narrow-mind-
ed nationalists” kind of way. The point here is just to outline the permanen-
cy of a phenomenon, which is pervasive in contemporary debates around
identity: the dialectical mechanism which makes every faction more radi-
cal in its positions, to the point of exacerbating their conflict to an unprec-
edented level.

Writing the word “dialectical” made me realise that it would not have
seemed out of place to the one who would shortly after endow this story
with a whole new meaning: the one and only Vladimir Ilitch Oulianov, also
known as Lenin.

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 Soviet poster from 1955, reads:
“All hail to the unbreakable friendship of the peoples!”

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 Ecce homo sovieticus
The year 1917 is a turning point in the history of Russia that it never com-
pletely recovered from to this day. Neither did the rest of the world, in fact.
In October of this fateful year, the unthinkable happened, with the takeo-
ver of a violent, fanatical minority, determined to destroy the existing order
to replace it with a hypothetical terrestrial paradise. They were, in fact, so
aware of being a minority that they decided, with an irony as amusing as it
is cruel, to call themselves “Bolsheviks” (majority in Russian).

From the moment they took over the political power, the Bolsheviks sought
to bring about the advent of a new humanity. One that writer Alexandre
Zinoviev (sarcastically) called Homo Sovieticus. For the distant observer,
whose imagination is filled with images from the Cold War, Homo So-
vieticus seems like a fairly grey and uninteresting individual, whose only
distinctive traits were washed off by the struggle for the “establishment of
Socialism”. This comes as no surprise if we bear in mind what basis the Bol-
shevik ideology was built on, following Lenin’s use of Marxist theories. All
men are born equal. This equality must be established, whether people like
it or not - and especially if they do not, it would seem. The only difference
that matters is the one between the bourgeois and the labouring masses,
until this distinction is abolished by the communist society, that is, a goal
which everyone must aim at, under the Party’s unwavering but benevolent
guidance. You would think that would be enough to relegate notions like
“identity”, “race” and “nation” in the dustbin of history. Enough, likewise,
to relegate into the background the conflicts around nationalities which
plagued the last decades of the Russian Empire.

Well, not quite! The new masters of Russia did nothing to counter the
outbreak of nationalisms. They amplified it, on the contrary, they endorsed
it and centred the organisation of their country and society around it.
They made it their duty to give every citizen the most absurdly artificial
labels, not least of which is the puzzling, anti-Marxist category of ethnicity
(even though the word nationality was of broader use). This intellectual
achievement was made possible, as was often the case with the Bolsheviks,
by a mix of political calculation and intellectual contortions which were
enough of a stretch to make any yoga master sore.

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 When power walks hand
in hand with ideology
Let us start with political calculations: the years following the coup were
key for the Bolsheviks. They were met with fierce Resistance, plunging the
country in a civil war and causing somewhere between 8 and 20 million
casualties in the process. Incompetent, corrupt and murderous as they may
have been, however, you cannot take away from Lenin and his clique that
they were tactically brilliant, impressively skilled in conquering and retain-
ing power. In what was an unforgiving context for the newly born proletar-
ian state, the new masters of the Kremlin slyly played the nationality card
to save their Revolution.

The forces which opposed the Bolsheviks (which were called “white”, but
should not be confused with the universal antagonist of contemporary de-
bates…Or should they?), although divided, were united behind a common
principle: their belief in a united and undivided Russia. From this point on,
the Reds started relying on the peripheries’ nationalistic leaders to reaffirm
their domination in jeopardy. After the war ended with their victory, the
Bolsheviks were so impressed by the impact of the nationalistic rhetoric
on part of the population that they quickly became the most enthusias-
tic defenders of “the peoples’ right of self-determination”. They saw it as a
means of channelling this energy, which they rightfully considered a pow-
erful tool for mass mobilisation, with the added benefit of undermining the
“Chauvinism of great nations”, the Russian sense of self-importance which
always threatened to bring back the old ways.

But how can one reconcile this ruthlessly Machiavellian program with an
ideology which, at least in theory, recognises none but one division, the one
between social classes? This contradiction was resolved by a Soviet theo-
rist, who came up with a quite colourful analogy: just like there is good and
bad cholesterol, he explains, we must distinguish between “nationalism of
the oppressor nation and nationalism of the oppressed nation, between na-
tionalism of a great nation and that of a small one”. The savvy dialectician
goes on, in his unmistakably communist rhetoric: the only way to achieve

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“properly proletarian” behaviour” is to go beyond “formal equality”, by
compensating in one way or another (…) through one’s behaviour, for the
mistrust, the suspicions, the grievances triggered by the governance of im-
perialistic nations on the oppressed people”. This theorist, whose words are
so reminiscent of contemporary post-colonial studies, is Lenin himself, in
his 1922 opus The National question and autonomy.

In an attempt to justify the special treatment of nationalities in his soon-to-

be ideal society, the orchestrator of the Russian Revolution draws a parallel
between the Russian coloniser and the old-timey bourgeois master, asso-
ciating them both within the figure of the “Oppressor”. Just like the “white
guilt” promoted nowadays by the Woke movement, this Russian guilt is
extended to Russian ethnicity in general, regardless of social status and in
blatant contradiction with Marxist theories. For these new Inquisitors, the
figure of the Oppressor is so convenient because it can be reshaped at will.
This is especially clear nowadays when it comes to progressivism tinged
with post-colonial ideology. I must admit I am rather puzzled, when I hear
the most ferocious defenders of this view, as to who exactly is the oppressor
that they refer to in their denunciations. Is it the “post-colonial” state? Is it
the “capitalistic system”, as its driving force or accomplice? Is it any “white
person”?

Universalistic communism,
the “maker” of the indigenous
Let us go back a century, to the exact moment Russia became fertile ground
for the implementation of Marxist-Leninist theories. Once the ideologi-
cal basis for the differentiated treatment of nationalities was settled, the
new masters of Moscow set to “correct” the inequalities generated by the
imperialistic ambitions of Russia. This policy was referred to by the name
korenizatsiya, which literally means “indigenisation”. Chilling revelation of
this choice of words: through such an absurdly voluntaristic term, those
political leaders, who claimed to act for the greater good of Humanity, ac-
tually went and created categories from scratch, deriving them from the
worst of identity stigma.

