The Multiethnic Soviet Union and Its Demise 9781350136786, 9781350136779, 9781350136816, 9781350136809

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THE MULTIETHNIC SOVIET UNION AND ITS DEMISE

Russian Shorts Russian Shorts is a series of thought-provoking books published in a slim format. The Shorts books examine key concepts, personalities, and moments in Russian historical and cultural studies, encompassing its vast diversity from the origins of the Kievan state to Putin’s Russia. Each book is intended for a broad range of readers, covers a side of Russian history and culture that has not been well-understood, and is meant to stimulate conversation. Series Editors: Eugene M. Avrutin, Professor of Modern European Jewish History, University of Illinois, USA Stephen M. Norris, Professor of History, Miami University, USA Editorial Board: Edyta Bojanowska, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Yale University, USA Ekaterina Boltunova, Associate Professor of History, Higher School of Economics, Russia Eliot Borenstein, Professor of Russian and Slavic, New York University, USA Melissa Caldwell, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA Choi Chatterjee, Professor of History, California State University, Los Angeles, USA Robert Crews, Professor of History, Stanford University, USA Dan Healey, Professor of Modern Russian History, University of Oxford, UK Polly Jones, Associate Professor of Russian, University of Oxford, UK Paul R. Josephson, Professor of History, Colby College, USA Marlene Laruelle, Research Professor of International Affairs, George Washington University, USA Marina Mogilner, Associate Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA Willard Sunderland, Henry R. Winkler Professor of Modern History, University of Cincinnati, USA

Published Titles Pussy Riot: Speaking Punk to Power, Eliot Borenstein Memory Politics and the Russian Civil War: Reds Versus Whites, Marlene Laruelle and Margarita Karnysheva Russian Utopia: A Century of Revolutionary Possibilities, Mark Steinberg Racism in Modern Russia, Eugene M. Avrutin Meanwhile, In Russia: Russian Memes and Viral Video Culture, Eliot Borenstein Ayn Rand and the Russian Intelligentsia, Derek Offord The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise, Brigid O’Keeffe Upcoming Titles Russia’s History Painters: Vasily Surikov, Viktor Vasnetsov, and the Remaking of the Past, Stephen M. Norris Russia and the Jewish Question: A Modern History, Robert Weinberg The Soviet Gulag: History and Memory, Jeffrey S. Hardy The Afterlife of the “Soviet Man”: Rethinking Homo Sovieticus, Gulnaz Sharafutdinova Russian Food since 1800: Empire at Table, Catriona Kelly A Social History of the Russian Army, Roger R. Reese Why We Need Russian Literature, Angela Brintlinger Nuclear Russia, Paul Josephson The Ballet Russes: Art, Money, Dance, Ira Nadel A Territorial History of Russia, Paul Werth Black Encounters with the Soviet Union, Maxim Matusevich The History of Birobidzhan, Gennady Estraikh

iv

THE MULTIETHNIC SOVIET UNION AND ITS DEMISE

Brigid O’Keeffe

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC, and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Brigid O’Keeffe, 2022 Brigid O’Keeffe has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover image: © Print Collector/Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders and obtain permission to reproduce the copyright material. Please do get in touch with any enquiries or any information relating to such material or the rights holder. We would be pleased to rectify any omissions in subsequent editions of this publication should they be drawn to our attention. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: PB: 978-1-3501-3677-9 HB: 978-1-3501-3678-6 ePDF: 978-1-3501-3680-9 eBook: 978-1-3501-3679-3 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To my students

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CONTENTS

List of Figures x Acknowledgments xi A Note on Terminology and Transliteration xiii Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations xiv 1 Revolutionaries

1

2 Foundations

7

3

Soviet Nation-Building

19

4

War and Aftershocks

51

5

Mature Socialism

77

6

Perestroika and Collapse

95

7 Afterlives

111

Notes 117 Selected Bibliography 130 Index 132

FIGURES

1 Map of contemporary Eurasia 2 Soviet poster, “Working Woman of the East! Join the Ranks of the Builders of Socialism!” 3 Stranded ship in the Aral Sea, Uzbekistan 4 Stalin Meets with Collective Farm Workers from Tajikistan and Turkmenistan 5 Red Army soldiers raise the Soviet flag over the Reichstag 6 Friendship of Peoples Fountain 7 Huldah Clark among her Soviet classmates, 1961 8 Soldier waves a Russian flag, August 21, 1991

xvi 28 33 42 69 78 82 108

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe many thanks to the people who helped me in one way or another as I wrote this book. I owe many more to those whose incredible scholarship made the writing of this book possible. How I wish there were enough space in these lines to thank each of you by name. My family, as always, cheered me along and it made all the difference. My thanks to the O’Keeffe, Centers, Mueller, and Clovis families whose love I felt even while we were separated from one another for very long. Ernie provided comic relief at all the right times. Zac Centers was reliably by my side as I wrote this book. Thank you, Zac, for being exactly who you are and for loving me as I am. Steve Norris had faith in this book before I did. I thank him for his mentorship, friendship, and unfailing support. Eugene Avrutin offered essential advice and helpful feedback on the book’s first draft. At Bloomsbury, Rhodri Mogford and Laura Reeves stewarded this book from proposal to completion with good care. Anonymous reviewers generously offered thoughtful suggestions that improved the final manuscript. Phil Napoli, Lauren Mancia, Jocelyn Wills, Gunja SenGupta, Swapna Banerjee, Mobina Hashmi, Peter Blitstein, Iverson Long, Josh Sanborn, Desi Allevato, and Jackie Levine helped in ways big and small. Their friendship proved buoyant during challenging times. Special thanks are owed to Peter Blitstein who read the manuscript in full and responded to it with incisive feedback. Evangeline McGlynn created the book’s map. I thank her for her expertise and patience. The Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University generously extended to me digital library privileges when I most needed them. I wrote this book during the pandemic and without access to a physical research library. I would not have been

Acknowledgments

able to write this book were it not for the help of my colleagues at the Jordan Center. While writing, I thought often of the teachers who inspired me along my journey to becoming a professional historian. I thank especially my mentors at NYU—Yanni Kotsonis, Jane Burbank, and Bruce Grant, in particular—who transformed my life with their expertise and good care. I thought, too, of my parents. My dad, Liam O’Keeffe, taught me in subtle ways how to find my writer’s voice and always encouraged me to take to my pen. I miss him so very much. My fourth-grade teacher at St. Mary’s School, Margaret O’Keeffe, proved a woman of extraordinary talent and enthusiasm for the craft of teaching. Mom, thanks for showing me how it’s done. The students whom I have had the honor to teach since I joined the Brooklyn College History Department in 2009 are the true inspiration for this book. It is dedicated to them.

xii

A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY AND TRANSLITERATION

For the sake of simplicity and ease of reading, I refer throughout the text to the various union republics not by their official Soviet titles, but rather by the names they are commonly known today. For example, instead of referring to the Ukrainian SSR or the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic in the text, I refer to Ukraine or Kazakhstan. It is my goal to speak plainly yet meaningfully about the centrality of ethnic politics to Soviet history. To that end, I have made a conscious effort to avoid introducing Russian words to the text except when it has seemed either unavoidable or essential. I have used the Library of Congress system of transliteration for Russian words except when writing about individuals or places known to English readers in a different formulation. I refer, therefore, in the text to Trotsky rather than to Trotskii.

GLOSSARY OF TERMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

aul CIS Comintern CPSU GARF glasnost’ Gulag hujum JAC kolkhoz Komsomol korenizatsiia

kulak NKVD paranja

perestroika RSFSR

nomadic encampment Commonwealth of Independent States Communist International Communist Party of the Soviet Union Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation) openness and transparency Main Administration of Corrective-Labor Camps literally “assault;” unveiling campaign launched in 1927 Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee collective farm Communist Youth League indigenization; Soviet policy of promoting native cadres and languages within ethnically delineated Soviet Union republics and other territories. wealthy peasant; Soviet catch-all term for “class enemy” People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs; the state security police head-to-toe robe traditionally worn in conjunction with a horsehair veil (chachvon) by women in sedentary Central Asian Muslim societies and targeted during the hujum (unveiling campaign) restructuring; era of Gorbachev’s reforms Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic

Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations

SSR USSR VDNKh

Soviet Socialist Republic, a union republic Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; also known as the Soviet Union Exhibition of the Achievements of the People’s Economy

xv

​ Figure 1  Map of contemporary Eurasia. © Evangeline McGlynn.

CHAPTER 1 REVOLUTIONARIES

In October 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power and formed a new revolutionary government—one that would usher in socialism for the diverse peoples of the former Russian empire. At its head was Vladimir Lenin, a middle-aged revolutionary whose own ethnic heritage seemed to attest to the multiculturalism of the vast Russian empire over which the tsars had ruled. Lenin’s family combined Russian, Jewish, German, Swedish, and Kalymk roots. Yet, for Lenin, ethnic identity was of little if any personal concern. His primary allegiance was to socialist internationalism and his first priority was revolution. Lenin and the Bolsheviks wanted to refashion life on earth, liberate humanity from the chains of capitalist exploitation, and create a new type of human being rooted in the life-affirming soil of socialism. By Lenin’s side in Petrograd in those heady days in October were comrades who hailed from all over the tsarist empire. A Jew from Ukraine who had little investment in his own Jewishness, Leon Trotsky grew up on a farm but preferred to cultivate revolution. In October 1917, Trotsky’s leadership in the armed uprising in Petrograd proved indispensable. He soon became Commissar of War and took responsibility for building the Red Army. Nadezhda Krupskaya, born into the impoverished Russian nobility, devoted herself to Bolshevism as an activist, organizer, and educator. She also devoted herself to her husband, Vladimir Lenin, and his work. After the October Revolution, Krupskaya joined the work of the Commissariat of Enlightenment. A child of the Polish nobility who was expelled from high school in Vilnius for his rowdy Marxist antics, Felix Dzerzhinsky endured years of tsarist prison in the name of revolution. He led Bolshevik forces in seizing Petrograd’s central post and telegraph office during the October Revolution. In the new Bolshevik state, Dzerzhinsky assumed

The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise

the leadership of the secret police. The daughter of a Ukrainian father and a Finnish mother, Aleksandra Kollontai theorized the relationship between socialist revolution and women’s emancipation. In 1917, she roused crowds in Petrograd with her stunning oratory, delivered in a voice that combined high-born mellifluousness and Bolshevik militancy. Kollontai joined the Bolshevik government as the Commissar for Social Welfare. A Georgian who was forever selfconscious of his accent when speaking Russian, Joseph Stalin—born Ioseb Jughashvili—had spent his formative years in the Caucasus, where he composed romantic poetry before falling under the spell of Marxism. Stalin assumed the post of Commissar of Nationalities, a position he held until 1923. Bolsheviks across the former tsarist empire and living in exile abroad rushed to help spread the fire of revolution. Anastas Mikoyan grew up inhaling the beauty of northern Armenia’s mountain forests. As a teenager, he devoured Armenian poetry and Russian novels before discovering Marx and Lenin. Mikoyan spent 1917 stoking Bolshevism in the Caucasus. He mobilized workers in Baku and Tiflis and even brought his Bolshevik speeches to his native Armenian village, where he soon disappointed his mother by confessing that Bolshevism was as dear to him as Christianity was to her.1 Lazar’ Kaganovich was born into a poor Jewish family in Ukraine. He lacked formal education and moved to Kyiv at the age of fourteen in search of employment. He soon discovered Bolshevism—his life’s overriding purpose. At the time of the October Revolution, Kaganovich found himself among Russia’s disintegrating imperial army and helped to establish outposts of Bolshevik power in what is today Belarus. Other so-called Old Bolsheviks faced the challenge in late 1917 and 1918 of having to find passage to revolutionary Russia from their exile outposts of revolution-making across Europe and the United States. Maxim Litvinov, a Jew from the tsarist Pale of Settlement, found himself in London at the time of the October Revolution. After gun-running for the Bolsheviks throughout finde-siècle Europe, Litvinov had settled into a comfortable exile’s life in London with his British wife. After the Bolsheviks seized power, he was arrested by British police and ultimately returned to 2

Revolutionaries

revolutionary Russia in a prisoner exchange. Litvinov soon joined the work of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and, in due time, became one of the most consequential diplomats of the twentieth century. Born in a shtetl, Mikhail Gruzenberg moved as a young man to Riga, where he studied in a Russian school and became a Marxist revolutionary. Facing arrest, he fled Russia in 1905 and constructed his life anew as a Bolshevik exile in the United States. In Chicago, he opened a school where he taught English to other Russian immigrants. Heeding the call of the October Revolution, Gruzenberg returned to Russia in 1918 and reinvented himself again as Mikhail Borodin. Fluent in five languages, Borodin crossed borders and codeswitched on behalf of international socialism in his prominent role as an agent of the Communist International (Comintern), the Bolshevik headquarters of world revolution from 1919 until 1943.2 The Bolsheviks who made the October Revolution were themselves made by the multiethnic Russian empire in which they were born, raised, and radicalized. Their life stories collectively spanned the geographic range of tsarist Russia and reflected its ethnic diversity. Their lives and outlooks were shaped in the mountainous villages of the Caucasus, the shtetls of the Pale of Settlement, the cities of Central Asia, the steppes of the Eurasian plains, the imperial borderlands we know today as Poland and Ukraine, the icy winters and mosquitoplagued summers of Siberia, and the imperial capitals of Moscow and St. Petersburg. The Bolsheviks were typical of “Russia’s people of empire.”3 That is to say, the Bolsheviks personified the diversity of the expansive, multiethnic, multilingual, and multiconfessional tsarist empire that was their homeland. Cross-cultural encounters were for many Bolsheviks utterly commonplace—a banal fact of everyday imperial life. Imperial Russia’s ethnic diversity shaped their politics no less than their life trajectories. Yet, questions of ethnicity were never the Bolsheviks’ first concern as Marxists. They believed, after all, that class conflict fueled the engine of history. Nonetheless, from the launch of the October Revolution the Bolsheviks were attentive to the need to successfully manage and mobilize the ethnic diversity of the Soviet 3

The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise

population in the strategic interests of achieving their revolutionary goals. Whether or not they themselves were existentially invested in their own ethnicity (most of them were not), the Bolsheviks recognized that many of Russia’s ordinary people found meaning in their ethnic identities and prized their distinctive ethnic cultures. Some ethnonationalists even hoped—and not without reason—that Russia’s revolutions in 1917 would open the possibility of the formation of their own independent nation-states outside of Bolshevik control. The Bolsheviks therefore recognized the power of nationalism and the threat it represented to their socialist revolution. They appreciated that they would have to deftly manage ethno-national identities and aspirations if they were to overcome them in the name of socialist internationalism. From the outset, the Bolsheviks did intend for nationalism and ethnicity itself to “wither away,” to dissolve in obsolescence once true communism was achieved. In the meantime, however, the Bolsheviks understood that they would need to counteract the power of nationalism and find a revolutionary way to harness the power of ethnic politics for the purposes of building socialism. In subsequent chapters, this book explains how and why the Bolsheviks built ethnicity—“nationality” in Soviet parlance—into the bedrock of Soviet civilization. It provides a concise explanation of the policies and ideological principles that shaped the Soviet Union as a multiethnic empire and that determined its fatal fracturing along national lines in 1991. This book aims to show how ethnic diversity was fundamental to the nature of the Soviet Union and how it was governed. Perhaps even more importantly, it seeks to show how ethnic diversity was central to how Soviet citizens variously experienced life and death, renewal and collapse, revolution and stasis, the extraordinary and the banal between the years 1917 and 1991. The book asks readers to appreciate the ways in which ethnic diversity was a basic, incontrovertible fact of Soviet life—the banal hum of everyday existence. It also asks readers to appreciate the ways in which ethnicity empowered some individuals in the Soviet Union but also disempowered and even doomed others to violent state efforts of 4

Revolutionaries

denationalization, structural prejudice, social alienation, and ethnic cleansing. The book discusses policies, institutions, and ideological principles, but its main focus is to explore how the people of the multiethnic Soviet Union shaped and were shaped by their polity’s evolving ethnic politics. Ethnicity was central to Soviet history and to the lives of Soviet citizens. I have tried in this slim book to capture to the fullest possibility the enormous ethnic diversity of the USSR. Yet, I do not chase the fool’s errand of attempting to discuss or even mention every ethnic group under the Soviet umbrella. Nor do I discuss any single ethnic group in exhaustive detail. Instead, I invite the reader to move with me in a purposeful balance of zooming out onto the “macro”—the big picture—and zooming in onto the “micro”—the individuals whose lives, or snippets thereof—help us to understand the centrality of ethnicity to Soviet history and its meaning in ordinary people’s lives. The Bolsheviks pursued their revolution with the aim of refashioning life on earth. They envisioned a global communist future in which all humans would enjoy freedom, equality, justice, material plenty, culture, technological advancement, health, fellowship, and joy. A triumphant proletariat would slough off the chains of exploitation and vanquish the hunger, misery, degradation, and cultural backwardness imposed upon society’s have-nots by the greedy and oppressive bourgeoisie under capitalism. Socialist revolution would lay the essential foundations—economic, social, cultural, and political—for Soviet society to ascend the emancipatory heights of communism. The Bolsheviks would serve as the vanguard that would lead Russia’s diverse peoples toward new life, rebirth. From the moment they seized power in October 1917, the Bolsheviks got to work chasing the Soviet dream. They hoped desperately for socialist revolution to ignite abroad. Yet, the anticipated world revolution did not arrive. The Bolsheviks soon realized that they needed to focus primarily on refashioning life on Soviet territory. Poverty, geopolitical isolation, and the harsh realities of needing to build a socialist economy from rubble were just a few of the challenges that dogged the Bolsheviks in their pursuit of socialist modernity in the early years of the Soviet state. “Our country is still very backward,” 5

The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise

Trotsky told the attendees of the Third World Comintern Congress in 1921. “It unfolds before you a panorama of unheard-of-poverty. But we are defending this bulwark of the world revolution since at the given moment there is no other in the world.”4 Economic backwardness was just one of many Bolshevik dilemmas. When, in the early years of the revolution, the Bolsheviks looked out to the country they wanted to transform into the mighty forerunner of global communism, they imagined a frightful landscape of destitution, and also an overwhelming cultural “backwardness.” Perceived backwardness clouded the land, miring the population in the muddy swamps of stunted historical development. This idea of cultural “backwardness”—with its connotations of illiteracy, filth, inertia, superstition, and all-consuming wretchedness—suffused Bolshevik rhetoric, informed Bolshevik policies, and dominated the Bolsheviks’ understanding of the multiethnic population that they hoped to lead from darkness to light, from backwardness to modernity. In the early revolutionary years, among the Bolsheviks’ most urgent priorities was the question of how to harness the potential of this multiethnic population; mobilize it for the building of socialism; and transform the presumed “backward” peoples of the former tsarist empire into modern, integrated Soviet citizens. This was no small task, and it immediately raised complex questions that defied simple answers. The Bolsheviks dreamed big. As we will see in the next chapter, they quickly laid the foundations for their nationality policy. Their approach to governing a multiethnic population transformed both the Soviet landscape and the diverse peoples who inhabited it. In ways both subtle and explicit, the Bolsheviks embraced an ethnic politics that have shaped Eurasia and the world ever since.

