Accidental National Identity

DEBATE

Stalin’s populism and the accidental creation of Russian nationalidentity

David Brandenberger∗

University of Richmond – History, Richmond, VA, USA

(Received 8 October 2009; final version received 16 December 2009)

This article argues that the formation of a mass sense of Russian national identity was arecent, contingent event that first began to take shape under Stalin. Surveying the newliterature on Russian nationalism, it contends that elite expressions of “Russianness”and bureaucratic proclamations of “official nationality” or russification should not beconflated with the advent of a truly mass sense of grassroots identity. Borrowingfrom an array of theorists, it argues that such a sense of identity only becomespossible after the establishment of necessary social institutions – universalschooling, a modern army, etc. Inasmuch as these institutions come into being onlyafter the formation of the Soviet Union, this article focuses on how a mass sense ofRussian national identity began to form under a rapid and unpredictable series ofideological shifts that occurred during the Stalinist 1930s and 1940s. This article’smajor contribution is its description of this development as not only contingent, butaccidental. Drawing a clear line between russocentric propaganda and full-blownRussian nationalism, it argues that the ideological initiatives that precipitated massidentity formation in the USSR were populist rather than nationalist. In this sense,Stalinism has much more in common with Peronism than it does with truly nationalregimes.

Keywords: Russia; USSR; Stalin; populism; nationalism

Ronald Grigor Suny’s book The Revenge of the Past is known for the elegant argument

that Soviet attempts to domesticate the forces of nationalism after 1917 actually led to

the consolidation of dozens of new nations and the collapse of the USSR. Within each

of these new national traditions, it is often possible to identify members of the creative

and political elite responsible for aspects of this nation-building (e.g. Allworth). The

Russians are no exception in this regard, as recent books by Yitzhak Brudny and

Nikolai Mitrokhin make abundantly clear.1

While Brudny and Mitrokhin are correct to trace the emergence of Russian-looking

institutions and incipient nationalist organizations to the decades following the death of

Stalin, neither spends much time on the preceding era, which presumably set the stage

for the emergence of increasingly full-fledged nationalism. This article investigates the

dynamics between 1917 and 1953 that ultimately gave rise to a social milieu capable of

producing articulate Russian nationalists. It dovetails with Suny’s analysis of the non-

Russian nationalities to argue that the formation of modern Russian national identity

should be considered in large part the product of a historical accident. While this would

ISSN 0090-5992 print/ISSN 1465-3923 online

# 2010 Association for the Study of Nationalities

DOI: 10.1080/00905992.2010.498464

http://www.informaworld.com

∗Email: [email protected]

Nationalities Papers

Vol. 38, No. 5, September 2010, 723–739

not be a controversial claim to make in regard to the modern Azeri or Turkmen nations,

this article contends that the emergence of modern Russian national identity in its

present form was by no means inevitable and was just as much a result of historical

contingency and the Soviet experience as the other republican cultures of the USSR.

Discussions of Russian national identity tend to locate its origins in the nineteenth

century. Historically, some commentators have focused on ideology and russification2

– work that has been recently complemented by new research on imperial nationality

policy in central institutions,3 the western borderlands and Poland,4 Ukraine,5 Siberia,6

and the Volga and North Caucasus regions.7 Others have examined the role of institutions

such as the Russian Orthodox Church and the military.8 Still other have offered expla-

nations pivoting on the role of the intelligentsia and educated classes, locating reflections

of an emergent sense of Russian national identity in the period’s debates,9 press,10 art,11

public culture and civic organizations.12 It is important to remember, however, that

such articulate notions of group identity found little reflection in Russian society as a

whole outside of the small urban educated elite. Marginally literate if educated at all,

vast stretches of the empire’s Russian-speaking population simply could not imagine a

larger political community than that defined by their provincial economic, cultural, and

kinship associations. In other words, the process Eugen Weber has described that trans-

formed peasants into Frenchmen during the nineteenth century was just barely underway

in the Russian-speaking lands of Eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century

(Weber; also Jelavich; Boyd).

