Racial politics without the concept of race: Reevaluating soviet ethnic and national purges

Slavic Review

Volumn 61, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 1-28

  Weitz, Eric D ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 67650695077     PISSN: 00376779     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2696978     Document Type: Review

References (220)

1. Particularly egregious in this regard is Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 1990). For more sober views on the persistence of nationalism and the national form
2. see Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Re-framed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge, Eng., 1996)
3. and Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton, 1994).
4. Ron Suny underscored the stark contrast between popular and scholarly understandings of the nation in a lecture at the University of Minnesota, March 2000.
5. To take the phrase from a book tide: see Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (London, 1991).
6. Sheila Fitzpatrick captures this trend with her use of the term Homo Sovieticus in Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times. Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999).
7. Some key works that mark the shift in perspective include: David L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis, eds., Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (New York, 2000);
8. Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley, 1999);
9. Peter Holquist, "State Violence as Technique: The Logic of Violence in Soviet Totalitarianism," in Amir Weiner, ed., Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Politics in a Comparative Framework (Stanford, 2002);
10. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism;
11. Stephen E. Hanson, Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions (Chapel Hill, 1997);
12. Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, 1997);
13. Jochen Hellbeck, "Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi (1931-1939)," Jahrbūcher fúr Geschichte Osleuropas 44, no.3 (1996): 344-73;
14. Stefan Plaggenborg, Revolutionskultur: Menschenbilder und kulturelle Praxis in Sowjetrußland zwischen Oktoberrevolu-tion und Stalinismus (Cologne, 1996);
15. and Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995).
16. I have adapted this phrase from E. P. Thompson's classic article, "Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?" Social History 3, no. 2 (1978): 133-65.
17. The first phrase comes from Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s, 2d ed. (New York, 1994),
18. the second from George M. Fredrickson, Difference and Power A Short History of Racism (Princeton, 2002).
19. For some examples based on studies of liberal polities, see Gary Gersde, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2001);
20. George M. Fredrickson, The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements (Berkeley, 1997);
21. Laura Tabili, We Ask for British Justice: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca, 1994);
22. and Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Angh-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass., 1981).
23. On the issue of race in the French Revolution, see Lynn Hunt, ed., The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History (Boston, 1996), 51-59, 101-18;
24. Shanti Marie Singham, "'Betwixt Cattle and Men': Jews, Blacks, and Women, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man," in Dale Van Kley, ed., The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789 (Stanford, 1994), 114-53;
25. David Geggus, "Racial Equality, Slavery, and Colonial Secession during the Constituent Assembly," American Historical Review 94, no.5 (1989): 1290-1308;
26. and Jacques Thibau, ed., Le Temps de Saint-Domingue: ĽEsclavage et la révolution française (Paris, 1989).
27. See, for example, Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (New York, 1973);
28. Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge, Eng., 1980);
29. and Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848-c.1918 (Cambridge, Eng., 1989).
30. Note also Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 170-171, who makes a parallel argument about the racialization of serfs by Russian nobles.
31. See Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1986).
32. For some of the first scholarly studies, see Carlton J. H. Hayes, Essays on Nationalism (New York, 1926);
33. Hayes, The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism (New York, 1931);
34. Hans Kohn, A His-tory of Nationalism in the East (New York, 1929);
35. Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background (New York, 1944).
36. Rogers Brubaker and David D. Laitin, "Ethnic and Nationalist Violence," American Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 428n1, contend that the term ethnic encompasses nationalist, but this seems misplaced to me.
37. On the nation as a "category of practice," see Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, 21.
38. On the definitions of ethnicity and nationality, see some of the excellent collections that have appeared in recent years, such as Montserrat Guibernau and John Rex, eds., The Ethnicity Reader. Nationalism, Mulliculturalism, and Migration (Cambridge, Eng., 1997);
39. Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader (New York, 1996);
40. Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay, The Nationalism Reader (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1995);
41. and John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, eds., Nationalism (Oxford, 1994).
42. I am drawing here on the recent theoretical and historical literature on race, for example, Ronald Aminzade, "The Politics of Race and Nation: Citizenship and Africanization in Tanganyika," Political Power and Social Theory 12 (2000): 51-88;
43. Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann, Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1998);
44. Fredrickson, Comparative Imagination;
45. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, "Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation," American Sociological Review 62, no.3 (1997): 465-80;
46. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation;
47. Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Waller-stein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London, 1991);
48. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991). I leave aside some differences on particular issues among these authors and stress the common features of their interpretations.