6

CHAPTER 2 FOUNDATIONS

As Marxists, the Bolsheviks believed that class conflict was the driver of history and that class was the fundamental determinant of any civilization’s economic, social, cultural, and political organization. At first glance, then, it is both surprising and strange that ethnicity came to be a fundamental organizing principle of Soviet life and an overriding determinant of many Soviet citizens’ fates in the twentieth century. In their bid to achieve communism, the Bolsheviks purposefully chose to reconfigure the tsarist empire—kaleidoscopic in its ethnic, linguistic, and confessional diversity—as a highly centralized socialist federation of nationalities. Over the course of the USSR’s life span, ethnicity proved to be a source of both vitality and cohesion, decay and conflict. How did a polity championed by its creators as the world’s first workers’ state come to be a multiethnic Soviet Union whose governing structure, political culture, and daily life were utterly saturated with ethnic politics? How and why did the Bolsheviks wholeheartedly embrace a politics of ethnic particularism in pursuit of socialist unity? How and why did the Soviet state come to fixate on ethnicity? How did this obsessiveness with ethnicity fundamentally shape the course of Soviet history and the fates of the peoples it had brought under the supraethnic Soviet umbrella until the USSR’s stunning collapse along national lines in 1991? When seizing power in 1917, the Bolsheviks asserted their rule over the many peoples and territories of the collapsed tsarist empire. Yet, their claim to power, let alone legitimacy, was tenuous. The Bolsheviks were still unknown to much of the multiethnic, multilingual, and multiconfessional population they claimed to rule. While the Bolsheviks’ supporters enjoyed the euphoria of the Revolution and the possibilities it opened for Russia and the world’s future, the country

The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise

was traumatized, fractured, hungry, tired, and still at war. Although the Bolsheviks extricated revolutionary Russia from the Great War in early 1918, violence and chaos prevailed at home. Until 1921, the people of the former tsarist empire were caught in the violence of the Russian civil war. This was a devastating conflict in which the Bolsheviks and their supporters fought an array of oppositionists on a number of fronts, and in which ordinary people were frequently caught up in the maelstrom. Against this backdrop, the Bolsheviks recognized the urgent need to win over non-Russian peoples, especially those who quickly claimed autonomy and otherwise threatened nationalist revolt against Bolshevik rule. If the non-Russian peoples of the former tsarist empire were deeply invested in the politics of ethnicity (and it appeared that at least some of them were), then the Bolsheviks resolved that they needed to adapt and harness those ethnic politics to serve Bolshevik aims. Ethnic politics, the Bolsheviks realized, could be instrumentalized in the service of building socialism. The pathway to communist unity, they reasoned, needed to be forged through the strategic emphasis on and energetic mobilization of ethnic difference. Or, as a 1918 Bolshevik resolution put it, a strategic nationality policy would facilitate “the transformation of the former Russian Empire, which kept the various nationalities within its confines by oppression and coercion, into a fraternal union of freely federated Soviet Republics of Russia.”1 In their efforts to reach out to nonRussian peoples, the Bolsheviks counterposed their own progressive pursuit of a multiethnic union to what they framed as the Russian chauvinism of the tsars. In an early “Appeal to the Muslims of Russia and the East,” for example, the Bolsheviks blended the rhetoric of anticolonialism with a commitment to protect and support the cultures of non-Russian peoples “whose beliefs and customs have been trampled underfoot by the tsars and oppressors of Russia!”2 The Bolsheviks crafted their evolving nationality policy with both short- and long-term goals in mind. In the short term, the Bolsheviks needed to win the trust of non-Russian peoples by demonstrating that they were not imperialists or chauvinists. In the long term, the Bolsheviks realized, they needed to provide mechanisms for the 8

Foundations

civic and cultural integration of ethnic groups—most of whom they considered woefully “backward”— into the emerging Soviet state. They committed to anchoring every Soviet citizen to nationality as a legal category of ethnic identification, an organizing principle of Soviet life, and a lever for what the Bolsheviks believed was the non-Russian peoples’ desperate need for civilizational catchup. And their most enduring motto of this foundational Bolshevik nationality policy was the pithy catchphrase: “national in form, socialist in content.” What did it mean—national in form, socialist in content? In theory, it meant that the non-Russian peoples of the emerging Soviet state would be entitled to the flourishing of their so-called national “forms.” They were owed state aid and support in the construction of national territories, native-language schools, theaters, and publishing houses. They were also promised preferential educational admissions and hiring. The Bolsheviks assured non-Russian peoples of these ethnicity-based entitlements as necessary aid for overcoming their so-called “backwardness.” In the Bolsheviks’ telling, the tsarist regime had served as a bastion of ethnic Russian chauvinism. The tsars had greedily promoted ethnic Russian interests above all others and, in doing so, had fated the non-Russian peoples of their empire to various degrees of socioeconomic and cultural “backwardness.” The Bolsheviks vowed to remedy and compensate for this stunted development with their generous nationality policy—a promise-filled program of development aid and nation-building for the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks’ novel experiment of harnessing ethnicity to advance their socialist agenda rapidly transformed the physical, institutional, and psychological landscape of the evolving Soviet state. The Bolsheviks did not merely entitle to the non-Russian peoples of the USSR the forms of nationhood (territory, language, literature, theater, schooling, etc.) within the Soviet state. They also built Soviet nations and invested scarce resources in aggressive nation-building campaigns in the 1920s and 1930s. They committed to a program of korenizatsiia (indigenization)—the promotion of native cadres and native languages within Soviet territories delineated along ethnic lines. 9

The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise

In an astonishingly brief time, ethnicity was embedded into the USSR’s geography, no less than its politics and culture. Administrators drew boundary lines into the evolving Soviet map to reflect and detail the parceling out of territories—from union republics to autonomous regions—to different ethnic groups within the USSR. Political entrepreneurs who claimed to represent and speak on behalf of their nationalities nestled into the “nationality affairs” departments of the expanding Soviet bureaucracy and made careers of Soviet ethnic politics. Textbooks, poetry collections, and new periodicals were published to outfit the USSR’s non-Russian peoples with socialist literature in their national languages. National and so-called “nativelanguage” schools, theaters, and other institutions were established all over the early USSR—they littered the landscape as both sites of nonRussian peoples’ Sovietization and monuments to the Bolsheviks’ progressive ethnic politics. In all of these ways, the world’s first workers’ state demanded that its citizens think of themselves in national terms and organize themselves along national lines. The Bolsheviks’ nationality policy insisted on ethnicity as a pillar of Soviet civilization; on ethnic difference as a primary governing principle; and on a multiethnic citizenry united under a supranational Soviet flag. In their sponsorship of state-guided national development for the USSR’s non-Russian peoples, the Bolsheviks asserted a key difference between what they referred to as the nationalism of “oppressor nations” and that of “oppressed nations.” The former was the aggressive, heartless nationalism of the bourgeoisie as exemplified by the “great power chauvinism” of the Russian tsars. In the Bolsheviks’ view, most of the ethnic groups living throughout the vast Soviet Union were “oppressed nations.” Prior to the Bolsheviks’ revolution, these nonRussian peoples had been stymied by the chauvinist Russian ruling class and stunted on the Marxist time line of historical development. The Bolsheviks’ nationality policy would “liberate” them from their historic backwardness. It was designed to “advance” (i.e., Sovietize) the USSR’s so-called “backward” nationalities at an accelerated rate so as to incorporate them as full citizens into the Soviet Union’s modern, socialist way of life. 10

Foundations

It is here where the full import of the Bolsheviks’ nationality policy catchphrase — national in form, socialist in content—comes into clearer view. The Bolsheviks poured precious resources into the construction of Soviet national “forms” with the full intent of saturating those forms with “socialist content.” National territories, theaters, publishing houses, clubs, and schools were built as mechanisms of Soviet acculturation. The national “forms” that proliferated in the 1920s and 1930s were designed to deliver “socialist content” to the ethnically diverse and presumed-to-be “backward” peoples of the USSR. Soviet nation-building was to bring the non-Russian peoples of the USSR into the Bolshevik fold: to introduce them to Soviet values, incorporate them into the socialist economy, draw them into a civic unity, and give them the tools to fashion themselves as modern, integrated citizens of a socialist state. Nationality policy was the cornerstone of the Bolsheviks’ civilizing mission. It was a Marxist-Leninist program of what one historian has aptly called “state-sponsored evolutionism.”3 In practice, Soviet nationality policy was to work as the civilizational training wheels that would put the presumed-to-be “backward” non-Russian peoples on course to achieve Soviet modernity at an accelerated speed. As should already be clear, the Bolsheviks assumed a great deal about the USSR’s non-Russian peoples—not least that most of them were mired in the sludge of cultural “backwardness” and in need of liberation at the hands of a socialist state led by modernizers aggressively confident in their own Marxist-Leninist certainty. Yet, the Bolsheviks knew very little about the many ethnic groups who inhabited the vast expanse of the Soviet Union. Despite their hubris, the Bolsheviks recognized that in order for their revolution to succeed, they would have to learn more about the ethnic groups who together comprised the Soviet mosaic of peoples. Who were the non-Russian peoples? What languages did they speak? What was their economic potential? Which cultural traditions stood most in opposition to Soviet goals and values? Who among the USSR’s different ethnic groups presented a threat to Soviet power and who among them could be co-opted into the service of the Soviet civilizing mission? If the Soviet Union were to be divided up into a patchwork of national republics 11

The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise

and smaller territories, where and how should administrators draw borders and delineate ethnic boundaries? In search of answers to these questions, the Bolsheviks relied on a variety of experts. They were ethnographers, linguists, statisticians, geographers, and economists—most of whom shared the Bolsheviks’ Eurocentrism, if not their Marxist-Leninism. These experts crucially helped the Bolsheviks to achieve “conceptual conquest” of the diverse Soviet lands and peoples. The Bolsheviks’ hired experts produced the ethnographic knowledge that helped to decide the boundaries of the USSR’s ethnically delineated territories as well as to inform the devising of the census lists of ethnic groups that were officially recognized by the Soviet state as nationalities (and therefore entitled to nationality policy’s tangible offerings). Drawing borders and tabulating census lists of nationalities were not academic and bureaucratic enterprises divorced from everyday Soviet life. They had enormous practical consequences for how the Soviet Union evolved both administratively and ideologically. Likewise, early Soviet map-making and census-taking profoundly shaped how Soviet citizens came to locate, imagine, understand, and define themselves in ethnic terms within the wider Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. For some, the Soviet census-taker’s question “who are you by nationality?” was a source of utter bewilderment and confusion; they had never thought of themselves in these terms before. Many no doubt responded with some variant of the befuddled rejoinder, “but what is a nationality?” Requiring the Soviet people to think of themselves in ethnic terms was in part the point of conducting the first empire-wide Soviet census in 1926. In order for the logic of “national in form, socialist in content” to work as intended, even those peoples whom the Bolsheviks regarded as so “backward” that they as yet lacked even an elemental national consciousness needed to be made to think of themselves in national terms. As a result of their efforts, Soviet census-takers in 1927 recognized some 172 ethnic groups on its official roster of the recognized nationalities of the USSR. Ukrainians and Georgians, Koreans and Armenians, Finns and Samoeds, Chuvash and Tajiks—these groups and many more appeared on the official list of ethnic groups recognized as worthy 12

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beneficiaries of the Bolsheviks’ nationality policy. Soon, even those who had earlier not known what was meant by the question “who are you by nationality?” were readily identifying themselves in ethnic terms. State-sponsored evolutionism was working! As the Bolsheviks’ Sovietizing mission progressed, the USSR’s official lists of nationalities were shortened as the administrative focus shifted to focus on “major nationalities.” In Soviet planners’ eyes, it was civilizational progress—progress made in Sovietizing the diverse population and rationalizing their administration—that allowed for the shortening of the census lists. For the 1939 census, the USSR recognized sixty-two official nationalities—from Russians to Gypsies, Armenians to Ossetians, Uzbeks to Nanai.4 Census data was used to inform the process of ironing out the complex matter of delineating the borders of the USSR’s national republics and regions. In less than two decades, the Bolsheviks had succeeded in not only outfitting the Soviet population with national identities but also in mapping out and institutionalizing its ethno-territorial administrative structure.5 The Bolsheviks’ impatience knew few bounds. They were feverish in their pursuit of progress—“building socialism” as they called it. They hurried in the 1920s and 1930s to achieve not only their “conceptual conquest” of the multiethnic Soviet Union, but also to destroy the “backwardness” they associated with the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet steppes, tundra, mountains, valleys, deserts, and plains. These battles went hand in hand. They were conceived as essential to the larger Bolshevik assault on the many grotesqueries of the old way of life, among them religion, nomadism, illiteracy, and individual profitseeking. Building socialism required a decisive triumph over the past. This victory was to be achieved by New Soviet Men and Women invested in their own transformation and committed to a new socialist way of life. When, in 1928, Stalin launched his First Five-Year Plan and rushed to transition to a fully socialist economy in an uncompromising “Great Break” with the past, a tidal wave of revolutionary upheaval swept up Soviet society. The Stalinist collectivization of agriculture was as much an intended war against the peasantry as it was a rush to reorient the rural economy on socialist lines. Stalin’s armed collectivizers 13

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bombarded the countryside in 1930 with urgent orders to vanquish the class enemies—so-called kulaks—who were said to be sabotaging the revolution and starving the cities in pursuit of their own self-interest. In practice, “dekulakization” meant stripping Soviet citizens of their property, barring them from admittance into the new collective farms (kolkhozes), and deporting some two million kulaks via cattle cars to distant Gulag settlements in the Far North, Central Asia, and Siberia where they could theoretically redeem themselves as penal laborers for the socialist economy. In the worst case scenario—that is to say, when deemed utterly irredeemable—kulaks were executed. As a consequence of collectivization’s merciless violence and the state’s setting of rapacious agricultural quotas, hunger soon ravaged key regions of the Soviet Union. The cataclysmic Soviet famines ignited by collectivization (and whose ethnic dimensions will be discussed at greater length in the next chapter) claimed approximately five to seven million lives.6 The brutalities and dislocations of collectivization unleashed chaos throughout the Soviet Union. Collectivization spurred a demographic revolution that transformed the Soviet landscape no less than how the Soviet state bureaucratically mandated and administered its individual citizens’ nationalities. Fleeing the wreckage of collectivization and the violence of dekulakization, millions of Soviet citizens were on the move during the Stalinist 1930s. The cities of Stalin’s crash industrialization program swelled with new arrivals. Between the years 1926 and 1939, the urban population of the Soviet Union ballooned as some thirty-one million people gambled on making new lives for themselves. Although the Stalinist state needed these migrants’ labor to power the USSR’s rapid industrialization program, the USSR’s cities and burgeoning industrial centers lacked the infrastructure to accommodate the enormous influx of rural migrants. They quickly began to overtax already insufficient stocks of housing, food, and transport in urban areas. Crowding, shortages, and rationing were the norm for the residents of Soviet cities as they nearly burst at the seams in the 1930s.7 To stem the tide of migration to cities and to better surveil those living within them, the Soviet state introduced in 1932 an internal 14

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passport regime that proved to have an outsized impact on ethnicity’s role in Soviet politics and daily life. All adult residents of Soviet cities, industrial complexes, and border regions were required to carry an internal passport. Inscribed within the passports were not only the individual’s name, birthdate, and residential address, but also their class status, occupation, and ethnicity. Without a passport, an individual could not legally reside in the USSR’s urban areas or access rationed goods. With a passport, a Soviet citizen became, in a bureaucratic sense, ethnically marked. The passport declared and documented a Soviet citizen’s ethnic identity. Passport holders effectively became tethered to the answer to the question “Who are you by nationality?” that was scrawled onto line item number 5 of their crucial identity document. “Who are you by nationality?” came, over time, to be one of the most important and inescapable questions of Soviet life. Soviet citizens confronted the question in nearly all their bureaucratic encounters—when they sought jobs, applied to schools, appealed to state authorities, or filled out any routine questionnaire. One’s answer to the question could lead to professional advancement or discrimination in the Soviet workplace. One’s answer to the question could mean a better life or an untimely death. Every Soviet citizen was required to identify as belonging to a singular nationality, but different ethnic groups experienced Soviet life in different ways. This book argues that ethnicity was central to the Soviet experience. Ethnic politics fundamentally shaped Soviet history from the launch of the Bolsheviks’ revolution through the USSR’s dissolution along national lines in 1991. Soviet ethnic politics not only framed how the peoples of the Soviet Union understood themselves and one another, but also colored their perceptions of the USSR and its role in the world. The Soviet politics of ethnicity came to saturate the elemental textures of Soviet life—governance, society, economy, and culture. The next chapters are designed to explore how Soviet citizens variously experienced the inescapably ethnicized dimensions of Soviet life. An understanding of Soviet ethnic politics is necessary to understand not only the contours of Soviet history but also the persistent legacies of the multiethnic Soviet Union that are still felt across contemporary Eurasia. 15

The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise

Before moving ahead, a few words on terminology are in order. First is the term “nationality”—the Bolsheviks’ word of choice for what many readers of this book would refer to as “ethnicity.” Throughout, I will alternate between the two terms—“nationality” and “ethnicity”— and will be using them more or less interchangeably. Why the caveat “more or less?” As this book will help to illuminate, “nationality” often proved a slippery term despite, and perhaps because of its status as a legal category of utmost importance in Soviet life. Next is the term “nationality policy.” The Bolsheviks never enshrined a singular, unchanging Soviet nationality policy encapsulated in a tidy programmatic text.8 Yet, in this book I will use the phrase “nationality policy” in the flexible yet meaningful way that scholars of the multiethnic Soviet Union have tended to use it in their rich and varied scholarship. When I refer to nationality policy, I will be referencing the discernible policies, practices, ideological principles, and ideological contradictions that—taken together—allow us to better see and understand (1) the Soviet Union’s evolving and often inconsistent approach to governing its ethnically diverse population and (2) the agency of Soviet citizens who variously enacted, resisted, shaped, and experienced the USSR’s ethnic politics. Last is the term “empire.” Historians have long debated the question of whether or not the Soviet Union was an empire. The question arises first and foremost because of the Bolsheviks’ avowed commitment to anti-colonialism and robust condemnation of imperialism. Should we take them at their word? History has shown that just because a state claims not to be an empire does not make it so. Was the Soviet Union an empire? And does the distinction matter? One historian answered these questions with a provocative quip: “The Soviet Union was an empire—in the sense of being very big, bad, asymmetrical, hierarchical, heterogenous, and doomed.”9 Yet, there are other ways to conceptualize empire that could prove still more helpful to understanding the multiethnic Soviet Union. As the historians Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper have reminded us, empires were the norm in world history for nearly two millennia. Empires have come in different shapes and sizes. Their life spans have varied as have their strategies of both conquest and rule. They have 16

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all insisted on underscoring and reinforcing the explicit difference(s) among and between the peoples incorporated under their rule. The understanding that “different peoples within the polity will be governed differently” is an essential predicate of empire. Burbank and Cooper have therefore argued that empires are best defined as “large political units, expansionist or with a memory of power extended over space, polities that maintain distinction and hierarchy as they incorporate new people.” Understood in this light, the Soviet Union certainly was an empire. Conceptually, the distinction matters in so far as it can help orient us as we explore in this book’s subsequent chapters how the explicit politics of ethnic difference shaped the lives of Soviet citizens and how they understood and positioned themselves within the Soviet Union and the wider world.10 It bears repeating at the outset that the politics of ethnic difference in the Soviet Union did not play out uniformly throughout the Soviet empire and certainly did not affect all Soviet citizens in the same manner. The Bolsheviks aggressively promoted the Soviet development of some ethnic groups while simultaneously working to destroy the languages, customs, and identities of others—especially those peoples who were deemed too small or simply too inconvenient for Soviet state-building purposes. Some nationalities were lionized—none more so than Russians—while others were demonized and targeted for ethnic cleansing. Some so-called “titular” nationalities enjoyed the perks of belonging to a union republic crafted in their name; others had to struggle to carve out spaces and loci of political power through which they could channel their ethnic interests and assert their ethnic identities. For some, ethnicity proved an unavoidable liability and even personal source of humiliation. For others, ethnicity proved a pathway to Soviet success as well as existential self-realization. Soviet propaganda defied the complexity of the politics of ethnic difference as they played out on the ground and in people’s actual lives. Soviet nationality policies shifted and evolved over time. Some of the ideological principles undergirding the Soviet approach to governing its multiethnic population metamorphosed too. Yet, throughout its history, the Soviet Union applauded itself for its embrace of what one historian has termed “domestic internationalism.” While all the 17

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peoples of the Soviet Union were united by a shared supranational civic identity, every individual citizen was obliged to self-identify and be identified by the state as belonging to a singular nationality. The supranational Soviet culture that bound this diverse citizenry together—at least in theory—celebrated the Soviet Union’s ethnic diversity as a rich cultural bounty, a source of strength, and a reflection of the righteousness of the ideology of Soviet socialism. As domestic internationalists, Soviet citizens were expected to appreciate the distinct ethnic cultures that each nationality brought to the shared Soviet table. The Soviet Union claimed its ethnic diversity as a point of pride in and of itself. It also claimed its approach to managing that ethnic diversity as a bragging right. The Soviet Union raised its domestic internationalism as evidence of the moral superiority of Soviet socialism and compared it to the racism of its primary capitalist antagonists in the twentieth century: Nazi Germany and the United States. Despite the bravado of Soviet propagandists in their hyperbolic portrayal of Soviet multiethnic harmony, it would be a mistake to dismiss Soviet domestic internationalism as a cynical ploy, an empty fiction. As an ideological principle, it was a pillar of Soviet civilization—a core ingredient of politics, culture, and daily life.11 It is the purpose of subsequent chapters to explore what the Soviet Union’s evolving ethnic politics could and did mean in the lives of Soviet citizens no less than what it could and did mean for the fate of the USSR itself.