What can account for this absence of an articulate sense of national identity? In part,

what seems to have been lacking among most Russians under the old regime was a com-

monly-held awareness of a long, glorious history, replete with a pantheon of semi-mythi-

cal patriots whose heroism had advanced the national cause (Smith 213). It was such

claims of primordial pedigree, according to Benedict Anderson, that mobilized “the

new imagined communities” of Europe through print media and mass education during

the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tales of ruling dynasties, epic struggles

and battlefield victories dominated these new national histories, the creation and popular-

ization of which was a central aspect of the consolidation of nations throughout Europe

(Anderson 109–10, 11). In Russia, however, a lack of agreement within elites about

what it meant to be Russian and disdain on the part of the tsarist regime for nationalism

of any stripe (particularly via print media and public education)13 prevented the coalescing

of a similarly coherent, consistent and articulate sense of national identity on the popular

level.14 Instead, group identity among Russians during the nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries was more or less coherent only on the regional level. As one scholar has put it,

the average peasant at the turn of the century “had little sense of ‘Russianness.’ He thought

of himself, not as a ‘Russkii,’ but as a ‘Viatskii’ or as a ‘Tulskii’ – that is, a native of

Viatka or Tula province.”15 Such understandings persisted even after peasants left their

villages to join the ranks of the nascent urban working class (Johnson).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a lack of national patriotic sentiments among the population

dovetailed with this underdeveloped and inconsistent sense of national identity. Provincial

Russia offered little to counteract this state of affairs – it was a society with few insti-

tutions, where authority was more often associated with specific personalities than with

the offices they held. For a variety of reasons, neither the public schools (to the extent

to which they even existed) nor the tsarist court made any concerted effort to alter the situ-

ation.16 Even the army relied on banal and simplistic forms of sloganeering (referred to in

Russian as shapkozakidatel’stvo) in order to maintain morale within the ranks. Although it

should be acknowledged that after the start of the First World War, the tsarist state did

724 D. Brandenberger

make some attempt to develop a more concrete and coherent notion of what it meant to be

Russian, too little effort was invested too late to have a tangible effect.17 As a result, nega-

tive caricatures of the German enemy did more to unite the empire than the clumsy nativist

patriotic slogans that were hastily disseminated between 1914 and 1917 (Jahn).

A decade later, little had changed, despite the intervening imperial collapse, revolu-

tion, civil war, and first phases of Soviet state building. Ethnographers associated with

the first Soviet census during the mid-1920s are known to have looked in vain for evidence

of an articulate sense of a Russian national community.18 Instead, when the archival record

reveals moments of ethnic self-awareness among ordinary Russians, these sentiments tend

to be vague and focus on negative characterizations of non-Russian ethnic groups rather

than on positive descriptions of themselves.19

Of course, if there had been only a weak and inconsistently-felt sense of national iden-

tity under the ancien regime, the fact that little changed following the revolution should

come as no surprise. National identity formation is not a spontaneous or inevitable

process; what’s more, the early Soviet regime’s commitment to proletarian international-

ism led the Bolsheviks to actively discourage the coalescing of a mass sense of Russian

national identity during the first 15 years of the Soviet “experiment.” As is well known,

Soviet authorities were relentless in their emphasis of the primacy of class consciousness

over national consciousness. Even after the inauguration of Stalin’s “Socialism in One

Country” thesis in the mid-1920s, Soviet propagandists continued to view class as a

more fundamental and decisive social category than other paradigms drawn along

ethnic or national indexes. Indeed, nationalism was viewed as a sentiment that threatened

to distract the “laboring masses” from more “natural” affiliations organized along class

lines. Russian nationalism in particular was seen as enough of a threat to the early

Soviet republic that positive appraisals of Russianness during the 1920s were condemned

as jingoism and “Great Power chauvinism” reminiscent of the tsarist-era (Martin, Affirma-

tive Action Empire 156–59, 388–89; Simon 83–91; Kohn, “Soviet Communism and

Nationalism” 65). Non-Russian nationalism was also discouraged during this time, with

the persecution of “bourgeois nationalists” in republican areas being complemented by

an ambitious “korenizatsiia” program designed to advance local cadres and develop

non-Russian cultures within the context of Soviet socialism. It was hoped that state-spon-

sored upward mobility and cultural development would defuse nationalist and separatist

sentiments on the periphery and foster new traditions that would be “national in form,

socialist in content.”

