Suny, Ronald Grigor, and Terry Martin (eds.). A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin

Suny, Ronald Grigor, and Terry Martin (eds.). A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

“How an anti-imperial enterprise aimed at the emancipation of nations metamorphosed into an empire of national states is the central theme of this book.” (vii)

Introduction

“After decades of Russocentric exclusion, historians in significant numbers have ventured into the non-Russian peripheries or examined metropolitan policies toward nationalities.” – this phrase betrays that they work in a hermetic environment, as in the Soviet context there were tons of publications on ‘Bolshevization’ of national peripheries. They are not going to take seriously Soviet research of this field.

Enter a dialogue with “Sovietologists”: “With few exceptions, non-Russians were either left out of the mainstream narrative or treated as objects of political manipulation and central direction, sometimes as victims of Russification, other times as pathetic, archaic resisters to the modernizing program of the central authorities.” (4) Suny and Martin claim that in Sovietologist works, “the Soviet state was presented as a fundamentally imperial arrangement, a colonial connection between Russia and its borderlands.” (4) Then they explain that “The essays in this book—while they do not

all conform to a single idea of empire or even agree that the USSR should be

labeled an empire—all engage with the problem of imperial rule…” – which means that they accept acting on the field demarcated by Sovietologists and, as titles of most articles show, including the book itself, they are not going to challenge this Sovietologist assumption. Richard Pipes's The Formation of the Soviet Union as the main reference point and ‘the other’ of this intellectual dialogue for Suny and Martin.

They argue that their novelty in the application of modern research on nations and nation building (Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, etc.) to Soviet materials. The “new paradigm shift” of the 1990s: “The political scientists Philip Roeder and Rogers Brubaker each produced institutionalist analyses that emphasized the role of Bolshevik-created national institutions and elites in preserving national consciousness and in providing institutions that allowed for rapid nationalist mobilization. The historians Ronald Suny and Yuri Slezkine, drawing on the research from their previous monographs, provided overarching accounts of the ways in which the Bolsheviks had encouraged national consciousness and a sense of inherent primordial ethnicity.” (7)

Curiously, language at certain points betrays the Eurocentric position of the book’s editors: “given Russia's historic backwardness” (8) “Unlike in Britain, Yugoslavia, India, or America, "Soviet" was never considered an ethnic or a national identity.” (9) – contradicts to SO MUCH empirical evidence.

“these deportations were perceived by their victims as national repression by an imperial Russian power.” – show me at least one Soviet Finn who would characterize it in this way. “by the time of Stalin's death, almost the entire Soviet exile population was being confined due to national identity alone.” (15) ??? really???

“The turn in the mid-1930 toward Russian nationalist propaganda and a practice of selective nation-destroying had a crucial long-term role in undermining the viability of the multiethnic Soviet state. As Mark Beissinger has convincingly argued, in the age of nationalism, to be labeled an empire by one's citizens and one's neighbors is frequently fatal, for it is assumed that empires are antiquated, artificial constructs that will eventually fragment into their natural nation-state components.” (15) Here, their narrative turns into absolutely artificial construction informed by their conceptual framework and teleological argument. No ‘futures pasts’. The mid-1930s as the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. “Stalin's nationally targeted repression, in fact, affected only a small percentage of non-Russians, but it nevertheless conveyed an image to all non-Russians of imperial behavior.” (15) what did they smoke when they were writing it? The most teleological text on Soviet history I’ve ever seen.

“There are many ironies to Soviet history. Certainly a principal one must be that a radical socialist elite that proclaimed an internationalist agenda that was to transcend the bourgeois nationalist stage of history in fact ended up by institutionalizing nations within its own political body.” – contestable. It was much about nationalities, not nations (a different way of conceptualizing things)

Бранденбергер выделяется из этой группы, когда эксплицитно говорит, что «...растущий руссоцентризм необходимо рассматривать скорее как тенденцию первых лет войны, чем как отчетливо сформулированную центральную линию» (279). Да и вообще у него вполне себе взвешенная аргументация, он много оперирует на «местном» уровне, в частности, обсуждая историю дискуссий вокруг «Истории Казахской ССР» -- рассуждает ровно о том, что функционеры пытаются «возвратить контроль над официальной линией» (283). По большому счету, Сталин в его аргументации появляется тогда, когда споры военного времени стихают и он готов сформулировать позицию победившего большинства (287). И он что делает хорошо, так это пишет историю именно дискурсивную (National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956 (Harvard, 2002))