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CHAPTER 3 SOVIET NATION-BUILDING

When the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917, they did not achieve their revolution. They launched it. Their success depended on the peoples of the emerging Soviet state. The participation of non-Russian peoples in the building of socialism was essential. The Bolsheviks could never have achieved their revolutionary goals without mobilizing the diverse population of the former tsarist empire. Bolshevik rule was coercive and often merciless. Yet, it also brought opportunity and, for some, hope of a better life. Bolshevik rule slammed some doors shut, but burst others wide open. A Ukrainian peasant may have regarded the Bolsheviks as footmen of the Apocalypse, but a young Romani (Gypsy) striver may have welcomed them as the creators of a new world in which the formerly downtrodden might skyrocket to socialist success.1 A Kazakh nomad may have experienced Soviet rule as little more than brutal dispossession and the collapse of the only world he had ever known. A Tajik woman once sold into marriage may have greeted the Bolshevik Revolution as an escape route from her misery and an invitation to build a new society that promised gender equality. Personal responses to the novelty and feverish dictates of Bolshevik rule varied among the Soviet people. Yet, few could avoid the need to adapt to the new way of life ushered in by the revolution. This chapter explores the interwar Soviet civilizing mission and different ethnic groups’ and individuals’ varied experiences of the Bolsheviks’ aggressive pursuit of their revolutionary agenda. The pivotal early decades of Soviet nation-building laid the essential foundations of Soviet ethnic politics, decided the ethnoadministrative structure of the USSR, and fundamentally transformed the lives of the multiethnic Soviet population.

The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise

Revolutionary Opportunities Some Jews welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution as their world-historic emancipation. The Bolsheviks promised to outlaw anti-Semitism and create a society in which all non-Russian peoples, including Jews, would flourish. This was not mere rhetoric. The Bolsheviks quickly got to work in cementing a “Soviet-Jewish alliance” in revolutionary Russia—hiring Jews for government positions; punishing popular anti-Semitism, and quashing outbreaks of pogroms (violent antiSemitic riots) in the shtetls of Ukraine during the civil war. Many Jews who initially were not sympathetic to socialism soon found reason to support the Bolsheviks.2 For many Jews hailing from the small towns of the tsarist Pale of Settlement, the Bolshevik Revolution meant physical and social mobility. In the 1920s, young Jews of the former Pale began migrating in large numbers to Soviet cities. Between the years 1926 and 1939 alone, no fewer than 300,000 Jews moved to Soviet cities. They left behind not only their older relatives, but also their old way of life: rural, religious, insular.3 The 1920s and 1930s witnessed Soviet Jews’ extraordinary entrée into Soviet higher education. By the close of the 1930s, Jews were well represented among the USSR’s ranks of students, scientists, and educated professionals. In fact, Jews were pursuing higher education at a rate ten times that of the broader Soviet population. The revolution opened doors to education and professional advancement for Jews who proved eager to take advantage of opportunities that would have been inconceivable to many of their Jewish forebears in the tsarist empire.4 Representatives of other ethnic groups also quickly awakened to the potential of the Bolsheviks’ nationality policy and the professional and social opportunities it offered. They creatively engaged the promises of Bolshevik nation-building and gave life to the slogan “national in form, socialist in content.” In so doing, they helped to embed ethnicity as central to Soviet daily life and individual identity. They helped to transform the Soviet landscape into one dotted with “national” institutions—schools, farms, workshops, clubs, and theaters—that mobilized non-Russian peoples in the service of building socialism. 20

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In 1924, for example, a group of young Romani activists approached Soviet authorities in the name of the Soviet Union’s “backward Gypsies.” As modern, literate representatives of their beleaguered nationality, they explained, they wanted to help lead the Soviet mission to transform so-called “backward Gypsies”—nomads, illiterates, marginals—into settled, integrated New Soviet Gypsies. The activists learned quickly how to mobilize the rhetoric of the Bolsheviks’ ethnic politics. They recognized the strategic value of portraying their fellow “Gypsies” as mired in backwardness. In 1925, they established the AllRussian Gypsy Union and committed to building a range of national Gypsy institutions that would introduce their people to the new Soviet way of life.5 Among the work that the Gypsy Union helped to achieve in the 1920s was the creation of so-called Gypsy schools in Moscow. Nina Dudarova was an activist and educator who participated in the Gypsy Union’s work, taught at one of the early USSR’s Gypsy schools, and composed didactic textbooks for Romani children and adults alike. Looking back on this work, Dudarova recalled how she taught her students not only the Russian language, but also about hygiene and socialism. She took them to museums, theaters, and the cinema. She emphasized the Bolsheviks’ “call to work, to a new life, and disapproval of the old Gypsy way of life.” While the work was never easy, Dudarova explained, it was meaningful: she had helped to rear “a new generation of Gypsies.” She and her fellow Romani activists “worked with great enthusiasm, joy, because before our eyes grew up our downtrodden, backward people.” It was thanks to the Bolsheviks and their nationality policy that “Gypsies became equal citizens,” Dudarova claimed.6 In Central Asia, a group of modernist Muslim intellectuals known as the Jadids received news of the revolution with excitement—not because they were Bolsheviks or even Marxists, but because they regarded the revolution as an opportunity to enact locally the reforms that they had been proposing for decades. During the twilight of tsarist rule, the Jadids had conversed with one another as well as with Muslims beyond Russia’s borders in pursuit of a program of “progress” and “civilization.” Islam, they argued, was not a prescription for the people of Central Asia to cling to traditions and reject modernity. 21

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Rather, it was a divine mandate to embrace progress. In seeking the enlightenment of modernity via the modern vehicle of the nation, the Jadids claimed, Muslims would come to see and to know “true” Islam.7 One warned his fellow Jadids that if they did not take advantage of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that the revolution afforded them, their failure would constitute “an enormous crime, a betrayal of not just ourselves, but of all Muslims.”8 In 1917, the Jadids were merely one among many groups then offering competing visions for Central Asia’s future. Their vision—a particularistic one for the national development of sedentary Muslim society in Central Asia—was not widely popular. Nor was it in harmony with the Bolsheviks’ militantly class-based and atheist worldview. Yet, by working in partnership (a sometimes quite awkward partnership) with the early Bolshevik regime, the Jadids managed to achieve some of their major goals—but not without considerable cost. In the early revolutionary years, the Bolsheviks helped to expand the network of schools that the Jadids had begun to operate in the late tsarist period. They also joined the Jadids in promoting girls’ and women’s education in Central Asia and the training of women teachers. The Bolsheviks’ and Jadids’ complementary pursuit of modernization in the early 1920s had real-world effects for those who had reason to seek safe haven in the revolution. A women’s teacher-training school established in Tashkent in 1919 quickly attracted ordinary women fleeing the miseries of the past and hoping for a better future. Zaynab Koribuva’s parents sold her into marriage when she was but seven years old. Her bride price? A stock of grain desperately needed during a famine. After enduring an abusive marriage, Koribuva escaped to Tashkent, where she enrolled in the teacher-training courses made possible by the revolution.9 Perhaps the Jadids’ greatest and most enduring achievement was the creation of the Uzbek nation under Soviet auspices during the territorial delimitation of Central Asia along ethnic lines in 1924. Soviet nationality policy—with its commitment to the territorialization of ethnicity—provided the framework within which Jadids realized their long-simmering dream of modern nationhood. The Jadids eagerly took advantage of Soviet nationality policy in order 22

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to make real their dream of a unified Uzbek nation—even if under the supranational Soviet umbrella.10 They also worked to establish a modern Uzbek language, literature, press, and theater—all within the wider Soviet frame. The Uzbek intelligentsia were not the only “winners” of the Bolshevik transformation of Central Asia’s political geography. The early Soviet ethno-territorial delimitation of the region appealed to other indigenous activists in the region—Kazakh, Turkmen, and Kyrgyz among them—who likewise recognized the potential of Soviet-sponsored nation-building. Between 1924 and 1936, Central Asia’s division into five union republics (today’s Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan) transformed not only the map of Eurasia but also the political imaginations of its inhabitants. While many ordinary people in this diverse region did not place much, if any, stock in their national identity prior to Bolshevik rule, they learned to think nationally—to engage in the USSR’s ethnic politics and to understand themselves as inhabitants of Soviet territories meaningfully encased by national boundaries.11 They took on national labels—Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Turkmen, Uzbek, and others—that in a matter of mere decades came to displace, if not efface kinship, local, and regional identities that had predominated prior to Soviet rule.12 It should not surprise us that many among the non-Russian peoples greeted Soviet nation-building with open arms. The Bolsheviks made enticing ethnicity-based promises, and many recognized in early Soviet nationality policy the potential for self-advancement no less than national realization. There were strings attached to the Bolsheviks’ civilizing mission—namely, the duty to participate in the building of socialism and the refashioning of one’s self into a modern Soviet citizen. For some, this insistence on modernization carried an undeniable appeal. Whether they liked it or not, however, the peoples of the Soviet Union—no matter their ethnicity—could not opt out from the Soviet civilizing mission. The Bolsheviks were dead set on making the peoples of the emerging Soviet state awaken to the enlightenment of socialism and to reforge themselves as New Soviet Men and Women. If the USSR’s peoples did not want to walk gladly 23

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into the enlightened socialist future, they would be dragged—kicking and screaming, if necessary.

Sovietizing Missions While the Bolsheviks recruited young people of all nationalities to join in their relentless assault on backwardness, the early Soviet civilizing mission arrived in some corners of the Soviet empire in a fashion that sometimes resembled the civilizing missions of the European colonizers of Africa, Asia, and the Americas—colonizers whom the Bolsheviks decried as murderous capitalist imperialists. Yet, the USSR was not alone among modernizing states that sought to eradicate their population’s presumed “backwardness” via aggressive campaigns of civic integration and assimilation into a unifying “modern” culture. Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan accelerated the Soviet civilizing mission and intensified the violence that the Bolsheviks accepted as necessary to their revolution’s success. Across the Soviet Union—in Moscow and Leningrad, Chukotka and Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Birobidzhan— Stalin’s so-called “revolution from above” ruthlessly demanded integration into the socialist economy and Soviet culture. The Soviet Union did industrialize at breakneck speed in the Stalinist 1930s. Many ordinary people paid for this industrialization with their lives. Others survived, but with the knowledge that their old way of life— and, for some, their once abundant ecosystems—had been sacrificed for the revolution. Tikhon Semushkin arrived in Chukotka in 1927 with a stockpile of Chukchi vocabulary and all the conceits of the Bolshevik civilizing mission. He marveled at how, upon transferring a gaggle of Chukchi schoolchildren to a newly established Soviet boarding school, he and his fellow cultural workers had to teach the youths how to use pencils for schoolwork and spoons for eating. Teaching them to become modern, Semushkin explained, meant outfitting the Chukchi children in “our clothing and underwear,” thereby replacing their native dress. It meant teaching them to bathe—to wash away the “greasy filth” that covered their bodies and that, in Semuhskin’s eyes, symbolized 24

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their backwardness. Semushkin never questioned that he and his fellow Bolsheviks were emancipating the tundra by teaching Chukchi literacy and hygiene and incorporating them into a modern socialist economy.13 A native reindeer herder in Chukotka expressed well how he and many of his fellow Chukchi felt about the arrival of the Bolsheviks. They “do not understand our way of life,” he stated simply.14 They knew nothing of reindeer, or of the ecosystem and the demands it made on those who inhabited the tundra. Yet, by the late 1920s, even reindeer herders could not easily escape the Bolsheviks, who followed them across icy expanses with mobile “red tents” that allowed for agitprop film screenings to teach suspicious Chukchi about the First Five-Year Plan and the need to collectivize their herds.15 As elsewhere in the USSR during collectivization, the tundra became a site of violent struggle between the Bolsheviks intent on “modernizing” reindeer-herding and Chukchi who refused to hand over their herds to new collective farms. Chukchi killed their reindeer in protest. Chukchi who refused to collectivize their herds were targeted as class enemies—subject to arrest—until they submitted to integration into the socialist economy.16 Along the Arctic coastline, however, collectivization proceeded with considerably less violence as Chukchi and Yupik hunters of walrus and whales were collectivized and given state-mandated targets for hunting. Bolshevik planners “modernized” the hunts by providing the Chukchi and Yupik with motors and guns and demanding fulfillment of aggressive quotas— their mandated contributions of blubber to the socialist economy. Yet, aggressive socialist walrus- and whale-hunting led to depopulating the herds that the Chukchi and Yupik had long relied upon not only for calories, but also for hides, oil, and ivory.17 As Chukchi and Yupik were assimilated into the Soviet economy and culture, their way of life and their ecosystem were Sovietized with dramatic consequence for humans and walruses alike. With fewer and fewer reindeer, walruses, and whales for them to hunt, many Chukchi and Yupik eventually ceased to be hunters. In the decades following Stalin’s revolutionary first five-year plans, more and more Chukchi and Yupik abandoned both hunting and their native villages, leaving 25

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the past behind for new futures in the apartment blocks of growing “modern” cities in the Soviet Far East.18

Revolutionizing Central Asia The Bolsheviks also sought to unleash the productive potential of Central Asia. Here, a huge focus of Bolshevik efforts centered on what they described as women’s emancipation from the “bleak and humiliating life” they suffered as “the slave of family, religion, and state.”19 The Bolsheviks understood their campaign to liberate Central Asian women as part of a larger struggle against stalwart class enemies—Muslim clerics and wealth-hoarders—and as a battle with what they regarded as a wider culture of “inertia, backwardness, and ignorance.”20 In the late 1920s, the Bolsheviks’ campaign to emancipate the women of the Soviet “East” came in part to focus on veiling practices among sedentary Central Asian women—namely, Uzbeks and Tajiks. The traditional horsehair veil and heavy robes worn by Uzbek and Tajik women symbolized “Eastern” inscrutability in Bolshevik eyes. One communist activist likened the veil to a “dark curtain of religion” that shrouded native society from the state, and rendered their wearers impenetrable to the reach of Soviet civilization. The unveiling of Uzbek and Tajik women symbolized—and was considered a necessary pretext of—the Bolsheviks’ hoped-for collapse of religious faith.21 In 1927, Bolshevik activists launched the hujum (unveiling campaign; literally, “the assault”)—an aggressive effort to “liberate” Central Asian women and, in particular, to unveil those Uzbek and Tajik women who wore paranji—full-length robes worn to cover the female face and body. The hujum came on the heels of an already disruptive and controversial land reform that had redistributed land held by the wealthy to the poor. It coincided with a broader Soviet initiative to shutter Central Asia’s mosques, Islamic courts, and religious schools. And while the hujum conspicuously targeted veiling practices among Uzbek and Tajik women, the Bolsheviks also sought to forcibly put an end to bride price, polygamy, and the confinement 26

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of women to the home. Unveiled and unshackled, women were to join in the work of Soviet society. In its most highly visible manifestation, the hujum featured public meetings at which women unveiled and sometimes burned their paranji. M. Arifkhanova, an Uzbek woman, was born in 1911 to what she referred to later as “a very fanatical family.” While a student preparing for her eventual scholarly career as a biologist, Arifkhanova participated in an unveiling celebration held in Tashkent on International Women’s Day in 1927. She recalled with pride how she exchanged her veil for a red kerchief and Communist Youth League (Komsomol) pin. Her unveiling symbolized her freedom, she explained, but she was not yet fully free. When she traveled to visit family in her native village that summer, Arifkhanova reluctantly donned her veil again. Yet, her relatives discovered that she had joined the Komsomol and were outraged. She narrowly escaped murder at her uncles’ hands.22​ Others were not as lucky. The hujum inspired violent outrage among Uzbeks who were already displaced by the Bolsheviks’ land reform and who rightly perceived the unveiling campaign as an assault against their religion and way of life. Women who unveiled paid the price for the outrage and frustration that the hujum inspired. An estimated 2,000 women were murdered.23 Many more were beaten, raped, harassed, and disowned by family and friends. When eighteenyear-old Adolat Burkhanova attempted to enroll in school in 1928, her husband murdered her on the streets of Bukhara. In another case, a woman who unveiled was poisoned by her mother-in-law.24 The murders were intended to terrorize as well as to punish. The Bolsheviks memorialized the women murdered during the hujum as “martyrs of the new life.”25 Despite the hujum’s terrifying violence, some Muslim women in Central Asia unequivocally embraced the Bolshevik Revolution as their emancipation. Jahon Obidova, for example, would later claim that “Soviet power, our Communist Party, made me a real human being, a human in the full sense of the word.”26 Born to an impoverished Tajik family, Obidova later surmised that if it had not been for the Bolsheviks, she would have spent her entire life miserable, powerless, 27

The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise

Figure 2  Soviet poster, “Working Woman of the East! Join the Ranks of the Builders of Socialism!” © Heritage Images/Getty Images.

and in the oppressive clutches of men. Obidova was sold at age thirteen into marriage to an elderly polygamist who abused her. During the First World War, she escaped her husband and fled to Tashkent where she took a job as a domestic servant. According to Obidova, however, it was the Bolsheviks who truly saved her. Under Soviet power, she was reborn. In 1918, she was admitted to a workers’ school and she learned to read and write. The Bolsheviks laid open all doors for her professional and personal development. In 1927, she joined the Communist Party (CPSU) and participated in the hujum. Obidova spent the next three decades ascending still higher in her CPSU career, eventually becoming mayor of Tashkent in the 1930s and working in various posts overseeing industrialization and managing factories in 28

Soviet Nation-Building

Uzbekistan. An exceptional case, she dedicated her life to building socialism in Soviet Central Asia and to flouting nearly every one of prerevolutionary society’s gender norms.27 In the end, the hujum did not succeed in eradicating the veil or Islam. It did, however, represent the Bolsheviks’ growing intolerance of local rivals to their authority as well as the Bolsheviks’ frustrated impatience with their own muddled attempts in the 1920s to revolutionize Central Asia.28 In tragic and often fatal fashion, the hujum also reflected the struggle between Bolshevik modernizers and their Central Asian opponents, no less than ongoing struggles among Central Asians who were themselves divided in their response to the Bolsheviks’ demand that they adopt a new way of life. The hujum was but one “assault” in a wider campaign to Sovietize Central Asia—a campaign that became still more violent and merciless during Stalin’s industrial revolution.

