Stalin's populism and the accidental creation of Russian national identity

Abstract

This article argues that the formation of a mass sense of Russian national identity was a recent, contingent event that first began to take shape under Stalin. Surveying the new literature on Russian nationalism, it contends that elite expressions of “Russianness” and bureaucratic proclamations of “official nationality” or russification should not be conflated with the advent of a truly mass sense of grassroots identity. Borrowing from an array of theorists, it argues that such a sense of identity only becomes possible after the establishment of necessary social institutions – universal schooling, a modern army, etc. Inasmuch as these institutions come into being only after the formation of the Soviet Union, this article focuses on how a mass sense of Russian national identity began to form under a rapid and unpredictable series of ideological shifts that occurred during the Stalinist 1930s and 1940s. This article's major contribution is its description of this development as not only contingent, but accidental. Drawing a clear line between russocentric propaganda and full-blown Russian nationalism, it argues that the ideological initiatives that precipitated mass identity formation in the USSR were populist rather than nationalist. In this sense, Stalinism has much more in common with Perónism than it does with truly national regimes.

Keywords:

• Russia
• USSR
• Stalin
• populism
• nationalism

Notes

Considerably less reliable are the memoirs of one of Suslov's former aides: Baigushev, Russkaia partiia.

Fundamental texts include Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality; Wortman, Scenarios of Power; Thaden, Russia's Western Borderlands; Thaden, ed. Russification; Löwe, “Russian Nationalism.” For new work on russification, see Weeks, “Russification;” Miller, “Russifikatsiia;” Kappeler, “Ambiguities of Russification.”

See, for instance, Steinwedel, “To Make . . .;” Tolz, Russia; Tolz, “Orientalism;” Cadiot, “Searching for Nationality;” Cadiot, “Russia Learns to Write.”

See Weeks, Nation and State; Weeks, “Religion and Russification;” Rodkiewicz, Russian Nationality Policy; Gorizontov, Paradoksy imperskoi politiki; Staliunas, “The Pole;” Dolbilov, “Kul'turnaia idioma;” Staliunas, “Granitsy v pogranich'e;” Staliunas, “Did the Government . . .;” Dolbilov, “Russification and the Bureaucratic Mind;” Dolbilov and Miller, Zapadnye okrainy; Maiorova, “War as Peace.”

See Miller, Ukrainskii vopros; Miller, “Shaping Russian and Ukrainian Identities;” Tolz, Russia; Mikhutina, Ukrainskii vopros; Vulpius, Nationalisierung der Religion.

Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors; Sunderland, “Russians into Iakuts?;” Bassin, Imperial Visions; Geraci, “Ethnic Minorities.”

See Geraci, Window on the East; Werth, At the Margins; Jersild and Melkadze, “Dilemmas of Enlightenment;” Crews, For Prophet and Tsar; Tolz, “European, National, and (Anti-) Imperial.”

Among others, see Vulpius, Nationalisierung der Religion; Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation; Vitarbo, “Nationality Policy.”

See Becker, “Russia between East and West;” Aizlewood, “Revisiting Russian Identity;” Knight, “Ethnicity, Nationality, and the Masses;” Knight, “Was the Intelligentsia Part of the Nation?” Maiorova, “Bessmertnyi Riurik;” Maiorova, “Slavianskii s”ezd 1867 g.;” Maiorova, “War as Peace;” Miller, “Imperiia i natsiia;” Poole, “Religion, War, and Revolution.”

See Renner, Russischer Nationalismus; Renner, “Defining a Russian Nation;” Weeks, “Official and Popular Nationalism.”

See Ely, This Meager Nature; Dianina, “Museum and the Nation;” Dianina, “Museum and Society;” Jenks, Russia in a Box; Norris, War of Images.

See Kotsiubinskii, Russkii natsionalizm; Dianina, “Museum and the Nation;” Dianina, “Museum and Society; Swift, “Russia and the Great Exhibition;” Fisher, “Russia and the Crystal Palace;” Bradley, Voluntary Associations; Loukianov, “Rise and Fall ….”

On education, see Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools 125–26; Seregny, “Teachers;” Seregny, Russian Teachers. It can be argued that the autocracy actively discouraged the emergence of a single mass sense of Russian national identity out of the fear that popularizing an ethnically based form of solidarity might inadvertently undermine monarchical authority. See Rogger, “Nationalism and the State;” Weeks, Nation and State 4–11; Siljak, “Rival Visions” 279–82.

