Creating a "people": A case study in post-soviet history-writing

Kritika

Volumn 4, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 411-438

  Solonari, Vladimir ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 63649084055     PISSN: 1531023X     EISSN: 15385000     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/kri.2003.0027     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. See the groundbreaking essay of Yuri Slezkine, "The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism," Slavic Review 53: 2 (1994), 414-52
2. and Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993)
3. More recent works include Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
4. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001)
5. Francine Hirsch, "Empire of Nations: Colonial Technologies and the Making of the Soviet Union, 1917-1939" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1998)
6. Peter Blitstein, "Stalin's Nations: Soviet Nationality Policy between Planning and Primordialism, 1936-1953" (Ph.D. diss., University of California-Berkeley, 1999)
7. See also the informative debate on the applicability of the Western concept of race to the Soviet nationalities policies in Slavic Review 61: 1 (Spring 2002), 1-65
8. Among earlier studies the works of Nicholas S. Timasheff, Klaus Mehnert, and Lowell Tillett stand out. See Nicholas S. Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1946)
9. Klaus Mehnert, Stalin versus Marx: The Stalinist Historical Doctrine, trans, from the German (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1952)
10. and Lowell Tillett, The Great Friendship; Soviet Historians on the Non-Russian Nationalities (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1969)
11. See, among others, David Brandenberger, "The 'Short Course' to Modernity: Stalinist History Textbooks, Mass Culture and the Formation of Popular Russian National Identity" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1999)
12. Stephen Velychenko, Shaping Identity in Eastern Europe and Russia: Soviet-Russian and Polish Accounts of Ukrainian History, 1914-1991 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993)
13. Donald V. Schwartz and Razmik Panossian, eds., Nationalism and History: The Politics of Nation-Building in Post-Soviet Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia (Toronto: Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Toronto, 1994)
14. Victor A. Shnirelman, Who Gets the Past? Competition for Ancestors among Non-Russian Intellectuals in Russia (Washington, DC and Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)
15. Georges Michel Nivat and Vilen Serhiiovych Hors'kyi, eds., Ukraine, renaissance d'un mythe national (Geneva: Institut européen de l'Université de Genève, 2000)
16. Serhy Yekelchik, "Stalinist Patriotism as Imperial Discourse: Reconciling the Ukrainian and Russian 'Heroic Pasts,' 1939-45," Kritika 3: 1 (2002), 51-80
17. I also addressed this problem in relation to the Republic of Moldova in my "Narrative, Identity, State: History Teaching in Moldova," in East European Politics and Societies 16: 2 (2002), 414-45
18. Brandenberger, "The 'Short Course' to Modernity," and idem, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002)
19. On Socialist Realism, see Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 3rd ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000)
20. idem, "Socialist Realism with Shores: The Conventions for the Positive Hero," in Socialist Realism without Shores, ed. Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 27-50
21. Régine Robin, Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992)
22. Evgenii Dobrenko, Formovka sovetskogo chitatelia: Sotsial'nye i esteticheskie predposylki retseptsii sovetskoi literatury (St. Petersburg: "Akademicheskii proekt," 1997)
23. trans. Jesse M. Savage as The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)
24. In a brilliant recent essay Dobrenko persuasively demonstrated that Stalin himself was the author of what he calls the Soviet historical master-plot, treating Stalin's Short Course on the history of the Communist Party as a Socialist Realist text occupying the space between history and literature (Dobrenko, "Mezhdu istoriei i proshlym: Pisatel' Stalin i istoki sovetskogo istoricheskogo diskursa," in Sotsrealisticheskii kanon, ed. Dobrenko and Khans Giunter [Hans Günther] [St. Petersburg: "Akademicheskii proekt," 2000], 639-72, esp. 668.)
25. See, e.g., Vladimir Shlapentokh, "Public Opinion: Acceptance of the Regime," chap. 10 of A Normal Totalitarian Society: How the Soviet Union Functioned and How It Collapsed (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001), 127-52
26. James Alexander, Political Culture in Post-Communist Russia: Formlessness and Recreation in a Traumatic Transition (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000)
27. It is remarkable that Alexander Lukin, who recently studied the political culture of the Russian "democrats" during perestroika, found that behind their hostility to all things Soviet lay a belief system that "maintained many of [Soviet] ideology's structural characteristics and even some particular beliefs which were typically Soviet" (Lukin, The Political Culture of the Russian "Democrats" [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], 166). Lukin attributes this to the pervasiveness of indoctrination in the official ideology, which, he suggests, effectively penetrated not only the schools and kindergartens but also "the process of family upbringing" (114)