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In this scope, they started things off by reshaping the old Empire on an eth-
nical basis. Every nationality (with a few notable exceptions, among which
the Jews) was thus officially recognised, on the ground of its territory, its
language and culture, as well as a new elite extracted from the local pop-
ulations, the same one which had long been “oppressed” by the Russian
colonisers. This was also the moment where the Ukrainian language came
into official use within the political institutions of the Republic of Ukraine;
the same applied to Belarus, etc…

But the subdivision of the country into Soviet Socialist Republics is just the
tip of the iceberg of this whole endeavour. Districts, village councils, terri-
tories and administrations are all re-organised along ethnical criteria. You
could see, for instance, a former subject of the Tsar from the Western part
of the empire suddenly forced to obey a Jewish village council, in a German
district of the Ukrainian Republic.

At the risk of repeating myself, I would like to stress how new this all was,
for everyone involved as well as for Mother Russia. Under the Tsar’s ad-
ministration, nationality as a principle played no part in the territorial sub-
division of the country. Before 1917, the ideas of nationalism had failed to
implant themselves in a large part of the population. Not to rewrite His-
tory, but the following hypothesis could even be formulated: Had the war
against the forces of the Axe been won by the Tsar’s armies, a resurgence of
imperial patriotism would have ensued, just like it did in post-1918 France,
or later when Stalin had to resort to patriotism to save the USSR from the
German invasion.

The previous sentences are not a testament to my nostalgia for the Empire,
or to my taste for historical speculations. Its sole purpose was to show the
reader that the triumph of nationalities was anything but unavoidable. The
Bolsheviks played an undeniable part in it. In this case, like in many others,
they played wizard’s apprentice, by capitalising on emerging trends, forcing
down the adoption by hundreds of thousands of individuals of an ethnical
identity far too restricted to encompass human experience in all its com-
plexity. In a way, you could even say that they set themselves up for failure:
the nationality issues, exacerbated, neglected and imperfectly assimilated

18
by Lenin’s successors, played a key role in the collapse of communism and
in the crumbling of the Soviet area.

Affirmative Action, a communist invention

At this point, however, there was no way to predict such an outcome. At
this point, there was no mention of a possible collapse, only the rise of a
new form of society. The first decades of the Bolshevik rule were defined
by a vast movement of upward mobility. To the neglectful observer, this
could seem like the product of a generous redistribution policy in terms of
professional positions. However, social advancement in the Soviet world,
lest we forget, was never far from devise: this remarkable mobility is largely
due to the relentless purges carried out by the country’s leaders to get rid of
any “suspicious” element. As a result, they quickly found themselves forced
to educate and train the masses, if they wanted to keep the country going.
Qualified personnel had to be formed everywhere, all the time. Thousands
of “workers”, who until then were dominated by the “elite”, were granted
new opportunities in universities, factories, in the army, and in the political
institutions of the Party.

This is where the korenizatsia and its practical consequences came into
play. It established a set of special treatments and privileges for the local
workers, who were now guaranteed quotas in education, as well as in the
professional world and in the public sphere. More specifically, starting
from 1923, quotas in favour of local workers were set in the industry, be-
fore being extended to the academic world the following year. In the whole
country, governmental committees were set up to oversee the implementa-
tion of this policy. They set a minimal number of locals to hire every year
for every governmental institution or company (which was no small feat
since every company was governmental). On top of it, these committees
helped companies meet these requirements, by singling out potential can-
didates and pointing them to the job offers they may have been suited for,
like an employment office specialising in “minorities”.

In Kakakhstan, for instance, the state set up a “preferential system for Ka-
zakh workers regarding employment and dismissal decisions”. In central

19
 Soviet poster from 1950, reads:
“We will not allow to sow dissent between our peoples.”

20
Asia, local nationalities were offered legal advantages regarding “insertion
into the labour market”. In north Caucasus, five-year plans were created to
include a certain proportion of workers from the mountain regions into
the factories of Rostov and other big cities. Even in Moscow, programs
were set up to bring in a predetermined number of Roma people into
factories. Surprisingly enough, these quotas were not only shown to the
bureaucrats in charge of fulfilling them: they were published in the local
newspapers. The Pravda Vostoka, the Party’s official publication in Central
Asia, laid out the required percentages for universities as follows: “a min-
imum of 85% of local nationalities (among which at least 10% of natives);
20% of Batrakis; 30% of kolkhozniks (sharecroppers) and bednyakis (the
destitute)”, and so on…

Looking at the Truth (such is the meaning of Pravda, for those unaware),
it becomes quite clear that everything is perfectly quantified, with the de-
fining administrative genius of totalitarian governments. In this planifica-
tion, there was no place for talent, initiative, the unexpected blooming of
personalities, none of life’s unpredictable and irreducible bountiful abun-
dance. Determinism reigns supreme here, yet another paradox for such an
emancipation-minded political system.

In the same year, 1923, one of the party’s leader explained, during the
twelfth Party convention: “regarding national cultures, we are in favour
of an affirmative, voluntaristic policy”. The man behind this statement
was none other than Joseph Stalin, who at the time was headed towards
a brilliant bureaucratic career as Commissar for Nationalities. Forty years
before the start of the American civil rights movement, the Soviet thus
proclaimed, in perfectly unambiguous terms, the policy of ethnicity-based
access to work positions, known today as affirmative action.

In case of disagreement, please repent

This was not the only front on which the Russians were ahead of the Amer-
icans, forty years before the Sputnik was launched. It is as though, by cre-
ating affirmative action, they had opened the Pandora box, unleashing the
vast array of ailments which now plague the Western civilisation. I am, of

21
course, referring to the guilt injunction, and cancel culture, which in my
view are both closely related to the artificial promotion of minorities.

To bring this relation to light, we must focus on a category that we have

not encountered until now: the “ethnically Russian” inhabitants of the ter-
ritories targeted by the korenizatsia. These people had every reason to feel
cheated by the quota system, and as we will see, this is what happened
in the end. Justifying the special treatment granted to the so-called his-
torically oppressed minorities means that you must also account for the
unfair treatment to those evicted from positions they were equally suited
for. This is where the notion of repentance comes into play, at least in its
Soviet form.

Lenin wrote, following the distinction mentioned above between good and
bad nationalism, that “we, people of the bigger nations, are guilty of having
committed an immeasurable amount of violence”. The supreme leader thus
presents the rise of modern Russia as a crime to atone for, which is a way
of forcing the acceptation of the unfair treatment to come. A few months
later, Bukharin, one of his most loyal subordinates (his only reward for it
was to be executed by Stalin), explains as follows the line that the ethni-
cally Russian had to keep: “we must keep ourselves at a disadvantage and
make always greater concessions to the nationalistic movements (…). This
is only way for us to regain the trust of the formerly oppressed nations”.

