Strategic Uses of Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict by Pl Kolst;

Author:Pl Kolst;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

CONCLUSIONS

In the Tsarist Empire, ethnic Russians did not dominate, either demographically or politically. In the 1897 census, the share of Great Russians in this state was only 44 per cent, and Russians did not enjoy any particular prerogatives such as privileged access to jobs in the civil service. Educated members of some non-Russian groups, such as Germans and Poles, were far more likely to land an attractive job in the state apparatus (Kappeler 1993). Many Russians were, no doubt, proud to be subjects of the Tsar and identified with the state, but this was a dynastic state, and certainly not ‘their’ ‘nation-state’ in any sense. Certain elements of a Russification policy were introduced in the last decades of the Empire, but this affected the life of the non-Russians more than the Russians.

In territorial terms the Soviet Union represented a continuation of the Russian Empire. While the nationality policy of the Bolsheviks differed radically from the one pursued by the Tsars, it was no more conducive to the formation of a Russian national identity. The federal structure of the Soviet Union gave all the major non-Russian nationalities an ethnic homeland which bore their name and also, to some extent, their cultural imprint. In all Union republics and autonomous republics education was available in the titular language, at least in elementary school, if not necessarily at higher levels. Titulars were also overrepresented in top jobs in the republics in both party and government structure (Hodnett 1979). All Soviet citizens carried with them at all times their internal passport, in which their natsionalnost’ (read: ethnic identity) was fixed as the so-called fifth point. This meant that non-Russians living in other parts of the country, having a personally ascriptive identity that corresponded with one of the republics, would also naturally identify with this federal unit.

All of this was different for the ethnic Russians. The first ‘R’ in the RSFSR was not ‘russkii’ but ‘rossiiskii’, and this vast conglomerate republic was not intended to be, or to be understood as, a homeland for ethnic Russians. As a federation in itself with a large number of ethnically defined subunits, the RSFSR was, in a sense, a copy of the Soviet Union writ small; however, it lacked some basic attributes of the Union republics, such as a separate party organisation or its own branch of the Academy of Sciences, as it was felt that this would duplicate the respective Soviet structures and be redundant (Kolstø 2000, 194–8). At the same time, Russian language schools and cultural institutions were available throughout the Soviet Union. For these reasons, Russians, to a much larger degree than non-Russians, would identify with the USSR as a whole, not with any particular geographical area (Kolstø 1999b). To be Russian was, in a sense, an unmarked quality, the opposite of being ‘ethnic’ (Brubaker 1996, 49). This was also reflected in Russian nationalism, which for the most part was focused on state strength and state size. Hardly any Russian nationalists at the time would contemplate a truncation of state territory.

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