The Kazakh Famine With the onset of Stalin’s revolution from above, the Bolsheviks’ efforts to transform Central Asia became still more aggressive. During the First Five-Year Plan, the Bolsheviks accelerated their drive to steamroll into oblivion all elements of so-called “backwardness” in Central Asia—among them, pastoral nomadism. Ultimately, the Bolsheviks’ violent attempt to sedentarize and Sovietize Kazakhstan’s pastoral nomads during collectivization permanently transformed the culture, landscape, environment, and people of Kazakhstan. The perceived primitiveness of pastoral nomadism perplexed bureaucrats in Moscow who regarded nomads as the antithesis of modern, integrated citizens of an advanced socialist state. Although they had once been idealized by some Marxist thinkers as primitive communists, pastoral nomads were reimagined during the First-FiveYear Plan as people no less dominated by a native class of capitalist exploiters (kulaks) than were sedentary farmers. The Bolsheviks believed it was urgently necessary to sedentarize nomads, thereby incorporating them into the socialist economy as productive, 29

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stationary agriculturalists. Once immobilized and incorporated into the socialist economy, former nomads could at last adapt to Soviet modernity. Bolshevik economic planners aimed not only to sedentarize and assimilate Kazakh nomads, but also to “collectivize” their livestock— the herds of sheep, camels, goats, and horses that they led in their seasonal migrations to the pasture lands of the Kazakh steppe. Whereas Bolshevik planners imagined Kazakh nomads and their agricultural techniques through a hubristic prism of civilizational hierarchy and Eurocentric ideological assumptions about “Eastern backwardness,” Kazakh nomads actually understood the ecology of the steppe. Theirs was a terrain that could not support stationary agriculture. Much of the region’s land was too arid. The climate—with its reliable droughts and frosts—was too unforgiving. The Kazakh nomads’ seasonal migrations were purposeful, sophisticated adaptations to the environment. Kazakh pastoral nomadism was rooted in a local knowledge that the Bolsheviks did not acknowledge and refused to understand. In launching collectivization in the Kazakh steppe, the Bolsheviks sought to tame nature no less than to transform illiterate Kazakh nomads into productive Soviet workers. The Bolsheviks wanted to modernize the steppe by crisscrossing it with paved roads, electrical wiring, schools, railways, and the modern infrastructure required to remake Kazakhstan into a regional center of meatpacking and wheat production that would serve and be networked into the wider Soviet economy. They believed that experts could apply science and socialism to the Kazakh steppe and thereby remold it into a reliable sector of the larger Soviet economy that would no longer be straitjacketed by either “backwardness” or the region’s unpredictable weather. With these goals in mind, the Bolsheviks launched their campaign to dekulakize, collectivize, and sedentarize Kazakh nomads in 1928. The Soviet collectivization drive in Kazakhstan quickly plunged the region into merciless famine. More than a million Kazakhs perished in the Kazakh famine of 1930 to 1933—a figure that represents some 40 percent of the Kazakh population.29 It was not the policy of sedentarization per se that led to the famine but, 30

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rather, the brutal mechanics of collectivization and, namely, the state’s rapacious meat and grain quotas imposed upon the pastoral nomads. By late 1933, 90 percent of Kazakhstan’s livestock had been destroyed—a jaw-dropping statistic that represents not only the violent cataclysm that Kazakhs suffered during these years or the devastation of their environment, but also an enduring economic catastrophe for a Soviet state that nurtured visions of transforming Kazakhstan into a modern meatpacking powerhouse.30 As ambitious as it was merciless, the Soviet collectivization drive in Kazakhstan upended Soviet planners’ own hopes for agro-industrial modernity and economic productivity in the Kazakh steppe. It also decimated the Kazakh population and traumatized those who lived to tell the tale of the brutal hunger and devastation that Stalin’s collectivization drive wrought. In his memoir The Silent Steppe, Mukhamet Shayakhmetov described in wrenching detail how Soviet collectivization led to famine and the pitiless destruction of what he called “the life we lost.”31 Shayakhmetov was just nine years old when Stalin launched the deadly collectivization drive in Kazakhstan. Yet, Shayakhmetov remembered life before collectivization in his native aul, or kin-based nomadic encampment. He recalled how his family’s aul had moved strategically through the seasons in search of pastures on which their herds could graze. “These moves were easy for us,” Shayakhmetov recalled, “as they had been developed to a fine art.”32 Underscoring the central relationship between the Kazakhs and their animals, he wrote, “the pattern of our year was dictated by the needs of our herds and flocks.” Animals were the Kazakhs’ livelihood, but also living creatures to which they were bonded. To live without their animals was unimaginable, except as “certain death.”33 Kazakh nomads were bonded, too, to their landscape. They followed its rhythms and adapted their way of life to the local ecology. Shayakhmetov lamented that future generations of Kazakhs would not know what he eulogized as “the joys and freedom of the wandering way of life”—“the green carpet of meadows stretching out before us as we arrived at our summer stopping place, the unforgettable scent of the wild flowers and the blaze of color they created all around, and the cool, fresh breeze 31

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blowing from the snowy peaks.”34 Collectivization, Shayakhmetov explained, had utterly destroyed the Kazakh nomads’ way of life. Bolshevik activists, Shayakhmetov recalled, did not merely confiscate the Kazakh pastoralists’ livestock. They took any movable property they could carry with them—even his grandmother’s “threadbare” heirloom shawl.35 Left propertyless and hungry, many Kazakhs wondered in bewilderment what it was all for and who, exactly, this Stalin was, who had demanded the steppe be collectivized?36 The Soviet state was weak enough, as yet, so that Bolshevik ideology remained alien to most Kazakhs. In Shayakhmetov’s community, Stalin was imagined at best as a shadowy, vague figure—distant and unrecognizable. For Shayakhmetov’s family, the Soviet state was personified in these years by both Bolshevik emissaries from Moscow and local Kazakh “activists” who were recruited to carry out collectivization.37 Moscow relied on native Kazakh recruits to confiscate the nomads’ property; tax and arrest those deemed “kulaks;” and upend the Kazakh nomads’ way of life in the name of socialist transformation and Soviet integration. Once the state expropriated their livestock and other property, Kazakh nomads could scarcely, if at all, support themselves. They were compelled to sedentarize for want of any other reasonable option. Soon, a devastating hunger set in. Shayakhmetov recalled the colossal, tragic waste of the animals confiscated by the Bolshevik activists who did not know how to either care for or make rational use of them. Animal carcasses piled up—their stench of spoilage a portent of their potential for epidemic disease—and decayed while Kazakhs starved.38 “Everywhere you looked,” Shayakhmetov wrote, “you could see starving people with swollen faces wandering about or, worst still, living skeletons, all skin and bones, in tattered clothing. There were corpses lying in the streets, the steppe and the roads.”39 The violence and trauma of the famine transformed the Kazakhs. “Famine,” Shayakhmetov lamented, “made people forget the traditions that made their nation so special.”40 In this grim way, the Soviet state achieved one of its goals in pursuing ruthless collectivization of the Kazakh steppe. Soviet Kazakhstan was built on the bodies of former nomads starved into submission. Dekulakization, collectivization, 32

Soviet Nation-Building

and sedentarization forced the transformation of Kazakh nomads into settled Kazakhs whose viable path forward could only be integration into the socialist economy and Soviet culture. In its horrifying violence, collectivization destroyed Kazakh nomads’ prior way of life, clearing the ground from which a new Kazakh national identity, rooted in Soviet culture, would grow.41​ Soviet authorities “cleared the ground” in Central Asia writ large with the hope of transforming its inhabitants into modern Soviet people, but also of reaping the economic rewards of transforming the arid landscape. In Central Asia, early Soviet socialism also fatefully converged with “the irrigation age.” Bringing water to Central Asia’s arid landscape was as essential to the Soviet civilizing mission as was bringing the words of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin to this region’s diverse inhabitants. Sedentary agriculture powered by modern irrigation systems would empower, uplift, and productively employ Central Asians. It would also feed the Soviet economy, nourishing it with lucrative cotton harvests.42 Soviet blueprints for irrigated modernity would dramatically reshape the economy, way of life, and environment

Figure 3  Stranded ship in the Aral Sea, Uzbekistan. © Daniel Kreher/Getty Images.

33

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of the Aral Sea basin—home to Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Uzbeks, and Karakalpaks. When, beginning in the 1920s, Soviet engineers and technocrats brought their irrigation schemes to Central Asia, they built from a process begun by their tsarist-era forebears. Yet, the Soviets coupled the engineering of new hydraulic systems with the unrelenting promotion of a cotton monoculture. The costs of diverting rivers, building canals, (re)settling populations, and fetishizing cotton production soared well beyond those accrued during the feverish years of Stalin’s five-year plans. Already in the 1960s, Soviet modernizers’ insatiable commitment to irrigation in service of cotton monoculture led to the rapid shrinking of the Aral Sea. Today, little of the Aral Sea remains. Haunting images of rusted ships marooned on the sandy remains of the Aral Sea’s desiccated expanse serve as grim reminders of the environmental consequences of relentless “modernization.” The Bolsheviks pursued their vision of a new world at all costs. In hurried pursuit of socialist modernity, they destroyed landscapes, ecosystems, cultures, and peoples. The scars of Stalin’s industrial revolution still mark the diverse landscapes of the former Soviet Union. For some, the wounds of Stalinist famine and ethnic cleansing are still fresh today. These are wounds that also potently serve as a source of national identity—a carefully guarded memory of ethnic loss and defiant national rebirth.

The Holodomor The deadly Stalinist collectivization drive, stunning in its brutality, imposed merciless upheaval of the old way of life wherever it was pursued. As we have already seen, however, the terrible famines caused by collectivization afflicted some regions and some populations disproportionately. In the West, at least, the Kazakh famine is generally less well known than the famine suffered in Ukraine during collectivization—famine that many Ukrainians today understand and mourn as a Stalinist attempt at genocide. The Holodomor, as the collectivization-era famine is called in Ukrainian, is remembered as an epic national tragedy born of the Stalinist state’s express, genocidal 34

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attack on the Ukrainian nation, a merciless effort to starve Ukrainian nationalism.43 While estimates of the number of Ukrainians who perished during the Holodomor vary, there is no doubt that more Ukrainians died than did members of any other ethnic group afflicted by collectivization-induced hunger and malnutrition in the USSR. Some three and a half million people in the Ukrainian SSR died in the Holodomor.44 Eyewitnesses recalled seeing Ukrainian peasants collapsing in hunger, exhausted and starved. Desperate Ukrainians bartered family heirlooms in exchange for precious grain. One survivor recalled how her grandmother sold off “all the family golden crosses, earrings, wedding rings” and “returned with a little sack of millet.”45 Many Ukrainian families did not survive the combined assaults of collectivization, dekulakization, and famine. Starving parents sometimes abandoned their starving children. Meanwhile, the Soviet state prosecuted 2,505 cases of cannibalism in 1932 and 1933. Ukrainians of all ages—ravaged by merciless hunger—roamed the countryside in search of calories. Many adults attempted to flee to Ukraine’s industrializing cities, where they hoped to reinvent themselves as socialist workers entitled to ration cards. They were joined by thousands of orphaned children who scavenged railway stations and city streets in search of food.46 It was against this backdrop of agony, chaos, and desperate millions on the move that the Soviet state introduced the internal passport system in late 1932. Even as Ukrainian peasants starved en masse in 1932 and 1933, the Stalinist state sold grain on the world market to help finance the development of heavy industry. Ukraine in the 1930s underwent both prongs of Stalin’s first five-year plans—rapid industrialization and the ruthless collectivization of agriculture—in strikingly dramatic fashion. Ukraine was a “showcase” for the Stalinist industrialization drive. Hundreds of factories were built in Ukraine to churn out steel, tractors, and chemicals, and Europe’s largest hydroelectric dam was constructed on Ukraine’s main river, the Dnieper.47 One American engineer who visited the industrializing USSR recalled his visit in 1932 to “the greatest project of the new Soviet industrialization and electrification program, Dneprostroi!” With 35

The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise

awe at the Stalinist transformation, he wrote: “The wide river surged against the great concrete wall and broke into clouds of foam. It was a tremendous and inspiring sight. Locomotive cranes moved slowly and irresistibly over the dam. On the farther side was the enormous powerhouse, under construction. Transmission towers, like great steel giants, stalked away into the distant hills.” From this American’s vantage point, Soviet Ukraine represented the stark contradictions of Stalinist development. One day he saw the power and might of Dneprostroi, and on the next day he saw some of the beaten-down peasants who were being made to pay for that industrialization. They were huddled in filth and misery at the nearby railway station, hoping to escape the countryside. The American engineer witnessed “hundreds of people, ragged, lying or sitting in the dirt, some in mud, with their belongings in sacks, also awaited some train to carry them elsewhere.”48 It was not only the Bolsheviks who understood Soviet civilization in the 1930s as a contest between modernity and backwardness.

Territorializing Ethnicity Landscapes were being transformed all over the Soviet Union and in more ways than one. As we have already seen, issues of territorialization loomed large in early approaches to governing the USSR’s multiethnic population. Bolshevik planners insisted that even nationalities who were considered without a historic “homeland”—a recognized territory of their own within or without the USSR’s borders—needed to be outfitted with one. It was a relatively small proportion of the Soviet Union’s officially recognized nationalities who were awarded the relative prize of a titular Soviet Socialist Republic—the Ukrainian SSR or Kazakh SSR, for example. Yet, Soviet territory could be delimited in other—smaller, less prestigious—ways that would suit the combined purposes of territorialization and Sovietization of non-Russian peoples. While “small” or territorially dispersed Soviet nationalities enjoyed no reasonable hope of claiming their own ethnically defined union republic within the federative USSR, they could and did find themselves occupying ethnically defined units of 36

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territory—autonomous regions and collective farms, for example— within the larger Soviet republics. Territorialization—from the titular union republics to the humble ethnically defined collective farms— was seen as an important tool in the Bolshevik toolbox of shaping ethnic identity within the Soviet Union. It was a method of mobilizing nationality politics in the service of Sovietizing the USSR’s multiethnic population. One outgrowth of this territorialization component of Bolshevik nationality policy—the effort to create a Soviet Jewish homeland within Soviet borders—captured considerable international attention and, initially at least, inspired much hope among the Jewish diaspora. In 1934 the Soviet Union formally incorporated its so-called Jewish Autonomous Region—known by the name of its administrative center, Birobidzhan. Jewish resettlement to the territory had begun in earnest already in 1928. On a territory located 5,000 miles east of Moscow, Birobidzhan was conceived as a Soviet Zion. At first, it attracted not only Soviet Jewish citizens but also foreign Jewish pilgrims enticed by the prospect of building socialism in a country that promised ethnic equality. In the idealized vision for it, Birobidzhan would attract Jewish settlers to till the land on collective farms. This ethnic enclave was also to feature Yiddish-language schools as well as a Yiddish-language newspaper and theater. Birobidzhan, it was hoped, would be a productive site of Jewish agricultural labor and acculturation to Soviet values. If successful, Birobidzhan would also help weaken popular anti-Semitism and thus help to strengthen the social, economic, and cultural bonds that tied together the USSR’s multiethnic citizenry. In the early 1930s, some Soviet Jews responded eagerly to the promise of this Soviet Zion. The teenager Emmanuil Kazakevich departed Ukraine for Birobidzhan urging his friends and family to join him. “That’s the place where we’ll really be able to spread our wings,” he enthused.49 For Fira Kofman, who settled in Birobidzhan in 1936, it was, indeed, a Soviet Jewish homeland, one where “Yiddish was heard on the streets.” In 1994, she wistfully recalled the Birobidzhan of her youth: “We had Jewish schools, a Jewish theater, a Jewish restaurant where one could eat real Jewish food.”50 37

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Yet, Birobidzhan in many ways proved a failure—if not from Fira Kofman’s perspective, then from Moscow’s. Most notably, it failed to attract and retain a large number of Jewish settlers. Many Jews who traveled to Birobidzhan eager to help build this Soviet Zion had no agricultural experience and struggled to adapt to the myriad challenges the underdeveloped territory presented to them. Moscow’s promises of equipment and supplies evaporated into thin air, as did similar promises made to agricultural collectives throughout the USSR in these lean years of rapid industrialization. Mosquitoes, poverty, and disease chipped away at settlers’ enthusiasm. The dropout rate of Jewish settlers in Birobidzhan was consistently high during the region’s critical early years of development. By 1939, Jews constituted but a small minority of the Jewish Autonomous Region’s population. Birobidzhan remained on the USSR’s map as an ostensible Soviet Jewish homeland, yet relatively few Soviet Jews chose to live there.

