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BOOK REVIEW: May, 2002
BOOK TITLE: The Affirmative Action Empire Nations and Nationalism
in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939
AUTHOR: Terry Martin, Harvard University
REVIEWER: Professor Raymond Pearson
University of Ulster, R.Pearson@ulster.ac.uk
PUBLISHER: Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001
ISBN: 0-8014-3813-6 (cloth)/0-8014-8677-7 (paper)
pp.xvii + 496. $55.00/$27.50
WEBSITE: The Institute of Historical Research (IHR)
London, UK
BOOK REVIEW BY PROFESSOR RAYMOND PEARSON--------------
The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet
Union, 1923-1939, by Terry Martin
Weighing in at over five hundred pages, this formidable work of scholarship
investigates the fifteen-year evolution of the Soviet Union's strategy
towards its multi-ethnic jurisdiction from the 'Lenin Constitution' of 1923
through to the consolidation of the 'Stalin Constitution' of 1936. The
touchstone of such a complex and convoluted topic is the principle of what
is now termed 'affirmative action': received wisdom holds that the Soviet
Union adopted 'korenizatsiia' or 'indigenisation' in the 1920s as "a
prophylactic policy designed to defuse and prevent the development of
nationalism" (p. 126) by simultaneously favouring the minority non-Russian
nationalities and penalising the majority Russian nation. In the course of
the 1930s, however, affirmative action was abandoned and then reversed,
initially as a 'Great Retreat' and most calamitously in a 'Great Terror'
which reasserted Russian dominance and victimised the previously-privileged
non-Russians to create a covert 'Russian Empire' legitimised by the
meretricious doctrine of the 'Friendship of Peoples'.
Following an extended introductory chapter, the main text is divided into
three unequal but comparable sections: Part One, accommodating Chapters 2 to
5, is entitled 'Implementing the Affirmative Action Empire' and broadly
covers the period from 1923 to 1932; comprising Chapters 6 and 7, Part Two
focuses on the crossroads of the early 1930s under the title 'The Political
Crisis of the Affirmative Action Empire'; and under the heading of 'Revising
the Affirmative Action Empire', Chapters 8 to 11 (constituting Part Three)
consider the years 1933 to 1939. Within the overall chronological structure,
individual chapters are generally thematic in approach without departing
from an essentially narrative treatment.
Handsomely produced by Cornell University Press, the volume provides
extensive references (which appear as footnotes on each text-page to
facilitate inspection by the conscientious scholar), some 46 tables
conveniently integrated into the text, four maps to illustrate geopolitical
shifts between 1922 to 1939, a useful - not to say essential - glossary, a
comprehensive and up-to-date bibliography of primary and secondary sources,
and an exhaustive index. Symbolising Martin's overall theme, the book cover
incorporates a 1935 propaganda photograph of an unctuous Stalin publicising
his newly-adopted 'Friendship of Peoples' slogan. Although apparently an
unreconstructed version of Martin's doctoral thesis for the University of
Chicago, making few discernible concessions to accessibility for a
non-specialist readership, The Affirmative Action Empire represents a
publisher's model of how to present an unapologetically academic treatise.
The professional virtues of the exposition are self-evident. While never
ignoring the historiographical context of secondary sources, The Affirmative
Action Empire is overwhelmingly a product of archive-based research.
Martin's positively Herculean labours in six historical archives in Moscow
and another two in Ukraine have been rewarded with a rich and abundant
harvest of hitherto-inaccessible primary documentation. To complain that
such a detailed investigation of so sensitive a topic by a Westerner was
unthinkable in the Soviet era does not detract from Martin's remarkable
achievement: the opportunities for Western penetration and exploitation of
the Soviet archives offered in the post-Soviet 1990s have been seized by
Martin with prodigious determination, enterprise and solid graft.