Having to acknowledge guilt only because of the community you were

born in, making it a permanent stain, refraining from judging others in any
way because of how your ancestors might have made theirs suffer, credit-
ing them with every possible quality for the mere reason that they belong
to the oppressed group: all these guidelines for the former “oppressors”
sound like they were formulated by the most relentless defenders of the
woke ideology. I cannot help but to feel reminded of the criticism directed
toward the New York Times, whose contributors were deemed “too white”
to talk about systemic racism. The worst part of it all is that the editorial
board of this newspaper ended up accepting it, completely reshaping its
functioning, be it that they wanted to conform to the new public mentality,
or because the journalists ended up actually believing that this criticism
was well-founded.

22
This phenomenon where the designated “oppressors” accept their purport-
ed guilt seems rather alien and, quite frankly, frightening to me. Allow me
to once again steer away from my old Russian lands, to focus on the no
less chilling contemporary political debate. I recently heard French essay-
ist Caroline Fourest talking about her experience on American campuses,
where she took part in a series of conferences on the current French po-
litical situation. The discussion quickly shifted towards the controversies
around the headscarf, which led to the intervention of a female student:
as a non-Muslim, belonging to an oppressive culture, Fourest was not “en-
titled” to address this issue. She still tried to defend herself, resolving the
apparent contradiction as best she could, in an atmosphere more suited for
a religious education camp than what you would expect from a university.
After it ended, several professors came to thank her, with teary eyes, for
having the courage to speak up about the things that they were long denied
the right to even mention, if they did not want to incur public prosecution,
sometimes to the point of being laid off from their position. The intellectu-
al terrorism apparatus of the woke fanatics was so powerful that they had
forced these teachers to either remain silent and accept the new dogma or
be excluded. But deep down, they never believed in it.

But then again, did Lenin, Stalin, Bukharin and the others really believe
in the compassionate discourses and the displays of emotion that they ad-
dressed to an audience of local governors, in an attempt to coax them, to
ensure their obedience?

Cancel culture and the promotion

of minorities: the never-ending story
There is yet another connexion that I can see between the Soviet lega-
cy and the contemporary situation in Europe and America, namely the
tendency to re-write history with the purported goal of defending minor-
ities. This phenomenon is commonly designated under the name cancel
culture. Examples abound, every time leaving me completely baffled. In
some British universities, people call for the dismissal of many brilliant
teachers and thinkers, on the ground that they would represent the “White
and patriarchal system”. In France, some want to deny Colbert’s legacy, for

23
the motive that he presided over the creation of the Black Code. We are
reluctant to celebrate Napoleon because of the role that he played in the
re-establishment of slavery in the French colonies, when there are so many
other reasons to dislike the man whom many, in Russia, nearly consider
as the equivalent of Hitler! And every time, the complexity of history is
dismissed entirely, to promote a binary and simplistic interpretation in its
place, outrageously biased at best.

This is yet another instance where I feel like I am watching the bad remake
of a Soviet play. Now of course, censorship, at its worst, went much further
than re-writing history for the sole purpose of benefiting minorities. There
was a time where something was erased with every scandal that shook up
the Party: events, real numbers, leaders fallen into disgrace, any individual
who walked out of line in the slightest. In the darkest hours of censorship
and police surveillance, a mere testimonial could make you a suspect, and
therefore a traitor. A passer-by, a grumpy neighbour, a member of your
own family looking to harm you could report you and get you sent to the
gulag for many years. Even the genuine communists, the few activists who
still believed in the whole farce, had to be careful. The party line was a sin-
uous one, and thus an easy one to walk out of, with every unexpected shift
in the Politburo’s policy threatening to ruin the carrier and sometimes the
life of those unfortunate enough to be accused of “deviation”.

Most research on this era tend to overlook the identity component of So-
viet revisionism. The reason a writer as ground-breaking as Pushkin, or a
composer as influential as Tchaikovsky were removed from school pro-
grams and official events at the beginning of the 1920’s is that they were
considered as examples of the “Chauvinism of the Great Power”. In a way,
affirmative action and cultural purges are the two sides of the same coin,
the two main components of a crazy dialectic in which re-writing history
appears to be the way to rehabilitate the victims, and more importantly (for
some reason), to ensure the inclusion of their descendants.

The difference between the current situation in our democracies and the
Soviet experiment is that the latter was not the discourse of a minority,
but the governmental policy of a State intoxicated by its own discourse
surrounding nationalities. I shudder to think about what would happen if

24
“For the solidarity of women of the world!”
says this poster from 1973.

25
the most ferocious defenders of progressivism in its newest form were the
ones pulling the threads of political power! I cannot help but to conclude
that it would end in continuous purges targeting the “symbols of domina-
tion”, in the hope of covering up the ineffectiveness of the political meas-
ures implemented. And sure enough, the convoluted methods that the Bol-
sheviks came up with to correct their past wrongdoings towards the natives
local nationalities turned out to be a complete and utter disaster.

26
 The truth behind the tale
of “friendship among peoples”
The position that I wish to uphold in this essay can be expressed as follows:
The Soviet Union’s nationalities policy paved the way to a complete and
prolonged disaster, planting the seeds of ethnical division in a society that
had remained largely untouched by it. I hope to demonstrate hereinafter
how this issue played a central part in the collapse of the country and con-
tinues to loom over the former Soviet countries.

But before this grand finale, this Marxist-Leninist Twilight of the Gods, I
would like to linger a bit longer on the decades-long detrimental effects of
this compensation policy on the Russian society, in what resembles a slow
decay. In fact, they were felt immediately after the implementation of the
korenizatsiya. Starting from the 1930’s, the compensation policy was dis-
torted away from its initial intent, after the targeted natives started asking
for more and more positions and subventions.

Affirmative action, the maker

of perpetual victims
And who could blame them? Every aspect of the compensation system was
designed to keep its beneficiaries in a comfortable state of retardation. I did
not come up with the word “retardation”, by the way: it can be found verba-
tim in the speeches of the Soviet leaders. Some of the nationalities listed by
the central bureaucracy were automatically labelled (with a condescend-
ence verging on racism) as “retarded”. This was not true for Ukraine or
Belarus, where the literacy rate was quite high for the period, but the East-
ern territories of the old tsarist Empire. In the eyes of these modernisers
with a God-complex, this cultural retardation had to be quickly made up
for, no matter what price the State would have to pay for it. A budget of
several million roubles was created for this sole purpose in the middle of
the 1920’s. This fund quickly turned into a piggy bank for local elites. They

27
“All hail the world October revolution!” – a poster from 1933.