Much of this changed toward the end of the 1920s, when turbulence and social unrest –

particularly in the aftermath of the 1927 war scare – led Soviet ideologists to look with

increasing urgency for a way to complement the party’s arcane, materialist propaganda

with slogans that would be more understandable and compelling to the average Soviet

citizen. Realizing that the existing line was too abstract and bloodless to effectively

rally their poorly educated population,20 Stalin and his colleagues began to look for a

more pragmatic alternative that would focus on the celebration of individual heroes and

the rather questionably Marxist notion of “Soviet patriotism.” This attempt to court

public opinion is at first glance paradoxical in light of the regime’s infamously reckless

and cruel “revolution from above” during these years – shock industrialization, “specialist

baiting” [spetseedstvo], forced collectivization, dekulakization and cultural revolution.

Nevertheless, these two seemingly incompatible trends functioned as carrot and stick

within Soviet mobilizational efforts, attempting to drive the society forward during the

late 1920s and early 1930s by hook and by crook.

Nationalities Papers 725

The origins of the new emphasis on accessible propaganda date to 1928, when Maksim

Gor’kii and others concerned with societal mobilization began to argue that everyday

heroes could be used to popularize the nascent patriotic line “by example.” In marked

contrast to the regime’s focus on proletarian internationalism and anonymous social

forces during the 1920s, this new stress on popular heroism led to the rise of what was

essentially a new genre of agitational literature. Prominent projects like Gor’kii’s multi-

volume History of Plants and Factories and The History of the Civil War in the USSR

began to assemble a new pantheon of Soviet heroes, socialist myths, and modern-day

fables. This “search for a usable past” not only focused on shock workers in industry

and agriculture, but it also lavished attention on prominent Old Bolshevik revolutionaries,

industrial planners, party leaders, komsomol officials, comintern activists, Red Army

heroes, non-Russians from the republican party organizations, and even famous

members of the secret police (Brandenberger, National Bolshevism 27–42). A.S. Enu-

kidze, G.I. Piatakov, A.I. Rykov, A.V. Kosarev, A.E. Egorov, M.N. Tukhachevskii,

F. Khodzhaev and Ia. Peters quickly became household names. This stress on everyday

“heroism” took center stage at the first conference of the Soviet Writers’ Union in

193421 right after the Seventeenth Party Congress “of Victors” hailed the successful com-

pletion of the first phase of industrialization and collectivization. Now, mobilizational pro-

paganda was apparently supposed to supplant the coercion of the first Five-Year Plan and a

massive array of new literature was commissioned to develop and expand upon the new

Soviet Olympus and its pantheon of contemporary heroes. Virtually silent on the issue

of Russianness (with the exception of attention cast toward nineteenth century “radical

democrats” such as A.S. Pushkin, N.G. Chernyshevskii and N.A. Dobroliubov), this pro-

paganda promoted a line that might anachronistically be called “multiculturalist,” insofar

as it devoted considerable effort to popularizing a diverse variety of non-Russian party

members and labor heroes whose valor was distinctly national while also conforming to

the reigning socialist precepts of the day.22 This contemporary focus was complemented

by the creation of new historical narratives for the various Soviet nationalities as well.

These popular histories publicized regional uprisings against tsarist colonialism (e.g.

movements under Imam Shamil and Amangel’dy Imanov) and grouped them together

with better-known peasant rebellions led by Pugachev and Razin. Worker unrest in

Baku and Tiflis in the 1890s was likewise described as part of the same revolutionary

tradition as the street fighting and barricades that paralyzed St. Petersburg and Moscow

in 1905. Ultimately, Soviet mass culture, circa 1935, was characterized by a colorful

and complex pageantry revolving around Soviet socialism and the “Friendship of the

Peoples.” Accessible, heroic tales from the recent (and not so recent) past served to

provide a common narrative that the entire society would be able to relate to – a patriotic

rallying call with greater social application than the previous decade’s narrow and imper-

sonal focus on materialism and class.