The first purpose of the study is to investigate the impact of
'korenizatsiia' over the 1920s and 1930s. What is immediately striking is
the sheer sweep of geopolitical discussion, comparing the application of
central strategy towards the 'national question' from the western to the
eastern extremities of the Soviet Union. Martin demonstrates how the diverse
societal circumstances of nations and nationalities in the more
sophisticated West and the less developed East (later to be dubbed the
'Soviet Raj') meant that 'affirmative action' by All-Soviet authority
bifurcated, settling for divergent objectives and disparate results across
an 'empire' which encompassed extravagant ethnic variety. Recognising that
the Soviet Union was far from being ethnically homogeneous, official
national strategy could not be as administratively monolithic or as
politically totalitarian as portrayed in Western historiography.
Martin's second preoccupation is to monitor and explain the dynamic of
change in the operation of 'korenizatsiia'. The study suggests that Soviet
nationalities policy was more multi-factorial than has been commonly
represented, typically precipitated by a fluctuating combination of internal
and external components. Simplistically expressed, Leninist strategy was
designed to avoid antagonising the still-potent force of separatist
nationalism by the intemperate imposition of state socialism, instead opting
to handicap the instinctive 'chauvinism' of the majority Russian population
and foster lasting goodwill among the non-Russians by institutionalised
'affirmative action' on their behalf. 'Korenizatsiia' was intended to
'indigenise' Soviet power through mass recruitment of local non-Russians as
cadres within the Communist Party, extending and deepening Soviet authority
within a state-sponsored political climate of respect for non-Russian
national identity and culture.
But Martin also asserts that a hitherto-undervalued element in determining
tactics towards the nationalities was geopolitical location: non-Russian
nations that straddled the Soviet frontier were crucial in the elaboration
of overall policy. Following the 'Piedmont Principle', conspicuous
benevolence towards nations within the Soviet Union was intended to furnish
supra-national window-dressing to co-nationals outside Soviet jurisdiction,
simultaneously facilitating future national unification and the expansion of
the Soviet Union. As nationalism was press-ganged into the service of
socialism, the interests of non-Russian nationalists and the Soviet Union
were - for the time being - expected to coincide. As a consequence, Ukraine
(as the largest non-Russian Soviet republic) was especially generously
treated in the 1920s, in the propagandist hope of recommending Soviet-style
socialism to the Ukrainian minority of Poland with a view to opportunist
Soviet encroachment westward.
By the early 1930s, however, both the internal and external rationales for
'positive discrimination' had been irremediably undermined. Most
non-Russians had their appetities whetted rather than slaked by 'affirmative
action' while 'korenizatsiia' showed every sign of exacerbating inter-ethnic
violence to the point of endangering the territorial integrity of the Soviet
Union. At the same time, the Russians mightily resented the
institutionalised and artificial 'reverse discrimination', which benefited
non-Russians who were increasingly condemned as ungrateful, extortionate and
manipulative. Meanwhile, on the western borderlands, front-line Ukraine,
Belorussia, Moldavia and Karelia were now considered vulnerable to Western
aggrandisement and the exploitative 'Piedmont Principle' was perceived as
backfiring on the Soviet Union.
The affirmative action of the 1920s was consequently replaced by a
security-conscious repression of all 'diaspora nationalities', that is to
say ethnic groups within the Soviet Union which could be accused of being
'fifth columns' or 'Trojan horses' for expansionist 'kin-states' across the
Soviet border. The 'Great Terror' undeniably targeted 'diaspora
nationalities' (notably Poles, Finns, Belorussians and Ukrainians) in
operations which would now be termed 'ethnic cleansing'. But the 'Terror'
did not necessarily victimise other ethnic groups: nationalities were not
harassed for their ethnic distinctiveness but because their geopolitical
location exposed them to the temptation of defection from the Soviet Union.
Martin asserts that available documentation indicates that anti-nationalist
purges accounted for no more than one-third of executions during the 'Great
Terror' (p. 338) and claims that extant evidence suggests that non-diaspora
non-Russians suffered an arrest, exile and execution rate lower than the
Russians (p. 424).
