Soviet nation ( ) was an
ideological demonym and proposed ethnonym for the population of the Soviet Union
. It first appeared in official usage in the
1970s.
History
Through the
history of the
Soviet Union, both doctrine and practice regarding ethnic
distinctions within the Soviet population varied over time.
Minority national cultures were not completely abolished in the
Soviet Union. By Soviet definition, national cultures were to be
"
socialist by content and national by
form", to be used to promote the official aims and values of the
state. While the goal was always to cement the nationalities
together in a common state structure, as a pragmatic step in the
1920s and early 1930s under the policy of
korenizatsiya (indigenization) the leaders of
the Communist Party promoted federalism and the strengthening of
non-Russian languages and cultures (see
national delimitation
in the Soviet Union). By the late 1930s, however, policy
shifted to more active promotion of Russian language and later
still to more overt
Russification
efforts, which accelerated in the 1950s especially in areas of
public education.
Although some assimilation did occur, this effort did not succeed
on the whole as evidenced by developments in many national cultures
in the territory after the
collapse of the Soviet Union in
1991.
Reinforcing the distinctions in national identities, the Soviet
state maintained information about "nationality" on many
administrative records, including school, work, and military
records, as well as in the periodic censuses of population. The
infamous "fifth record" ( ,
pyataya grafa) was the section
of the obligatory
internal passport
document which stated the citizen's ethnicity ( ,
natsionalnost). In some cases, this official nationality
served as a basis for discrimination.
Soviet "nation"
The new term "Soviet nation" (Советский народ) first appeared in
official statements at the
24th
Party Congress in 1971, and was later incorporated into the
Soviet Constitution of
1977. However, the concept of "Soviet nation" did not use the
term that had heretofore been used for a "nation": natsiya (нация).
Instead it used the word for a "people": narod (народ). Thus, it
may be more appropriate to understand the new concept as "Soviet
people" rather than as "Soviet nation."
This single all-Soviet entity—the Soviet people, Sovietskiy
narod—was attributed many of the characteristics that official
doctrine had formerly ascribed to nations (natsii – нации) and
nationalities (natsionalnosti – национальности) composing the
multi-national Soviet state. The "Soviet people" were said to be a
"new historical, social, and international community of people
having a common territory, economy, and socialist content; a
culture that reflected the particularities of multiple
nationalities; a federal state; and a common ultimate goal: the
construction of communism." This description echoed the well known
definition of
nation of
Joseph Stalin, in his essay from 1913 entitled
"Marxism and the National Question": "A nation is a historically
constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a
common language, territory, economic life, and psychological
make-up manifested in a common culture." It also echoed
philosophical literature in the 1970s that defined a
socialist nation (natsiya — нация) as "a social-ethnic
community of people, characterized by a single industrial economy,
territory, literary language, national character and culture.
Although the word
narod had an
ethnic connotation, official doctrine had not
yet reached the point that all prior Soviet nations and
nationalities (Russians, Ukrainians, Estonians, Uzbeks, and so on)
were to merge into a single all-Soviet nation (нация – natsiya).
Even in the subsequent Soviet censuses of 1979 and 1989, in which
all Soviet residents were categorized by "nationality"
(национальность – natsionalnost), none were classified as belonging
to the "Soviet nation" or "Soviet nationality". As a project, the
construction of the "Soviet people" ended when the Soviet Union
(the Soviet state) was
dissolved
in 1991.
Footnotes
- ; ;
- Barbara A. Anderson and Brian D. Silver, "Some Factors in the
Linguistic and Ethnic Russification of Soviet Nationalities: Is
Everyone Becoming Russian?" in Lubomyr Hajda and Mark Beissinger,
Eds., The Nationality Factor in Soviet Politics and
Society (Boulder: Westview, 1990): 95-130.
- Shtromas, A. (1978) The Legal Position of Soviet Nationalities and
Their Territorial Units according to the 1977 Constitution of the
USSR. Russian Review 37 (3), 265-272. However,
as reported in the Russian-language version of Wikipedia, First
Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev had used the term in his
speech at the 22nd
Communist Party Congress in 1961, when he declared that in the
USSR there had formed a new historical community of people of
diverse nationalities, having common characteristics—the Soviet
people [советский народ]".
- Советский народ – "Новая историческая, социальная и
интернациональная общность людей, имеющих единую территорию,
экономику, единую по социалистическому содержанию и многообразную
по национальным особенностям культуру, федеративное государство и
общую цель — построение коммунизма".
- 1913: Marxism and the National Question
- T. Yu. Burmistrova, Teoriya sotsialisticheskoi natsii
[Theory of the socialist nation]. Leningrad: Leningrad
University Press, 1970.
- In the first all-union census of population of the USSR
conducted in 1926, the operating concept for "nationality" was
narodnost' (народность), perhaps best translated as an ethnic
community or people. All later Soviet censuses, from 1937 to 1989,
used the term natsionalnost (национальность). See Brian D. Silver,
"“The Ethnic and Language Dimensions in Russian and Soviet
Censuses,” in Ralph S. Clem, Ed., Research Guide to the Russian
and Soviet Censuses (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986):
70-97.
- "Nationality" in this context should be understood as an ethnic
designation, and not as equivalent to the concept of citizenship.
Although in many languages these two terms are conflated, in
Russian a distinct word, grazhdanstvo (гражданство), stands for
citizenship in a legal sense and is never confused with nationality
in an ethnic sense. Thus, when people stated in the census that
they were citizens of the Soviet Union, they were not declaring
themselves to be members of a Soviet "nation" or
"nationality."
See also
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