49. See Fredrickson, Difference and Power, 5 (of the manuscript), who writes: "when ethnic differences are regarded as innate, indelible, and unchangeable ... a racist attitude or ideology can be said to exist."
50. Notably, one strand in the development of racial ideology originated as a defense of aristocratic class privilege in eighteenth-century France. See the discussion of the Comte de Boulainvillier's writing in Hannah Arendt, "Race-Thinking before Racism," Review of Politics 6, no. 1 (1944): 42-47
51. and in Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, D. C, 1996).
52. See especially Cornell and Hartmann, Ethnicity and Race, 15-38
53. and Omi and Winant, Racial Formation.
54. Étienne Balibar, "Is There a 'Neo-Racism'?" in Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 22; emphasis in the original. See also the similar formulation in George M. Fredrickson, "Understanding Racism: Reflections of a Comparative Historian," in Fred-rickson, Comparative Imagination, 84-85.
55. For some examples of this literature going back to the 1950s, with varying degrees of scholarly detachment, see Edward Allworth, ed., Soviet National Problems (New York, 1971);
56. John A. Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 1939-1945 (New York, 1955);
57. Yaroslav Bilinsky, The Second Soviet Republic: The Ukraine after World War 11 (New Brunswick, 1964);
58. Walker Connor, The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy (Princeton, 1984);
59. Robert Conquest, The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (London, 1970);
60. Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, ĽEmpire éclaté: La Révolte des nations en U.RS.S. (Paris, 1978);
61. Carrère d'Encausse, The Great Challenge: Nationalities and the Bolshevik State, 1917-1930 (French original, 1987; New York, 1992);
62. Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923 (Cambridge, Mass., 1954);
63. John S. Reshetar, Jr., The Ukrainian Revolution, 1917-1920: A Study in Nationalism (Princeton, 1952). See also the individual volumes of the Hoover Institution series on the nationalities of the Soviet Union.
64. Notable exceptions include Ronald Grigor Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation (Bloomington, 1988)
65. and Suny, The Baku Commune, 1917-1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Princeton, 1972).
66. Among the works to which I am responding are: Francine Hirsch, "Empire of Nations: Colonial Technologies and the Making of the Soviet Union, 1917-1939" (Ph.D., diss., Princeton University, 1998);
67. Hirsch, "The Soviet Union as a Work-in-Progress: Edinographers and the Category Nationality in the 1926,1937, and 1939 Censuses," Slavic Review 56, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 251-78
68. Peter Holquist, "To Count, to Extract, to Exterminate: Populatíon Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia," in Terry Martin and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford, 2001);
69. Holquist, "State Violence as Technique"; Holquist, "'Conduct Merciless Mass Terror': Decossackization on the Don, 1919," Cahiers du Monde russe 38, nos. 1-2 (1997): 127-62;
70. Holquist, "A Russian Vendée: The Practice of Revolutionary Politics in the Don Countryside" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1995);
71. Terry D. Martin, "Terror gegen Nationen in der Sowjetunion," Osteuropa 50, no.6 (2000): 606-16;
72. Martin, "The Origins of Soviet Ethinic Cleansing," Journal of Modern History 70, no.4 (1998): 813-861;
73. Martin, "An Affirmative Action Empire: Ethnicity and the Soviet State, 1923-1938" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1996);
74. Yuri Slezkine, "N. la. Marr and the National Origins of Soviet Ethnogenetics," Slavic Review 55, no.4 (Winter 1996): 826-62;
75. Slezkine, "The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism," Slavic Review 52, no.2 (Summer 1994): 414-52;
76. Slezkine, "From Savages to Citizens: The Cultural Revolution in the Soviet Far North, 1928-1938," Slavic Review 51, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 52-76;
77. Amir Werner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, 2001);
78. Weiner, "Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia: Delineating the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the Age of Socialism," American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (1999): 1114-55.
79. See especially Slezkine, "USSR as a Communal Apartment," and Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, 1993).
80. See Brubaker, "Nationhood and the National Question in the Soviet Union and Its Successor States," Nationalism Reframed, 23-54.