Two ostensibly contradictory points about the transition from the twenties
to the thirties are advanced. While it is conventional to identify 1928, the
year of Stalin's initial assumption of leadership, as the turning-point
between the versatile Leninism of the twenties and the consolidating
Stalinism of the thirties, Martin convincingly proposes the alternative of
1932 - dated specifically to the test-case of Ukrainisation - as the supreme
political watershed of the interwar Soviet Union. At the same time, the
traditional dichotomy between the twenties and thirties is consciously
played down, with the 'unfortunate' labelling of the 1930s as the era of the
'Great Retreat' from Soviet ideals coming under close and critical scrutiny
(pp. 414-16). Martin insists that the element of continuity between the two
decades was authoritative and persistent, with 'silent korenizatsiia' being
effectively "scaled back, although not abandoned" (p. 27), a reading which
undermines the image of reactionary backlash which has dominated Western
historiography of the period.
There are identifiable shortcomings to the study, some of which are patently
not the responsibility of the author. As Martin candidly concedes, KGB
documentation remains 'largely inaccessible' to researchers (p.387). With
the expanded activities of the OGPU/NKVD so central to the 'Stalin
Revolution' and 'Great Terror' over the 1930s, the current non-availability
of the historically-crucial KGB archives inevitably prevents anything
resembling a definitive interpretation, necessarily downgrading the present
meticulous account to the level of an enterprising interim investigation.
By its very nature, administrative history is never likely to set the pulse
racing and this detailed dissection of Soviet social-engineering ambition
and practice cannot escape a certain hermetic and de-humanising character.
In a quite literal sense, the study is essentially characterless, that is to
say devoid of personalities. Although Stalin predictably looms large, always
the ultimate architect of nationalities policy but often essentially
arbitrating between the initiatives of underlings, no personal dimension
emerges: there is plenty on the 'Stalinshchina' but precious little about
Stalin himself. Significantly, the protagonists in the ongoing saga of
Soviet affirmative action were typically Bolshevik second-rankers of the
likes of Kaganovich, Skrypnyk and Postyshev. The almost total non-appearance
of first-rankers like Bukharin, Kirov, Trotsky and Zinoviev is a reminder
that, while not automatically a peripheral issue, the nationalities question
was still only one of a number of interlinked items high on the packed
agenda of the interwar Soviet Union.
One particular professional shortcoming of the text can be laid more readily
at the author's door. Perverse though it may seem to criticise a volume of
over 500 pages for being too short, the lack of chronological context in the
shape of the pre-1923 and post-1939 settings is regrettable. Too little by
way of historical background, either tsarist or Leninist, is provided. It is
surprising, as well as disappointing, to see Richard Pipes's Cold War
classic The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism,
1917-1924 (Harvard University Press; Cambridge, MA, 1964) and especially
Jeremy Smith's post-Cold War study The Bolsheviks and the National Question,
1917-1923 (Macmillan in association with the School of Slavonic and East
European Studies; Basingstoke, 1999) cited in the bibliography but not even
mentioned, still less discussed, in the body of the work. Similarly, while
it would seem that the Second World War reinforced rather than retarded
interwar trends, no significant attempt is made to do more than hint at
their impact on the short-term (1939-41 and 1941-45), medium-term (1939-53)
or long-term (1939-91) career of the Soviet Union.
Over ten years after the end of the Cold War, Western revisionist history of
the defunct Soviet Union is still gathering pace, fuelled both by a greater
historical objectivity and the growing availability of primary
documentation. Martin has demonstrated in The Affirmative Action Empire an
admirable open-mindedness towards the tortuous and traumatic development of
the Soviet Union, and presented outstanding credentials as what Stalin once
ominously described as an 'archive rat'. While Martin's reputation as a
'super-rat' is already assured, there are still more questions than answers
about the career of the Soviet Union, certainly the largest and probably the
most controversial country in the twentieth-century world. If and when the
KGB archives are ever mined, admitting the tantalising possibility of
retrospectively resolving the bewildering paradoxes of the Soviet era, it is
to Martin that we must surely look for magisterial re-interpretation and
re-evaluation.
The Institute of Historical Research, London, UK, June, 2002
http://www.ihrinfo.ac.uk/reviews/paper/martinT.html
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