28. For a useful overview of the texts concerned, see Gennadii Arkad'evich Bordiugov, ed., Natsional'nye istorii v sovetskom i postsovetskikh gosudarstvakh (Moscow: AIRO-XX, 1999). At the same time, at least some of the contributions to that volume themselves appear as manifestations of the Soviet historiographical tradition
29. Elena Lisovskaya and Vyacheslav Karpov, "New Ideologies in Post-Communist Russian Textbooks," Comparative Education Review 43: 4 (1999), 522-43
30. Lisovskaya, "The Dogmatism of Ideology: Content Analysis of Communist and Post-Communist Russian Textbooks," in Comparative Perspectives on the Role of Education in Democratization, ed. Noel F. McGinn and Erwin H. Epstein (Frankfurt am Main and New York: P. Lang, 1999), 367-95
31. cited in Gheorghe E. Cojocaru, Separatismul în slujba Imperiului [Chişinǎu: Civis, 2000], 158)
32. See, for example, Michael Wines, "Trans-Dniester 'Nation' Resents Shady Reputation," New York Times, 5 March 2001
33. and Anna Zakharevna Volkova, Smirnov's deputy when he headed the Transnistrian "Supreme Soviet" in 1990-91 and later Smirnov's aide, have all contributed to this avalanche of publications on the history of the DMR
34. I discuss this perspective in Solonari, "Narrative, Identity, State."
35. Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)
36. I borrow this term from Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)
37. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: International Publishers, 1948), 9
38. Ironically, these are exactly the parts of the curriculum that Soviet students persistently found impenetrable. See Brandenberger, "Short Course to Modernity," 293-318
39. Bakhtin, "Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination, 234-35
40. One can easily see here a clear analogy with what Katerina Clark terms "a Soviet dialectic of spontaneity and consciousness." See Clark, The Soviet Novel, 15-24
41. Dobrenko, "Mezhdu istoriei i proshlym," 663, 665
42. According to Robert A. Nisbet, progress as movement towards liberty and progress as accumulation of power were for centuries two main and competing understandings of historical consciousness. See Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, rev. ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994), 179-298
43. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), esp. 163-228
44. On the prevalence of this "us versus them" worldview, see Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia: Terror, Propaganda, and Dissent, 1934-1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 124-44
45. and Elena lur'evna Zubkova, Poslevoennoe sovetskoe obshchestvo - politika i povsednevnost', 1945-1953 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000), 117-19
46. and David D. Laitin, Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 48-82
47. See Solonari, "Narrative, Identity, State."
48. Cited in Cojocaru, Separatismul în slujba Imperiului, 158
49. Istoriia, vol. 2, bk. 1, 95
50. MASSR was just one example of the Kremlin's "Piedmont principle" policies of putting additional pressure on Soviet neighbors: see Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 36, 274-75, 313
51. See, for example, Cojocaru, Separatismul în slujba Imperiului, 169
52. For convincing rejoinders to these stances, see Pål Kolsto and Andrei Malgin, "The Transnistrian Republic: A Case of Politicized Regionalism," Nationalities Papers 26: 1 (1998), 103-28
53. and William Crowther, "Ethnic Politics in the Post-Communist Transition in Moldova," in ibid., 147-64
54. On nationalist histories in post-colonial states see, e.g., Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)
55. and Ayesha Jalal, "Conjuring Pakistan: History as Official Imagining," International Journal of Middle East Studies 21:1 (1995), 73-89
56. Pierre Bourdieu, "Identity and Representation: Elements for a Critical Reflection of the Idea of Region," in Language and Symbolic Power, 223 (emphasis in orig.)
57. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 62
58. See esp. Istoriia, 1: 5, 6, 527-30
59. Yizhak M. Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953-1991 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 86, 186-89, 252-53, 312 nn. 83, 84, 313 n. 89
60. On Gumilev's ideas, see Ryszard Podarowski, "The Eurasian Idea and Leo Gumilev's Scientific Ideology," Canadian Slavonic Papers 41:1 (1999), 19-32
61. In contemporary Ukraine, the notion of "civilization" has also come into vogue recently; see Marko Bojcun, "Where is Ukraine? Civilization and Ukraine's Identity," Problems of Post-Communism 48: 5 (2002), 42-51
62. See Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, vol. 2 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985), esp. 759
63. On the "Soviet people," see Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, Decline of an Empire: The Soviet Socialist Republics in Revolt, trans. Martin Sokolinsky and Henry A. La Farge (New York: Newsweek Books, 1979), 121-64
64. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 21-22