28
immediately understood the benefit that they could derive from overstat-
ing the under-development of their region to be granted a more gener-
ous allowance. There were some rather pathetic and deplorable moments
where local leaders coming to the capital would rival each other in their
displays of economical misery, in the hope of gaining better subventions
from Moscow’s bureaucrats, profoundly moved by such economical retar-
dation. The first adverse effect of the korenizatsiya was thus to trap people
from peripherical nationalities inside the role of perpetual public welfare
recipients, first administratively, then symbolically and lastly, it can only be
assumed, psychologically.

At this point, I feel compelled to clarify my position regarding these “mi-

norities”. I do not deny that discriminations exist. I would never deny the
difficulties encountered by those born in a certain social circle, from uned-
ucated parents, with limited financial means and in an environment where
everyone constantly reminds you, through all sorts of bullying, that you do
not belong, that you are too different. I simply think, and this is where I
completely disagree with those who promote affirmative action, that there
are other ways to solve this problem, ways pertaining to education, merit,
strength of will, and the refusal to be assigned a label. I think that identity
assignment, although its goals are highly praiseworthy, is detrimental to
society as well as the individuals themselves.

Nowadays, it is customary to bring up one’s victim status, as if it were the

only way to exist in the media. Sometimes, when I am reading the newspa-
pers, I feel like the world has been reduced to a never-ending misery con-
test, where people try to out-cry each other. Again, I do not mean to deny
the existence of tragedies, of trauma and personal hardships. I just cannot
bring myself to accept the fact that this sort of competition becomes a way
to regulate human relations, or even worse yet, something that individu-
als strive for. It would be interesting to know from a scientific standpoint
what psychology would say about the effects of life-long victimhood men-
tality…I would be naturally inclined to think that it only makes jealousy,
dissatisfaction and resentment worse, and these amotions are already pre-
dominant in our democracies, so much so that when authoritarian leaders
promise to put an end to this social hysteria, thus capitalising on the even

29
more profound resentment of the “silent majority”, they are welcomed with
open arms.

But perhaps the psychological discomfort born from victimhood is, in

some cases, compensated for by the advantages that come with it? It would
be a mistake to only approach the “minorities” issue with abstract ideas.
Their defenders, like every human being, are torn between idealism and
strategic thinking. There can lie, of course, a great deal of hypocrisy be-
hind all this, like the co-founder of Black Lives Matter who now lives in a
million-dollar mansion in a predominantly white Los Angeles neighbour-
hood. But most of the activists who joined the movement are probably
sincere. That does not prevent them from taking their career into account.

It is no secret, nowadays, that defending the “oppressed”, be it for ethnical

reasons, for their gender, weight, or disability, has become a way to ensure
mediatic exposure and material support for hundreds of “identity entre-
preneurs” (I like this phrase a lot, because it makes it very clear that the
ideological sphere is a market just like any other). You do not even have to
be the most relentless activist to cash in on identity issues without a second
thought. Thousands of companies converted themselves to the progressive
discourse on minorities and the necessity to ensure their “visibility”. A few
years ago, in Australia, political measures were taken to increase the num-
ber of women in fire brigades. The fire fighters Union protested, arguing
that it would pose a risk, whereas several female firefighters stated that they
refused to be treated any differently from their male counterparts.

Conversely, knowing how human beings are, it is not too difficult to im-
agine someone using this equality imperative as a roundabout way to get
a promotion, even if it means ousting a more suited candidate for the po-
sition, sometimes by discrediting them with questionable accusations. For
someone like me, who grew up in a country where political power and
ideology walked hand in hand, this would not be too surprising. It would
only be a worrying sign that we are taking backwards steps.

30
When affirmative action
turns brothers into enemies
This whole rant might make it sound like I, too, have fallen into a pit of
resentment and despair. I can assure you that it is not the case! There are
people, however, who did not take it well when the Bolsheviks set up their
compensation policy at the beginning of the 1920’s: I am talking about the
Russians who lived in the peripherical territories, as well as the Jews.

In the Eastern territories, these two groups were the most educated, as
well as the ones with the highest rate of approval of the Bolsheviks ide-
als, whereas the locals of the various peripheries remained indifferent at
best. When they found out about what the korenizatsiya had in store for us,
the “ethnical” Russians felt emotions ranging from deception to feelings
of betrayal, even more so for those who had fought alongside the Reds
in the Civil War. As far as the Jews were concerned, the quotas ended up
having the opposite effect, namely restricting the access of some minorities
to the positions they were seeking. This result is reminiscent, all things
being equal, of the complaints formulated by the Asian American students
regarding the university quotas benefitting Black and Latino students.

The only way to truly fathom the extent of this frustration is by looking at
the letters that many angry comrades addressed to their superiors. This is
the work that American historian Terry Martin went through, in one of the
most useful existing research for our inquiry. In 1928, a group of workers
operating in Central Asia formulated their complaint regarding industrial
quotas as follows: “In all these Republics, it is their alphabet and their lan-
guage that were put into use. Which leads to us asking: What place is there
for Russians? Where are they going to work? With the Uzbekisation, there
is no doubt that the Russians will end up being replaced by the Uzbeks.
That is a fact. There is an increasing number of employees and workers
who express their indignation after being displaced because of the koreni-
zatsiya. It seems like our government thinks that Russians belong in Russia,
whether they like it or not, and that because of the korenizatsiya and the
uzbekisation, the Russians will be forced to escape back to Russia. You al-
ready hear some Uzbeks saying things like “this country is ours, not yours”.

31
An Uzbek invasion! This is the kind of ideas that affirmative action en-
grained in the mind of those who felt cheated by the quota policy. The let-
ter mentioned above is not an isolated case. There are thousands of those,
written by citizens brave enough (or crazy enough) to question the official
discourse. It is easy to understand how it might have made the propaganda
officials feel uneasy, when they were constantly repeating that all was well
in the workers’ Paradise.