Performing Nationality It was seemingly easier (and less costly) to create national theaters throughout the Soviet Union in the 1930s than it was to parcel out autonomous ethnic territories and union republics. The Soviet 1930s witnessed the flowering of national theaters—all established to fulfill in dramatic form the dictum, “national in form, socialist in content.” In Moscow, the Gypsy Theater “Romen” opened its doors in 1931 and welcomed theatergoers to delight in Romani performers’ dancing and singing their way to socialist modernity. The first of its kind in the world, this national Gypsy Theater performed plays and musical programs that celebrated the ostensible transformation of “backward Gypsies”—nomads, fortune-tellers, horse-dealers, burlesque performers, and black market speculators—into enlightened Soviet collective farmers, industrial workers, and Red Army soldiers. Amidst shabby nomadic tents and broken caravan wheels, Romani performers in colorful dress celebrated socialism as they shimmied across the stage and into the light of Soviet civilization.51 38

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The Theater Romen’s first artistic director, Moshe Goldblatt, had been hired from Moscow’s State Yiddish Theater, established in 1919. In the 1920s, Moscow’s Yiddish Theater had retrofitted the works of Sholem Aleichem and others to spin tales of capitalism’s moral bankruptcy and the shtetl’s need of socialist revolution. Against the backdrop of sets designed by Marc Chagall and other Jewish artists, the Yiddish Theater’s performers experimented with new modes of staging Jews becoming modern, leaving the old world and its stubborn religiosity behind. In 1928, the Moscow State Yiddish Theater toured Europe for nine months in a bid to demonstrate for an international audience the cultural might of the multiethnic Soviet Union. In the 1930s, new Jewish Soviet playwrights premiered their plays on the Yiddish Theater’s stage. Under the direction of Solomon Mikhoels, traditional Jewish themes and symbols were adapted to meet the demands of socialist realism—the Stalin-approved artistic style of portraying the Soviet Union not as it was in the imperfect present, but where it ought to be heading in the perfected future.52 By the late 1930s, artists at the Theater Romen, Moscow’s Yiddish Theater, and other national theaters throughout the USSR performed Shakespearean plays and other classics of Russian and world dramaturgy as a way of demonstrating the rapid cultural advancement made possible by the conditions of Soviet socialism. Romani performers were celebrated, by decade’s end, for their successful adaptation of the Russian poet A. S. Pushkin’s nineteenth-century narrative poem The Gypsies while Jewish performers at Moscow’s Yiddish Theater were hailed for their performance of King Lear.53 In this way, the national theaters joined a larger Soviet effort during these years to help Soviet citizens become “cultured.” In this Stalinist configuration, being “cultured” meant appreciating Bach as well as Marx, Shakespeare as well as Stalin.54 So-called national costume, music, and dance were deployed on the stage to help realize a Soviet socialist culture that incorporated the so-called classics of world heritage alongside the new pantheon of socialist realist art and literature. Many of the Soviet Union’s new national theaters were located outside the Soviet capital. The Kyrgyz State Theater, whose Kyrgyz actors were trained at Moscow studios, debuted its first play in 1930. 39

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As at Moscow’s Gypsy Theater, emphasis was placed on abandoning a nomadic way of life, learning to read and write, and entering the proud Soviet labor force as productive farmers and workers. In Kyrgyzstan, too, national theater provided performers with new opportunities for Soviet self-fashioning. The Kyrgyz actress Sabira Kumushalieva was born in 1917 into a wealthy nomadic family. During collectivization, her father was arrested as a kulak and Kumushalieva seemed fated to a dreaded existence as a kulak’s daughter. Her life took a fortuitous turn when she was “discovered” by a theater director visiting her village. Later, as a renowned stage and film actress, Kumushalieva represented the New Soviet Woman for her Kyrgyz fans. By all accounts, she took seriously her role as a model of Sovietness for Kyrgyz girls and women. She renounced nomadism as backwardness, placed a premium on secular education, spoke Russian fluently, and insisted that Soviet modernity had enhanced Kyrgyz culture.55 Within the early USSR’s many national theaters, however, playwrights and performers who engaged the “national question” in their work often walked an unstable ideological tightrope. Mykola Kulish, a Ukrainian playwright, earned short-lived acclaim for his play Sonata Pathétique—a drama that explored the complex and varied encounters between Ukrainian nationalism and Bolshevism during the civil war. Kulish himself had embraced the October Revolution and welcomed what he hoped would be a productive partnership between Ukrainian nationalism and Soviet socialism. Yet, he sought in Sonata Pathétique to portray the messy, all-too-human ways the national question played out among Ukrainians whose nationalism did not come in only one shape or size. His was a bold approach and censors in Soviet Ukraine would not permit the potentially controversial Sonata Pathétique to be performed there. Kulish’s play debuted, instead, in a prestigious theater in Moscow, where it was performed some forty times in the winter season of 1931–2. Although initially greeted favorably, the play’s run was cut short after an anonymous editorial in Pravda criticized what was described as Kulish’s harmful depiction of bourgeois Ukrainian nationalism. Kulish’s Sonata Pathétique did not conform to the preferred type of clean-cut Soviet morality play typically staged in the national 40

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theaters in these years—tales of non-Russian peoples taking the straightforward path from the darkness of the prerevolutionary past into the light of Soviet modernity. Kulish, in other words, had stretched too far the logic of “national in form, socialist in content.” He was seen as having created a cultural product that was more substantively “Ukrainian” than it was instructively, unambiguously “Soviet.” In 1934, Kulish was arrested for his ostensible crimes as a “bourgeois nationalist” and sentenced to a term of penal labor in the Gulag, where he was executed in 1937.56 In the Stalinist 1930s, serving as a nation-builder was like walking an ideological tightrope toward an uncertain destination. Kulish was one of many who, in the 1930s, paid the ultimate price for the alleged crimes of bourgeois nationalism.

The Friendship of Peoples In the mid-1930s, the Stalinist state wove a new metaphor—one of enormous and lasting consequence—into the increasingly tense ideological tightrope of Soviet ethnic politics. At a Kremlin reception held in December 1935 to celebrate outstanding collective farm workers from Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, Stalin hailed what he called the Soviet “Friendship of Peoples”—the harmonious union of the ethnically diverse Soviet citizenry. Whereas the tsars had chauvinistically elevated the Russian people at the expense of all other nationalities, Stalin explained, the Bolsheviks had pursued, instead, a “politics of friendship, a politics of brotherhood between the peoples of our country.” The Bolsheviks, Stalin said, demanded that all nationalities of the USSR “must be equal and free.”57 The USSR had created the conditions for all nationalities to thrive while Russia served as a benevolent “elder brother” who helped to lead the harmonious multiethnic Soviet Union. Bolshevik nationality policy, Stalin insisted, had successfully nurtured trust and affection between the Soviet Union’s diverse peoples. The multiethnic population was now bonded in a supranational, socialist civic unity—a friendship that was unshakable and formidable in the face of external foes.​ 41

The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise

Figure 4  Stalin Meets with Collective Farm Workers from Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. © Sovfoto/Universal Images Group/Getty Images.

The new Friendship of Peoples slogan adopted in 1935 thus celebrated Soviet multiethnic harmony under the banner of socialism but also enabled a significant ideological pivot. The Friendship of Peoples metaphor created room for Stalin to rhetorically maneuver the elevation of the Russian people as the “first among equals” in the multiethnic Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks had liquidated the Russian chauvinism that had characterized prerevolutionary tsarist rule, Stalin emphasized. Russians now benevolently led the Soviet Union’s diverse peoples not as enemies or oppressors, but, instead, as fellow citizens who deployed their energies to advancing the Soviet Union as a whole. Their exceptional vitality and patriotic strength allowed for non-Russian peoples to flourish as the Soviet citizenry worked in unified fashion to achieve socialism together, as one people bonded in friendship. In 1936, a Pravda editorial signaled this ideological shift to a Russocentric Soviet patriotism. All of the USSR’s peoples—“from the smallest to the largest”—had contributed valiantly to the construction of socialism as “Soviet patriots,” the editorial explained. Yet, Russians occupied a special place among the Soviet people. “First among these equals is the Russian people,” Pravda asserted. It was the Russian people who had played an outsized role in leading the “Great Proletarian Revolution” and carrying the Soviet people forward “from the first 42

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victories to the present day’s brilliant period of development.”58 This populist blend of Soviet Russocentrism represented the Stalinist state’s perceived need to adopt a pragmatic rallying cry capable of rousing the Soviet people’s patriotism and inspiring their active loyalty. It was the CPSU’s tacit acknowledgment that Russocentric populist appeals were more likely to inspire and effectively mobilize Soviet patriotism than were straightforward invocations of Marxism-Leninism or the slogans of socialist internationalism.59 In the face of the looming Nazi threat, the Stalinist state attempted to galvanize Soviet patriotism by means of rallying the Soviet people around the greatness of Russian culture. This ideological elevation of Russian history and culture was more than rhetorical, and it was meant to inspire a Russocentric Soviet pride in the face of the very real threat of war. Soviet schoolchildren learned about the world-historic greatness of the Russian people and their primacy of place within the Friendship of Peoples. Tsaristera literary, cultural, and military figures like Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky, and Kutuzov were elevated to Soviet icons of Russia’s historical contributions to world culture. Even Peter the Great and Catherine the Great were celebrated in this Stalinist retrofitting of the prerevolutionary past. Most striking, perhaps, was the move in 1938 to mandate the teaching of the Russian language to all Soviet schoolchildren, to unapologetically embrace Russian as the lingua franca of the supranational Soviet state. Crucially, the 1938 mandate did not deny non-Russian peoples their Soviet right to instruction in their native languages. It mandated, instead, that in non-Russian schools, all students must be taught the Russian language as a separate, but necessary subject. Here, too, the threat of war loomed large. To explain this policy move, Stalin invoked Soviet military interests. “We have only one language in which all citizens of the USSR can make themselves understood more or less—this is the Russian language,” Stalin argued. “It would be a good thing if every citizen conscripted into the army could make themselves understood in Russian.”60 At first glance it might seem that the Stalinist embrace of the Friendship of Peoples metaphor was at odds with the simultaneous 43

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elevation of Russians as the Soviet first among equals and the Russian language as the Soviet lingua franca. Yet, the Friendship of Peoples and Soviet Russocentrism were ideological principles purposefully combined with an aim toward cementing the unity of the Soviet citizenry and overcoming its social and cultural divides. Especially as the threat of Nazi Germany appeared ever more menacingly on the Soviet Union’s horizon, Stalin and the CPSU recognized the need to heal internal fractures, inspire affective bonds among its diverse population, promote a shared language of interethnic communication, and strengthen the patriotic resolve of the multiethnic Soviet population. Stalin and the CPSU’s statist goals sometimes neatly overlapped with those of ordinary people. For example, when given the opportunity, some non-Russian parents had already chosen to enroll their children in Russian schools long before the 1938 mandate was introduced. Their decision can be seen as its own kind of pragmatic patriotism—a choice to have their children learn the language of the Soviet state, a language that would be key to their children’s social and professional advancement in the multiethnic Soviet Union.61 Whether they learned Russian in school as the language of primary instruction or as a secondary subject of study, Soviet youth were expected to become Russian speakers. Fluency in Russian would enable all the USSR’s nationalities to converse as friends as well as cooperate in achieving the multiethnic Soviet Union’s social, economic, cultural, political, and military goals. Meanwhile, these years also witnessed the selective promotion of non-Russian heroes, writers, artists, and accomplishments. The logic of domestic internationalism allowed, ultimately, for the assertion of ethnic Russian superiority, of Russians as the wise “elder brother” within a multiethnic Soviet family. Yet, the framework of Soviet domestic internationalism also provided plenty of room for exemplary representatives of the non-Russian peoples to stand aside Russian “greats” in the Soviet pantheon. Thus, while Alexander Pushkin was hailed as Russia’s national poet, Suleiman Stalskii was likewise celebrated as the national poet of the Dagestanis and Taras Shevchenko as the great bard of Ukraine.62 44

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Deportations, Purges, and Terror The Friendship of Peoples was Stalin’s covenant of internationalist socialist unity. Through it, he and the CPSU hoped to bind the multiethnic Soviet citizenry together as one people united in a shared Soviet patriotism, a shared culture led by the “advanced” Russian people, a shared Russian language, and a shared resolve in the face of external enemies. The limits to this theory were tested during the violent years of Stalin’s Great Purge and Terror as Stalin disinvited some nationalities from the Friendship of Peoples, violently excommunicating them from this civic covenant of interethnic harmony. The paroxysms of state violence and terror that washed over the Soviet Union in terrifying and deadly waves in the Stalinist 1930s were not without a distinctly ethnic dimension. Already middecade, Bolshevik nationality policy began colliding with Stalinist foreign policy concerns—and with results that were both violent and xenophobic. The looming Nazi threat helped to amplify Soviet authorities’ fears of ideological contamination spilling over the USSR’s borders and of potential fifth columns operating unchecked along its multiethnic frontier. From 1935 to 1938, the Soviet Union engaged in ethnic-cleansing operations targeting some nine ethnic groups who lived in Soviet border zones and who—as so-called “diaspora nationalities”—were presumed dangerous because of their potential ties to co-ethnics living in nation-states outside the USSR. Demonized as agents of cross-border anti-Soviet subversion, these ethnic groups were targeted for Soviet ethnic cleansing on the basis of their presumed disloyalty to the Soviet Union. The Soviet ethnic-cleansing campaigns against Poles, Germans, Koreans, Finns, Latvians, Estonians, Chinese, Iranians, and Kurds represent in stark and tragic fashion the paradox of the Stalinist state’s efforts to destroy nations as well as to build them. In the 1920s and early 1930s, these very same so-called “diaspora nationalities” in Soviet border regions had been the subjects of early Soviet nationality policy. German, Polish, Korean, and other national collective farms, newspapers, and schools had been created. Authorities initially hoped that Soviet-style nation-building for the 45

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diaspora nationalities in the borderlands would bring an additional benefit in propagandizing Soviet superiority among Poles, Germans, Koreans, and others living on the other side of the USSR’s borders. Yet, given the layered domestic and foreign policy crises they faced in the 1930s, Soviet authorities grew increasingly nervous about the fact that ethnic politics could spill across and transgress Soviet borders in both directions. In 1935, the NKVD began operations to deport ethnic Germans and Poles away from the Soviet frontier and “resettle” them as “antiSoviet” elements in eastern Ukraine and soon, farther away, in Kazakhstan. By the same logic and in the same year, the NKVD also began deporting to resettlement camps in Siberia and Central Asia thousands of Finns, Latvians, and Estonians living along the USSR’s northern borders in Leningrad Province. In the Far East, the NKVD began ethnic-cleansing operations against Soviet Koreans in 1937. Before year’s end, the NKVD’s head reported that the agency had succeeded in resettling the USSR’s entire Korean nationality—some 171,781 persons—to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.63 Deportees suffered a wide range of cruelties and indignities inherent to what became standard Soviet ethnic-cleansing processes. The NKVD transported the Korean deportees in overcrowded cattle cars on a harrowing month-long journey during which they were offered little insight into their destination or terms of resettlement. Upon disembarkment, they discovered that they would have to build their lives anew—with few resources, in territory unknown to them, far from the homes they had been forced to leave behind.64 In one oral history interview, Maria Andzhe’evskaia—a Pole deported to Kazakhstan in the 1930s from western Ukraine, recalled: “We arrived and there was nothing, just naked steppe. . . . I hid behind Mama. The mothers screamed and shook from crying. ‘They brought us here to die,’ they said.”65 So as to live, the deportees had to get to work quickly in building new homes for themselves. Koreans, Poles, Germans, and others targeted in the Soviet ethnic-cleansing campaigns of the late 1930s were only sometimes provided tents to live in as they began the process of building new settlements far from the border zones from which they had been banished as suspect nationalities. New 46

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tenants, meanwhile, moved into the deportees’ forcibly abandoned homes. Soviet ethnic cleansing accelerated during the Great Terror. Caught in dangerous webs of Stalinist suspicion, diaspora nationalities were rebranded with a deadly new Stalinist category: enemy nations. In 1938, the Soviet leadership ordered the NKVD to liquidate all “espionage and sabotage contingents made up of Poles, Latvians, Germans, Estonians, Finns, Greeks, Iranians” and others.66 Soviet citizens belonging to the diaspora nationalities were demonized as alien others; their ethnicity became sufficient reason for their arrest and execution—and in large numbers.67 One scholar has estimated that “approximately 800,000 individuals were arrested, deported, or executed in the ethnic-cleansing and mass national operations from 1935 to 1938.”68 The ethnic dimensions of the Stalinist Terror were not limited to the deportation campaigns. In the late 1930s, some Soviet nationbuilders who had been essential to the shaping and deployment of the Bolsheviks’ early nationality policy came under suspicion as socalled “bourgeois nationalists.” Their commitment to the nation, Stalin’s henchmen in the NKVD now claimed, had gone beyond the boundaries of “national in form, socialist in content” and morphed into a dangerous nationalism—one that elevated one’s ethnic interests above Soviet interests. One did not have to be a representative of a titular or a diaspora nationality to be punished for alleged crimes of dangerous, antiSoviet nationalism. In 1938, Zulfugar Ahmedzade was arrested and sent to a Gulag labor camp for the alleged crime of treason motivated by separatist nationalism. Yet, a review of Ahmedzade’s professional résumé reflects, instead, how he had served the Soviet state in the 1920s and 1930s as a faithful executor of Bolshevik nationality policy. A Talysh born in 1898, Ahmedzade became a Bolshevik in 1919 and worked devotedly on behalf of the CPSU for nearly two decades in Azerbaijan. A teacher, he was active in the work of spreading “cultural enlightenment” among his fellow Talysh—one of many minority ethnic groups within Soviet Azerbaijan—and the titular Azeris alike. He seemingly personified the Soviet Friendship of Peoples from his 47

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outpost of ethnically diverse Azerbaijan. Ahmedzade wrote poetry and fiction in both the Talysh and Azerbaijani languages. He also contributed to the effort to establish a Talysh national literature by writing textbooks for Talysh-language schools and translating classics into Talysh. During the Terror, however, everything was turned upside down. In the hands of the NKVD, Ahmedzade’s résumé of Soviet patriotism was disfigured into a sordid tale of Talysh bourgeois nationalism and anti-Soviet conspiracy. Desperate to prove his innocence, Ahmedzade appealed his fate from the Gulag, but died in the camps in 1942 at age forty-three.69 For the Jadids of Central Asia, the Purges and Terror tragically proved a culmination of a process that had been going on for nearly a decade. Already in the late 1920s, they were increasingly criticized and cast aside as “old intellectuals”—out of sync with the forward march of Bolshevism. In some cases, they were arrested for the ostensible crime of bourgeois nationalism. In 1928, a young Soviet Uzbek poet decried his forebears, the Jadids, for their efforts “to fill the minds of schoolchildren with the poison of homeland and nation.”70 The very same poet was arrested in 1930 during another purge of alleged Uzbek nationalists. The Great Terror of the late 1930s hammered the final nail in the coffin of Jadidism. Scores of Uzbek nation-builders who had worked in partnership with the Bolsheviks to Sovietize Central Asia were arrested between 1937 and 1939 and either executed or condemned to the Gulag. What remained was their most enduring creation, Soviet Uzbekistan.71

Worldly Optimism At the World’s Fair held in New York City in 1939, the Soviet Union sought to present itself in a more optimistic spirit than the one that prevailed at home during the Terror. The Soviet pavilion’s crowning glory was its Hall of the Unity and Friendship of the Soviet Peoples—a model display of the USSR’s interethnic harmony that featured a huge mural depicting the Soviet people in all their ethnic diversity. Stalin’s words hung over the mural: “We have now a fully-fledged 48

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multinational socialist state which has stood all the tests and the stability of which might well be envied by any national state in any part of the world.”72 An English-language pamphlet produced for visitors to the Soviet pavilion celebrated the USSR’s diverse peoples’ “love” for socialism and passion for “the great cause” to which they were devoted—“the building of a new society.” The Soviet Union was a young country, no doubt, but its strength resided in its people and the “vigor and energy” they devoted to conquering all obstacles. Soviet society was animated by “a spirit of cheerfulness, contentment, and confidence in the morrow.”73 These ideals, this confidence, and this rosy-hued portrait of a unified multiethnic Soviet people would soon be put to a test of survival of horrific proportion. While Americans toured the Soviet pavilion at the New York World’s Fair in August 1939, Stalin’s regime signed its infamous Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. Yet, Stalin’s notorious bid to fend off Hitler’s armies failed, in the end, to spare the multiethnic Soviet Union from the mortal threat of Nazi invasion and total war.

