![\"945\"](\"http:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/files\/2016\/05\/945.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nPhoto: \u00a0Belovezhskaia pushcha (1991).<\/p>\n
Soviet nationality policy is a perfect microcosm for the history of the Soviet Union itself. The original policy was created by Lenin and Stalin, and was as unique as it was radical. It was also contradictory, at times leading to senseless violence and at others lending itself to sincere progressivism (sometimes simultaneously). It might have sown the seeds for its own end, but nonetheless had settled into an uneventful groove by the 70s. By 1992 it was gone, leaving more questions than it did answers, but also having irreversibly and incomparably altered the world.<\/p>\n
For members of the Soviet Union\u2019s diverse population, nationality was perhaps the most important aspect of their identity\u2014at least when it came to interactions with the State. In the mid-1920s, being Kazakh, or Ukrainian, or Polish, or Korean in the Soviet Union meant opportunity\u2014jobs, education, political power. By the early 1930s, being any one of these meant one could be the victim of political violence\u2014arrest, deportation, or execution. This would continue until Stalin\u2019s death in 1953. On Christmas day 1991, being Kazakh, or Ukrainian, or Polish, or Korean abruptly meant independence. Indeed, a lot of weight was carried by a little label in section five of one\u2019s Soviet Passport.<\/p>\n
The nationality question took on grave importance right from the beginning. Casting itself as the very antithesis of imperialism and the Russian empire that had recently been overthrown, the Bolshevik Party championed \u201cself-determination,\u201d leaving it the difficult task of trying to build an international revolution while avoiding the \u201coppression\u2026unprecedented in its cruelty and absurdity\u201d that had characterized the tsarist regime\u2019s treatment of its national minorities.<\/p>\n
The theoretical answer, of course, was to replace nationally-based identities with class-based ones. As Lenin said, \u201cIt is not the state frontiers that count with us but a union of toilers of all nations ready to fight the bourgeoisie of any nation.\u201d[1]<\/a> This was easier said than done.<\/p>\n Although the Marxist line holds that nationalism arises as a salient force as a result of capitalism\u2019s inequities, the Bolsheviks realized that simply instituting socialism would not eliminate dangerous national consciousness. And so rather than turning their backs on minority nationalism, the Party embraced it. This was truly revolutionary: the Soviet Union became \u201cthe first of the old European multiethnic states to confront the rising tide of nationalism and respond by systematically promoting the national consciousness of its ethnic minorities.\u201d[2]<\/a><\/p>\n This policy, however, had a clear goal in mind: transcending nationalism to create proletarian internationalism. The idea was that (1) nationalism would increase class conflict, creating a proletarian base; (2) nationalism was a natural byproduct of modernization, an important Soviet goal, and thus would be a necessary consequence of the drive to industrialism; and (3) nationalism was an inevitable response to the previous tsarist oppression. Essentially, nationalism would help accelerate (and would be an unavoidable byproduct of) the ultimate drive to communism.[3]<\/a> If that seems perfectly logical in theory but seems a bit too overly-utopian to work in reality, that\u2019s because it\u2019s communism. As such, it was the course the Soviets would take.<\/p>\n This logic informed the nationality policy that Lenin and Stalin would jointly create. National identity would become the defining factor in the organization of the Union and in State policies. Large national minorities were made into republics (SSRs). Smaller minorities were made into smaller entities, autonomous republics (ASSRs). And even smaller minorities were given oblasts. In any case, administrative boundaries were drawn according to populations of national minorities\u2014ensuring that each republic or oblast was made up of mostly (or entirely) members of a single nationality.