The ghost of essentialism and the trap of binarism: six theses on the Soviet empire

Abstract

This article endeavors to open a new critical space for Soviet studies and for nationalities studies more generally. Through analyses of recent trends in Soviet studies, the article dismantles the frequently used opposition between subjective and objective approaches to Soviet empire and suggests instead that truths and categories, whether considered “subjective” or “objective,” are constructed discursively, through legitimizing certain interpretive models over the others. The article also argues against disciplinary avoidance of “what is” questions (e.g. “what is a nation?”) and claims that an excessive concern for (re)producing essentialism should not hinder scholarly inquiry. Several new lines of inquiry for the study of the Soviet empire are suggested and also applicable in nationalities studies more generally: research on the role of symbolic violence in manufacturing consent and research concerning the role of affect in producing linkages between the performative life of a singular human being and the pedagogical discourse of a nation or empire. The article also offers an analysis of the Soviet Union as an empire in becoming and it advocates for postcolonial approaches within Soviet studies. The practical dimensions of Soviet rule are exemplified with data from the Baltic borderlands in the postwar years.

Keywords:

• Soviet Union
• postcolonial studies
• empire
• nation
• the Baltic states

Notes

1. In Lithuania, the demographic situation was somewhat different. Lithuanians composed 78% of the 1939 population of just under 2,900,000. During and after World War II, Lithuania's Jewish and Polish populations were destroyed or displaced, and then proportionally replaced by an influx of Soviet-era settlers, reestablishing the same 78–80% proportion of Lithuanian-speakers. Lithuania went through a rapid urbanization period in the 25 years following the end of the war, during which its urban population exploded from 10–15% to over 50% of the total population (Davoliūtė 2014, 2).

2. Tania Raffass distinguishes between an objectivist, subjectivist, and “policy theory” of empire.

3. The Estonian scholar Tannberg (2005, 274) puts the number at more than 204,000; Zubkova (256) provides similar numbers from Soviet government documents available in Russian archives. According to Zubkova's data, which she does not consider exhaustive and which do not cover the 1941 deportations, almost 200,000 Balts were deported from 1944 to 1952.

4. Mari Saat's fictional account, told from a child's perspective, adds an intriguing romantic touch to the weighty topic of deportations: for the child in her novel, deportation might hold the promise of an adventure. Similarly, but from the realm of real life, the anthropologist Skultans provides the biographical narrative of a Latvian, who, as a 13-year-old boy in search of adventure, escaped home and stowed away upon a series of trains, until he managed to reach Siberia and his deported godmother (2000, 59).

5. Gayatri Spivak introduced this notion to postcolonial studies in her articles “The Rani of Sirmur” (1985, 250, 258) and “Can the subaltern speak?” (1988, 280–281), yet did not elaborate on this topic.

6. All translations from Estonian are mine – E.A. The collection Tolmust ja värvidest [Of Dust and Colours] was published in a popular monthly preordered book series in 17,000 copies. Censors understood their mistake very quickly: the collection was completely silenced in the official press, no critical reviews were allowed for publication.

7. Appropriations of Native American themes to address Baltic dilemmas were already in use in the nineteenth century, by authors such as Lydia Koidula and Mats Kirsel. See Peiker's (2006) analysis of Perùama wiimne Inka [The Last Inka of Peru, 1866] by Lydia Koidula.

8. While Zubkova is surely correct about the biased Baltic perspective, we should also add that the postwar Baltic experience included plentiful encounters with bag people and Soviet militaries, and significantly fewer encounters with highly educated Soviet engineers. As Mertelsmann (2010, 26) has shown in the case of Estonia, the vast majority of the 1946–1948 migrants were hunger refugees and only less that 4% were recruited by the Soviet state for work in Estonia. We would assume, then, that highly educated engineers formed less than 4% of immigrants. We should also note that during the following decades, the image of Russianness became more complex and included also a widespread belief that “real” Russians in Russia were kind and cultured people, whereas the migrants would be predominantly a “lower kind” of Russians with no cultural interests (see, e.g. Toivo's opinion in Tammer 2004, 72).

9. Take, for example, interactions in the health-care system, where doctors did not necessarily speak local languages (Anne in Tammer 76 recalls the necessity of finding somebody who could translate between a patient and a doctor).

10. The distancing gesture toward “them” was common also among Russian populations of the Soviet Union, for whom “them” referred to the government and to “all those external forces that put one's own life out of one's control” (Fitzpatrick 1999, 219). It is important to stress that in the borderlands the opposition between “us” and “them” had a clearly national character.

11. Compare to definitions of colonialism in (McClintock 1992, 88; Bolaffi 2003, 39; Rogers, Castree, and Kitchin 2013, 65).

12. “Water” in Russian.

13. Personal conversation with one of the participants in the Baltic chain, 12 December 2013; testimonies of the very special feeling in the chain are commonly heard in the Estonian cultural sphere.

14. It is worth noting that affective links need not rely on positive emotion. Paperno (2011, 145) claims that the Soviet regime's postwar legitimacy in Soviet Russia relied upon mobilizing fears of a future nuclear war:

 fear of a future nuclear war may well have been the dominant emotion of the postwar period [ … ] For political purposes, the Soviet regime encouraged memories of the war in the population; projected into the future, these memories intensified the fear of a possible nuclear war, serving as a foundation for loyalty to the state and to the leader.

See Massumi 2010 for an excellent analysis of the media production of fear as an “affective fact” (54).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Estonian Ministry of Education and Research [grant number IUT22-2].