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This article shows how the Soviet government perceived higher birth rates in Central Asia as a threat to national identity and the stability of the USSR. The issue of demographic change was complex, and concerns about differential fertility between republics were not informed solely by prejudice. Rather, prejudice and racism mingled with practical concerns about labor surpluses and shortages. The Central Asian Republics had low labor mobility because people were unwilling to leave their cultural community, had a low level of Russian, and tended to not to be trained in the kind of heavy industries that required workers elsewhere in the Soviet Union. I argue that rather than aiming to change these factors, the government misdiagnosed economic problems as demographic ones. They placed primary emphasis on changing patterns of reproduction to remedy the situation by changing the population itself, portraying Slavs and Central Asians as distinct groups who had a predetermined role and place in life. In doing so, Moscow elites failed to address the structural and operational issues of Soviet socialism and inflamed tensions with local leaders who saw demographic campaigns as an attack on their culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the current scholarship around racism and nationalism, two of the mostly hotly debated issues in contemporary politics. Both racism and nationalism involve dividing humanity into groups and setting up some groups as innately superior to others. Until recently, racism and nationalism were both widely seen as unpleasant relics of times past, destined to disappear as the principles of equality and human rights become universally embraced. But both concepts have proved their resilience in recent years. Scholars have been devoting new attention to the "racialization" of ethnic and national identities in the former Soviet Union and East Europe, the regions that are the main focus of this journal. The article examines the prevailing approaches to understanding the terms "racism" and "nationalism," which are distinct but overlapping categories of analysis and vehicles of political mobilization. Developments in genomics have complicated the relationship between perceptions of race as a purely social phenomenon. The essay explores the way racism and nationalism play out in two self-proclaimed "exceptional" political systems – the Soviet Union and the United States – which have played a prominent role in global debates about race and nation. It briefly discusses developments in other regions, such as the debate over multiculturalism in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the Ili Rebellion in Xinjiang (1944–49). Relying primarily on Chinese sources, the author identifies variations in the rise and fate of non-Han ethnic guerillas, and the patterns of military conflict in different regions during the expansionist stage of the Ili Rebellion from 1944 to 1946. The article argues that neither a nationalist nor a geopolitical explanation adequately account for such variations. Rather, the overlapping and intersecting geopolitical influence (both the Soviet Union and the two Chinese regimes) as well as local conditions (including local ethnic composition and social structure) explain such patterns. Finally, this article discusses broader implications of the role of nationalism and geopolitics in revolutions in small and dependent states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article raises questions about the relationship between theory and practice, legality and illegality in the late Soviet nationalities policy, and the role played by various branches of power. It focuses on the Veps, an indigenous ethnic minority in the northwest of Russia. In the Brezhnev era, quite a few officials and census takers refused to register the Veps nationality in personal identification documents and during censuses, claiming, incorrectly, that the Veps were not in the official list of nationalities or that they were a people (narodnost’), not a nationality (natsional’nost’), and hence could not be registered as one. The Veps were counted as Russians instead. These bureaucratic practices, widespread in Leningrad and Vologdaoblasti, but not in Karelia, contradicted official nationalities policy, passport regulations, and census instructions. It seemed that the Soviet state no longer recognized the Veps as an ethnic community. The article claims that the mass refusal to register the Veps nationality was intentional and directed by the regional authorities. The goal was to accelerate the assimilation of the Veps, a policy that worked well. The official number of Veps decreased extremely rapidly in the 1970 and 1979 censuses, only to recover in 1989, after the manipulations had ended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The late 1980s and early 1990s were characterized by the sudden rise of nationalist movements in almost all Soviet ethnic regions. It is argued that the rise ofpoliticalnationalism since the late 1980s can be explained by the development ofculturalnationalism in the previous decades, as an unintended outcome of Communist nationalities policy. All ethnic regions are examined throughout the entire history of the USSR (49 regions, 1917–1991), using the structural equation modeling (SEM) approach. This paper aims to make at least three contributions to the field. First, it is a methodological contribution for studying nationalism: a “quantification of history” approach. Having constructed variables from historical data, I use conventional statistical methods such as SEM. Second, this paper contributes to the theoretical debate about the role of cultural autonomy in multiethnic states. Finally, the paper statistically proves that the break between early Soviet and Stalinist nationalities policy explains the entire Soviet nationalities policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the role the Soviet Union's western borderlands annexed during World War II played in the evolution of Soviet politics of empire. Using the Baltic