81. See especially Martin, "Affirmative Action Empire."
82. Martin, Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing."
83. See Hirsch, "Soviet Union as a Work-in-Progress."
84. See Nicolas Werth, "Un État contre son peuple: Violences, répressions, terreurs en Union soviétique," in Stéphane Courtois, ed., Le livre noir du communisme: Crimes, terreur et répression (Paris, 1997), 112-117, and Holquist, "Russian Vendée."
85. Holquist, "Russian Vendée," 381.
86. Martin, "Affirmative Action Empire," 562.
87. Weiner, Making Sense of War, and Weiner, "Nature, Nurture, and Memory."
88. Martin, "Affirmative Action Empire," 956-960
89. Weiner, "Nature, Nurture, and Memory," 1122.
90. Hirsch, "Soviet Union as a Work-in-Progress," 276-277
91. J. V. Stalin, "The National Question and the Soviet Constitution" (1936), Marxism and the National Question: Selected Writings and Speeches (New York, 1942), 218.
92. All these examples from Martin, "Affirmative Action Empire," 944-47, 964-965
93. Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 89-92.
94. For summaries of the various deportations, see Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 85-107;
95. Weiner, "Nature, Nurture, and Memory"; and N. F. Bugai, "K voprosu o deportatsii naro-dov SSSR v 30-40-kh godakh," Istoriia SSSR, 1989, no. 6:135-44.
96. Summaries can also be gleaned from some of the documents published by N. F. Bugai, for example, "'Pogruzheny v eshelony i otpravleny k mestam poselenii. . .': L. Beriia-I. Stalinu," Istoriia SSSR, 1991, no. 1:143-60
97. and "20-40-e gody: Tragediia narodov," Vostok, 1992, no. 2:122-39.
98. See also Jean-Jacques Marie, Les Peuples déportés d'Union soviétique (Brussels, 1995)
99. and the older but still useful work by Aleksandr M. Nekrich, The Punished Peoples: The Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of the Second World War, trans. George Saunders (New York, 1978).
100. Martin, Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing," 839.
101. Ibid., 847. Other historians would date the beginning of this transition a bit later, to 1937.
102. Martin, Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing," 815.
103. See Michael Gelb, "An Early Soviet Ethnic Deportation: The Far-Eastern Koreans," Russian Review 54 (1995): 389-412
104. and N. F. Bugai, "Vyselenie sovetskikh koreitsev s daĽnego vostoka," Voprosy istorii, 1994, no. 5:141-48.
105. Germans were expelled from the Red Army by a decree of 8 September 1941, the others somewhat later. As late as March 1949, some 63,000 ex-Red Army soldiers from targeted nationalities were counted in the special settlements, including 33,615 ethnic Germans; 8,995 Crimean Tatars; 6,184 Kalmyks; 4,248 Chechens; 2,543 Karachai; and 946 Ingush. See Weiner, "Nature, Nurture, and Memory," 1134, and Nekrich, Punished Peoples, 83.
106. Gelb, "Early Soviet Ethnic Deportation," 401.
107. Martin, "Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing," 855, 858. Martin, though, exaggerates by claiming that the "the Great Terror had evolved into an ethnic terror" (858) since one still has to explain the other two-thirds of the victims for whom ethnicity was not the decisive factor. I thank Peter Holquist for emphasizing this point to me.
108. Werťh, "État contre son peuple," 241, 242.
109. Bugai, "Kvoprosu o deportatsii," 135, 137; Bugai, "20-40-e gody," 122.
110. Nicolas Werth, "Logiques de violence dans l'URSS stalinienne," in Henry Rousso, ed., Stalinisme et nazisme: Histoire et mémoire comparées (Paris, 1999), 122. Werth, though, persists in labeling these actions "retrograde and regressive," "a resurgence of obscurantist aspects" (123), rather than seeing their highly modernist character. In this sense, Peter Holquisťs arguments are more convincing, as in "State Violence as Technique."
111. For a very effective general description of how these operations work, see Jacques Semelin, "Analysis of a Mass Crime: Ethnic Cleansing in the Former Yugoslavia, 1991-1999" (paper presented at the Comparative Genocides Conference, Barcelona, Spain, December 2000). Semelin emphasizes three elements: "a hierarchy in the structure of command, a sealed up theater of operations, [and] a culture of impunity" (12-13).