Terry Martin selected another letter worth looking into, signed by a fac-
tory worker from Tashkent, in Uzbekistan as well. The author complains
that he is “unable to find a job” because “these are reserved for indigenous
populations, for Uzbeks, when our European brothers die amidst gener-
al indifference”. What makes it even more enraging is that the reason he
cannot find a job is not his lack of skills, but his ethnicity. More specif-
ically, the fact that others had obtained it simply because of where they
were born. Which is precisely the accusation formulated by equalitarian
revolutionaries towards the old hereditary aristocracy…Now granted, it
remains unknown whether this worker had feelings of condescendence,
if not near-xenophobia towards the Uzbek workers. But if we leave aside
this endless and sterile discussion, it seems only fair to make the following
statement: with their supposedly more fair and harmonious compensation
system, the Bolsheviks ended up fuelling the mistrust, if not the hostility
between nationalities.

This is yet another instance of a pattern that we encountered previously,

namely the correlation between the rise in hostility and resentment be-
tween nationalities and the increased centrality of this question in the po-
litical agenda. In this case, too, I cannot help but to feel reminded of what
happened in the United States after affirmative action was introduced.
Several specialists of American culture consider that this set of measures
benefitting African Americans has triggered a huge backlash that the Re-
publicans used to present themselves as the defenders of a “cheated majori-
ty”. This is what Ronald Reagan, and in a more spectacular manner Donald
Trump have made use of, cashing in on the increasing cultural discom-
fort felt by WASP voters. Some have ventured as far as to say that the rea-
son the Americans have always been so reluctant to adopt European-like

32
governmental redistribution model, is that the white majority dislikes the
idea of letting the Blacks benefit from the distribution of wealth. Even
though things are probably more complicated than this, the fact remains
that a few rabble-rousing politicians have taken advantage of these fears by
focusing their speeches on the welfare queen stereotype, a rather unambig-
uous phrase for the targeted audience, who automatically associates it with
the image of a Black woman with a lot of kids living off public well-fare…
This is just one example of the way seemingly generous measures can have
no other effect than enhancing general mistrust and the stereotypes that
come with it. When a policy makes sure that all Blacks and Latino citizens
are treated in a certain way, only because they belong to a certain category
of the population, then it comes as no surprise that a discourse emerges
whereby they are accused of being “all the same”. It may be upsetting, it can
be deplored, but that is the way it is.

The fact remains that in the Uncle Joe’s USSR (let us not forget Stalin, Com-
missioner for nationalities), just like in Uncle Sam’s US, with all action oc-
curs an equal and opposite reaction: if you set up a rigid system whereby
eviction operates on the ground of ethnical criteria, all you get is a feeling
of resentment among the affected categories, which have been reduced to
their identity. The difference between this and Trump’s America is that
the Soviets did not have a say in the matter, nor did they have democrat-
ic elections. So much so that this unfortunate country of mine remained
plagued by a dormant, silent resentment, slowly eating up society from the
inside while its leaders nagged the people with repeated discourses on “the
friendship between peoples”.

Affirmative action, the disguise of social purge

Another adverse effect of affirmative action that I would like to point out,
before coming to the tragic outcome of our story, is the risk incurred when
the ethnical labelling operated by a government backfires on the very mi-
norities which it aimed at promoting.

The korenizatsiya first started out as a means of propaganda geared to-

wards the rest of the world. In particular, by showing the neighbouring

33
countries, such as the segregated Ukrainians from Poland, the Koreans
living under the Japanese rule, the Chinese Wigurs, or the Iranian Azeris,
how well their fellow countrymen were treated in the new Soviet Union,
the Soviet government, still holding onto its messianic revolutionary ideal,
was sure to aim a low-cost advertisement campaign at these populations.

The middle of the 1930’s saw a complete shift in momentum. The increas-
ingly paranoid Stalin went on a purging spree. When the rise of Hitler
made matters even worse, some ethnicities, until then tokens of the Soviet
grandeur, suddenly became an object of suspicion. The quotas introduced
in the 1920’s thus became the basis of a massive repression targeting the
supposedly treacherous ethnical groups. This was the unfortunate fate of
the Polish, the Germans, the Koreans, and even the Jews, whom the Rus-
sians accused, during the Great Patriotic War, of being the accomplices of
their “fellow nationals” living abroad.

The identity assignment policy, which is supposed to aid the upward mo-
bility of minorities, can thus backfire on said minorities when the gov-
ernment so desires. That ought to give some fuel for thought to those of
my European friends who advocate for the use of ethnical statistics in the
public sphere, arguing that the situation of the “oppressed” must first be
correctly asserted, if we want to “correct” it. Who knows what effects such a
device could have when used by an ill-intentioned government, attempting
to get rid of the minorities it was made for?

A recipe for self-censorship and hypocrisy

As explained above, it does not take long for cancel culture and its identity
obsession to create a climate of terror in any given population. So much
so that the only way to stay safe in such a context is to avoid saying any-
thing at all. When it became clear what the communist paradise really was,
self-censorship became the best way to steer clear of the constant political
threats to people’s lives.

I sometimes feel like I sense the same atmosphere, in an admittedly less

oppressive form, when I see how nowadays the mere act of expressing one-

34
self can lead to a manhunt. Except that this time, the threat is not posed
by the State, but by the public surveillance emanating from the vigilantes
of Righteous Thinking. I am, of course, referring to the internet, which
has become, for better or worse, an unescapable discussion space. A space
where anyone is at risk of being attacked by a plethora of critics, misquot-
ing them, taking their words out of context, when they are not simply fab-
ricated using deepfakes or other similar falsification tools. So, when I hear
brilliant, genuine and sound journalists and researchers say that they pre-
fer to refrain from speaking altogether, rather than throwing themselves
into the Lion’s den, I am reminded, with utter dismay, of the world I spent
my younger years in, thinking that the association of ideology and technol-
ogy in open societies might just yield similar results.

Again, the necessity for citizens to remain within the boundaries of “right-
eous thinking” did not only pertain to local nationalities. But it was, just
like anything else, subject to an unwavering censorship, to the extent that
the authors of the letters quoted above most likely never had the opportu-
nity to publicly express their dismay.

With time, the sense of uneasiness resulting from affirmative action joined
the endless succession of communism’s disenchantments. As early as the
middle of the 1930’s, the leaders themselves started toning down their
rousing speeches on the necessity to help the retarded masses catch up with
the rest, not least of whom Stalin, who went from defending the nationali-
ties to their complete subjection amidst the Union. The war with Germany
was looming, and the Soviets had to find a way to unite themselves around
a common goal. An ideology as divisive as the korenizatsiya could hardly
fulfil this role. Neither could Marxism-Leninism, oblivious as it was of the
conflicts between nations. The only candidate left was good old Russian
imperial nationalism. And this is exactly what Stalin set out to do, with
his unique flair for propaganda. It was suddenly permitted, and even com-
mendable, to constantly invoke the grandeur of eternal Russia. Were not
the German troops ready to take the country by storm the descendants
of the Teutonic knights defeated in the thirteenth century by Alexander
Nevski? The fact that Eisenstein directed a movie celebrating the latter in
1938, at the request of the Kremlin, is certainly no accident.