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Lilacs in bloom. Sunshine and blue skies. Spiderwebs swaying in the summer wind. The smell of freshly baked bread. Then, suddenly, the terrifying roar of enemy planes above. Bombs raining down. Villages burning. Families torn apart. Death, hunger, and overwhelming fear. When asked about their memory of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union that began on June 22, 1941, these are some of the memories evoked by men and women later interviewed by oral historian Svetlana Alexievich.1 Just children when the war began, their lives were forever thereafter shaped by the struggle for survival that the Soviet Union faced in the Second World War. The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was apocalyptic. It is difficult to overstate the degree to which the Second World War was a transformative, earth-shattering event for the Soviet people— combatants and civilians alike (a distinction, in any case, that frequently blurred to the point of meaninglessness on the Eastern Front). For the USSR, the Second World War was a world-historic tragedy and a world-historic triumph. The losses incurred by the Soviet Union— in terms of human lives as well as economic devastation—know no parallel in modern times. From 1941 through 1945, the Soviet people suffered unprecedented violence, dislocation, hunger, and loss. For many, though not all, the war also proved a unifying experience of shared struggle, and ultimately, a shared Soviet victory. Some thirty-four million Soviets—both men and women—were mobilized to serve in the Red Army during the war. The war changed them and their families forever. It also changed how many Soviet citizens felt about their fellow citizens and about their relationship to the country as a whole. The war inspired for many a new feeling of solidarity with the CPSU. During the war, and in the face of a

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merciless foreign foe, the unified, multiethnic “Soviet people” that Stalin and the CPSU had repeatedly invoked in the late 1930s seemed to many ordinary citizens to come to life. Against a backdrop of death, devastation, and countless hardships, the Soviet people fought, labored, and suffered an unimaginable scale of loss. The Soviet Union, in the end, declared victory over Nazi Germany. In some ways, the war unified the multiethnic Soviet people to a degree never seen before the war. Yet, it also exacerbated certain ethnic divisions. This chapter explores the multiethnic Soviet Union at war and under postwar reconstruction. Its focus is on the ethnic dimensions of both Soviet unity and disunity during the Second World War and its aftermath.

The Great Patriotic War: An Overview Scholars regard the Second World War as a pivotal and defining event in Soviet history—and with good reason. The apocalyptic Nazi invasion nearly collapsed the Soviet Union. It unleashed a tidal wave of destruction and horrors endured by the Soviet people in what they referred to as their Great Patriotic War. In the end, the desperately hard-won Soviet victory served to legitimize the Soviet past, present, and future. For some, the war was understood as a justification of all the revolutionary upheaval that had preceded it in the first decades of Bolshevik rule. For many more, the Second World War proved the Soviet Union’s crowning achievement. It was understood as such by those who lived through it and continues to be understood in this light by several generations of the war’s descendants alive today throughout the former Soviet Union. The Friendship of Peoples is often reflected in Soviet citizens’ recollections of how they endured and triumphed, fought and labored, lived and died during the Second World War. Some Soviet citizens later recalled with nostalgia the lived experience of multiethnic solidarity during the war. The Kyrgyz actress Sabira Kumushalieva told an interviewer in 2002, “Friendship between the people was very strong during the war. That was the best thing. People cared for each other. Even if the three of us had little bit of bread, we would be sharing it among us.”2 The beloved Soviet 52

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children’s writer Kornei Chukovsky later wrote that the act of Soviet citizens adopting the war’s orphans constituted “the most touching and poetic form of the indissoluble brotherhood of peoples which is such a solid foundation of our entire Soviet system.”3 To fully appreciate the meaning of the Great Patriotic War for Soviet citizens and their descendants requires an acknowledgment of the unprecedented loss of life suffered in the USSR. An estimated twenty-seven million Soviet lives were lost during the war. The Great Patriotic War was not fought in foreign lands or on distant shores, but on Soviet territory. Whole swaths of territory in the USSR’s western borderlands came under Nazi occupation as the Wermacht advanced with swift ferocity in the early months of the war. By mid-October, the Germans seemed poised to take the Soviet capital. Although they did not succeed, Moscow erupted in panic as its inhabitants rushed to evacuate to safety.4 The Battle of Stalingrad proved as deadly as it was decisive. After six months of air raids and street fighting, the Soviets declared victory on February 2, 1943—a turning point in the war. Stalingrad itself had been firebombed into utter ruins. Soviet civilian and military casualties in the battle are estimated to range from 479,000 to more than a million.5 Meanwhile, Nazi forces laid siege to Leningrad for 872 days—from September 1941 to January 1944. Those left trapped in the city perished in large numbers. As many as two million Soviets died in the Siege of Leningrad. Among them were some 800,000 civilians, most of whom died of agonizing starvation.6 Nina Mervol’f, a university student, kept a diary during the siege. On her diary’s first page, she itemized the dates of all her loved ones’ deaths as they were felled, one by one, by disease and hunger as Leningrad starved.7 The Nazi genocide of Jews and Roma is also central to the Soviet experience of the Second World War. It has been estimated that Nazi forces murdered some one and a half million Jews and at least 30,000 Roma in their genocidal campaigns on Soviet territory (including the Soviet-occupied Baltics).8 The Nazis tore through Soviet villages and got to work executing their genocidal campaign. Priyska Gordievskaya, a native of a small town in Ukraine, told Soviet investigators in 1945: “Our village was beautiful before the war, but 53

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now, you see—only ruins remain.” German forces, she explained, had burned much of the town’s infrastructure as they retreated. During their occupation, she explained, the Germans had “gorged” themselves on the local farmers’ milk and butter—sustenance for their work shooting hundreds of her fellow villagers in broad daylight and burying them in a crude mass grave.9 When Nazi forces arrived in Soviet cities and towns, they found Soviet citizens’ internal passports—records of their bearers’ ethnicity—to be useful in their pursuit of genocide.10 While the Nazis relied heavily on concentration camps and gas chambers to accomplish mass murder in East Central Europe, they pursued the genocide of Jews and Roma on Soviet territory by the more prosaic means of mass shootings. At Babyn Yar, in a series of deep ravines located just beyond Kyiv, the Nazis executed and buried in mass graves approximately 77,000 Soviets—Jews and Roma, most prominently. The mass killings at Babyn Yar began in late September 1941, when Nazi forces ordered Kyiv’s Jews to report to a designated checkpoint with their identity documents as well as their valuables. Some of Kyiv’s Jews committed suicide, but thousands of others arrived at the Nazis’ checkpoint on the morning of September 29. One eyewitness later remembered of the scene, “my God, there were so many children!”11 By the close of September 30, Nazi forces had murdered 33,771 Jews at Babyn Yar. It was the largest act of Nazi mass murder of Jews on Soviet territory, but not the last—nor was it the last act of Nazi genocide at Babyn Yar.12 On April 24, 1942, Nazi forces arrived in the village of Aleksandrovka in Smolensk Province and proceeded to murder the inhabitants of a Romani collective farm there. Lidiia Krylova was one of the few Romani collective farmers who survived that day and lived to tell how Nazi forces marched her and her fellow Roma “like cattle” to their intended mass grave. “The shooting began at 3 in the afternoon,” she remembered. “I saw with my own eyes how no fewer than seventy Gypsies from our collective farm—women, children, and elderly — were shot.” Krylova managed to escape only by convincing the executioners that she was Russian, not Romani. That day, an estimated 180 Roma were executed, their bodies falling into a primitive mass 54

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grave.13 Gruesome scenes such as these played out many times over in the Soviet territory under Nazi occupation. Long after the war’s conclusion, Soviet survivors of the Great Patriotic War could still hear ringing in their ears the sounds of air raid sirens, of Nazi bullets in the backs of their Jewish neighbors, of the hunger pangs of those who starved, the cries of orphaned children, and the keening of the many who had lost everyone and everything they loved during the war. Yet, they would also remember other sounds, too—an aural landscape of memories of how the Soviet people came together during these years in all their unspeakable suffering, and in the face of a merciless external enemy. When Stalin addressed the Soviet people over the radio on the anniversary of the October Revolution in 1941, his words for once seemed to unite the Soviet people, to reassure them. In besieged Leningrad, Vera Inber wrote in her diary of Stalin’s radio address: “It came across above the darkness, above the alerts, above the raid. It was stronger than anything. We listened to it . . . and everything merged for us as one great shining consolation.”14 Wartime radio broadcasting allowed the Soviet people to feel together despite the vast differences in circumstance and location that kept them apart. When broadcasting was disrupted, it could feel like a plunge into the most disorienting darkness, a lonely and discomfiting silence. When broadcasting resumed, Soviet citizens felt jolts of reconnection, a surge of vitality and hope.15 One voice above all others spoke to the Soviet people over the radio in these years—whether they were in Leningrad or Kuibyshev, Kamchatka or Tashkent. Yuri Levitan, son of a Jewish tailor, addressed the Soviet people over Soviet radio more than 2,000 times during the war, beginning always with the reliable words, “Attention! Moscow is speaking!” When on May 9, 1945, he announced the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, he spoke as the recognizable voice of the Soviet people. The affective power of Levitan’s voice was so strong that just hearing him say aloud his famous broadcast greeting could still bring tears to Soviet citizens’ eyes long after the war was over.16 Other sounds, too, united the Soviet people in new ways. In 1944, the Soviet Union adopted a new national anthem—one that replaced 55

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The Internationale adopted in 1917. Whereas The Internationale was a hymn of socialist internationalism that was written by a Frenchman for a global proletariat, the new anthem celebrated the Soviet people—their bravery, might, and triumphant unity. Broadcast over Soviet radio for the first time on January 1, 1944, the Soviet anthem combined Russocentrism with proud celebration of the USSR’s ethnic diversity in its paean to civic unity. Soviet citizens sang the praise of their “Unbreakable union of freeborn republics / Great Russia has welded forever to stand! / Created in struggle by the will of the people, / United and mighty, our Soviet land.”17 In all of these ways, the Great Patriotic War proved a powerful force for unifying the Soviet people in a shared sense of purpose and belonging. Yet, the war also introduced and otherwise reinforced painful ethnic divisions that fractured the idealized vision of a harmonious Friendship of Peoples under the lead of a superior Russian nation. In suffering and in triumph, in devastation and in victory, the multiethnic Soviet people came together in the face of an external enemy but also fractured along markedly ethnic lines.

Coming Together In 1941, men and women throughout the Soviet Union volunteered for the front or were conscripted into the Red Army. One of the Red Army’s soldiers was Mukhamet Shayakhmetov, a young boy who had survived the Kazakh famine and lived to tell about it. In 1935, fortune had finally shone on Shayakhmetov when a local primary school teacher took pity on this “kulak’s son” and allowed him to be readmitted to school. Here, as a teenager, Shayakhmetov learned Russian and joined the Komsomol. When the war began, Shayakhmetov was nineteen years old and an aspiring teacher. Conscripted into the Red Army, Shayakhmetov found himself a rare Russian speaker among Kazakh troops who could not understand the Russian words of their commanders. Shayakhmetov served as an interpreter for his compatriots en route to the front. Shayakhmetov also served during the Battle of Stalingrad as a Red Army scout, 56

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conducting reconnaissance alongside Russians, Kazakhs, and fellow Soviet citizens of various nationalities. These compatriots helped him to safety when he was caught by a German sniper’s bullet and seriously injured. He recuperated alongside his fellow wounded in a hospital ward that inevitably reflected the USSR’s ethnic diversity. Once recovered, he was dispatched to serve as a border guard in Tajikistan where he soon faced a new language barrier: he could barely converse with the local Tajik villagers where he was stationed because they did not know Russian. By the time Shayakhmetov returned to Kazakhstan, he was an exemplary New Soviet Man: Russian-speaking, fluent in Soviet culture, and a proud veteran with battle scars.18 Red Army soldiers on the frontlines—Russians, Jews, Kazakhs, Ukrainians, Tatars, and Buriats—together faced the same mortal enemy, and they did so wearing the same simple Soviet uniform and eating the same porridge under the shared Soviet flag. For some Red Army soldiers, it was at the front where they learned to speak Russian for the first time. Military leaders soon realized the need to arrange for interpreters for non-Russian speakers and to produce publications in minority languages. Some Red Army soldiers were quick to assimilate to the demands of not only war but also Soviet Russocentrism. It was not uncommon for non-Russian soldiers to assume new Russian names. In the crucible of war, Talgat Genatulin adopted the name Anatolii—a “Russian” name he remained hitched to even decades after the war.19 The diverse peoples of the Soviet Union came together in the Red Army during the Second World War and were transformed by its horrors as well as by their victory over a merciless foe. At the front as well as in the rear, they were knitted together by a Soviet culture that, during wartime, ever more insistently emphasized the superiority of Russian culture and the primacy of the Russian language. In 1944, the Georgian G. Lomidze hailed the wartime ideological blending of Soviet Russocentrism and the Friendship of Peoples. He welcomed the increasingly blurred distinction between the meanings of “Russian” and “Soviet.” In an article titled “Friendship, Sealed in Blood,” Lomidze celebrated that “A Soviet warrior of any nationality proudly calls himself a Russian soldier. The word ‘Russian’ has become a symbol of strength, courage, victory.” In Lomidze’s mind, the war had 57

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also enhanced Red Army soldiers’ appreciation of the Soviet Union’s rich ethnic diversity. Prior to the war, Lomidze wrote, the average Red Army soldier “had only heard and read about the vastness, wealth, and diversity of our Fatherland. At war they have seen with their own eyes and measured with their own soldierly tread the unimaginable expanses of the Soviet Motherland.”20 During the war and in the immediate years that followed, Soviet citizens also rushed to apply to join the Communist Party. A CPSU membership card conferred advantages in terms of access to scarce goods no less than to improved prospects of social and professional mobility. Yet, the skyrocketing in CPSU membership cannot be seen merely as ordinary Soviet citizens seeking tactical advantages in a wartime economy. These were also years of surging patriotism and a growing faith on the part of the broader population in Stalin and the CPSU. Some nine million new members joined the Communist Party during the war years alone.21 Shayakhmetov was also among the new CPSU recruits. Although he had served honorably in the war and gained certification as a trained teacher in the years that followed, Shayakhmetov still doubted that he, a kulak’s son, could ever dream of joining the party. Some of his comrades persuaded him, however, that times had changed— that surely, he, a war veteran, would not be forced to pay for the alleged crimes of his father. However, Shayakhmetov’s first CPSU membership application was rejected on account of his family’s history; the stain of “class enemy” still clung to this former Kazakh nomad. Yet, Shayakhmetov persisted. In late 1947, Shayakhmetov received his prized red CPSU membership card.22

The Punished Peoples During the war, the Soviet state relied again on the ethnic cleansing methods it had used against Germans, Poles, Koreans, and other minority groups in the 1930s. This time, the Stalinist regime declared entire ethnic groups to be “enemy nations” and deported them en masse to Gulag special settlements in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, 58

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Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Siberia. Known as the “punished peoples”—Balkars, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Germans, Ingush, Karachays, and Kalmyks, approximately two million people in all— these ethnic groups were demonized as enemies within, traitors to the Soviet cause. The “logic” of the deportations revolved around a calculus of betrayal. Ethnic Germans were deported before they could betray the USSR; it was assumed that they would if given the opportunity. Crimean Tatars were decried as enthusiastic Nazi collaborators under occupation. In the North Caucasus, Karachays and Balkars were accused of providing intelligence and tactical aid to Nazi forces. Chechens and Ingush were derided as anti-Soviet elements who refused to labor for the Soviet state, demonstrated loyalty only to their own clan networks, and stubbornly clung to their ethnic backwardness. In this way, ethnic groups were categorically branded as dangerous internal enemies. In deporting the punished peoples en masse, the Soviet state aimed to both neutralize the perceived threat they posed to the USSR in wartime and to establish the conditions for these groups’ eventual integration into the Soviet people as reformed, reeducated, and Sovietized.23 The grim realities of these deportations and their categorical branding of entire ethnic groups are represented in the testimony of Ismail Baichorov, a Karachay who served in the Red Army from 1940 through 1943. “For excellence in battle,” Baichorov explained, “I was awarded both the First and Second Class Orders of the Patriotic War, and a series of combat medals.” After suffering serious injuries during the war, however, Baichorov was demobilized. He returned home and assumed a post as a military instructor. His world was soon torn asunder. “On 2 November 1943, an officer of the NKVD burst into my home and announced that . . . all Karachays were to be moved to a new location. He gave us 30 minutes to pack. I, a Soviet officer in full uniform, and my entire family, were sent to Kyrgyzstan within half an hour.”24 As the USSR battled its external enemies, it devoted precious resources—manpower and railways—to brutal ethnic deportations. The punished peoples were punished in more ways than one. Weeks 59

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spent in overcrowded cattle cars weakened, sickened, and traumatized them. Forced to resettle in alien territory and to rebuild without the necessary food, clothing, housing, or tools required of the task, many died in what proved to be an enduring demographic disaster. Through the end of the decade, birth rates were low and death rates were high.25 For those who survived, other cruelties framed their Soviet experience as members of so-called “enemy nations.” Merciless hunger was the norm. Although the punished peoples were exhorted to become exemplary Soviet laborers, decorations and awards were not enough to liberate a member of these deported groups from their ethnicity’s stigma. Under the NKVD’s authority, the deportees could not legally travel beyond a three-kilometer radius of their Gulag special settlements.26 Within the Gulag, however, the punished peoples were expected to redeem themselves as reformed Soviet citizens. To promote this goal, Soviet authorities often relied on the tried and true tactics of “national in form, socialist in content.” In one case, Kazakh officials obtained Chechen-language pamphlets that had been languishing in storage in Grozny to use to promote Sovietization among Chechen deportees.27 After the war, Soviet authorities found a new way to exploit the labor of the punished peoples who had been deported to the Urals region—their health was sacrificed for the sake of building the Soviet nuclear arsenal. The nuclear city Ozersk, a guarded outpost of Soviet plutonium production, was built largely by a prisoner population of “suspect” ethnic groups—Germans deported from Ukraine and the Volga region; Chechens deported from the Caucasus; Ukrainians who had been arrested for their complicity with Nazi occupying forces; and German prisoners of war. Regarded as cheap, disposable labor and as potentially cancerous tumors within the Soviet body politic, they were put to work in constructing an expensive and dangerous nuclear weapons production plant. It is an ironic twist that, in pursuit of their nuclear arsenal, Soviet authorities exploited the labor power and devalued bodies of ethnic groups who occupied the lowest, most maligned rungs of the Soviet ethnic hierarchy— precisely because they were seen as threats to Soviet national security.28 60

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Only after Stalin’s death in 1953 did many of the people who survived the wartime ethnic deportations begin to return home. Some Chechens and Ingush began relocating to the North Caucasus without waiting for official sanction to do so. Others lobbied state officials for permission and help to return to their homes. In one petition a Chechen wrote of the heartbreak of deportation: “They shamed us, they called us traitors, betrayers of the motherland.”29 In late 1956, the Soviet state relented and agreed to repatriate the North Caucasians and Kalymks in an “orderly” and “gradual” fashion. Many were unwilling to wait. They rushed to the train stations demanding immediate return to their native lands, where Russians and others had long since assumed control over the deportees’ homes and other property.30 Bitter and violent conflicts erupted as returning exiles angrily confronted the occupants of the houses that they had been forced to vacate during the war.31 All those deported during the wartime ethnic deportations were, in the years following Stalin’s death in 1953, released from the Gulag. Yet, the punished peoples were not all treated the same by the postStalinist state. Only five of the ethnic groups targeted during the war—Balkars, Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks, and Karachays—were exonerated and permitted to return home. Eventually, the Soviet state even reconstituted their prewar national territories. Ethnic Germans and Crimean Tatars, however, would have to wait. Only in 1972 were ethnic Germans relieved—theoretically, at least—of Soviet travel and residency restrictions.32 Although exonerated as a nationality by the Soviet state in 1967, the Crimean Tatars were not permitted to return to their homeland until 1989.33

A Pact of Aggression The so-called “punished peoples” were not the only ethnic groups targeted for violent Soviet deportations during the war. No less transformative for the fate of the multiethnic Soviet Union was Stalin’s decision in 1939 to sign the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. In signing this notorious pact, Stalin was buying time—enough time, he 61