Republics and Western Ukraine as case studies, it argues that Sovietization had a profound impact on these borderlands, integrating them into a larger Soviet polity. However, guerrilla warfare and Soviet policy-making indirectly led to these regions becoming perceived as more Western and nationalist than other parts of the Soviet Union. The Baltic Republics and Western Ukraine differed in their engagement with the Western capitalist world. Different experiences of World War II and late Stalinism and contacts with the West ultimately led to this region becoming Soviet, yet different from the rest of the Soviet Union. While the Soviet West was far from uniform, perceived differences between it and the rest of the Soviet Union justified claims at the end of the 1980s that the Soviet Union was an empire rather than a family of nations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Current literature on twentieth century Kurdish history overwhelmingly covers Kurdish populations and national movements within the borders of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. This article, hoin Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan,ever, focuses on Soviet Kurdistan and Kurdish policy in Azerbaijan between 1920 and 1937 through the broader question of national minorities within the republic. It is claimed here that the Soviet policy on Azerbaijani Kurds was part of a multilayered issue. First of vnall, the Kurds of Azerbaijan were semi-nomadic mountain dwellers transformed by the modernization policies implemented in Soviet territories. Azerbaijani Kurds were a national identity within the Soviet Union and thus subject to ethnophilic All-Union policies in those years. Finally, Kurds were one of the numerous national minorities in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan who were exposed to the national minority policies executed within the republic by the administration in Baku. The national minority policy in Azerbaijan was often contested and limited by local conditions and obstacles. Therefore, the granting of cultural rights in the 1920s to national minorities, which included the Kurds of Azerbaijan, the promotion of these rights in the 1920s and 1930s, and opposition to these policies can only be examined with regard to these three layers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1929–1934 Galician intellectuals who emigrated to Soviet Ukraine from abroad were subject to mass repression. This article demonstrates how the party and the Soviet secret police discredited and eliminated this intelligentsia. Leading party officials perceived Galicians as possessing a strong sense of national identity and internal unity, and therefore an obstacle to plans for homogenizing Soviet Ukraine. The research draws on Ukrainian periodicals published in the early 1930s, on files relating to two major group criminal cases that were conducted in the early 1930s and that are now available to scholars in the Security Service archives of Ukraine (the former Soviet secret police archives), and on recent scholarship in the field. The archival evidence demonstrates that the cases were fabricated and the charges against Galicians were constructed as part of a planned “anti-nationalist” campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although much attention has been paid to national construction in Soviet and post- Soviet Central Asia, the field of literary and cultural analysis of the origins of current national symbols and texts in this region is yet not fully acknowledged and discovered. This article tries to shed light onto the literary construction of an ethnic identity and its historical background in Soviet Kazakhstan and its influence on the post-Soviet ideology in this multicultural country. In doing so it investigates the ways and the time when most of the important historical epics were "re-written," brought back by the Kazakh writers and intellectuals in the mid-twentieth century. The importance of investigating this period and this phenomenon is twofold. First, it provides further contribution to the Soviet creation of binary approaches to the formation of ethnic identities and the continuous attack on local nationalisms. Following the arguments of some scholars in the field (e.g. [Adams, Laura. 1999. "Invention, Institutionalization and Renewal in Uzbekistan's National Culture." European Journal of Cultural Studies 2; Dave, Bhavna. 2007. Kazakhstan: Ethnicity and Power. London: Routledge]) this asserts that the local cultural elites found ways of bargaining and re-structuring such identity contributing to its "localization" through the usage of pre-Soviet and pre-Russian historical symbols. In a way, they were able to construct their own "imagined community" and resistance to the past and existing (according to them) colonialism within the given framework of Kazakh- Soviet literature. Secondly, the historicity that became a leitmotif of most important literary works and later on a main focus of national ideology in post-Soviet Kazakhstan must be viewed not just as an instrument of legitimation in this post- colonial state but also as a strong continuity of cultural and ethnic identity lines. The very fact that a detailed and continued genealogy of Kazakh medieval tribes and rulers was the main focus of major works by such famous Kazakh writers as Mukhtar Auezov or Ilyas Yessenberlin demonstrates the importance of the "continuity" and kinship and family lines for Kazakhs. The paper raises the questions of how national and elitist these movements were before the independence and how the further post-independent projects of using and re-establishing these links and continuity formed more questions than answers for the nation-builders in independent Kazakhstan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Influential scholarship on the Brezhnev era has described the instrumental official support for Russian nationalist themes and pre-socialist imagery in public discourse as a deliberate "politics of inclusion," designed to co-opt certain nationalist intellectuals and the sympathies of the state's core