Paul Goble
Staunton,
September 14 – Soviet and Russian nomenclature about nations and peoples has
always struck many in the West as needlessly fussy, but in Soviet times and
until very recently, officials and experts have insisted on a clear distinction
between “a people” [“narod”] and “a nation” [“natsiya”].
The
first refers to any human group, political or otherwise, which has some
consciousness of itself and some eternal signs that set it apart from
others. The latter refers to an ethnic
community, defined variously, that includes a common language, culture and
sense of origin.
In
late Soviet times and in more recent discussions of that period, both officials
and experts in the Russian Federation and elsewhere were and have been
scrupulous in referring to the population of the USSR as “the Soviet people”
[“Sovetsky narod”], a “new historical community” that remained multi-national.
That
makes an article posted on the KM.ru portal day especially intriguing because
in a sharp departure from this practice, it poses the question “Was the Soviet
Nation [‘Natsiya’] a Myth or Reality” and suggests that the answer should be a
confident “yes” (km.ru/front-projects/belovezhskoe-soglashenie/sovetskaya-natsiya-mif-ili-realnost).
The unsigned article offers two
bases for its conclusion. The first is historical. It says that the USSR was
created officially and practically out of 15 “nations,” each of which had its
own republic, but says that “by the 1980s, the real situation had essentially
changed” and they had come together as a “Soviet nation.”
The other is conceptual and involves
the differences between those nations which are
based on “blood, origin, and culture,” like the German, and those based
on a political community based on territory, linguistic, statehood, and
economics, like the French and the Americans.
The population of the Soviet Union
was never a nation in the former sense, despite a high degree of intermarriage
among its constituent nations. But
according to KM.ru, it had become one in the second sense after World War II. Indeed, it was, just like most of the “nations”
of the world today “poly-ethnic” rather than “mono-ethnic.”
According to unnamed experts, “the
identification of the majority of people living in the country with a common
territory, a common statehood, a common history, a common language of interethnic
communication, and a common economy began to be established in the USSR in the
course of the Great Fatherland War and was basically in place by the 1970s and
1980s.”
But during the last decades of the
Soviet system, Soviet social scientists resisted calling this community a
nation, preferring instead to label it “the multi-national Soviet people,” a
term, the KM.ru article suggests, provided an intellectual foundation for the
subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union.
But there were some experts, again
unnamed, KM.ru continues, who argued that “a new ‘Soviet nation’ had in fact been
born, not in the sense of ‘a nation of Soviet power but rather in the sense of
a nation which formed he people of the country under the name USSR” – much in
the same way the various peoples of the US formed the American nation.
Soviet writers could never
adequately explain why they were not prepared to talk about a Soviet nation,
but it appears that they were constrained by the fact that they did not want to
declare that “the old nations [which would be part of such a community] were
atrophying and dying.”
To say that would have called into
question a major plank of Soviet ideology, the notion that the system was
promoting both the self-determination and flourishing of peoples. But thus, these writers failed to take into
account that “by the 1970s, this real flowering had already led to the process
of fusion, albeit not complete, into a single union nation.”
Had the Soviet-era writers focused on
this, the disintegration of the USSR on national lines would have been far more
difficult, although KM.ru notes that “in the opinion of a number of experts,
the division of the USSR was not the realization of the principle of the right
of nations to self-determination but rather a complete neglect of that
principle.”
That is because, these experts say,
the events of 1991 “ignored the right of this new political union ‘Soviet’
nation to control its own national state.” Its interests were neglected and
trampled upon, and now, one can see, “the destruction of the
self-identification of the pretender to the role of its successor – ‘the [non-ethnic]
Russian proto-nation.’”
If one accepts the theory of “’a
single political Soviet nation,’” then “today one could resolve the problem of ‘a
divide people’ and guarantee the normal development of the country to the extent
that even today, the interests of Soviet national unity on the space of the
former USSR are objectively distinct” from those of the ethnocracies in the
now-independent countries.
“However,” the KM.ru article
concludes, “today even many of those who would like to see this are often
afraid to speak about this publically and officially, fearing attacks for
striving to ‘the restoration of the empire’ and ‘the trampling of the rights of
other nations’ as well as ‘attachment to Stalinism and great power aspirations.’”
At its base, the KM.ru argument
about the existence of “a Soviet nation” collapses because the USSR was not an
immigrant society as is the United States. Instead, its numerous peoples were
brought into the fold by military conquest, and many if not all of them have
national traditions extending back even further than the Russian not just the
Soviet.
But of course, the KM.ru article is
not so much about the past as about the future: it is designed to provide grist
for the mill of those who want to promote two ideas: a single nation within the
Russian Federation, one that doesn’t need provide support to non-Russians
within it or have any non-Russian republics, and the a restored Moscow-centric
state on the territory of what was the Russian and Soviet empire.
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