Central to this argument is the populist nature of this new line. Although populism is

difficult to define in the abstract23 and is often associated with agrarian politics in practice,24

it also describes top-down political campaigning designed to mobilize society on the mass

level through the co-option of grassroots beliefs and values. The latter definition effectively

describes Stalinist propaganda between the early-to-mid 1930s and 1953, inviting compari-

sons with the “authoritarian populism” of Argentina’s Juan Peron (1943–1952), Chile’s

Carlos Ibanez del Campo (1927–1931), Brazil’s Getulio Vargas (1930–1945), Cuba’s

Fulgencio Batista (1937–1940), Peru’s Juan Velasco Alvareda (1968–1975) and

Paraguay’s Alfredo Stroessner (1954–1989) (Dix; Malloy; Sondrol; etc). In each case, a

charismatic leader presided over a developing but divided society by appealing for


popular unity against internal and external enemies. Remedies for poverty and poor living

conditions were promised, to be realized at the expense of poorly-defined corruption and

“vested interests” rather than through more systemic reform. Symbols and rhetoric deployed

in support of this agenda focused not only on enemies of the people and the promise of a

better life, but the shared history of “blood and soil” that harkened back to a semi-mythic

golden age of unity and prosperity (Dix; Canovan 136–71). Of course, for all these

leaders’ talk about nation, national origins and national unity, they were not genuine nation-

alists, inasmuch as they believed in dictatorial power from above rather than self-determi-

nation from below.25

Although sometimes referred to as an ideology, such populism is probably better

thought of as a mode of mobilizational agitation – a conclusion which simplifies the com-

parison of Stalin-era populism to that advanced by a number of South American dictators

during the twentieth century (Horowitz; Merkl 114–35). Indeed, the fact that populism in

Argentina coexisted harmoniously with other seemingly-incompatible ideological pre-

cepts (e.g. the defense of oligarchic privilege and elite business interests) illustrates

how Stalin could use populist appeals alongside a more orthodox Marxist-Leninist line

based on class analysis and proletarian internationalism (Horowitz). And as was the

case with Argentina under Peron, Soviet society responded well to Stalin’s deployment

of populist sloganeering oriented around the friendship of the peoples and a shared

history of heroism, valor and virtue (Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis chap. 6).

No sooner had this new populist propaganda begun to enjoy success in Soviet society

than it was hamstrung by the Great Terror between 1936 and 1938. What had previously

been support for non-Russian ethnic self-expression translated during these years into sus-

picion and charges of “bourgeois nationalism”26 at roughly the same time that Enukidze,

Piatakov, Rykov, Kosarev, Egorov, Tukhachevskii and other members of the new Soviet

Olympus were consumed by the on-going purges. It is also at this time, interestingly

enough, that the press’ regular condemnation of “great-power chauvinism” quietly gave

way to a gradual and halting rehabilitation of myths, legends and iconography drawn

from the Russian national past. New names – from Aleksandr Nevskii and Peter the

Great to Aleksandr Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov – joined the now-sparse official

pantheon of heroes, replacing famous personalities from the Soviet past who had fallen

victim to the Terror. By 1938, this celebration of things Russian was even beginning to

refer to the Russian people as primus inter pares – the most historic, heroic and revolu-

tionary of the peoples of the USSR (Volin, “Velikii ruskii narod”).

This prewar shift towards the prerevolutionary Russian “usable past” was intensified

further during the opening weeks of the German Soviet war in 1941 as Soviet ideologists

struggled to mobilize their society for war by any means possible. True, party propagan-

dists made other pragmatic concessions as well in regard to the church, non-Russian self-

expression and the new alliance with capitalist powers abroad, but all of these gestures

paled in comparison to the huge amount of resources devoted to the Russian national

past. What’s more, tentative efforts between 1938 and 1941 to venerate not only

Russian historical figures, but the Russian people itself, also matured into a major

wartime theme.27 Ultimately, this celebration of Russian war heroes of the past and

present not only set up Stalin’s famous 1945 toast to the Russian people, but the xenopho-

bic excesses that followed during the mid-to-late 1940s and early 1950s.