<\/p>\n With this administrative framework in place, the State would embark on its quest to achieve equality among nations. This would take the form of what historian Terry Martin calls an Affirmative Action Empire, living up to Lenin\u2019s claim that \u201cnothing so retards the development and consolidation of proletarian class society as national injustice\u201d by seeking not only \u201cformal equality\u201d of nationalities, but equality in practice.[4]<\/a> This meant the Soviet system would \u201csystematically promote the distinctive national identity and national self-consciousness in its non-Russian populations\u2026 through the formation of national territories staffed by national elites using their own national languages, [and] also through the aggressive promotion of symbolic markers of national identity.\u201d[5]<\/a> When all nationalities had achieved equality, national consciousness would dissipate naturally, giving way to a unified class consciousness.<\/p>\n It was a radical policy, but it was par for the Soviet Union\u2019s course. Nationality was now endowed with great importance. In every administrative entity (each matched to a single nationality), efforts were made to promote the national language, to create schools (which would educate citizens in their national language), to ensure that the workforce consisted mainly of nationals, and to put in place local governments led by members of each administrative entity\u2019s nationality.<\/p>\n The State took these policies very seriously. In 1930 one Soviet newspaper recounted glowing examples of the nationality policy\u2019s achievements: \u201cTake Uzbekistan\u2026 Whereas before the Revolution the Republic had less than 10 secondary schools, attended by the offspring of the colonial officials, it now has four higher educational establishments, which train dozens of indigenous<\/em> engineers, doctors, chemists, agronomists and so forth. Fifty per cent of the workers of Uzbekistan are [now] from the indigenous population.\u201d Similar successes in the field of education, employment, and economic infrastructure were noted in Kazakhstan.[6]<\/a><\/p>\n Indeed by the end of the 1920s the Soviet Union was well on its way to eradicating illiteracy, was in the process of industrializing its national republics and oblasts (promoting indigenous workers in the process), had created governing structures made up of local (indigenous) elites, and was fostering national cultures, occasionally conjuring them up where they hadn\u2019t really existed. \u201c[T]he culture of the nationalities, which [was] national in form and proletarian in content, [was] growing and developing,\u201d aided by the State which was essentially acting as the \u201cvanguard of non-Russian nationalism.\u201d[7]<\/a><\/p>\n The progressivism of these policies, however, would soon be accompanied by the Soviet Union\u2019s most conspicuous legacy: political violence. Stephen Lovell\u2019s short introduction to the Soviet Union characterizes the 1930s as a \u201cdecade or so of state-sponsored violence.\u201d And given the fact that administration and nationality were so closely tied in Soviet governance and policy, this meant that the state violence of the 1930s was often tied to nationality.[8]<\/a> When Soviet policies failed, or were deemed to be in danger, the nationally-defined administrative districts bore the blame, leaving the consequences to fall upon national populations.<\/p>\n One example: The man-made famine that struck the Ukraine in 1932-33 became a national<\/em> tragedy because the Soviet Union\u2019s grain requisition policy operated according to its nationally-defined<\/em> administrative basis. When the Ukrainian Republic wasn\u2019t able to meet the production demands, yet the State still requisitioned its slated amount, there wasn\u2019t enough food to feed the Ukrainian population. As such it was Ukrainians who suffered, reflected in the repressed census of 1937: the Ukrainian population dropped from almost 31.2 million in 1926 to 26.4 million by 1937.[9]<\/a><\/p>\n Paranoia also took on a national coloring. And because nationality was tied to administration, populations would feel the wrath of State violence along national lines<\/em> in the terror-ridden decades of Stalin\u2019s rule. It started with diaspora nationalities, those populations residing in the Soviet Union but sharing a national heritage with populations having their own independent states. The diverse Soviet Union was rife with such populations: Poles, Germans, Jews, Iranians, Koreans, Chinese, etc. These populations often inhabited border regions, and when paranoia began to run high in the early-30s, they started being subject to forced relocation.