of ethnic Russians for the purpose of popular mobilization. How thin policy related to and interacted with the ubiquitous official commemoration and mythologization of the Great Fatherland War during this period, however, has remained unexplored. Based on a number of the most important Russophilic publications in the censored press - the writings of the so-called "Chalmaevists" - this article contends that despite unambiguously russocentric, single-stream readings of history in general, when it came to the war in particular, nationalist intellectuals tended to muffle their russocentrism through opaque language or an avoidance of the war's larger significance, or conformed to the war's official (supra-ethnic, socialist) reading. It was only in samizdat that the essentially Russian, primordial nature of victory in 1945 could be fully articulated. The present study thus probes the limits of the concept of inclusionary politics and underscores the party leadership's apparent commitment to maintaining the war myth's predominantly supranational, socialist significance as a means of fostering all-Soviet, rather than Russian national, solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an article on Bolshevik nationalities policy and ethnic engineering, asking who, in fact, decided which populations belonged together as ethnic groups (narodnost') and thus had the right of national self-determination, and how the level of autonomy was determined for each ethnic unit. Scholars have dealt with Russian and Soviet nationalities issues for decades already, but they have turned their attention mainly to the larger nationalities (at the level of SSR, and to a lesser degree the levels of ASSR and autonomous oblast). I argue that the lower levels of national territorial autonomy in the Soviet Union (national okrug, raion, volost', and selsovet) are worthy of greater academic attention, at least from the ethnological point of view. Having this kind of low-level territorial autonomy has often been a question of to be or not to be for the small ethnic groups concerned, and hence the subject is connected with the question of preservation of cultural and linguistic diversity in Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With a focus on Gintaras Beresnevičius's book The Making of an Empire (2003) and the marketing and consumption of "Soviet" sausages, this article explores the rise of national ideologies that promote an "eastern" and "Soviet" identity in Lithuania. Both during the nationalist movement against the Soviet Union and later in the 1990s and 2000s, the west and Europe were seen as sites of prestige, power, and goodness. Recently the reinvented "east" and "Soviet" have become important competing symbols of national history and community. In this article Neringa Klumbytè argues that nationalism has become embedded in the power politics of Europeanization. National ideologies are shaped by differing ideas about ways of being modern and European rather than by simple resistance to European Union expansion. The resulting geopolitics of provinciality, a nationalist politics of space, thus becomes an integral part of the story of European modernity and domination within a global history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

So far in the twenty-first century, triumphalism has dominated Russian culture. As manifest in popularized history and film, this wave has often been described by recourse to interpretive paradigms derived from a neo-Soviet or neo-socialist realist orientation, particularly when the subject is war. While understandable, this interpretive practice cannot account for salient productions that upstage Soviet conventions by reconfiguring the Russian historical experience along a narrative trajectory anchored by two scenarios that constitute the alpha and omega of national achievement and pride: Aleksandr Nevskii and the Time of Troubles. Tapping into deep structures of myth, contemporary reproductions of these two tie their significance explicitly to the post-Soviet period. Supported by the state and church, their increasing traction in war narratives facilitates a new discourse of nationalism that supersedes Soviet precedent, reconfigures traditional domains of triumphalism, and sets a standard for future constructions of Russian history that eclipses key problems of the real or imagined past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A vibrant countercultural and dissident movement developed in Romania between 1965 and 1975. Young Romanians combined elements of the global youth movement with local cultural and political practices. Thus, Romanian counterculture and dissent shared the era's hippie aesthetic and anti-authoritarianism, but was highly isolationist, vehemently antisocialist and heavily couched in the language of the nation and nationalism. Furthermore, during this early Ceauşescu period, the socialist regime attracted some level of nonconformist support through a program of reform, opposition to Soviet interference, and nationalist rhetoric. These conclusions demonstrate that the rubric of 1960s counterculture needs to be extended to include a variety of ideological and cultural positions beyond the New Left that scholars generally emphasize. Furthermore, scholarly avoidance of Ceauşescu's early period has obscured the existence of an alternative culture, and has led to an un-nuanced interpretation of Romania's postwar history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper offers hypotheses on the role that state social welfare measures can play in reflecting nationalism and in aggravating interethnic tensions. Social welfare is often overlooked in theoretical literature on nationalism, because of the widespread assumption that the welfare state promotes social cohesion. However, social welfare systems may face contradictions between the goal of promoting universal access to all citizens on the one hand, and social pressures to recognize particular groups in distinct ways on the other. Examples from the post-Soviet context (particularly Russia) are offered to illustrate the ways in which