112. See also Wolfgang Sofsky, Traktat über die Gewalt (Frankfurt am Main,1996).
113. The organized nature of the operations comes through in the documents; see, for example, Bugai, "20-40-e gody."
114. For descriptions see Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 96-99, 101-104
115. and Nekrich, Punished Peoples.
116. As was the case with Balkarians. See Bugai, "K voprosu o deportatsii," 140.
117. Norman M. Naimark, Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe, The Donald W. Treadgold Papers in Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies, no.19 (Seattle, 1998), 22-24.
118. Werth, "Logiqucs," 121-122
119. Werth, "État contre son peuple," 261-62, and Martin, "Terror gegen Natio-nen," 608.
120. See Werth, "État contre son peuple," 269-276
121. Weiner, Making Sense of War, 198; Werth, "État contre son peuple," 276;
122. Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSĶ and the Successor States (New York, 1998), 374.
123. Weiner writes: "[the] portrayal of Jews in the press assumed an unambiguous racial character" (Making Sense of War, 198).
124. Holquist, "Russian Vendée," 381.
125. Martin, "Terror gegen Nationen," 612.
126. David L. Hoffmann, "European Modernity and Soviet Socialism," in Hoffmann and Kotsonis, eds., Russian Modernity, 255.
127. Holquist, "State Violence as Technique."
128. Slezkine, "USSR as a Communal Apartment," 444.
129. Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 106.
130. Weiner, Making Sense of War, 149-150
131. Among many works on race, see Sander Gilman, Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul: Race and Psychology in the Shaping of Aesthetic Surgery (Durham, 1998)
132. and George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (Madison, 1985).
133. Weiner, Making Sense of War, 207.
134. Martin, "Terror gegen Nationen," 611.
135. Naimark, Fires of Haired, 106.
136. Hoffmann, "European Modernity and Soviet Socialism," 257.
137. Hirsch, "Empire of Nations," and Hirsch, "Soviet Union as a Work-in-Progress."
138. Holquist, "State Violence as Technique," 27 (of the manuscript).
139. See, again, Gerstle, American Crucible, and Tabili, We Ask for British Justice.
140. The point is emphasized by Hirsch, "Empire of Nations"; Holquist, "State Violence as Technique"; Weiner, Making Sense of War;
141. Hoffmann and Kotsonis, eds., Russian Modernity;
142. and Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, among others.
143. Yanni Kotsonis, "Introduction: A Modern Paradox-Subject and Citizen in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Russia," in Hoffmann and Kotsonis, eds., Russian Modernity, 11.
144. Or as Terry Martin argues in the same volume, "[the Bolsheviks'] attempts to organize, classify and reward their population according to sociological categories led them to reify categories they themselves viewed as constructed rather than essential." Martin, "Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism? Ascribed Nationality and Soviet Primor-dialism," in Hoffmann and Kotsonis, eds., Russian Modernity, 170.
145. See Martin, "Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism?"
146. See Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 (New Haven, 1996).
147. J. Arch Getty, Gabor T. Rittersporn, and Viktor N. Zemskov, "Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence," American Historical Review 98, no. 4 (1993): 1017-49
148. and Weiner, Making Sense of War, 201-9.
149. See Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 2 vols., trans. Martin Chalmers (New York, 1998-1999);
150. Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany (New York, 1996);
151. and George H. Stein, The Waffen SS: Hitler's Elite Guard at War (Ithaca, 1966), 179-185
152. On the dilemmas inherent in the multinational character of the empire, see Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552 - 1917 (Cambridge, Mass., 1997)
153. and Andreas Kappeler, Rußland ah Vielvölkerreich:Entstehung, Geschichte, Zerfall (Munich, 1993). Their divergent emphases can be read in tandem. See also the interesting exchange between Josh Sanborn, "The Mobilization of 1914 and the Question of the Russian Nation: A Reexamination,"
154. and S. A. Smith, "Citizenship and the Russian Nation during World War I: A Comment," with a rejoinder by Sanborn, "More than Imagined: A Few Notes on Modern Identities," in Slavic Review 59, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 267-89, 316-329, and 330-35.
155. I thank Peter Holquist for emphasizing this point to me. On the development of the terminology of people, ethnicity, and nationality, see Nathaniel Knight, "Ethnicity, Nationality and the Masses: Narodnosť and Modernity in Imperial Russia," in Hoffmann and Kotsonis, eds., Russian Modernity, 41-64.
