What does the Soviet Experience provide with regard to the Institutionalisation of Ethnicity and Nationalism.

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What does the Soviet Experience provide with regard to the Institutionalisation of Ethnicity and Nationalism

For a large part of the twentieth century many informed commentators regarded the Soviet Union as a highly stable country with little prospect of change and even less of domestic strife. That this had been achieved over seventy years; with a heterogeneous population of nearly 300 million people; over a hundred distinct nationalities; scores of languages and five alphabets, was truly remarkable. Had the Soviets managed to solve age-old national rivalries and antagonisms among peoples with very different religious backgrounds, traditional cultures, historical experiences and standards of living; and constructed a 'friendship of the peoples' through socialism? This facade of tranquillity was shattered by the reactionary coup in August 1991. On the eve of the signing of a new Union Treaty, the conservatives in the Kremlin tried to turn back the clock and, essentially, re-impose centralised party control over the USSR. This ill-advised and ill-conceived coup only succeeded in hastening the end of the Soviet Union and replacing it with the Commonwealth of Independent States.

In 1917 the Bolsheviks inherited from the tsars a crumbling multiethnic empire stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific, and compromising over one hundred distinct nationalities and ethnic groups. The relationship of these non-Russian minorities presented the new regime with a major problem. Before the October Revolution the Bolsheviks had floated the idea of national self-determination and autonomy from the Russian State. However, this upsurge in nationalist feeling throughout the former Russian empire presented Lenin with something of a dilemma: Marx had taught his followers to consider nationalism a bourgeois phenomenon doomed to disappear in the global melting pot which capitalism would bequeath socialism. In its place would emerge international class-consciousness, with the proletariat willingly becoming part of supranational blocs to ensure more efficient and rational means of production. However, the people who had recently been released from the autocratic rule of the Tsar’s, wanted only one thing: self-determination and autonomy. Faced with these difficulties Lenin finally devised a formula, which would yoke the revolutionary potential of nationalism to Marxist socialism. He argued that the promise of self-determination would rally the suppressed nationalities to the revolutionary cause and the revolution in turn would hasten the disappearance of nationalism. With Stalin newly installed as the People's Commissar for Nationalities the Bolsheviks prepared to put Lenin's formula to the test. Yet almost immediately, and amid the chaos engendered by the civil war, nationalities began peeling away from the Bolshevik sphere of influence.

Stalin insisted that proletarian self-determination dictated that which was in the interests of the worker, to remain part of a larger proletarian state. The other nationalities of Central Asia succumbed to the Bolshevik pressure, lacking powerful allies, or indeed, the internal governmental structure to offer an alternative to communist rule. The Bolsheviks went on to reinforce the local soviets with communists sympathetic to their aims and secured further adherence to the proletarian cause with units of the Red Army and Russian settlers.

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Lenin was, however, pragmatic enough to realise that force alone would not suffice to hold the new Soviet polity together, and that the non-Russians would have to be won over with concessions. The raw materials, goodwill and co-operation of the non-Russians were vital to sustain the already precarious Russian economy. As Stalin himself put it in October 1920... "Central Russia, that hearth of world revolution, cannot hold out long without the assistance of the border regions, which abound in raw materials, fuel and foodstuffs..." (Swoboda: p.352) Therefore, in the face of strong nationalist feelings and the overwhelming need for ...

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