The intentions behind this about-face in Soviet propaganda have been widely debated

since Nicholas Timasheff termed it one aspect of the era’s Great Retreat in 1947. Some

have linked the phenomenon to nationalist sympathies within the party hierarchy,28

eroding prospects for world revolution,29 and the Stalinist elite’s revision of Marxist


principles.30 Others associate the transformation with increasing threats from the outside

world (especially Hitler’s rise to power in 1933),31 the emergence of domestic etatism,32

the triumph of administrative pragmatism over revolutionary utopianism33 and the evol-

ution of Soviet nationality policy.34 Still others tend to contextualize the changes under-

way as symptomatic of larger ideological dynamics,35 while yet another school of

thought considers the phenomenon to be little more than a short-term exigency of

war.36 Recently, Veljko Vujacic has returned Stalin to center stage in order to argue

that the general secretary aspired to cultivate no less than a new Soviet-Russian identity

over the course of his reign, combining his affection for the Russian working class with

Marxism-Leninism’s principle of proletarian class consciousness. In order to do this,

Stalin apparently not only advanced a newly hybridized identity, but aggressively

destroyed the remaining vestiges of Old Russia as well.37 An original interpretation, it

suffers from the lack of a proverbial “smoking gun” in the form of archival documentation.

Unable to conclusively demonstrate the existence of a consistent party line on Russian pro-

letarian identity stretching from the 1920s through to the 1950s, Vujacic assembles a cir-

cumstantial case based on a motley assortment of public speeches, policy decisions and

institutional developments. The end result is an interesting but artificially linear and over-

determined argument that meshes poorly with the established contours of Stalin-era ideo-

logical and cultural politics. Even more problematically, this interpretation fails to explain

major aspects of the party’s rehabilitation of Russianness during the mid-1930s and 1940s,

particularly the massive emphasis placed on non-proletarian elements of the Russian

national past.

Perhaps the only interpretation capable of accounting for all of the turnabouts in

regime propaganda during the 1930s contextualizes them within a newly populist ideology

that prioritized societal mobilization for industrialization and war above all else.38 Two

points are worth noting in regard to this emergent sense of “national Bolshevism.”

First, the deployment of Russian symbols and iconography was far from inevitable and

should be seen as a by-product of historical contingency stemming from the failure of

more thoroughly “Soviet” propaganda during the purges. Second, even pervasive russo-

centrism after 1937 should not be confused with official support for Russian state- or

nation-building, inasmuch as state- and nation-building required a degree of institutional,

political and cultural autonomy that the Bolsheviks never had any intention of extending.

Instead, Stalin-era russocentrism should be regarded as instrumental and populist in

design – gestures designed to mobilize rather than enfranchise. Noticeably absent,

after all, was the creation of an independent institutional identity for the Russian Soviet

Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) that was separate from that of the USSR as a

whole. That is to say that russocentrism after 1937 did not redress a profound institutional

imbalance that lay at the heart of the Soviet system. As is widely known, the RSFSR was

originally incorporated into the USSR without the bureaucratic institutions established

elsewhere in the Ukraine, the Transcaucasus or the other union republics. This denial of

a separate party organization, central committee, academy of sciences, etc. had been a

deliberate strategy to limit Russian influence in Soviet society during the early 1920s.39

Tellingly, this imbalance was retained after 1937 despite official paens to the Russian

people as “the first among equals.”40

This discouragement of state-building was mirrored in the party’s stance on Russian

nation-building. Although a vast array of heroes, legends and myths associated with the

Russian national past were revived after 1937, these efforts were selective and cautious,

being designed to reflect upon the Soviet present rather than to encourage independent his-

torical inquiry into the past. Tsarist centralization and empire-building were styled as


necessary precursors to Soviet state-building, while leaders from Ivan the Terrible to Peter

the Great were used to implicitly legitimate the party’s preference for charismatic one-man

rule. Age-old anxieties served to inform the new concerns of the 1930s, whether through

the Oprichnina’s “just” suppression of internal enemies or Aleksandr Nevskii’s epic

struggle with German Teutonic invaders. Prerevolutionary triumphs on the battlefield,

as well as in science and the arts, served as a pedigree for Soviet-era commanders,

artists and thinkers. Pushkin’s use of literary realism and his refusal to be restrained by

convention was even held to anticipate the advent of Socialist Realism. According to

the paradigm that apparently governed this revisionism, the rehabilitation of historic indi-

viduals, reputations and accomplishments was governed by their ability to illustrate,

explain and justify contemporary aspects of Soviet life without allowing for the creation

of an independent, free-standing alternative to the official line.