35
This poster from 1957, shows a multicultural group exploring Moscow sights.

36
After Stalin’s death, the repression gradually eased. In a way, the people
were given some room to breathe. The risk to be physically eliminated was
lower, even though you could still see yourself become symbolically “can-
celled” after letting a misguided political observation slip out. The likes of
Boris Pasternak and Joseph Brodsky bore the brunt of it, seeing their works
censored, the latter being forced to exile, which is admittedly a more envi-
able fate than the Gulag. Although the failure of communism was evident
at this point, the ideology remained, albeit devoid of any sincerity. It had
become “a form with no content”, in the words of anthropologist Alexei
Yurchaq. The friendship among peoples, one of many governmental lies,
gradually turned into an “empty mantra”, a formula that people repeated
robotically with a mindless smile. When I was young, aside from the boun-
tiful parades and the official declarations on national folklores, there was
not much left from the multiculturalism rhetoric that was so pervasive in
the 1920’s.

To me, this is another example of something that clearly echoes the con-
temporary era. Seeing how overused the phrase “living together” has be-
come in the French media, in a time where the country is so ridden with
tensions, I find myself wondering whether this formula could be consid-
ered as the equivalent of the “friendship between peoples” tune which
resonated throughout my childhood: an imprecation uttered on TV in an
attempt to conceal the sad reality of a community where everyone wants to
remain enclosed, sheltered within their own community.

37
 Sitting on the volcano
of identities
Vladimir Putin once called the collapse of the USSR “the biggest geopoliti-
cal disaster of the 20th century”. He has, since then, reiterated this statement
on a number of occasions, adding that if he could change the course of
history, he would do everything in his power to prevent it. Many com-
mentators (especially in what was formerly known as the “Western camp”)
interpreted it as nostalgia for the grandeur, the imperialistic expansionism
of the time, emanating from the current president of Russia. Regardless of
what one thinks of Putin and his decisions, only someone who has not wit-
nessed these events first-hand could deny that it is in fact a quite insight-
ful statement. I personally share this view and understand it perfectly. The
sudden, unforeseen and poorly handled shattering of a seventy-year-old
political structure, which had hitherto maintained its hold and ascendance
on half of humanity through sheer ideological cunningness, was indeed a
tragedy affecting millions of people. Its impact is in fact still felt at the time
of my writing.

It is easy to see this collapse as an inevitable outcome after the fact. Some
claimed that they had seen it coming, arguing that it was clearly foreshad-
owed by the demographic and economic decline, the overall exhaustion of
a system in its last throes. The truth is that it might have gone on for much
longer, if it were not for the gloomy stagnation which had replaced the ini-
tial revolutionary surge of the Bolsheviks, leaving behind nothing but lies,
hypocrisy and generalised incompetence. According to those nostalgic for
this era, Gorbatchev is the one to blame for this failure. You hear that by
trying to bring a breath of fresh air into the old house, he sparked off the
storm which blew away the whole building. One thing is clear: he under-
estimated the power of nationalistic discourses, which played a decisive
part in the disaster. But then again, how could he possibly have? Were the
peoples of the Union not supposed to be friends?

38
Nationalistic vengeance is a dish best served
cold (the return of nationalities?)
Gorbatchev’s experiment is often summed up with the following two no-
tions: glasnost (transparency) and perestroika (reconstruction). It is best
described as an attempt to liberalise the Soviet society while carefully su-
pervising the resulting freedom. I will not go into too much detail regard-
ing this policy, which I personally benefitted from, in the sense that it al-
lowed me to dabble into entrepreneurship for the first time. Suffice it to say
that, looking at the bigger picture, these dynamics ended up escaping from
their instigator’s control.

Let us try to give a quick summary of these fateful few years. When in
1988, Gorbatchev realised that the only way to reach his goal was to divest
the party of absolute power, it was immediately interpreted by the political
centre as a sign of weakness. The power-hungry local elites of the vari-
ous peripheries started using separatism as an emblem, building on the
momentum of a large part of the population, exhilarated by the scope of
independence. Indeed, at the time, the first signs that populations were
striving for secession started appearing in the Baltic states, before reaching
the Caucasus. During the year 1988, the movement spread like wildfire, in
a Soviet recreation of the Spring of Peoples, the USSR losing on top of it
most of its grip on the satellite countries (namely Poland, Hungary, Ger-
many and the like). In Georgia, Moldavia, Belarus and Ukraine, thousands
of people went off to the streets demanding true democracy and independ-
ence. Moscow reacted to these demonstrations, which escalated into vio-
lence in the Caucasus, in a rather weak and hesitant manner.

Comrade Gorbatchev seemed lost, helpless, overwhelmed. Nobody among

his collaborators seemed to have seen it coming: the nationalities case
was thought to have been closed a long time ago. Gorbatchev tried to deal
with it, negotiated, made concessions, tried to salvage what he could. But
by giving up too much, he only favoured the rise of these reformers, who
were often none other than the pro-native nationalists. The 1999 demo-
cratic elections overwhelmingly favoured separatist parties. This chaotic
era is remembered for the human chains pervading the country, the putsch

39
plotted by a few defenders of the old system, and for Boris Eltsine stir-
ring up the Moscow crowd from atop his tank. The 26 December of 1991
marked the official end of the USSR, with the authorities acknowledging
the already several months old secession of the Soviet Republics. And thus
Lenin’s work was stricken down by some bureaucrats, in a recorded vote,
swept away by the very forces he had sought to channel for his revolution.

In the end, it all happened very quickly, in the seamless succession of dom-
inoes knocking each other down. The rise to independence of the old So-
viet Republics made it seem like the work was already cut out for History.
A KGB analyst named Nikolai Leonov described it with another metaphor:
the chocolate bar. A bar ready to be broken apart along the very borders
drawn by the Soviet. Only when the peripheries started claiming their
“freedom” did we realise how incidental the partition operated between
the entities of the Union had been. There was no reason for Ukraine to
be granted the status of Republic whereas Bashkiria remained part of the
Federative Socialist Republic of Russia other than the outcome of the civil
war. There was no other reason for tiny Estonia to be granted the same sta-
tus, when the vast and densely populated Tatarsan was not, other than the
circumstances of its 1940 annexation by Russia.

