Unspoken Hierarchy of Nations Behind Many Soviet Decisions, ‘Russkaya Semerka’ Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 7 – Many Soviet citizens noticed and commented upon that there were no cosmonauts from Armenia, Georgia or certain other non-Russian republics, only incompletely recognizing that this was a reflection of Moscow’s “unspoken” but nonetheless very real hierarchy of nations and republics of the USSR, Russkaya Semerka says.   

            This hierarchy governed everything from the order in which the coats of arms of the union republics were shown on official documents and posters to the selection of cosmonauts and other high profile professions, the history portal reports (russian7.ru/post/takikh-ne-berut-v-kosmonavty-k-zhitelyam/).

                “In first place,” not unexpectedly, was the Russian Federation. It was followed by Ukraine, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan “and so on.”  The order, Russkaya Semerka says “did not correspond to the population size as the populations of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan were greater than that of Belarus.

            With respect to the selection of cosmonauts, the portal continues, Moscow made no distinction among Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians considering them “as under the tsars, all Russians.”  In evaluating someone’s nationality, the family name was key: if someone russified it, then he or she became a Russian in the eyes of the powers that be.

            This happened sometimes with Kazakhs but more often with Jews. And when the latter changed their family name, Russkaya Semerka says, “the mass of people also consider [those who did] as Russian.”  Unlike some non-Russians, it continues, Jews could become part of the cosmonaut corps only if they had Russian names.

            As a result of this selection principles, only five union republics – the RSFSR, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan -- were represented among cosmonauts who went into space and only six nationalities – Russians, Ukrainians, two Belarusians, a Jew, an Azerbaijani and a Kazakh.

            The range of republics and nationalities was somewhat larger among those cosmonauts who were included in the training program but never were sent into space. Nonetheless, even including this group, there were no representatives of the titular nationalities of the Moldovan, Georgian, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Latvian and Estonian union republics.

            Russkaya Semerka suggests that professionalism triumphed over nationality in some of these cases, but its own write up of this case shows that ethnicity and the ranking of ethnicities Moscow maintained implicitly had an enormous impact on personnel outcomes and decisions about who got to succeed in public and who did not.