The Soviet people: national and supranational identities in the USSR after 1945

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Notes

1. I would like to express gratitude to the Petro Jacyk Foundation that funded my postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto. I would also like to thank University of Toronto's Petro Jacyk Foundation, Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, Centre for Jewish Studies and the Dean of Arts and Science for funding the symposium.

2. For example, the closing scenes of the popular 1936 musical, Circus, showcased representatives of the USSR's different ethnicities singing a lullaby for a black baby whom they protect from a racist foreigner. Tsirk, Mosfilm, 1936. During the 1930s, Soviet patriotism was often defined in opposition to foreign states and nations. As Terry Martin argues, the concept was ‘most frequently used in discussions of the need to resist potential foreign aggression’ (Martin 2001, 450). The position of ethnic Russians in this imagined Soviet community remained ambiguous – before the mid-1930s in particular, Bolshevik leaders saw Russian nationalism as a threat, but they subsequently removed many obstacles to the promotion of ethnic Russian cadres and couched Soviet patriotism in terms of Russian language, history, and culture (Hosking 2006).

3. Weiner (2001) discusses the impact of Nazi racist ideas in Ukraine during and after the occupation.

4. The 1953 transfer of the Crimea from the Russian Federal Soviet Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was a notable exception.