social welfare issues may be perceived as having ethnic connotations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a body of scholarship arose which effectively bypassed Miroslav Hroch's work on the emergence of small nations. Rogers Brubaker, Yuri Slezkine and Ronald Suny, among others, persuasively argued that Soviet nationalities policies shaped the ethnogeographic make-up of the post-Soviet space some sixty or seventy years later: it had become literally almost unimaginable to conceive of national affiliation outside of institutionalized forms. This analysis also convincingly accounted for the relative weakness of ethnic Russian identity in contrast to the assertive nationalism of non-Russian nationalities around the time of the USSR's collapse. The Kuban' Cossacks - an ethnocultural community in the south of Russia - never had official recognition as a Soviet nationality. Hroch's framework can be applied to show their clearly national characteristics and, indeed, their progress towards nationhood around the turn of the twentieth century. By reclaiming Hroch's framework for the post-Soviet context, and combining it with later scholarship, we are able to identify this process for the first time, and thus further refine our understanding of the nation-formation processes within Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the formation of a mass sense of Russian national identity was a recent, contingent event that first began to take shape under Stalin. Surveying the new literature on Russian nationalism, it contends that elite expressions of “Russianness” and bureaucratic proclamations of “official nationality” or russification should not be conflated with the advent of a truly mass sense of grassroots identity. Borrowing from an array of theorists, it argues that such a sense of identity only becomes possible after the establishment of necessary social institutions -- universal schooling, a modern army, etc. Inasmuch as these institutions come into being only after the formation of the Soviet Union, this article focuses on how a mass sense of Russian national identity began to form under a rapid and unpredictable series of ideological shifts that occurred during the Stalinist 1930s and 1940s. This article's major contribution is its description of this development as not only contingent, but accidental. Drawing a clear line between russocentric propaganda and full-blown Russian nationalism, it argues that the ideological initiatives that precipitated mass identity formation in the USSR were populist rather than nationalist. In this sense, Stalinism has much more in common with Peronism than it does with truly national regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article, a response to the article "Stalin's populism and the accidental creation of Russian national identity" elsewhere in the issue by David Brandenberger, critiques his thesis that modern Russian nationalism has its origins in the russocentric populism promoted by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in the 1930s and 40s. Brandenberger's argument is seen as needing more historical context, both by better defining nationalism and national identity in post-Soviet Russia, and by examining debates in the pre-Stalinist Soviet Union about chauvinism versus the goal of a multi-ethnic state.

The article presents a socio-political examination into the concept of Soviet Patriotism during the 1950s and 1960s in the U.S.S.R., particularly in Soviet Russia and the Ukraine. Questions are raised regarding the problematic challenges of identifying and characterizing nationalism and patriotism within Soviet political discourse. Definitions are offered and a social framework of an "imagined community" is analyzed through case examples of sympathetic and contrary ideological movements within the young intellectual sphere during the era.

The article examines the limits and utility of the concept of "empire." It argues that empire needs to be understood, not as a clearly bounded transhistorical model, but as Wittgensteinian "family resemblance" whose meaning and referents have altered significantly over time. The article explores the ways the concept of empire has been re-deployed in the Soviet context, addressing the particular the role of nationalism in the making of empire.

Questioning Edward Said's controversial perception of European Oriental studies as a facilitator of imperialism, this article analyses the views and policies promoted in late imperial Russia by academics specializing in Oriental studies, as they debated how best to integrate ethnic minorities in the country's eastern borderlands. The article argues that, themselves influenced by the pervasive impact of nationalism on European scholarship, between the 187os and the 1917 Revolution these academics proposed policies which are best understood as aimed at nation-building (i.e.fostering a sense of community and unity among the population of a state) rather than at imperial domination of the minorities by the Russians. Identifying the origins of the academics' support for cultural and linguistic pluralism as fully compatible with pan-Russian nationalism, the article demonstrates that the Bolshevik nationalities policies of the 1920S were strongly influenced by the views of academic Orientalists and the pre-revolutionary Russian intellectual tradition to which the latter belonged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an overview of the history, memory and nation building in the post-Soviet Union colonial space. Focus on imperial legacy and nationality policies that were applied in historiography; Theoretical literature of nationalism and historical myths; Inherited legacies of colonial policies; Analysis of the how post-colonial successor states are re-claiming their national historiography.

Examines the nationalities policy in the Soviet Union under Stalin, specifically during the period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Possibility that the publication of articles that dealt with nationality issues was part of a propaganda program originated by state policy.