156. David Hoffmann and Peter Holquist, Sculpting the Masses: The Modern Social State in Russia, 1914-1941 (Ithaca, forthcoming). I thank Peter Holquist for sending me an excerpt of this work in progress.
157. See also Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca, 1992).
158. Engelstein, Keys to Happiness, 128-164
159. On the strong attraction eugenics held for the left in general, see Michael Schwartz, Sozialistische Eugenik: Eugenische Sozialtechnologien in Debatlen und Politik der deutschen Sozialdemokratie 1890-1933 (Bonn, 1995);
160. Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna:Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919-1934 (New York, 1991);
161. Diane Paul, "Eugenics and the Left," Journal of the History of Ideas 45, no.4 (1984): 567-90;
162. Michael Freeden, "Eugenics and Progressive Thought: A Study in Ideological Affinity," Historical Journal 22, no.3 (1979): 645-71;
163. and Loren R. Graham, "Science and Human Values: The Eugenics Movement in Germany and Russia in the 1920s," American Historical Review 82, no. 5 (1977): 1133-64.
164. Graham, "Science and Values," 1146-1150
165. See, for example, Knight, "Ethnicity, Nationality and the Masses," and Charles Steinwedel, "To Make a Difference: The Category of Ethnicity in Late Imperial Russian Politics, 1861-1917," both in Hoffmann and Kotsonis, eds., Russian Modernity, 41-64 and 67-86
166. and Mark von Hagen, "The Great War and the Mobilization of Ethnicity in the Russian Empire," in Barnett R. Rubin and Jack Snyder, eds., Post-Soviet Political Order: Conflict and State Building (London, 1998), 34-57. Knight writes: "Deeply rooted in the world view of Romantic idealism, narodnosť provided a model of ethnicity that was both essentialist-derived from a concept of immutable identity-and at the same time cultural rather than biological in its manifestations. This is, perhaps, one reason why the racial obsessions of Western Europe throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century evoked (with a few significant exceptions) only a limited response in Russia" ("Ethnicity, Nationality and the Masses," 58). But this seems to me to draw too sharp a distinction between biologically and culturally based essentialisms.
167. See Eli Weinerman, "Racism, Racial Prejudice and Jews in Late Imperial Russia," Ethnic and Racial Studies 17, no. 3 (1994): 442-95
168. who discounts the seriousness of racist thought in imperial Russia, while Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Im-perialRussia (Berkeley, 1986), sees an advance in racial anti-Semitism, especially in the decade before World War 1.1 diank Amir Weiner for bringing these sources to my attention.
169. On the issue of continuities, see Hoffmann and Kotsonis, eds., Russian Modernity; Hirsch, "Empire of Nations";
170. Peter Holquist, "'Information Is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work': Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Context,"Journal of Modern History 69, no.3 (1997): 415-50;
171. Holquist, "To Count, to Extract, to Exterminate"; and Holquist, "State Violence as Technique."
172. J. V. Stalin, Marxism and the National Question (1913)
173. J. V. Stalin, Works, vol.2, 1907-1913 (Moscow, 1953), 300-381
174. See Carrère d'Encausse, Great Challenge, 35-39.
175. Carrère d'Encausse, Great Challenge, Ibid., 38-39.
176. Stalin, Marxism and the National Question, 307.
177. Stalin, Marxism and the National Question, Ibid.
178. Stalin, "Deviations on the National Question" (1930), Marxism and the National Question: Selected Writings and Speeches, 208-209
179. Stalin, "Deviations on the National Question" (1930), Marxism and the National Question: Selected Writings and Speeches, Ibid., 212.
180. See Hirsch, "Empire of Nations"; Hirsch, "Soviet Union as a Work-in-Progress"; Slezkine, "N. Ia. Marr"; and Slezkine, "USSR as a Communal Apartment."
181. See Mark B. Adams, "Eugenics in Russia, 1900-1940," in Adams, ed., The Wellborn Science:Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia (New York, 1990), 153-216; and Graham, "Science and Values."