<\/p>\n By the late 1930s, the Great Purge was in full swing. Stalinist paranoia resulted in mass arrests, deportations, and executions. And much like the Soviet economy, the state violence during the Stalinist Purge was not based on supply and demand (i.e. number arrests of being directly dependent on the number of crimes), but was set by the state\u2014a command economy of political violence. NKVD officials were ordered to meet arrest quotas for each administrative district\u2014administrative districts that were, again, based upon nationality. Basically arrest quotas were assigned to nationalities. Calling for the arrest of 1,500 First Category criminals from the Azerbaijan SSR, or 300 Second Category criminals from the Kalmyk ASSR essentially meant arresting 1,500 Azerbaijanis and 300 Kalmyks.[10]<\/a><\/p>\n Thus, beginning with deportations of diaspora nationalities in the early 1930s and continuing until Stalin\u2019s death in 1953, political violence along ethnic lines became commonplace in the Soviet Union.[11]<\/a> It took many forms: institutional oversights (like in Ukraine), arrests according to ethnic quotas, and national deportations.<\/p>\n The State\u2019s demographic impact is startling. In the Soviet Union\u2019s history, millions of citizens were forcibly relocated, generally along ethnic lines and often as entire national populations. In the pre-War years it was typically diaspora nationalities\u2014notably Koreans and Poles\u2014who faced mass deportations. But deportations weren\u2019t limited to diaspora, technically non-Union, nationalities. During and after the Great Patriotic War, Union nationalities also faced mass deportations. In 1943-44 nearly one million people in the territory of the Northern Caucasus were collectively accused of treason and deported. Chechens and Ingushetians (496,460), Karachaevs (68,327), Balkirs (37, 406), and other national minorities were crammed into cattle cars and relocated to Kazakhstan and Kirghizstan.[12]<\/a> The paranoia and political violence that characterized much of Stalin\u2019s rule was combined with the nationality policy that had tied ethnic identity to institutional administration and had made national identities more conspicuous. The result: \u201centire villages [and sometimes entire ethnic populations] were deported on the principle of collective responsibility and collective guilt.\u201d[13]<\/a> As such, nationality carried grave importance.<\/p>\n Lovell does well to capture the effects of the Soviet nationality policy in the first three decades of the Union\u2019s existence: \u201cOne of the legacies of indigenization was primordialism: the sense that nations were not recent political constructs but rather had deep roots in a particular homeland, language, and culture. In the 1920s, this meant that dozens of Soviet \u2018nations\u2019 deserved administrative recognition. In the 1930s and 1940s, it meant they deserved mass arrest and deportation.\u201d[14]<\/a><\/p>\n However, Lovell slightly misrepresents the disconnect between the 1920s on one hand and the 1930s and 1940s on the other. There was not a shift in policy from indigenization based on nationality in the 1920s to political violence based on nationality in the 1930s and 1940s; rather, in the 1930s and beyond, the two policies essentially co-existed. Martin describes this succinctly as the \u201csimultaneous pursuit of nation-building and nation-destroying.\u201d[15]<\/a><\/p>\n This helps to explain how the deportations of Chechens, Ingush, and Balkirs, along with the violent suppression of nationalist guerrillas in Ukraine,[16]<\/a> could have happened more or less concurrently with celebrations of nationalism in Estonia. In 1947 the Soviet Union permitted the return of the Estonian Festival of Song and Dance (it had been discontinued during Nazi and then early-Soviet occupation). And although the expressions of Estonian nationalism were highly regulated by Soviet authorities, \u201cthe Soviet language of nationality,\u201d i.e. the nationality policy, \u201c[still] gave Estonians a powerful vehicle for their own national aspirations.