National Delimitation in The Soviet Union - Nation-building For Ethnic Minorities

Nation-building For Ethnic Minorities

In the 1920s and the 1930s, the policy of national delimitation, which assigned national territories to ethnic groups and nationalities, was followed by nation-building, attempting to create a full range of national institutions within each national territory. Each officially recognized ethnic minority, however small, was granted its own national territory where it enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy, in addition to, and national elites. A written national language was developed (if it had been lacking), national language planning was implemented, native teachers were trained, and national schools were established. This was always accompanied by native-language press and books written in the native language. National elites were encouraged to develop and take over the leading administrative and Party positions, sometimes in proportions exceeding the proportion of the native population.

With the grain requisition crises, famines, troubled economic conditions, international destabilization and the reversal of the immigration flow in the early 1930s, the Soviet Union became increasingly worried about a possible disloyalty of diaspora ethnic groups with cross-border ties (especially Finns, Germans and Poles), residing along its western borders, which eventually led to the start of Stalin's repressive policy towards them.

Each adult citizen's ethnicity (Russian: национальность) was necessarily recorded in his passport after the introduction of the passport system in the Soviet Union in 1932 and was determined by his choice between his parents' ethnicities (practice that didn't exist in Imperial Russia and is abolished in the Russian Federation).

However, the important question is: why did the communist rulers of the USSR need to create a national consciousness among people, given that it is generally used by the bourgeoisie to curtail the class struggle? The reason lies in both the pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary policies of the Bolshevik Party. Before the revolution, Vladimir Lenin used demands for national autonomy by the non-Russian communities as a tool for gaining power against the tsarist regime; he promised autonomy to these communities, even the right to secede. After the revolution, reifying national identities was seen as a solution for local administrative problems. Sovietization was the ultimate goal behind the nation-building process. In local administrative units, the “rulers” needed to be natives in order to make the non-Russian populations feel that they had been granted national self-determination, and this was accomplished via the politics dubbed korenization ("indigenization"). Autonomous states like Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and others had their own ruling communist parties and native elites, although they were actually under the explicit control of the overall Communist Party of the Soviet Union. There was also another aspect of this project: it was not aimed at the differentiation of nations but at unifying them over time. The implicit assumption was that after a short (10-20 year) period, bourgeois nationalism would be abandoned and support for a worker-state would follow. The Bolsheviks' aim was not a loose federation but a completely unified modern socialist state.

The Bolsheviks’ plan was to identify the total sum of all national, cultural, linguistic, and territorial diversities under their rule and establish scientific criteria to identify which groups of people were entitled to the description of 'nation'. This task relied on the existing work of tsarist-era ethnographers and statisticians, as well as new research conducted under Soviet auspices. Because most people did not know what is meant by a nation, some of them simply gave names when asked about ethnicity. Many groups were thought to be biologically similar, but culturally distinct. In Central Asia, many identified their "nation" as "Muslim." In other cases, geography made the difference, or even whether one lived in a town versus the countryside. Principally, however, dialects or languages formed the basis for distinguishing between various nations. The results were often contradictory and confusing. More than 150 nations were counted in Central Asia alone. Some were quickly subordinated to others, with communities which had hitherto been counted as "nations" now deemed to be simply tribes. As a result, the number of nations shrunk over the decades.