182. See especially Adams, "Eugenics in Russia." Moreover, recent research on countries other than Britain and Germany has shown that eugenics is not necessarily linked to Darwinism and Mendelian genetics; it can flourish just as well with neo-Lamarckism, as in France, Brazil, and elsewhere, where greater attention was placed on environmental factors. See Frank Dikötter, "Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics," American Historical Review 103, no. 2 (1998): 467-78.
183. Hirsch, "Empire of Nations," 235-36, 264-65, 278-279
184. See Kenneth M. Pinnow, "Cutting and Counting: Forensic Medicine as a Science of Society in Bolshevik Russia, 1920-1929," and Frances L. Bernstein, "'The Dictatorship of Sex': Science, Glands, and the Medical Construction of Gender Difference in Revolutionary Russia," both in Hoffmann and Kotsonis, eds., Russian Modernity, 115-37 and 138-160
185. On the Soviets' obsessive drive to categorize and control the population, see Paul M. Hagenloh, "Police, Crime, and Public Order in Stalin's Russia" (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1999);
186. Golfo Alexopoulos "Rights and Passages: Making Outcasts and Making Citizens in Soviet Russia" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1996);
187. and Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia," Journal of Modern History 65, no.4 (1993): 745-70. In the 1920s and early 1930s the Soviets were already discussing sending into exile "socially dangerous" and "undesirable elements," including the Roma and Sinti.
188. See the secret police documents, 7 July 1925 and 10 July 1933, in Nicolas Werth and Gaël Moullec, eds., Rapport secrets soviétiques: La société russe dans les documents confidentieh, 1921-1991 (Paris, 1994), 33, 43-44.
189. Weiner, Making Sense of War, 35.
190. Martin, Origins of Sonet Ethnic Cleansing," 816.
191. Slezkine, "USSR as a Communal Apartment," 415.
192. Holquisťs comments strike me as too categorical: "The Soviets did not believe that an individual was irrevocably tainted by his or her biological composition ... the Soviets did not believe individuals were organically malevolent from birth." He does, however, go on to say that "at times Soviet categories operated in similar ways to deterministic racial categories (the dynamic of ethnic repression bearing the greatest similarities)." See "State Violence as Technique," 28-29 (of the manuscript).
193. For one argument that the connection between science and racism was "accidental," that race thinking can thrive in association with all sorts of other modes of thought, see Jeremy Waldron, "Whose Nuremberg Laws?" London Review of Books, 19 March 1998.I thank Thomas Lindenberger of the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam, for emphasizing this point to me.
194. For various examples of the use of such terms as Red Holocaust, see the studies in Rousso, Stalinisme et nazisme. For just two examples of the need to distinguish sharpty between the Nazi and Soviet projects, see Tony Judt, "The Longest Road to Hell," a commentary on Courtois, ed., Le liυre noir du communisme in the New York Times, 22 December 1997, and Holquist, "State Violence as Technique," 23-24 (of the manuscript).
195. Stéphane Courtois, "Les crimes du communisme," in Courtois, ed., Le livre noir du communisme, 9-41
196. as well as numerous interviews, including those in "Der rote Holocaust," Die Zeit 48 (21 November 1997): 17-18
197. and "Glaube und Schuld," Die Woche (29 May 1998): 22-24, the latter also with Joachim Gauck.
198. On the Soviets' own rejection of any comparison with the Nazis, see Hirsch, "Empire of Nations," 266-67, 281-83; Weiner, "Nature, Nurture, and Memory," 1122-23, 1141-49; and Holquist, "State Violence as Technique," 25-27 (of the manuscript).
199. The work that probably best reflects this synthesis is Ulrich Herbert, ed.,National-sozialistische Vernichtungspolitik 1939-1945: Neue Forschungen und Konlroυersen (Frankfurt am Main, 1998).
200. From another vantage point, see William W. Hagen, "Before the 'Final Solution': Toward a Comparative Analysis of Political Anti-Semitism in Interwar Germany and Poland," Journal of Modern History 68, no.2 (1996): 351-381 Hagen finds extensive similarities in the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazi regime and various eastern European countries, especially Poland, in the 1930s, that is, just prior to the onset of the Holocaust. For Hagen, these similarities reflect the structural crisis of central and east European Jewry that emerged with the rise of nationalism and capitalism.
201. Weiner, "Nature, Nurture, and Memory," 1116.
202. Ibid., 1119.
203. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 364;Weiner, "Nature, Nurture, and Memory," 1114.