\u201d Gathered in the Estonian capital Tallinn, Estonians \u201csang of [their] love for the homeland [rodina<\/em>]\u2026 all within the bounds of Soviet discourse\u2026 [T]he entire audience understood the homeland to be Estonian, and not Soviet, [and thus] the experience was one of overwhelming national solidarity.\u201d[17]<\/a><\/p>\n The terror and ethnic violence of the Stalin era thus did not destroy nationalism by any means; the nation building and nation destroying were happening simultaneously. And so when Stalin died and his successor Nikita Khrushchev ended state-sponsored political violence, the Soviet Union\u2019s nationality policies were still in place. The promotion of nationalities in schools, industry, and political structures had for the most part remained, and the flourishing national cultures hadn\u2019t disappeared either. In fact, nationalism emerged from the Stalin era as a firmly entrenched aspect of Soviet society\u2014a result of the Soviet nationality policy.<\/p>\n The staying power of nationalism vexed post-Stalin Party leadership, which was still dedicated to the Leninist idea of achieving transcendent internationalism through national equality. A 1972 Pravda <\/em>article on the theory behind communist construction and nationality policy urged that with the necessity of devoting energy to overcoming backwardness having \u201clong since passed\u2026 [and with] the former inequality of peoples ha[ving] been eliminated\u2026 the drawing together of nations is increasingly acquiring fundamental importance.\u201d<\/p>\n The article offered a number of possible methods for drawing the nations together including: striving for \u201cthe even fuller equalization of the levels of economic development in the republics\u201d; \u201cthe voluntary learning of the Russian language \u2013 the language of communication between nationalities\u201d; and \u201cincreasing unity through mutual spiritual enrichment and reciprocal exchanges.\u201d However the article, essentially speaking for the Party, still remained dedicated to its promotion of nationalism: \u201cSocialism does not eliminate national special features, it eliminates the social causes that pit one nation against the other. Thanks to this, the national factor in our country is not a barrier that separates peoples.\u201d[18]<\/a><\/p>\n Try as it might to achieve socialist internationalism, it became clear to the Party over the course of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras that \u201cthe original goal of Soviet nationality policy \u2013 to create the conditions for \u2018backward\u2019 nationalities to catch up and ultimately transcend nationalism<\/em> \u2013 was remaining elusive.\u201d Nations were there to stay; nationalism would have to be managed rather than transcended.[19]<\/a><\/p>\n But the fact that nationalism was by then firmly entrenched in Soviet society didn\u2019t mean that there was necessarily largescale conflict between the State and its national minorities. In the reigns of both Khrushchev and Brezhnev the most spectacular displays of nationalism came from outside the Union\u2014in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.[20]<\/a> Within the Union itself there was some agitation by nationalists\u2014Estonians, Crimean Tartars, the ever-irascible Ukrainians\u2014however, these nationalist movements gained very little traction before 1985\u2014certainly not enough to imply that nationalism could in any real sense result in the dissolution of the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n From Stalin\u2019s death until Gorbachev\u2019s attempt to breathe new life into the Union, nationalism existed conspicuously but settled into an uneventful status quo. Sure there were displays of nationalism from some citizens, and occasionally an indigenous leader would be removed from power for failing to keep national expression at an acceptable level, but for the most part \u201cparty functionaries remained loyal to the system that fed them,\u201d and the Union trudged on.[21]<\/a> This was more or less the situation until the mid-1980s. Call it mature socialism or call it stagnation, but either way it was steady. Nationalism was there, but it wasn\u2019t causing any unsolvable problems.