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19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An absolutely seminal work on the subject, March 4, 2002
This is a difficult book, but everyone must make the effort to read it. It is based on dozen of archives and several pages (in tiny print) of contemporary Soviet sources. It details a very important question. In recent years the "totalitarian" paradigm has returned, with a vengeance, to the study of Soviet history. And what could be a greater symbol of the "equivalence" of Stalinism and Nazism, than their mass use of ethnic cleansing? German atrocities need no introduction. But one can still be stunned by the brutalities involved in the acquistion of the other fourteen Soviet republics, the savage famine of 1932-33 that ravaged Ukraine and Kazhakstan, the mass deportations from the Baltic countries, and the manifold ethnic cleansing of Germans, Poles, Koreans and Chechyeans, among many others. The vital importance of this book is that whatever one might say about these cruelties, they emerged in a context radically different from that of Nazism, they had a different logic, and in the end radically different consequences. The Soviet Union was always dominated by the Soviet Communist Party. The nominal independence of the 15 republics was an illusion until just before the end. But the desire to encourage the national consciousness of every group within the Union, that was not an illusion, that was not a lie. Indeed, far from being destroyed by the primordial nationality that it so viciously repressed, the Soviet Union did much to foster nationalities in the first place. Not only did it create the 15 republics, but it created dozens upon dozens of autonomous republics and national soviets all throughout the Soviet Union. For dozens of tribes and languages it created written scripts and then set about translating each others books into each others languages. In every corner of the Soviet Union it sought to increase the representation of the dominant nationality in the local branch of the party. It is often forgotten that in much of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the now dominant nationality was a minority in the cities. Prague was once a German city. Kiev and Minsk were dominated by Jews and Russians. Tiblisi, the capital of Georgia, once had an Armenian majority, while many times during its history Armenia's capital had a Muslim majority. Ensuring the demographic triumph of the dominant nationality was another Soviet policy. The origins of this eccentric and vigorously pursued policy came from Stalin and Lenin who believed that encouraging national consciousness would limit local opposition to any "Russian" movement. Martin details the development of this policy from 1923 to 1939 where it modified in several important ways. In 1939 the Soviet Union no longer castigated Russian chauvinism as the most pernicious of evils. The other nationalities were expected to have some basic knowledge of Russia and its culture, and no longer would the tiniest of nationalities would be given its own soviet. The active opposition to allowing members of other nationalities to becoming Russian was dropped. However, the affirmative action programs would be continued, and indeed the beneficiaries would be the core of many post-Soviet regimes. Martin writes important chapters on the especially complicated situation in the Far east, where the Soviet government had to deal with 99 separate nationalities. He discusses the efforts to encourage Ukrainization in Ukraine. Much to their disappointment, and contrary to what one might expect from Ukrainian nationalist historigoraphy, their support for a unilingual Ukrainian culture in the cities met with very limited success. The people there actually preferred a bilingual Russian-Ukrainian culture. Martin also provides a subtle account of the 1932-33 famine. This was not a famine designed against the Ukraine, but against grain "surplus" regions. However, a deadly "national interpretation" of the famine developed in Soviet ideology as the famine progressed. Martin is also useful on the Great purges later in the decades. Contrary to what one might think, nationalities like Ukrainians and Jews were not overrepresented. The one that were consisted of the "diasopora" ones, such as Poles, Germans, Koreans and other bordering countries that might be potential threats. Finally there is the chapter on ethnic cleansing. Martin reminds us of the ideological and security origins of the cleansing. In certain situations even Russians could find themselves ethnically cleansed (such as former Russian workers on the Manchurian railroads). He reminds us of the broader context of ethnic cleansing, such as the extermination of the Armenians, the mass deportations following the Balkan Wars and the Greek-Turkish war, and the wartime deporation of 800,000 Jews from the Russian Front. He also reminds us of the local ethnic and popular hatreds that would have existed regardless of the Soviet Union's existence, such as in Kazhakstan and the North Caucasus. He also reminds us that the Soviet leadership understandly wanted to encourage ethnic concentration in order to form more viable national units. In the end most nationalities have claimed to be specially victimized by the former Soviet Union. And while this is true for some groups, like the Chechens, it should be remembered that for the Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, Georgians, Kazhaks, and many other groups, the Soviet Union was not the prisonhouse of nations. It did not kill countries, only people.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Soviet Multiculturalism, June 1, 2006