This quixotic relationship with the Russian national past is best understood as a func-

tion of Stalin’s peculiar regard for the Russian people as a whole. Although famous for his

valorization of the Russian people, Stalin was not a Russian nationalist and had historically

opposed all efforts to promote Russian self-rule. As Terry Martin has put it, Stalin viewed

the Russian nation as a “state-bearing people,” the backbone of the Soviet Union’s multi-

ethnic society.41 Known for their “revolutionary sweep of the hand,” the Russians were

drafted to serve quite literally as the “first among equals,” the “elder brother” within the

Soviet family of nations. Their culture, history and demographic strength were to reinforce

the authority and legitimacy of the Soviet state. As A.N. Poskrebyshev put it in Pravda

after the war, Russians in the USSR were the society’s “cementing force, strengthening

the friendship of the peoples.” Only this explanation can account for why even at the

height of postwar russocentrism, the regime had little patience for anything reminiscent

of Russian state- or nation-building.

Ultimately, then, Stalin was an authoritarian populist rather than a nationalist and

exploited russocentric imagery and rhetoric in order to mobilize Russian speakers to

serve all-union interests. Geoffrey Hosking questions how effective this bid really was,

noting that any positive influence on public opinion was likely tempered by the USSR’s

continuing persecution of village culture and the Russian Orthodox Church during these

years (Hosking, Rulers and Victims 188, 157, 180–187). Vujacic agrees, contending

that “the mass terror of the Stalinist period and the collectivization of the Russian peasan-

try opened an unbridgeable chasm between the Soviet state and the Russian nation” (178).

But as logical as these assumptions may seem, they are contradicted by a recent investi-

gation of the popular reception of Stalin’s russocentric populism that suggests that the

new line resonated quite well – well enough to function as something of a modus

vivendi between the Stalin-era state and Russian-speaking society.42

This is not to say, however, that Stalin’s populist attempt to co-opt the Russian national

past without encouraging Russian nation- and state-building translated perfectly from

theory into practice. Indeed, Russian speakers appear to have assimilated the general

secretary’s national Bolshevism in rather peculiar ways. In particular, although Russians

generally grasped and internalized the most familiar, epic dimensions of the official line

(Pushkin, Peter and other personality cults; their status as “first among equals”), they

often failed to appreciate its more arcane and elusive “Soviet” elements (historical mate-

rialism; class consciousness; the “friendship of the peoples;” etc.). Letters, diaries, secret

police reports and postwar interviews reveal that many Russian speakers actively distin-

guished between the two, thinking about their national past and its heroes and iconography

separately from more conventional Soviet values (Brandenberger, National Bolshevism).

One was familiar, accessible and appealing, while the other was schematic, bloodless and


impersonal. One stirred up emotions of pride and belonging; the other only duty and

obedience.

This idiosyncratic reception of the official line should really come as no surprise, inas-

much as audiences rarely accept ideological pronouncements wholesale, tending instead to

simplify, essentialize, and misunderstand the content of official communiques in ways that

are sometimes difficult to anticipate. Such dynamics make the analysis of popular recep-

tion an essential dimension of any study of propaganda and ideology in the modern world.

In this case, Russians’ selective consumption of national Bolshevik rhetoric and imagery

during the Stalin era meant that by 1953, they were in possession of a much more coherent

and articulate sense of who they were as Russians than they had enjoyed in the years before

1937. Put another way, the party’s attempt to reinforce popular loyalty to the Soviet regime

through the selective co-option of Russian myths, legends and iconography resulted in

something Stalin never anticipated: the formation of a sense of Russian national

consciousness quite independent of Soviet socialist trappings. As such, although the emer-

gence of this sense of national identity is tied to one of the greatest propaganda campaigns

of the mid-twentieth century, it should also be regarded as an unintentional and even acci-

dental by-product of the general secretary’s populist flirtation with the mobilizational

potential of the Russian national past.

Notes

1. Considerably less reliable are the memoirs of one of Suslov’s former aides: Baigushev, Russkaiapartiia.

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

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

4. See Weeks, Nation and State; Weeks, “Religion and Russification;” Rodkiewicz, Russian Nation-ality 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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


13. 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 ofa single mass sense of Russian national identity out of the fear that popularizing an ethnicallybased 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.