<\/p>\n By 8 December 1991, however, the Soviet Union found itself in the following position: three nationalist<\/em> leaders from Ukraine, Belorussia, and Russia were signing the Belavezha Accords, declaring the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States<\/em>. By this time all three Baltic republics had already declared their independence from the Union. How did the Soviet Union arrive at this point in just over half a decade? To answer this question is to understand the tremendous impact of Mikhail Gorbachev\u2019s short tenure as General Secretary\/President of the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n Regarding the unbounded nationalism that was unleashed in the latter half of the 1980s, Lovell locates the cause not in the members of minority nationalities, but in Gorbachev himself: \u201cWhat changed in the mid-80s was not the behaviour of national elites, and still less the behaviour of peoples, but rather that of the leadership in Moscow.\u201d[22]<\/a> With his policies of perestroika<\/em> and glasnost<\/em>, Gorbachev sought to restructure and open the ailing Union. He did just that, opening and restructuring the Soviet Union into fifteen independent countries!<\/p>\n Like Brezhnev and Khrushchev before him, Gorbachev dealt with problems of nationalism among the Union\u2019s diverse populations. But unlike his predecessors Gorbachev did so in a political climate\u2014one of his own creation\u2014that encouraged openness, that encouraged citizens to address the Union\u2019s problems and voice their concerns out loud<\/em>. And so in the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, and the 1986 replacement of a Kazakh Party official with a Russian one, and the 1989 Solidarity movement in Poland, Soviet citizens in Ukraine and Kazakhstan and the Baltics were able to express their nationalistic sentiments. The people in Ukraine seethed over the Soviet system\u2019s continuous disregard for Ukrainian suffering (recall the man-made famine of 1932-33); the people of Kazakhstan rioted in the streets of Alma-Ata; the people in the Baltics created a human chain spanning the three capitals of the republics. Gorbachev could and did respond with force, but it was too late.<\/p>\n Despite having opened the floodgates with regard to nationalism, Gorbachev still naively clung to the idea of socialist internationalism. In a 1988 speech at the Nineteenth All-Union Conference of the Party he said as much: \u201cLife has shown the correctness of the idea laid down in the organization of our great union, that the joining, the unification of efforts permitted every nation and society as a whole to sharply accelerate its movement, to advance to new frontiers of historical progress.\u201d That \u201cidea\u201d was the Leninist nationality policy, and \u201chistorical progress\u201d was internationalism. At the same time, however, he admitted that \u201c[r]ecently we have seen with our own eyes how tangled the problems of internationality relations can become.\u201d<\/p>\n Maintaining full commitment to both<\/em> the Leninist nationality policy and <\/em>the integrity of the Union was by this time an untenable position. Gorbachev could see only one path for the resolution of the Soviet Union\u2019s nationality problems, and believed that it must come from \u201cwithin the framework of the existing structure of the union republic to guarantee maximum consideration of the interests of every nation and national group and of the entire society of Soviet peoples. Any other approach,\u201d he argued, \u201c[was] simply impossible.\u201d[23]<\/a> Tellingly, Gorbachev either couldn\u2019t or didn\u2019t want to see the clear solution to the nationality problem: the dissolution of the Union.<\/p>\n But the Soviet Union\u2019s national groups surely saw it. And the blows came quickly: over the course of 1990-1991, beginning with the Baltics, Soviet republics began asserting their sovereignty within the Union, and later their independence from it. Political elites declared their rights to national independence and the people would follow suit, turning in clear affirmations of independence in overwhelming referendum votes. By the 21 December Alma-Ata Protocol, all of the former Soviet republics had declared themselves independent and affirmed their territorial sovereignty. On 25 December 1991 the Soviet Union officially ceased to exist.<\/p>\n Gone was the Soviet Union, but its impact would persist. The boundaries of the fifteen nations that succeeded the Union were the exact ones drawn by the Union itself, and those have persisted almost exactly to the present.