The inconsistency of this partitioning generated an ever-increasing feel-

ing of injustice amongst the various ethnical groups, each of them striv-
ing to be recognised for its specificities. And since those specificities, in
the nationalistic lexicon, translate into the words of “independence” and
“sovereignty”, it was enough to generate endless territorial conflicts. The
endeavour to “correct” the geographical mistakes made by the Bolshevik
amateur mapmakers of the past quickly became a national sport in the
regions where nationalism was thriving. A sport which, unfortunately, is
still paid in human lives in the ruins of the USSR.

The endless dismantlement

Ossetia, Georgia, Armenia, Chechnya, Transnistria, Donbass: before
making the headlines of the last thirty years, these words used to be
written in the files handled by the bureaucrats in charge of partitioning

40
the Soviet Union along ethnical criteria (among others). An endeavour
which had far-reaching implications indeed. History offers too many ex-
amples of this: creating a community from scratch, assembling groups of
people on a sometimes very narrow basis, means risking facing protesta-
tions, conflicts, if not massacres down the road, as was the case in Rwanda.
Although the conflicts in the former Soviet peripheries never generated
tragedies on the same scale, the persistence of several seemingly unsolv-
able conflicts will inevitably fuel the nostalgia for imperial structures,
well-founded or not.

I will quickly go through two of the most scorching pending issues in the
region. Not to formulate a judgement, but simply to make a point about
the long-term effects of an identity assignment policy built on a skewed ba-
sis. The Nagorno-Karabakh region, populated in majority by Armenians,
was included in the former Socialist Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan because
of the historical circumstances of the Russian colonisation. Starting from
1987, the local nationalists sparked a rebellion demanding that this au-
tonomous oblast be re-annexed to Armenia, marking the beginning of an
“agitation” era which surprised Gorbatchev himself with its virulence. The
breakup of the USSR only made matters worse, leading up to a 2020 blood-
shed which did not resolve the issue in any way. This example alone seems
to disprove what I have been trying to show in this essay. This is an obvious
example of two heterogeneous national entities refusing to live on the same
ground. If nothing else, it clearly shows one thing: the Soviet administra-
tors did not merely create identities from scratch, disregarding completely
any existing historical or cultural characteristics. The issue here is the po-
litical and administrative organisation that they set up, which completely
failed to take any territorial specificities into account.

In the case of Ukraine, whose borders never reflected any national compo-
sition whatsoever, the impossibility to work out a solution favouring the
two main parties (Ukrainians and “ethnical” Russians, to simplify a bit)
is due to the long-lasting impact of past conflicts, as is often the case. A
Canada-type solution, or a Belgium-like one might do the trick. It is not
necessarily the one I would defend, but it is on the table. The problem is
that Ukrainian nationalists are clinging so hard onto their exceptionality,

41
brought up in the nineteenth century and reinforced ever since by the ko-
renizatsiya, that they could never be made to accept such an idea. Granted,
the Russian-speaking communities of the country are not really helping
bring back peace, with their Moscow-funded military expedients…Yet an-
other example of the escalation which arises as soon as identity is brought
up and prevents any compromise-based solution.

There is a widespread analysis regarding the conflicts which continue to

plague the formerly communist countries. As soon as this ideology dis-
appears, another one emerges, or indeed resurfaces, poorly contained as it
was like a water leak by a piece of duct tape, and that is nationalism. This
theory was used to explain the armed conflict following the dissolution of
the USSR, as well as those which caused bloodshed in former Yugoslavia
during the 1990’s. This is a theory that I would like to debunk, at least in
the case of the Soviet Union. Saying that Communism muffled the feelings
of hostility which resurfaced at the first opportunity would be a mistaken
assumption.

If you have read up to this point, I hope that I could help you understand at
least the following: far from alleviating identity fractioning, the Bolshevik
strategy towards peripheries only served to exacerbate it. The nationalities
policy inoculated the population with the virus of essentialism. It infected
several generations of citizens, who saw themselves permanently marked
with a biological label written on their passport, and worse yet, in their
mind. This policy managed to turn separation lines hitherto confined to
the local elites’ imagination, which was shaped by the nineteenth century’s
nationalistic discourse, into a “natural” concept for millions of people.

42
 Soviet poster from the 1970-s, reads:
“All hail to the USSR, the model of the friendship of the working people of all nationalities”

43
 Yesterday, today, tomorrow:
affirmative action, a one-way
ticket to endless identity conflicts
We have now reached the conclusion of our eventful journey throughout
the history of Soviet identity policies. I hope that the many topic-specific
references were not too baffling for the unfamiliar reader. As for those who
do know Russian history like the back of their hand, may they forgive the
many shortcuts that I indulged in throughout this essay: the way to argu-
mentative persuasion is rarely the longest.

This story, I feel, offers some valuable perspective, in a time where a very
widespread ideological movement, especially among young people, pro-
claims the necessity to correct inequalities on the ground of identity. In
the United States, this movement contributed to the polarisation of society
on the notion of race, to the extent that the whole country is now divided
almost entirely along this axis. In Europe, it is slowly emerging, under the
combined influence of researchers dabbling in cultural studies, indigenist
movements and long-lost factions of the Marxist left, all determined to
take down the old humanistic universalistic apparatus. Funnily (or trag-
ically) enough, this movement emerged at the very moment when Euro-
pean societies, profoundly scarred by the events of the twentieth century,
hoped to be finally done with the notion of race.

I recently heard one of the spokesmen of woke culture in America claim

that in his view, the real danger was not the rise of the identity-obsessed
alt-right, but humanistic universalism. The real enemy is humanism: this
was already the rallying cry of the so-called progressist activists of the last
century. Their romantic and ingenuous outlook on these issues inspired
part of the new progressists to shape their activism after the Maoist and
Trotskyist struggles of the seventies. Their thought and action patterns
have remained those of the far left of the time, despite the collapse of the
USSR. When it comes to “racial issues”, they think that they battle against
an iniquitous system, all the while promoting solutions experimented by

44
one of the worst totalitarian states of the twentieth century. Of course, they
would never tolerate such a comparison, even less so if it comes from an
old white capitalistic male like myself!