14. Of course, this lack of universal public schooling did not mean that the peasantry and nascentworking class were completely unaware of Russian state history. Ethnographic material col-lected by the Russian Geographic Society and other nineteenth-century organizations revealsthat ordinary people displayed a surprising variety of opinion regarding historical events andpersonalities, 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 awarenessof historical events and personalities should not be mistaken for a coherent sense of nationalidentity on the popular level during the nineteenth century. Given the wide variation in historicalfolklore from region to region, it would be rather hasty to assume that such notions might con-tribute to a single, widely held sense of national identity during the nineteenth century. Conflict-ing impressions of heroes, imagery, and symbols, after all, divide rather than unite, denying oldregime Russia the sense of a common heritage that is so critical to the possession of a mass socialidentity. See Buganov, Russkaia istoiriia.

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

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

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

18. Hirsch, “Soviet Union as a Work-in-Progress” 259; Hirsch, “Empire of Nations” 87–88.19. 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; Hoff-mann, Peasant Metropolis 124–25; Rozhkov, “Internatsional durakov” 60.

20. Evidence of this can be found in Stalin’s 1934 critique of Comintern propaganda as excessivelyschematic and arcane. According to Georgi Dimitrov, Stalin denounced the materialist approachwith the comment that “people do not like Marxist analysis, big phrases and generalized state-ments. This is one more of the inheritances from Zinoviev’s time.” Anecdotal evidence verifiesStalin’s appraisal – for a former political officer’s commentary on the difficulties of basing agi-tational work on unadulterated historical materialism, see Lenin Schools, 5; for Stalin’s com-mentary, see the April 7, 1934, entry in Dimitrov, Dnevnik, 101.

21. 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 individualactors in the classic Marxist understanding of historical materialism, Stalin identified a promi-nent role for decisive leaders aware of the possibilities and limitations of their historical contextsin 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, “Marksists-koe uchenie.” M. Gor’kii and A. N. Tolstoi, among others, led the new interest in heroes with thesupport of A. A. Zhdanov. See Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s”ezd 8, 17, 417–19, 4.

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

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

24. Traditionally, discussion of populism in the Russian context is almost always limited to the nine-teenth 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.

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

26. This was first noticed by Mensheviks watching the purges from Parisian exile—see Sh., “Vraz-heskie gnezda;” 24; Sh., “Razgrom natsional’nykh respublik,” 16. For more modern analysis onthis turnabout, see Szporluk, “Nationalities” 30–31.

27. Deployment of such mobilizational rhetoric against the backdrop of Stalin’s draconian prosecu-tion of the war makes it clear that he was acting as an authoritarian populist rather than anationalist.

28. 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.

29. Mehnert, Weltrevolution durch Weltgeschichte 11, 72–73.30. Szporluk, “History and Russian Ethnocentrism” 44–45; Szporluk, Communism and National-

ism, esp. 219–20; Pospelovsky, “Ethnocentrism” 127; Glazov, “Stalin’s Legacy” 93–99;Rees, “Stalin and Russian Nationalism” 77, 97, 101–03.

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

32. Black, “History and Politics” 24–25; Shteppa, Soviet Historians 124, 134–35; Agurskii, Ideo-logiia 140–42; Agursky, “Prospects” 90; Lewin, Making of the Soviet System 272–79; Hellerand Nekrich, Utopia in Power 269; Seton Watson, “Russian Nationalism” 25–28; Besancon,“Nationalism and Bolshevism” 4; Simon, Nationalismus 172–73; Tucker, Stalin in Power50–58, 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, “Natsio-nal’naia politika.”

33. 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.”

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

35. See, for instance, Hoffmann, Stalinist Values; Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, esp. 357.36. 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.

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

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

39. The original architecture of the USSR attempted to hamstring Russians’ ability to advance theirown sectarian interests by denying the RSFSR a republican-level communist party and stateinstitutions. Such administrative structures, it was feared, would endow the RSFSR with toomuch influence and create the potential for a standoff between the Russian republic and theall-union center.

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


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

42. Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, chaps. 6, 10, 14. This analysis of Russian speakers doesnot attempt to speculate on how the non-Russian peoples responded to the russocentric populism– a subject worth its own separate, empirical investigation.

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