Martin, Terry Dean. The Affirmative Action Empire

Martin, Terry Dean. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.

“Russia’s new revolutionary government was the first of the old European multiethnic states to confront the rising tide of nationalism and respond by systematically promoting the national consciousness of its ethnic minorities and establishing for them many of the characteristic institutional forms of the nation-state.” (1) He speaks of the strategy that the Soviet leadership pursued to “disarm” nationalist forces in its ethnic peripheries.

Curiously, he keeps on saying that the Russian population of ethnic republics supported the Bolshevik side in the Civil War – possibly explaining a switch to Russification in the 1930s, as one of those investments made in Stalin.

Terry Martin’s The Affirmative Action Empire is a good example of an extremely thoroughly written research which is, nevertheless, shaped by an extensive use of the Stalinocentrist narrative strategy to make sense of empirical material and to organize it into causal relations. At some points, his analysis of Soviet nationality policy turns into an exercise in discourse analysis, which is excellent, if it hadn’t been for the fact that his research agenda is different. See here: “Stalin, of course, famously defined Soviet national cultures as being ‘national in form, socialist in content.’ But his just begged the question as to what ‘national in form’ meant, and Stalin purposefully chose not to clarify this concept. The very existence of national culture was controversial. The left oppositionist, Vaganian, spoke for many party members when he asserted that national culture was an inherently bourgeois and nationalist concept and that the Bolsheviks should do no more than build international or socialist culture in national languages. Although he would never admitted it, this is close to what Stalin had in mind.” (182) – Martin makes two assertions: first, that “Stalin purposefully chose not to clarify this concept” and that “this is close to what Stalin had in mind.” This sounds as if Martin had a direct access to Stalin’s mind and can speak of what Stalin “really” though; it also implies that Stalin was the ultimate cause of changes in the nationality policy.

“… latinization represented an indigenously sponsored project of cultural revolution.” (191)

P. 239: discussing the Socialist Offensive and Cultural Revolution, Martin argues that it was “Stalin’s Cultural Revolution” and that “Stalin aimed at rapid and violent annihilation of class enemies, too which end he solicited mass popular participation. More important, Stalin sought to mobilize the population primarily through an ideology of class warfare rather than nationalism. This was the strategy of cultural revolution.” A repeated use of the name “Affirmative Action Empire,” all three words capitalized, also underlines how strongly he sticks to this model and tends to subdue empirical material to it, as on p. 258-9, when he has hard time explaining why the Soviet regime was always hesitant to use force to promote the rise of national self-awareness, even though when it came to a struggle against local ‘extreme’ nationalism (The Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, for example), it never reserved the use of violence and force. And the dismissal of smenovekhovsktvo intelligentsia is better explained through the struggle between old (pre-revolutionary) and new (who came to power during the Civil War) social groups that both claimed power.

On p. 272, he once again speaks of Stalin as an omnipotent agent: “It is quite clear from this [quote above] passage that Stalin aimed quite instrumentally to motivate Russian workers through an appeal to their national pride in order ‘to create miracles.’” And then he writes: “The Russian pride propagated was designed to appeal to a resentful Russian audience, an audience that to a considerable extent did in fact exist.” And here is his key mistake: any interaction between power and society works in a kind of interplay, where not only Stalin shapes the audience, but the audience shapes Stalin as well.

Martin’s book, as well Douglas Northrop’s The Veiled Empire provide ground for two more observations on patterns in the writing of Soviet history of the 1920s and 1930s: that of the use of theoretical models to interpret factual material, which is closely related to many researchers’ unwillingness to take into account their own political positions that inform their writing on Stalinism. Martin takes his model of the Affirmative Action Empire very seriously: his repeated use of the name “Affirmative Action Empire,” all three words capitalized, underlines how strongly he sticks to this model and how highly and uncritically he thinks of it. He tends to subdue empirical material to it, even when , as on pp. 258-9, the material resists this model and he has hard time explaining why the Soviet regime was always hesitant to use force to promote the rise of national self-awareness, whereas as it came to struggle against local ‘extreme’ nationalism (The Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, for example), it was fast and resolute in its use of violence and force. By the end of the book, when he discusses the events of the mid- and especially late 1930s, his model collapses, as entire nationalities become forcedly deported, many smaller written languages abandoned and larger nations Russified, but he still calls these events “revising the Affirmative Action Empire” (p. 309).