Of course, this lack of universal public schooling did not mean that the peasantry and nascent working class were completely unaware of Russian state history. Ethnographic material collected by the Russian Geographic Society and other nineteenth-century organizations reveals that ordinary people displayed a surprising variety of opinion regarding historical events and personalities, especially the “great events” and “great leaders” that Anderson identifies above. But it is precisely because of the regional variation in these accounts that such an awareness of historical events and personalities should not be mistaken for a coherent sense of national identity on the popular level during the nineteenth century. Given the wide variation in historical folklore from region to region, it would be rather hasty to assume that such notions might contribute to a single, widely held sense of national identity during the nineteenth century. Conflicting impressions of heroes, imagery, and symbols, after all, divide rather than unite, denying old regime Russia the sense of a common heritage that is so critical to the possession of a mass social identity. See Buganov, Russkaia istoiriia.

Pipes, Russian Revolution 203. On regionalism, see Kingston-Mann, “Breaking the Silence” 15; Tolz, Russia 178–81; Kaiser, Geography 45.

On schools, see Trostianskii, Patriotizm 3-4; Dmitriev, Natsional'naia shkola; Siljak, “Rival Visions” 253–54; Eklof, “Peasants and Schools” 123; Karlsson, “History Teaching” 203. On the court, see Wortman, Scenarios of Power 2: 525; also Tolz, Russia, 100–04, 179. Only at the very end of the old regime were local institutions beginning to take steps to promote a broader sense of identity. See Seregny, “Zemstvos, Peasants, and Citizenship.”

See Knox, With the Russian Army 32; Dobrorol'skii, “Mobilizatsiia” 114–15; Danilov, Rossiia v mirovoi voine 112, 115–16; Golovin, Voennye usiliia Rossii 2: 124–25, 121. Although some studies have regarded the war as having a galvanizing effect on identity formation, they typically conflate inarticulate nativism with a more coherent and well-defined sense of Russian national identity. See Sanborn, “Mobilization of 1914;” Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation; Stockdale, “United in Gratitude;” Kolonitskii, “Russian Idea” 57–60; Wildman, End of the Russian Imperial Army, 116–17.

Hirsch, “Soviet Union as a Work-in-Progress” 259; Hirsch, “Empire of Nations” 87–88.

For examples of inarticulate Russian chauvinism, see Martin, Affirmative Action Empire 94–96, 103–12, 137–39, 148–54, 158, 161; Payne, Stalin's Railroad 10, 127, 135–55, 235, 292; Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis 124–25; Rozhkov, “Internatsional durakov” 60.

Evidence of this can be found in Stalin's 1934 critique of Comintern propaganda as excessively schematic and arcane. According to Georgi Dimitrov, Stalin denounced the materialist approach with the comment that “people do not like Marxist analysis, big phrases and generalized statements. This is one more of the inheritances from Zinoviev's time.” Anecdotal evidence verifies Stalin's appraisal – for a former political officer's commentary on the difficulties of basing agitational work on unadulterated historical materialism, see Lenin Schools, 5; for Stalin's commentary, see the April 7, 1934, entry in Dimitrov, Dnevnik, 101.

On the emergence of the hero in Socialist Realism, see Clark, Soviet Novel 34–35, 72, 119, 136–148, 8–10; Clark, “Little Heroes” 205–206. Although there was little room for individual actors in the classic Marxist understanding of historical materialism, Stalin identified a prominent role for decisive leaders aware of the possibilities and limitations of their historical contexts in 1931. See “Beseda s nemetskim pisatelem . . .,” 33; also Merzon, “Kak pokazyvat'” 53–59; Istoriia VKP(b), 16; Gorokhov “Rol' lichnosti;” Il'ichev, “O roli lichnosti” 2; Iudin, “Marksistskoe uchenie.” M. Gor'kii and A. N. Tolstoi, among others, led the new interest in heroes with the support of A. A. Zhdanov. See Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s”ezd 8, 17, 417–19, 4.

On the promotion of “socialist” priorities (collectivism, absence of property relations, etc.), see Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain; Hoffmann, Stalinist Values.

One analyst has identified seven distinct types of populism while others have contended that populism is such a context-specific mobilization strategy that it almost defies generalization. Compare Canovan, Populism with Beasley-Murray, “Peronism;” Dix, “Populism;” etc.

Traditionally, discussion of populism in the Russian context is almost always limited to the nineteenth century Slavophilic idealization of the village, the nativism [pochvennichestvo] of people like F. M. Dostoevskii and the rural pro-peasant activism [narodnichestvo] of educated radicals. Two exception to this rule are Glazov, “Stalin's Legacy;” Priestland, Stalinism.

Nationalism by definition is inherently linked to self-determination and popular rule, see Gellner, Nations and Nationalism.

This was first noticed by Mensheviks watching the purges from Parisian exile—see Sh., “Vrazheskie gnezda;” 24; Sh., “Razgrom natsional'nykh respublik,” 16. For more modern analysis on this turnabout, see Szporluk, “Nationalities” 30–31.