I can already hear the objections. “By drawing a parallel between the Sovi-
et experiment and affirmative action as implemented in western societies,
you are comparing apples to oranges. You are playing the emotional card of
the dreaded recent history, like those people who talk about the threat of a
trip back to the thirties with teary eyes and quivering voice.” I agree. These
situations are anything but identical. Neither the US, nor Europe are now-
adays on the brink of totalitarian racialism. Yet there are patterns, common
factors, a logic specific to such ways of thinking, which inclines us to treat
anything that pertains to affirmative action with the utmost suspicion. In-
deed, this policy produced results that were mixed at best, and detrimental
most of the time, no matter where and when it was implemented. This
is something that American economist Thomas Sowell understood and
showed very well.

The fact that Sowell remains relatively unknown in Europe is partly due
to his academic background. Owing to his links with the school of Chi-
cago and the fact that he acknowledges his intellectual debt towards Mil-
ton Friedman, the left-wing dogma quickly labelled him as a dangerous
ultraliberal thinker, possibly involved in Pinochet’s crimes. One must go
beyond this caricatural view to dive into his works, in particular his cri-
tique of affirmative action. An African American himself, he relentlessly
criticised the policies that were geared toward a “community” which he
never considered himself to be a part of. His negative outlook on affirm-
ative action does not only derive from the American experience, but also
from thirty years of research on various countries where such policies
were put into use: India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Nigeria, Cana-
da…No matter where he looked, the same detrimental effects were there
to be noticed. The disheartenment which inclines students to put in less
of an effort, among the “discriminated against” as well as among the ma-
jority group, since everything was decided in advance. The separation, if
not the hostility between the quota-benefiting students and the others. The
violence which sometimes arises in situations perceived as unfair. In India,

45
the quotas for Untouchable students in med schools sparked off a series of
demonstrations which killed tens of people in the middle of the eighties.
Meanwhile, less than 5% of the places set aside for Untouchable students
were effectively filled…This is perhaps an extreme example, but there is
no denying the fact that there is a form of psychological violence in main-
taining others in an alleged state of inferiority. In the US, economist Glenn
Loury, who is considered by some preachers of wokeness to be a “traitor for
his cause” because of his dark complexion, recently called out a proposi-
tion by the mayor of New-York to suspend the entrance exams in prestig-
ious schools, on the ground that Black students were underrepresented as
a result. It would have equated telling these students that they could never
compete with the others, he argued, that they would never have what it
takes to achieve excellence.

Ineffective, psychologically detrimental, hostility-festering, gateway to vio-

lence: when it comes to evaluating the consequences of affirmative action,
Sowell’s verdict is final. But the most dangerous thing, in my view, is the
fact that these measures, presented as temporary, end up prevailing both in
practice and in people’s imagination. The common denominator between
the various situations described by Sowell is that they all saw the imple-
mentation of affirmative action for a restricted duration, in the scope of
helping “catch up with”, or “compensate for” historical inequalities, until a
hypothetical point of optimal equality is finally reached. But this, of course,
could never happen, not least because individuals born in certain cultures
which promote hard work and merit inevitably tend to have better results
in many areas. And as is often the case with temporary policies, they end
up dragging on for much longer than originally planned, propagating re-
sentment in all layers of society.

Instead of cancelling out differences, affirmative action sharpens them,

makes them even more obvious. It creates a climate of perpetual victim-
hood and competitive mimicry. It denies the capacity for individuals to
escape the conditions that they were born in. Promoting the so-called
oppressed minorities eventually amounts to creating societies built on
separations, prone to degenerating into a casts system. But despite such
a separation, these societies remain pervaded by a powerful community

46
outward momentum. Which in the worst cases can lead up to separatism
and sometimes civil war.

The alternative to such a conception, the one I will never cease to defend,
is meritocracy. Providing the most gifted, the most brilliant, the most
strong-minded with a fair reward, in the context of an open society. Per-
haps I believe in it because it justifies my own journey. Nietzsche pointed
out that men tend to embrace the philosophical conceptions which justify
their own biography. Maybe so…But the truth is that I already believed in
it when I was trying to find my way inside a crumbling system designed by
an empty and dying ideology, which somehow kept going on, moving on
pure reflexes and impulses, like a beheaded chicken.

Years have passed. The USSR collapsed. The hazards of life have made it
so that I now live in France. But I could never possibly erase the scar left
in my heart by the explosion of the world that I grew up in. The least you
could say is that the USSR had a lot of shortcomings. And yet things could
have been different. I once thought that a peaceful transition was possible,
in our old Russian Empire. I failed, like many other observers, to meas-
ure the power of identity discourses. The venom that can infiltrate human
relations. Today, I see the return of the very patterns, the very mistakes
which wrought havoc in my country. I am willing to believe that Europe is
immune to this divisive discourse. But I sometimes find myself doubting
it, and it makes me afraid.

Looking at the current European situation, in particular the state of its in-
tellectual public debate, all I can see is the increasing opposition between
identity-based nationalism and part of the population, which converted
themselves to woke ideology and the defence of immigrants, supposedly
oppressed because of their religion (the “pro-Islam leftism”). This narrative
is trending everywhere in Europe. It is not the only one, but there is no de-
nying that it is gaining ground. Until now, France for example has managed
to cling onto its universalistic model. But it is starting to tear up in multiple
places. Hearing so many politics talk about defending the Republic does
make you feel like it is in danger. But is it strong enough to withstand it? I
wonder what would happen if, in a near future, majority of the population,
seduced by the discourses revolving around ethnical differentiation, start-

47
ed endorsing the divisions of society in the law itself. I find myself thinking
about this possibility, and I can only envision a country even more divided
than it currently is. A country where mistrust prevails, where resentment
towards members of the other “communities” becomes the law, in a fight
for the last resources provided by a waning welfare state, and where civil
war is looming.

France, and more generally Europe have managed to create a unique po-
litical model, carefully crafted to cater to the needs of both individuals and
populations and maintain balance between the two. A model which allows
everyone to escape the determinism of the circumstances they were born
in, without leaving them to fend for themselves when things become dif-
ficult (I often find myself railing against the excesses of this solidarity, but
this is another discussion altogether). European liberal universalism is far
too precious to be thrown to the wolves of identity movements of all kinds.
It deserves to be defended before it is too late. Only by keeping an unwa-
vering stance on these principles can we prevent devastating outcomes in
the future. Take it from a homo sovieticus who survived a similar ordeal!

Soviet poster from the 1960-s, reads: “Peace! Friendship!”

48