[24]<\/a> For the Baltic republics, it was a return to the boundaries of the past. For many others, however, like the Central Asian countries, these new nations were entirely creations of the Soviet Union; nothing like them had existed before. Indeed as Lovell notes, the Soviet Union \u201chad been a maker, not breaker, of nations.\u201d[25]<\/a><\/p>\n Desiring to transcend nationalism and achieve socialist internationalism, the Soviet Union\u2019s nationality policy, by promoting national and indigenized infrastructure and culture, had in fact laid the groundwork for stronger senses of nationalism that would culminate in the eventual creation of independent nations. As Lovell quips: \u201cThe law of unintended consequences has rarely been so richly illustrated as by the history of Soviet nationalities.\u201d[26]<\/a><\/p>\n It is hard, however, to categorically label the Soviet Union\u2019s nationality policy as a failure. Sure the Union collapsed and proletarian class consciousness failed to usurp national consciousness, but it is hard to put the blame for this solely on the nationality policy. For one, the original nationality policy was obviously corrupted by the state-sponsored violence along national lines that incredibly existed as a companion to the promotion of national consciousness. Also, given that nationalism\u2019s salience derives from capitalistic inequities, the fact that Soviet governance became an elite oligarchical-gerontocracy rather than a proletarian dictatorship (or even a benevolent vanguard) might have something to do with nationalism\u2019s continued salience. Perhaps had the Soviet Union remained more closely to its founding principles, nationalism might have withered away, a communist utopia might have emerged\u2026<\/p>\n But such considerations are obviously ridiculous. And therein lies the difficulty in regarding the Soviet Union: essentially everything can be labelled a failure\u2014because the Soviet Union collapsed\u2014but at the same time one can say that the practical failures all resulted from perversions of the theoretical concept, which if followed correctly<\/em> would, scientifically, rationally, logically, lead to communist utopia.<\/p>\n Perhaps then the best thing to do is to look at Soviet nationality policy as emblematic of communism and the Soviet Union itself, and to keep in mind Lovell\u2019s admonition that \u201cto say that [the Soviet Union (or communism, or Soviet nationality policy)] \u2018failed\u2019 is meaningless: complex societies are not amenable to one-word assessments.\u201d[27]<\/a> In any case, Soviet nationality policy was radical, revolutionary, and appears today to be unparalleled in its impact on Eastern Europe, Asia, and the world. Just like the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n Photo Credit: \u00a0http:\/\/soviethistory.msu.edu\/1991-2\/the-end-of-the-soviet-union\/the-end-of-the-soviet-union-images\/#bwg217\/1044<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Vladimir Lenin, \u201cSpeech at the All-Russian Navy Congress,\u201d 5 December 1917:\u00a0 http:\/\/soviethistory.msu.edu\/1917-2\/the-empire-falls\/the-empire-falls-texts\/speech-at-the-all-russian-navy-congress\/.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 <\/em>(Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2001), 1.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire<\/em>, 4-8.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Vladimir Lenin, \u00ab\u00a0On the Question of the Nationalities or of Autonomization,\u00a0\u00bb 30 December 1922\u00a0: http:\/\/soviethistory.msu.edu\/1921-2\/transcaucasia\/transcaucasia-texts\/lenin-on-nationality-policy\/.<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire<\/em>, 13.<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> P. Rysakov,\u00a0 \u00ab\u00a0Practice of Chauvinism and Local Nationalism,\u00a0\u00bb 1930\u00a0:\u00a0 http:\/\/soviethistory.msu.edu\/1929-2\/making-central-asia-soviet\/making-central-asia-soviet-texts\/practice-of-chauvinism-and-local-nationalism\/ (italics mine).