Deployment of such mobilizational rhetoric against the backdrop of Stalin's draconian prosecution of the war makes it clear that he was acting as an authoritarian populist rather than a nationalist.

Barghoorn, Soviet Russian Nationalism 28–34, 148–52, 233–37, 260; Barghoorn, “Four Faces” 57; Barghoorn, “Russian Nationalism” 35; Dzyuba, Internationalism or Russification 65; Kohn, “Soviet Communism” 57; Kostyrchenko, V plenu, 7; Blank, Sorcerer 211–25.

Mehnert, Weltrevolution durch Weltgeschichte 11, 72–73.

Szporluk, “History and Russian Ethnocentrism” 44–45; Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism, esp. 219–20; Pospelovsky, “Ethnocentrism” 127; Glazov, “Stalin's Legacy” 93–99; Rees, “Stalin and Russian Nationalism” 77, 97, 101–03.

Mehnert, Weltrevolution durch Weltgeschichte 12–14; Urban, Smena tendentsii 9–11; Dunlop, Faces 10–12; Konstantinov, “Dorevoliutsionnaia istoriia Rossii” 226–27; Suny, “Stalin and His Stalinism” 39; Brooks, “Thank You, Comrade Stalin” 76.

Black, “History and Politics” 24–25; Shteppa, Soviet Historians 124, 134–35; Agurskii, Ideologiia 140–42; Agursky, “Prospects” 90; Lewin, Making of the Soviet System 272–79; Heller and Nekrich, Utopia in Power 269; Seton Watson, “Russian Nationalism” 25–28; Besançon, “Nationalism and Bolshevism” 4; Simon, Nationalismus 172–73; Tucker, Stalin in Power 50–58, 319–28, 479–86; Kostyrchenko, V plenu 7–8; Suny, “Stalin and His Stalinism,” 39; Williams, Russia Imagined 111–26; Perrie, “Nationalism and History;” Vihavainen, “Natsional'naia politika.”

Szporluk, “Nationalities” 30–31; Dunlop, Faces 10–12; Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy 51–52, 158–59, 178–79; Slezkine, “USSR as a Communal Apartment;” Bordiugov and Bukharev, “Natsional'naia istoricheskaia mysl'” esp. 39; Vihavainen, “Nationalism and Internationalism.”

Martin, “Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism;” Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, esp. chap. 11; Kappeler, Russian Empire 378–82; Hosking, Russia 432–33.

See, for instance, Hoffmann, Stalinist Values; Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, esp. 357.

Tillett, Great Friendship 49–61; Lane, Rites of Rulers 181; Dunham, In Stalin's Time 12, 17, 41, 66; Barber and Harrison Soviet Home Front, 69; Bonnell, Iconography 255–57; Boterbloem, Life and Death 257.

Vujacic, “Stalinism and Russian Nationalism,” esp. 159–72. For a more subtle reading of Stalin's relation to the Russian people, see Van Ree, “Heroes and Merchants.”

Although Terry Martin traces this ideological turnabout to “russificatory” changes in Soviet nationality policy during the early 1930s, this connection is somewhat circumstantial. Aside from unresolved questions concerning causality and sequencing, these early administrative policies resemble later cultural forms of russification only superficially. Administrative russification consisted of a limited set of institutional reforms designed to rationalize and streamline Soviet governance, while cultural russification represented a more general, non-bureaucratic effort to improve mobilizational propaganda through the remodulation of ideological appeals. No documentation from the former party and state archives has ever been uncovered that explicitly links the two policy shifts together. See Martin, “Russification of the USSR.”

The original architecture of the USSR attempted to hamstring Russians' ability to advance their own sectarian interests by denying the RSFSR a republican-level communist party and state institutions. Such administrative structures, it was feared, would endow the RSFSR with too much influence and create the potential for a standoff between the Russian republic and the all-union center.

Efforts to develop a bureau for RSFSR affairs within the all-union central committee resulted in the brief creation of such a body in 1926–1927 and 1936–1937. In each case, however, the bureau lacked a clear administrative mandate and enjoyed little influence. Efforts to expand RSFSR institutions after the war were brutally suppressed as “Russian nationalism” during the Leningrad Affair – see Brandenberger, “Stalin, the Leningrad Affair . . .”

Martin, Affirmative Action Empire 20, 396–97; see also Van Ree, “Heroes and Merchants.” For a more “internationalist” reading of the Russian people's role in the Soviet experiment from Stalin's former comrade-in-arms, see the second edition of Molotov's famous conversations: Chuev, Molotov 333–34.

Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, chaps. 6, 10, 14. This analysis of Russian speakers does not attempt to speculate on how the non-Russian peoples responded to the russocentric populism – a subject worth its own separate, empirical investigation.