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hoped, to avoid a Nazi invasion of the USSR for which he and the Red Army were not prepared. However, he was also making a power move to “recoup” for the USSR lands of the former tsarist empire—that is, to occupy and forcibly annex the independent nation-states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia as well as portions of eastern Poland and the territory today known as Moldova. In 1939, both Hitler and Stalin put their so-called Non-Aggression Pact in motion; Hitler’s forces invaded Poland from the west and Stalin’s forces from the east. Stalin’s biggest tactical prize—assured to him in the so-called blank check that Nazi Germany offered him in the Non-Aggression Pact’s secret protocols— was the opportunity to invade the Baltic states and claim them for the Soviet Union. Between 1940 and 1941, and in connivance with the Nazi regime, the USSR forcibly annexed Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, eastern Poland, and Moldova. In the case of the Baltic states, Soviet authorities quickly moved to force tens of thousands of Balts onto cattle cars destined for exile and labor in Central Asia, the Far North, and Siberia. In a series of both wartime and postwar deportations, the NKVD targeted native elites as well as other perceived “class enemies” and “counterrevolutionary nationalists” hostile to Soviet socialism. These deportations were an effort to sociologically clear the ground and neutralize potential resistance in the Baltics so as to facilitate Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia’s incorporation into the USSR as union republics. In all, it is estimated that in the 1940s, the Soviets deported 118,599 Lithuanians, 52,541 Latvians, and 32,540 Estonians.34 As the NKVD deported native elites and other alleged class enemies away from the Baltics, administrators were dispatched from Moscow to begin the process of Sovietizing Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. After the war, large numbers of Russian speakers were recruited to join the industrialization drives in the Baltic states. The influx of Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarussian migrants to the Baltic states dramatically reshaped the demography and political reality on the ground. It also exacerbated Balts’ resentment of what many bitterly regarded as Soviet imperialism and Russian colonialism.35 No matter the extent of their grievances vis-a-vis the Soviet state, ordinary people in the Baltic republics were left in the immediate 62

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postwar years with little option but to adapt to their new reality. Born in 1932 into a Lithuanian peasant family, Marija Popova recalled how the upheavals of the late 1940s reframed the horizons of her young life. The NKVD arrested and beat her father in 1945. Her family’s land and livestock were incorporated into the new collective farm system. By her own account, Popova adjusted well to life on the collective farm. She worked hard and enjoyed participating in the farm’s cultural activities. In 1952 she assumed directorship of her farm’s clubhouse library and became active in the Komsomol. It soon became clear that joining the Communist Party was a pathway to professional, social, and economic advancement. She joined in 1956, and later remembered the self-esteem boost that this fateful decision afforded her: “I felt valued by everyone, it was as if I was the most intelligent person, as if nobody in the kolkhoz could get by without me, I felt like a real leader.” In 1966, she married a Russian and he encouraged her to seek a higher education in a CPSU school. She and her husband worked for the CPSU for several decades. Only after the USSR’s collapse would she reflect on how her “patriotic and nationalistic ideas” had been “trampled” during the postwar years of Sovietization in Lithuania.36

The Holocaust and the Soviet Politics of War Memory As the Red Army moved west toward Berlin, they found much to disorient them—not only the wreckage and dead left behind by the Wermacht, but also the seeming “otherness” of the western borderlands of the Soviet Union. The Red Army encountered a wide range of hostility as they pushed through the territories that the Soviet Union had forcibly annexed following its signing of the NaziSoviet Non-Aggression Pact in 1939. The peoples of the Baltics and western Ukraine were not only hostile toward Soviet troops. They also lived differently, behaved differently, and spoke in languages that the Red Army soldiers did not understand. For many it surely raised questions about what, if anything, could unite these “alien” peoples with the Soviet citizenry. Could the peoples of these recently annexed territories be integrated into the Soviet way of life and the Friendship 63

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of Peoples?37 It remained to be seen, and there was ample reason for doubt. En route to Berlin, the Red Army also discovered the horrors of Nazi genocide. The Jewish writer Vasily Grossman served as a special correspondent for Red Star, the Red Army’s newspaper, and produced extraordinary reporting of Soviet frontline soldiers’ efforts to repel the Wermacht. Born in the Pale of Settlement in 1905, Grossman came of age alongside the Bolshevik Revolution. In the 1920s and 1930s, he fashioned himself as a New Soviet Man—secular and urbane. Sent to the front in August 1941 as a war correspondent, Grossman reported on the Battle of Stalingrad and was embedded with the Red Army as it moved westward to liberate Nazi-occupied territory and march onward to Berlin. The scale and scope of the Nazi genocide came into horrifying focus as Grossman moved west through devastated Ukraine. In late 1943, he wrote an article titled “Ukraine without Jews” that was rejected for publication by Red Star. In it, Grossman wrote, “There are no Jews in Ukraine. Nowhere. . . . All is silence. Everything is still. A whole people has been murdered.”38 He contemplated the human beings lost, their bodies buried in the pits and ravines of the Nazi killing fields of the USSR’s western borderlands: “Old men and women are dead, as well as craftsmen and professional people: tailors, shoemakers, tinsmiths, jewelers, house painters . . . dead are teachers, dead are babushkas who could knit stockings and make tasty buns, cook bouillon and make strudel with apples and nuts.”39 In January 1944, Grossman entered the ruins of Berdichev—the city of his birth, the city where his mother and other relatives perished in the Holocaust; they were among the estimated one and a half million Soviet Jews to die in the Nazi genocide.40 “This is the murder of a people,” Grossman wrote in anguish. The Nazis had attempted to exterminate the Jewish people and the Jewish culture they embodied. “This is the murder of a people’s morality, of customs, humorous stories, passed on from grandfathers to their sons, this is the murder of memories, of a sad song, of people’s poetry . . . this is the death of a people, which lived for centuries beside the Ukrainian people,” he eulogized.41 Grossman dedicated himself to not 64

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only describing the immensity of the Nazi genocide or to explaining its somber meaning for the Soviet Union and its Jews. He also endeavored to document the Holocaust. With his colleague Ilya Ehrenburg, Grossman began planning in 1943 to publish a book conceived as The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry—a compendium of witness testimonies and other documentary evidence of the Nazis’ crimes, namely, the systematic murder of Jews. En route to Berlin, Grossman composed unflinching descriptions of Nazi massacres on Soviet territory as well as of the Red Army’s grim discoveries upon liberating Nazi death camps in Poland and Germany. “Sometimes,” Grossman wrote of surveying the abundant evidence of the Nazis’ cruelty, “you are so shaken by what you’ve seen, blood rushes away from your heart, and you know that the terrible picture you saw in a glimpse will haunt you forever.”42 In late 1944, Grossman published his heartbreaking account “The Hell of Treblinka” in the Soviet journal Znamya. The world needed to know that Treblinka was an extermination camp, and Grossman explained how the Nazis and their collaborators carried out Hitler’s Final Solution there. “Nothing in this camp was adapted for life,” he underscored. “Everything was adapted for death.” Treblinka’s architects even saw fit to deceive their prisoners from the get-go. A fake train station greeted the doomed upon their arrival at Treblinka. Departure and arrival schedules were posted as props meant to distract the Jews, Roma, and others who arrived at what was their final destination, a fascist “slaughterhouse.” Grossman explained, “An orchestra played in the station building to greet the new arrivals,” while “a station guard in railway uniform collected tickets.” Yet, there was nowhere to go beyond Treblinka but to death. The Nazis smirked menacingly at the men, women, and children upon their arrival. They mocked them before methodically dispossessing them of their clothing, documents, valuables, and lives. In his account of how the camp ran, Grossman painstakingly extended to its victims the empathy that their Nazi executioners had denied them. He described their confusion, fear, and embarrassment. He imagined their tears as they said goodbye to one another as “the conveyor belt of Treblinka” forced them into gas chambers. He described their screams, their agony. He described the silence that 65

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followed upon their murder. Grossman begged his readers to “find within us the strength to imagine what the people in these chambers felt, what they experienced during their last minutes of life.” Their lives needed to be remembered, their deaths both documented and avenged. “The defenders of Stalingrad have now reached Treblinka,” Grossman wrote. It was the Red Army and the Soviet people, he implied, who would be the ones to ensure that the world remembered the unprecedented crimes committed there.43 Yet, Grossman’s vision for remembering and avenging the dead did not come to fruition as he imagined. Although the Soviet state saw fit to reproduce copies of “The Hell of Treblinka” in multiple languages and to distribute these at the Nuremberg trials after the war, it would not reach Soviet readers in the Black Book that Grossman and Ehrenburg had compiled.44 Soviet authorities prohibited the Black Book’s publication, deeming it politically harmful. Its documentary evidence was presented at Nuremberg and portions of it were published abroad, but Soviet authorities did not want the book in the hands of the Soviet public. One CPSU report warned that the Black Book, with its emphasis on the Final Solution, would mislead Soviet readers about the nature and meaning of the war as the test and triumph of the entire Soviet people.45 After the war, the Soviet state prohibited open discussion of the Holocaust and refused to acknowledge the Nazis’ genocide of Jews and Roma on Soviet territory. That some Soviet citizens had collaborated with the Nazis was a fact rendered utterly taboo, unmentionable. In the drive to rebuild the Soviet Union, the Soviet state insisted on a narrative of the Great Patriotic War as a time of Soviet suffering without distinction. As Grossman and Ehrenburg struggled in vain to publish their Black Book, Soviet survivors of the Holocaust attempted to rebuild their lives and the Soviet Union. Approximately ten thousand Jews undertook the journey to Birobidzhan, the Soviet Zion that had proven such a disappointment for so many in the 1930s. In search of a better life, many of these postwar pilgrims were fleeing the devastated western borderlands of the Soviet Union. In the lands of the former Pale of Settlement, there remained little for them except war’s traumas, 66

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hostile neighbors, and the wreckage of a genocidal war that had killed so many of their family members and friends. Birobidzhan once again beckoned as a Soviet Jewish homeland. Yet, Birobidzhan’s prewar problems extended into the postwar period. Many of the new Jewish settlers to Birobidzhan were disappointed to discover that the Jewish Autonomous Region after the war was scarcely more equipped than it had been in the 1930s to welcome new settlers. As in the 1930s, only a minority of those Jews who sojourned to Birobidzhan in the immediate postwar years stayed on permanently.46 Meanwhile, the Soviet state remained committed to refusing a special recognition of the Nazi genocide of Jews and Roma for decades after the war’s end. The Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko in 1961 published a poem that served as both aching lament and angry protest against both the Soviet refusal to commemorate the Soviet Jews who died as victims of Nazi genocide and the persistent anti-Semitism at the core of Eastern European history. The poem begins pointedly, “No monument stands over Babi Yar [Babyn Yar].” Here, at this site of Nazi genocide, this neglected mass grave of Soviet citizens murdered because of their ethnicity, Yevtushenko wrote, “all things scream silently.”47 The publication of Yevtushenko’s poem caused such a stir that Nikita Khrushchev himself lectured the Union of Soviet Writers, of which Yevtushenko was a member, about the appropriate Soviet interpretation of Babyn Yar. “Many people were murdered there,” Khrushchev insisted. “But comrades, Comrade Yevtushenko, you have to know that not only Jews died there, there were many others. Hitler exterminated Jews, exterminated Gypsies, but his next plan was to exterminate the Slavic peoples, we know that he also exterminated many Slavs.” Khrushchev claimed that to emphasize the particular suffering of Jews or Roma was to “contribute to hatred between peoples.”48 Echoing Khrushchev’s remarks, the Soviet newspaper Pravda accused Yevtushenko of “an ignorance of historical facts” and stressed that Babyn Yar was the tragic mass grave of “Soviet people of various nationalities.”49 In 1976, Soviet authorities belatedly erected a commemorative sculpture outside of Babyn Yar—a memorial that with purposeful vagueness honored those murdered there. The Soviet politics of 67

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commemorating the Great Patriotic War insisted on a refusal to acknowledge the particular suffering of Jews or Roma as targets of Nazi genocide, as ethnic groups singled out for extermination. As will be explained below, the plight of Soviet Jews worsened significantly after the war—and in ways that went well beyond the Soviet refusal to accord special memory of the Holocaust as part of the remembrance of the horrors of the Soviet wartime experience.

A Toast to the Russian People Red Army soldiers triumphantly raised the Soviet flag over the Reichstag on May 1, 1945. As memorialized in one of the most iconic photographs of the war, the Soviet flag billowed against clouds of smoke wafting from the shelled buildings of defeated Berlin. Taken by the Soviet Jewish photographer Evgenii Khaldei, “Raising the Red Flag Over the Reichstag” was a photograph that offered, in visual form, an emotive representation of the Soviet Union’s costly victory as well as its assertion of its hard-won superpower status. A casual observer of the photograph would not know that the Soviet flag raised over the Reichstag had been sewn from tablecloths by a Jewish tailor in Moscow.50 In other ways, too, the Soviet Union’s proud multiethnic heritage was consciously built into this memoryframing image of the Great Patriotic War. The two Soviet soldiers featured in the photo—one a Russian, the other a Georgian— embodied the multiethnic Soviet Union under the leadership of the Russian nation.51​ Just weeks after the Red Army raised the Soviet flag over the Reichstag, Stalin received Soviet military leaders in the Kremlin and raised his glass in celebration. “As the representative of our Soviet government,” Stalin said, “I would like to propose a toast to our Soviet people and, in the first place, the Russian people.” His guests cheered and applauded, celebrating Soviet victory but also the Russian “first among equals” in the Soviet Friendship of Peoples. This was not a closed-door concession, a hushed nod to Russian supremacy. Rather, Stalin’s toast became the next day’s front-page news; his words were 68

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Figure 5 Red Army soldiers raise the Soviet flag over the Reichstag. © Sovfoto/Universal Images Group/Getty Images.

reprinted in Pravda.52 “I drink, most of all, to the health of the Russian people,” Stalin explained, “because they are the most outstanding nation of all the nations in the Soviet Union. I raise a toast to the health of the Russian people because they earned general recognition during the war as the Soviet Union’s leading force among all the peoples of our country.”53 The war amplified and cemented the Soviet state’s prewar embrace of Russocentric patriotism. During and after the war, the Stalinist state doubled down on its ideological insistence on the primacy of Russians as the leading people of the Soviet Union and of Russianness as the glorious touchstone of Soviet culture writ large. Soviet Russocentrism during and after the war also changed how some Soviet citizens imagined their place—and their possibilities— within the evolving multiethnic Soviet society. The exaltation of the Russian people as the leading force of Soviet civilization even prompted some Soviet citizens to pursue new ethnic Russian identities. For some, this beneficial cloak of ethnic Russianness was obtained through the adoption of a spouse’s valuable Russian surname or the 69

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wholesale replacement of one’s “Jewish” name for one that sounded more Russian.54 For others, maneuvers of self-Russification were more complex and involved a savvy refashioning of their life stories and ethnic affiliations. Take, for example, the celebrated Romani (Gypsy) writer, Alexander Germano. In the 1920s and the 1930s, Germano had proven an adept nationality policy careerist and an ardent Romani activist. He was pivotal in the creation of the Moscow State Gypsy Theater and a Romani national literature—all designed in the spirit of “national in form, socialist in content.” Germano had readily embraced the opportunities that being a Gypsy—a non-Russian nationality promised “uplift” by the Soviet state—afforded him. He built his cherished literary career as a writer of poetry, plays, and short stories intended to contribute to the Sovietization of so-called “backward Gypsies.” He was rewarded with membership to the prestigious Union of Soviet Writers. Yet, the shift in the Soviet Union’s privileging of Russians and Russianness prompted Germano, in 1952, to revise his ethnicity. In an autobiography he wrote in that year, Germano responded to the proverbial Soviet question—who are you by nationality?—with the answer, “Russian.” He narrated his life as that of a Russian who had benevolently led the USSR’s “backward Gypsies” to the promised land of Soviet culture. Germano’s malleable Soviet self-fashioning and his evolving response to the question “who are you by nationality?” reflects in singular fashion his success as a self-made New Soviet Man who deftly navigated Soviet ethnic politics both before and after the war. When in 1952 Germano declared himself a Russian rather than a Gypsy, he was apparently acting on the fact that his non-Russian nationality no longer provided the social currency that Russianness offered him in the postwar USSR. Exceptional though it may be, Germano’s case shows how Soviet nationality policy could, even in unexpected ways, function just as the Bolsheviks had originally hoped. Germano’s ethnic status as a “Gypsy” had served him in the 1920s and 1930s as a plastic identity—a vehicle of Soviet selftransformation—that he sloughed off after the war as he attempted his fullest realization as the New Soviet Man—integrated, proud, and Russian.55 70

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Postwar Soviet Anti-Semitism For prominent Soviet Jews after the war, the type of flexibility that Germano availed himself of was not accessible. During the war, Soviet people realized that anti-Semitism was no longer taboo—that the state would not intervene to police anti-Semitic speech or punish antiSemitic attacks. Prominent among this worsening anti-Semitic speech was the widespread accusation that Soviet Jews had shirked military service and fled to the “Tashkent front” during the mass evacuations of Soviet citizens to the interior that took place early in the war. Between 1941 and 1942, some sixteen and a half million Soviet citizens were evacuated to points east. More than 100,000 of them found temporary refuge in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent—a city that became during the war both a relative safe haven from the front and a symbol of the Soviet Friendship of Peoples.56 Yet, the wartime symbol of Tashkent was also warped into a slur that cast doubt on Jews’ rightful Soviet belonging. The so-called Tashkent front become a rhetorical signpost of the wartime unleashing of popular anti-Semitism as Soviet Jews were taunted openly in public for their alleged refusal to serve.57 In the immediate postwar years, Jews throughout the Soviet Union experienced a fresh wave of virulent anti-Semitism that was tacitly endorsed by the late Stalinist state. Popular and sometimes deadly anti-Semitism spilled out on the USSR’s streets, city buses, workplaces, schools, cultural centers, and corridors of Soviet power. Among the first targets of Stalin’s anti-Semitic postwar campaign were prominent members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC). Established in 1942, the JAC was a Soviet patriotic organization dedicated to lobbying Jewish allies in the West so as to mobilize financial aid and other support for the Soviet war effort. In its work, the JAC emphasized Jewish unity in the face of the Nazi threat and named its Yiddish newspaper Eynikayt (Unity) to underscore the JAC’s purpose. It argued that Jews around the world needed to band together to defeat the Nazis and their stated goal of exterminating the Jewish people. The celebrated actor and director of Moscow’s Yiddish Theater Solomon Mikhoels chaired the JAC. Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in 1890, Mikhoels strayed far from the Hasidism in which he 71

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was reared, but he did not join the CPSU and never hid his attachment to Jewish culture, even its prerevolutionary elements. He proudly identified as Jewish. Even when speaking in a formal setting to CPSU authorities, Mikhoels was known to make references to the Bible or the Talmud. During the war, he carried a Bible openly and without apology.58 He was widely regarded as a leading voice among Soviet Jews. In 1943, he toured the United States rallying support and raising funds for the Soviet war effort. He was received with great enthusiasm by American Jews who hosted rallies, dinners, and other events to support the JAC and its mission. After the war, the JAC continued its work, but did so under increasing scrutiny from the Stalinist state. One secret CPSU report prepared for Stalin in 1946 applauded the JAC for its useful work during the war, but now characterized the JAC as a political liability. According to the CPSU report, the JAC’s activities had allegedly become “increasingly nationalistic, Zionist.” Its partnership with “reactionary” and “bourgeois-nationalistic” Jewish organizations abroad was at odds with Soviet interests. In the pages of Eynikayt, the JAC’s leaders had promoted “the reactionary idea of a single Jewish nation.”59 It was not until after the establishment of Israel, however, that the JAC was shuttered and its leaders’ lives wrecked during the so-called “anti-cosmopolitan campaign” of 1948–53—a program of state-sponsored anti-Semitism that destroyed the lives of the JAC’s leaders and introduced anti-Semitism as a structural foundation of Soviet society. On January 13, 1948, NKVD agents assassinated Mikhoels. Though presented in the Soviet press at the time as an unfortunate accident, it quickly became apparent that Mikhoels’ assassination—ordered by Stalin himself—was the dark prelude to an orchestrated state campaign of anti-Semitism that accelerated after the establishment of Israel in May. Although the USSR immediately extended diplomatic recognition to Israel, Stalin suspected Soviet Jews of disloyalty, of a primary allegiance to their fellow Jews around the world. Many of Mikhoels’ colleagues at the Yiddish Theater and the JAC were arrested. The anti-cosmopolitan campaign also witnessed the arrest of other prominent Jewish public figures, the disbanding of the Yiddish press, 72