204. Weiner, "Nature, Nurture, and Memory," 1114.
205. Still, many observers persist in talking about only the class and political purges; see, for example, Wolfgang Wippermann, Tolalilarismuslheorien: Die Entiυicklung der Diskus-sion von den Anfängen bis heule (Darmstadt, 1997).
206. See Werth, "État contre son peuple."
207. The whole process of accommodation and complicity has been sorely neglected in the historiography on the Soviet Union. Werth, "État contre son peuple," 295, closes his study with a suggestive comment along these lines, but that is all. Similar shortcomings are evident in other recent general histories of the Soviet Union, for example, Robert Service, A History of Twentieth-Century Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).
208. I am drawing here especially from Alf Lũdtke, Εinleitung: Herrschaft als soziale Praxis," in Lūdtke, ed., Herrschaft als soziale Praxis: Historische und sozial-anthropologische Studien (GŌttingen, 1991), 9-63; Lūdtke, "Die DDR als Geschichte: Zur Geschichtsschrei-bung über die DDR" (unpublished manuscript, Gõttingen, 1998), 32-40;
209. and Thomas Lindenberger, "Die Diktatur der Grenzen: Zur Einleitung," in Lindenberger, ed., Herrschafł und Eigen-Sinn in der Diktatar: Studien zur Geselłschaflsgeschichte der DDR (Cologne, 1999), 13-44.
210. See also James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990), and for a less metaphorical treatment of "face,"
211. Alexander La-ban Hinton, "Why Did You Kill? The Cambodian Genocide and the Dark Side of Face and Honor,"Journal of Asian Studies 57, no.1 (1998): 93-122. In regard to recent histories of ethnic cleansings or genocides, I would argue that an approach focused exclusively on the explicit actions of the state is too limited and loses sight of the way that, in the twentieth century, such actions become societal projects. This criticism is applicable, for example, to the enormously important recent work by Naimark, Fires of Hatred
212. and to Ben Kiernan's more general statements in, for example, "Sur la notion de génocide," Le Débal (March-April 1999): 179-192, though not necessarily to his highly significant major study, Pol Pot Regime.
213. Vasily Grossman, Forever Flowing, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York, 1972).
214. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York, 1988), 36-69.
215. See Omer Bartov, "Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews, and the Holocaust," American Historical Review 103, no. 3 (1998): 771-816, on the mutually constitutive process of making victims and perpetrators.
216. The usefulness of the U.N. definition was a major point of conflict at the Comparative Genocides Conference, Barcelona, Spain, December 2000, sponsored by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and organized by the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University and the Center for Holocaust Studies at Clark University. The fact that current and potential war crimes trials are based on the U.N. Convention is a strong argument for maintaining the definition in scholarly as well as legal work. This is especially Ben Kiernan's argument. See Kiernan, "Sur la notion de génocide," and Kiernan, "Comparing Genocides: Some Underlying Themes" (paper presented at the Comparative Genocides Conference, Barcelona, Spain, December 2000).
217. Quoted in Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons, "Introduction," in Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons, and Israel W. Charny, eds., Genocides in the Twentieth Century: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts (New York, 1995), xiv.
218. Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 98. On the question of genocide, Naimark writes in relation to the Chechens, Ingush, and Tatars: "That tens of thousands died during the deportations and after they arrived at their destinations did not overly concern Soviet authorities, though killing off these nations in a genocidal attack was clearly not the Soviets' intention. Instead, policies were implemented to reeducate the Chechens-Ingush and Crimean Tatars.... The 'human material' was salvageable; just the nations-as nations-were slated to disappear through assimilation and detachment from their homelands" (105). On the basis of the U.N. definition, the events Naimark describes would constitute genocide.
219. For a forceful statement on the applicability of genocide to colonial states, see Elazar Barkan, "Indigenous Peoples Genocide: Terminology or Human Rights?" (paper presented at the Comparative Genocides Conference, Barcelona, Spain, December 2000).
220. On providing provisions and establishing institutions for some of the purged groups, see, for example, resolutions of the State Defense Committee, May 1944 and July 1944, and communiqué from the Kazakh Communist Party to the National Commissariat of the Interior, 10 January 1945, all in Bugai, "20-40-e gody," 132-136