<\/p>\n [7]<\/a> Ibid.; Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire<\/em>, 15. For a stark example of the way that the Soviet Union promoted national identity as a way of trying to transcend nationalism and achieve socialist internationalism see Document 5, which concerns the Jewish autonomous oblast of Birobidzhan, which was created by the Soviet Union in 1934. There, in a national oblast, Jews in the Soviet Union became toilers, perhaps becoming Soviets in the process\u2014as illustrated by the image of the Jewish man standing beneath the Soviet sickle.<\/p>\n [8]<\/a> Stephen Lovell, The Soviet Union: A Very Short Introduction<\/em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 104.<\/p>\n [9]<\/a> \u201cNationalities of the Union and Autonomous Republics of the USSR, According to the Censuses of 1926 and 1937\u201d:\u00a0 http:\/\/soviethistory.msu.edu\/1939-2\/the-lost-census\/the-lost-census-texts\/nationalities-in-1926-and-1937\/.<\/p>\n [10]<\/a> Class handout: \u201cDocument 170\u201d \u2013 NKVD operational order \u2018concerning the punishment of former kulaks, criminals, and other anti-Soviet elements,\u2019 30 July 1937, in The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-39<\/em>, eds. J. Arch Getty and Olga V. Naumov, trans. Benjamin Sher (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 473-480.<\/p>\n [11]<\/a> Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire<\/em>, 326.<\/p>\n [12]<\/a> Lavrentii Beria, \u00ab\u00a0From the Report of L.B. Beria to I.V. Stalin, V.M. Molotov, and A.I. Malenkov\u00a0,\u00bb July 1944\u00a0:\u00a0 http:\/\/soviethistory.msu.edu\/1943-2\/deportation-of-minorities\/deportation-of-minorities-texts\/beria-report-on-the-deportation\/.<\/p>\n [13]<\/a> Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire<\/em>, 327.<\/p>\n [14]<\/a> Lovell, The Soviet Union<\/em>, 104-105.<\/p>\n [15]<\/a> Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire<\/em>, 312.<\/p>\n [16]<\/a> Lavrentii Beria, \u201cReport on the Battle with Guerillas in the Ukraine\u201d 11 August 1945:\u00a0 http:\/\/soviethistory.msu.edu\/1947-2\/ukraine-after-the-war\/ukraine-after-the-war-texts\/beria-report-on-the-guerillas\/.<\/p>\n [17]<\/a> \u201cDays of Our Lives\u201d (1967):\u00a0 http:\/\/soviethistory.msu.edu\/1947-2\/estonia-sings\/days-of-our-lives-1967\/; also see accompanying subject essay: James von Geldern, \u201cEstonia Sings,\u201d Seventeen Moments in Soviet History<\/em>, http:\/\/soviethistory.msu.edu\/1947-2\/estonia-sings\/.<\/p>\n [18]<\/a> E. Bagramov, \u201cQuestions of Theory:\u00a0 The Drawing Together of Nations is a Law of Communist Construction\u201d 22 June 1972:\u00a0 http:\/\/soviethistory.msu.edu\/1980-2\/drawing-together\/drawing-together-texts\/theory-of-soviet-nationalities\/.<\/p>\n [19]<\/a> Lovell, The Soviet Union<\/em>, 107 (italics mine).<\/p>\n [20]<\/a> See Imre Nagy, \u201cRadio Announcement\u201d 4 November 1956:\u00a0 http:\/\/soviethistory.msu.edu\/1956-2\/hungarian-crisis\/hungarian-crisis-texts\/soviet-intervention\/; and Sergei Kovalev, \u201cThe International Obligations of Socialist Countries\u201d 25 September 1968:\u00a0 http:\/\/soviethistory.msu.edu\/1968-2\/crisis-in-czechoslovakia\/crisis-in-czechoslovakia-texts\/brezhnev-doctrine\/.<\/p>\n [21]<\/a> Lovell, The Soviet Union<\/em>, 111.<\/p>\n [22]<\/a> Lovell, The Soviet Union<\/em>, 112.<\/p>\n [23]<\/a> Mikhail Gorbachev, \u201cReport of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party at the Nineteenth All-Union Conference of the Communist Party\u201d 29 June 1988:\u00a0 http:\/\/soviethistory.msu.edu\/1985-2\/gorbachev-and-nationalism\/gorbachev-and-nationalism-texts\/gorbachev-on-relations-between-nationalities\/.<\/p>\n [24]<\/a> The major exception being Crimea, which was gifted to Ukraine in 1954, but then occupied by Russia in the recent years.\u00a0 See Pravda <\/em>27 February 1954, pg. 1:\u00a0 http:\/\/soviethistory.msu.edu\/1954-2\/the-gift-of-crimea\/the-gift-of-crimea-texts\/transfer-of-crimea\/<\/p>\n [25]<\/a> Lovell, The Soviet Union<\/em>, 116.<\/p>\n [26]<\/a> Lovell, The Soviet Union<\/em>, 116.<\/p>\n [27]<\/a> Lovell, The Soviet Union<\/em>, 142 (parenthetical implication mine).<\/p>\n Matthew Gauthier is a junior majoring in History at Miami. \u00a0This essay was his final paper for HST 375, A History of the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Matthew Gauthier Photo: \u00a0Belovezhskaia pushcha (1991). Soviet nationality policy is a perfect microcosm for the history of the Soviet Union itself. The original policy was created by Lenin and Stalin, and was as unique as it was radical. It … Continue reading