This book underscores the importance of ideology in historical development. The Soviet Union was a communist entity, and the often bizarre vagaries of communist ideology as they pertained to the Soviet Union's multi-ethnic make-up are the centrepiece of this important and original investigation. According to Terry Martin, the Soviet Union was not, at least in its pre-war manifestation, a chauvinistic entity, despite the evident suffering meted out to sundry ethnic groups in opposition to the implementation of Bolshevik policies. Indeed, Martin demonstrates that the Soviets embodied a qualified cosmopolitan tendency. Soviet authorities, although divided on the wisdom of this course of action, sought to undermine certain ("negative") aspects of nationalism or ethnic particularism by promoting other ("positive") aspects of the same phenomenon. They were, for a time, national internationalists. Russian nationalism, long excoriated and denigrated by the Party, did eventually emerge supreme after World War Two, for reasons outlined by Martin, but multiculturalism was not entirely eschewed. Martin's research is a seminal contribution to the field of Russian and Soviet studies. His book does, however, lack a certain fluency in composition and does seem quite cumbersome, if not repetitive, in certain places.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The definitive work on Soviet nationalities policy in the 1920s and 1930s, September 27, 2011
Terry Martin, Associate Professor of History at Harvard University, has written the definitive book on Soviet nationalities policy in the 1920s and 1930s. He writes, "the Soviet Union became the first multiethnic state in world history to define itself as an anti-imperial state." He points out, "The Soviet Union was the first country in world history to establish Affirmative Action programs for national minorities, and no country has yet approached the vast scale of Soviet Affirmative Action." As he observes, "The Bolsheviks attempted to fuse the nationalists' demand for national territory, culture, language, and elites with the socialists' demand for an economically and politically unitary state. In this sense, we might call the Bolsheviks internationalist nationalists or, better yet, Affirmative Action nationalists." Martin notes, "Russia's new revolutionary government was the first of the old European multiethnic states to confront the rising tide of nationalism and respond by systematically promoting the national consciousness of its ethnic minorities and establishing for them many of the characteristic institutional forms of the nation-state. ... New national elites were trained and promoted to leadership positions in the government, schools, and industrial enterprises of these newly formed territories. In each territory, the national language was declared the official language of government. In dozens of cases, this necessitated the creation of a written language where one did not yet exist. The Soviet state financed the mass production of books, journals, newspapers, movies, operas, museums, folk music ensembles, and other cultural output in the non-Russian languages. Nothing comparable to it had been attempted before, and, with the possible exception of India, no multiethnic state has subsequently matched the scope of Soviet Affirmative Action." He writes, "the Soviet state created not just a dozen large national republics, but tens of thousands of national territories scattered across the entire expanse of the Soviet Union." But this, unfortunately, turned out to be a mistake. "This system was based on the assumption that, to use Stalin's famous formulation, national territorial forms could be empty of national content, that if national territories were granted, national solidarity would crumble and class differentiation would become apparent. ... The larger the territory, and the more multinational its composition, the less intensely any one given group will feel its minority status. As the scale of territory is reduced and the number of ethnic groups drops to only two, the minority group becomes acutely aware of its minority status. Drawing any national border creates ethnic conflict. The Soviet Union literally drew tens of thousands of national borders. As a result, every village, indeed every individual, had to declare an ethnic allegiance and fight to remain a national majority rather than a minority. It is difficult to conceive of any measure more likely to increase ethnic mobilization and ethnic conflict."
In passing, Martin concludes, "The famine was not an intentional act of genocide specifically targeting the Ukrainian nation."
The Soviet government punished chauvinist words and deeds, but, "The Affirmative Action Empire required a constant practice of ethnic labelling and so inadvertently indoctrinated its population in the belief that ethnicity was an inherent, fundamental, and crucially important characteristic of all individuals. ... the nationality line on Soviet passports became one of the single most important factors in reinforcing the belief, and the social fact, that national identity was primordial and inherited."
Stalin wrote, "The leaders of the revolutionary workers of all countries study eagerly the enormously instructive history of the Russian working class, knowing that in addition to reactionary Russia, there existed a revolutionary Russia, the Russia of Radishchevs and Chernyshevskiis, Zheliabovs and Ulianovs, Khalturinyis and Alekseevs. All of this instills in the hearts of the Russian workers (and cannot not instill) a feeling of revolutionary national pride, able to move mountains, able to create miracles." So Russia was not just its reactionary ruling class, but was also its revolutionary working class. Stalin's definition of nation applies to all nations.
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