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and the shuttering of all of the USSR’s Yiddish theaters.60 On August 12, 1952, thirteen members of the JAC were executed for their alleged crimes of treason, espionage, and Zionist bourgeois nationalism. Meanwhile, ordinary Soviet Jews now faced the new reality of their fellow Soviet citizens freely hurling anti-Semitic slurs at them on buses, in stores, at work. Some were demoted or let go from their jobs. During the anti-cosmopolitan campaign, Jewishness became both a professional and social liability. Then a schoolboy, Emil Draitser recalled his classmates taunting him with slurs and telling him accusingly, “All Jews are cowards. During the war they hid in Tashkent.”61 For many Jews in the postwar Soviet Union, Jewishness became a persistent source of humiliation no less than an impediment to social and professional advancement. A particularly striking case of late Stalinist anti-Semitism is that of Polina Zhemchuzhina. Born in a shtetl in 1897 as Perl Karpovskaia, this daughter of a Jewish tailor was raised in the tsarist Pale of Settlement, graduated to work in a cigarette factory, and came of age alongside the Bolshevik Revolution. She joined the CPSU in 1918 and rebranded herself with a new secular name. Through her party work, Zhemchuzhina met her future husband—Stalin’s future right-hand man Viacheslav Molotov. Zhemchuzhina rose in the 1920s and 1930s alongside fellow Soviet Jews who climbed the social, educational, and professional rungs afforded them by the Bolshevik Revolution. She distinguished herself as a manager of the Soviet cosmetics industry and in 1939 became the Soviet Union’s first (and only) female people’s commissar—a position she was removed from a mere nine months later during the Purges and Terror of the late 1930s. Not until 1949, however, was Zhemchuzhina arrested—under the storm clouds of postwar Stalinist anti-Semitism—and sentenced to five years in the Gulag. Her ostensible crime? Jewish nationalism.62 What did or could this criminal charge mean in the menacing haze of late Stalinist anti-Semitism? In the first place, there were Zhemchuzhina’s allegedly suspect ties to her brother and sister abroad. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, Zhemchuzhina and two of her siblings fled the pogrom-wracked Pale and sought new fates; her brother emigrated to the United States and her sister to Palestine. 73

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Zhemchuzhina corresponded with both siblings in the two decades that followed. During the Second World War, Zhemchuzhina had served on the JAC alongside Mikhoels, Ehrenburg, and Grossman. After the war, her service to the Soviet state included her role of hostess as the wife of Stalin’s top diplomat—duties she notably carried out at a Kremlin reception in October 1948 that would no doubt come to haunt her. At this reception, Zhemchuzhina spoke animatedly with Golda Meir, Israeli ambassador to the Soviet Union—and Zhemchuzhina spoke with her in Yiddish, reportedly telling her, “I am a daughter of the Jewish people.”63 Meir had recently caused a stir upon visiting a Moscow synagogue for Rosh Hashanah services, whereupon she had been met by thousands of Soviet Jews who enthusiastically greeted her Israeli delegation. This stunning Jewish crowd assembled for holiday services with the Israeli ambassador despite a recent party-line editorial published in Pravda that had instructed “the State of Israel has nothing to do with the Jews of the Soviet Union, where there is no Jewish problem and therefore no need for Israel.”64 For Meir, there was no mistaking the intentions of the “brave Jews” who assembled to greet her in Moscow with shouts of “Shalom, shalom.” Their gathering, she explained, was meant “to demonstrate their sense of kinship and to celebrate the establishment of the State of Israel.”65 Meir was no less certain that not only Zhemchuzhina, but all of Soviet Jewry suffered a “heavy price” for the welcome that she had received on behalf of Israel.66 Zhemchuzhina was expelled from the party and arrested just a few months after her encounter with Meir on allegations of Zionist anti-Soviet conspiracy. She maintained her innocence while serving her term in the Gulag. Only after Stalin’s death was she released and ultimately exonerated. Zhemchuzhina maintained her allegiance to Stalin until her own death in 1970.67 More frightening for Soviet Jews in the last years of Stalin was the so-called Doctors’ Plot. On January 13, 1953, the Soviet newspaper Pravda announced the arrest of a “terrorist group” of the most nefarious sort—a cabal of “despicable spies and murderers” who had plotted the death of Stalin and other top government officials while “masked” as their physicians. These “doctor-saboteurs,” Pravda reported, had been 74

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plotting stealth assassinations of Soviet officials in connivance with the intelligence agencies of the USSR’s enemies abroad—among them, the USA.68 Terrifying rumors of Jewish doctors poisoning ordinary Soviet citizens spread quickly. Rumors also swirled that Stalin was preparing to deport Soviet Jews to Siberia. During these bleak months, Emil Draitser recalled, his household was overtaken by feverish anxiety as his parents and relatives worried that they would soon be deported to Siberia.69 Flora Litvinova, a Jewish biologist then employed at a Moscow laboratory led by one of the accused, recalled the “genuine panic” that the Doctors’ Plot generated in Soviet society and how it seemingly reawakened a popular “antisemitic mood, a pogrom psychology” that the Bolsheviks had failed to defeat.70 This reawakened anti-Semitism would outlive Stalin, whose death on March 5, 1953, ushered the denouement of the Doctors’ Plot. On April 4, Pravda printed a small announcement that the doctors had been falsely accused, victims of injustice. That morning, Litvinova later recalled, she and her family danced with relief and excitement around their apartment. At her hospital laboratory, she and her colleagues greeted one another with meaningful smiles.71 Yet, even if the sordid Doctors’ Plot had been brought to an end, the anti-Semitism unleashed and encouraged during the years of the late Stalinist anti-cosmopolitan campaign had become a new norm of Soviet life. Under Stalin’s successors it would continue to flourish.

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In 1935, construction began at the site of what would evolve to become Moscow’s “VDNKh”—the Exhibition of the Achievements of the People’s Economy. A popular fairground, VDNKh featured pavilions celebrating the ethnic distinctiveness and economic contributions of each of the USSR’s union republics. As many as two thousand artisans from the Soviet national republics were invited to Moscow to contribute their ethnic expertise to the building and decoration of their pavilions.1 As the Soviet Union evolved, so too did VDNKh. In 1954, VDNKh reopened with three new pavilions— one for each of the Baltic republics annexed during the war (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). The renovated fairground also unveiled its new “Friendship of Peoples Fountain,” located just inside VDNKh’s main entrance. This large fountain was designed to excite and awe, to celebrate the multiethnic Soviet people living in harmony and tending to a fertile socialist economy and culture. The fountain welcomed visitors to the park with its shiny statues of women whose dresses and accoutrements suggested beauty, fecundity, prosperity, and ethnic distinctiveness. Each bronze statue represented one of the USSR’s union republics. Hydraulic engineering and folk art motifs combined to produce VDNKh’s main attraction—a sparkling monument to Soviet domestic internationalism.​ In her memoir, Anya von Bremzen recalls how VDNKh dazzled her in her Soviet girlhood. The majestic Friendship of Peoples Fountain at the park’s entrance was her favorite feature of the sprawling exhibit complex. The fountain did not just offer Soviet kids like von Bremzen a beautiful spot to rest on a warm day, droplets of water bouncing onto their grateful skin. The fountain’s explicit “spectacle of the happy family of our Socialist Union republics,”

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Figure 6  Friendship of Peoples Fountain. © Mikhail K./Getty Images.

von Bremzen writes, “mesmerized” her. The statues that circled the fountain were icons of Soviet glory and multiethnic pride. For von Bremzen, the fountain statues—with their “wreaths, tiaras, hats, ribbons, and braids”—were the “ethnic princesses” of her patriotic imagination.2 Under “mature” postwar Soviet socialism, the Friendship of Peoples was celebrated as an unshakable foundation of Soviet society. Yet, as before and during the Great Patriotic War, there were discernible cracks in this professed foundation of Soviet interethnic harmony. This chapter explores the Friendship of Peoples as it was lived by Soviet citizens in the postwar era and as it was shaped by the geopolitical climate of the Cold War. As Soviet society matured, so too did some of the tensions embedded in the USSR’s ethnic politics. Among these tensions was the prominent mismatch between the Soviet state’s professed anti-racism and the homegrown racism that flourished in the postwar era. Likewise, Soviet domestic internationalism hailed the interethnic harmony that ostensibly prevailed in Soviet society. Yet, a hardening ethnic hierarchy—and the resentments and fissures that this hierarchy produced—increasingly threatened to destabilize the multiethnic Soviet Union. 78

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A Culinary Feast Soviet domestic internationalism was more than a rhetorical and ideological touchstone for the USSR. It permeated Soviet political culture, animated Soviet iconography, and saturated the material culture of daily life. It also flavored the food that Soviet citizens ate. In the postwar period, the Friendship of Peoples was increasingly expressed on the dining tables of the Soviet people. The multiethnic Soviet Union celebrated not only the dance, music, and literature of the different nationalities, but also the best that the different cuisines of the Soviet people had to offer. First published in 1939, the Soviet cookbook The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food became a culinary and cultural mainstay for the postwar Soviet generations. Featuring photographs of appetizing table spreads, The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food at once glossed over the food deprivation that so many Soviets had suffered in previous decades and taught Soviet citizens how to lay out a feast in a cultured, dignified manner. Its recipes celebrated what Soviet-born food writer Anya von Bremzen has dubbed “SovietEurasian fusion.”3 Ukrainian dumplings, Georgian soups, Uzbek pilaf, Armenian-style shish kabob, and Tatar deep-fried meat pies were among the many delicious and nutritious meals featured in The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food. At least in its idealized form, Soviet gastronomy, too, reflected the USSR’s domestic internationalism. The multiethnic Soviet Union promoted a multiethnic cuisine that incorporated dishes, flavors, and alcoholic drinks associated with non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union. The Caucasus provided the Soviet people with citrus fruits; Central Asia offered melons. Soviet citizens were meant to understand that a refined Soviet palate appreciated Armenian cognac as much as Russian vodka and Georgian khachapuri as much as Russian borsch. Soviet cuisine was celebrated for its multiethnic flavors and hailed as a tasty feast to be enjoyed and celebrated by the Soviet people—united in friendship and a shared taste for domestic internationalism. Here, too, some nationalities rose above the rest and occupied a preferred place in the Soviet ethnic hierarchy. Stalin’s energetic promotion of Georgian cuisine secured its top billing among the 79

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Communist Party elite and helped to pave the way for its exalted place in Soviet gastronomy. Stalin’s patronage, however, was only one ingredient of Georgian cuisine’s success in the Soviet Union. Georgian cuisine was admired for its perceived refinement as much as it was enjoyed for its delicious taste. The Georgian restaurant Aragvi, established in 1940 and located on Moscow’s central thoroughfare, helped further elevate Georgian flavors as high-prestige within the wider, multiethnic Soviet culinary repertoire. Reflecting the premium placed on Aragvi’s offerings, the wines, meats, cheeses, and produce served in this fashionable restaurant were sourced from the Georgian SSR and shipped to Moscow.4 In the postwar period especially, the growing demand for Georgian cuisine in the Soviet capital opened up valuable opportunities for Georgian chefs to advance themselves socially and professionally in Moscow as ethnic entrepreneurs. Yet, the landscape of the Soviet capital was soon transformed to feature Armenian, Azeri, and Uzbek restaurants, too—each of them established as a dining outpost in the Soviet capital of the titular union republic that it represented. At these restaurants, patrons not only feasted on ethnic cuisine, but were also served by waitstaff wearing putative national costumes and entertained by performers who sang and danced in the ostensible national style. Those who had access to these restaurants enjoyed tasty meals designed to honor not only the individual ethnic cuisine around which each respective national restaurant was created, but also the ethnic diversity of the Soviet Union as a whole. Ethnic restaurants in postwar Moscow offered their patrons—Soviet elites and foreign visitors, primarily—with a culinary virtual tour of the union republics they represented. Aragvi, however, maintained its pride of place as the crown jewel of Moscow’s ethnic restaurant culture, and Georgian cuisine was claimed as a cultural achievement that reflected well on the taste and refinement of the Soviet people as a whole.5 The vast majority of ordinary Soviets who would never sit down to a table at the prestigious Aragvi could and did nonetheless participate in the remarkable Soviet embrace of Georgian cuisine and dining rituals that flourished in the post-Stalin era. Soviet women were instructed on how to cook delicious Georgian dishes in 80

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recipes printed in mass-produced cookbooks like The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food. Photographs of tables laden with lavish feasts of Georgian delicacies and wines invited Soviet citizens to savor the flavors of Georgian cuisine as well as to appreciate the Soviet Union’s ethnically diverse bounty. Georgian sauces and marinades were massproduced for Soviet consumers and sold in stores around the country. Soviet popular culture introduced ordinary people of all ethnic backgrounds to the traditions of Georgian toast-making and other rituals of hospitality. These cultural practices, too, were folded into a common Soviet dining tradition and performed in homes all across the multiethnic Soviet Union—all without losing their recognition as distinctly Georgian contributions to a shared Soviet, supranational culture.6

Soviet (anti-)Racism and Ethnic Hierarchy The Soviet Union prided itself not only on its ethnic and culinary diversity, but also on its anti-racism. In propaganda designed for both domestic and international audiences, the Soviet Union compared itself to its capitalist counterparts whose profit margins, social hierarchies, and cultural values thrived on endemic racism. In the 1930s (right up until the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact), Nazi Germany was portrayed as the Soviet Union’s ultimate antithesis—a fascist state devoted to the racial supremacy of the Aryan race. The Soviet Union celebrated its wholesale rejection of the Nazis’ “zoological” ideology of race. In the Soviet Union, it was claimed, biology did not destine some ethnicities for greatness and others for subordination or worse, extermination. Instead, the Soviet Union had created a socialist society in which citizens of all ethnicities were not only expected to thrive, but also given the necessary tools for their own self-advancement and incorporation into a modern, united, multiethnic civic body. Later, during the Cold War, the main foil against which the Soviet Union defined itself was its primary superpower rival, the United States. Soviet citizens learned of the everyday degradations 81

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of Jim Crow. The Soviet people imagined the United States as a land of lynchings, racially segregated schools, and unabashed white supremacy. In Soviet propaganda, the “emancipated” peoples of the ethnically diverse Soviet Union were put forward as proof positive that the Soviet Union had not only conquered the ethnic chauvinism of the tsarist empire, but also the scourge of racist ideology that dominated in capitalist societies. Moreover, it was said, the USSR was a progressive force on the global stage, putting its commitment to anti-racism and anti-colonialism in action. During the Cold War, as in the interwar period, the Soviet state emphasized its progressive antiracism as reflected in its tolerant and humane approach to governing its multiethnic population. The USSR’s ostensible virtue as an antiracist state was played up in propaganda designed for domestic as well as international audiences. Contrasting Soviet internationalism to American (capitalist) racism in particular, the Soviet state sought to prove the USSR’s moral superiority.​ A dramatic example of the USSR’s projection of its global commitment to anti-racism was the case of Huldah Clark—a Black

Figure 7  Huldah Clark among her Soviet classmates, 1961. © Bettmann/ Getty Images. 82

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American teenager to whom Nikita Khrushchev offered a full-tuition scholarship to study in a Soviet boarding school. The daughter of a Black American communist who insisted that his children were denied a decent education given the racist system of segregated American schooling, Huldah studied in Moscow from 1961 to 1964. Hers was a striking case of Soviet patronage of Black Americans in their struggle against Jim Crow during the Cold War. Huldah became an international symbol of American racism and—for some—of Soviet benevolence and anti-racism. Huldah’s father insisted that in the USSR, Huldah “won’t find signs saying ‘no colored here,’ or have to ride in the back of a bus, or be denied service in a restaurant, or be kept out of public places, or any of the thousand and one things that add up to Jim Crow.”7 Tragically, Huldah’s study abroad in Moscow appears to have come to an end in the summer of 1964. While home on summer break, Huldah was arrested on a flimsy pretext and branded a “juvenile delinquent.” Her arrest was obviously designed to put an end to the embarrassment caused to the United States by her Soviet education and her father’s outspokenness. Prior to her arrest, Huldah had dreamed of working as a doctor “in Africa, the land of my forefathers” because, she explained, she wanted to help the people of Africa just “as the Soviet country is helping me.”8 In the 1960s, the USSR welcomed thousands of students from the so-called “Third World”—Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East—to study at its institutions of higher education and offered them scholarships and stipends. The Soviet state presented such “benevolence” as evidence of its commitment to internationalism— of tangible efforts to help create a global Friendship of Peoples. Yet, foreign exchange students often suffered during their time in the USSR. They were subjected to torrents of verbal abuse and racial slurs, and many cases of physical assault and beatings were reported. Soviet propagandists endeavored to gloss over the frequent racist attacks perpetrated against foreign students in Soviet cities even as internal CPSU reports tabulated reports of beatings and verbal abuse.9 Many ordinary Soviet citizens, however, were confident in the USSR’s achievement of anti-racism. Andrea Lee, an African American who lived in Moscow in 1978–9, recalled how a Soviet acquaintance 83

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insistently told her that “there’s no racism here” while “studiously ignoring the fact that we’d just heard a Russian woman cursing a ‘filthy’ African on a crowded bus.”10 Historians of the Soviet Union, too, for a long time failed to see that the Soviet Union’s professed anti-racism did not preclude the emergence of the Soviet Union’s own domestic practices, structures, and logics of racism. Recently, historians have offered compelling analyses of the many ways in which race and racism were at work in Soviet society and embedded, too, in the ideology and practices of Soviet nationality policy.11 The Soviet Union’s pride in its own anti-racism, ultimately, did not prevent the growth and evolution of homegrown racism. In fact, the very logic of the Bolsheviks’ ethnic politics paradoxically promoted racism. How could this be? For starters, to understand race and racism in Soviet society, we need first to recognize that race as it was defined and racism as practiced in other societies—in Nazi Germany or the United States, for example—offer historical examples, rather than singular, universal models. This allows us to better appreciate that race and racism have been experienced differently across time and space. The Soviet Union offers a notable case in point. The USSR did not formally embrace biologically determinist concepts of race; did not deploy race as a legal category; and claimed throughout its entire existence to be a proudly anti-racist state rooted in an inherently anti-racist Marxist-Leninist ideology.12 And yet, the very logic of early Bolshevik nationality policy not only encouraged, but also ultimately demanded the operationalization and institutionalization of racial logics in everyday Soviet life. The Soviet insistence on nationality—on its citizens’ ethnic identification and on the embedding of ethnicity into Soviet politics, socioeconomic relations, institutions, and culture—led over time to an official and popular embrace of a primordial understanding of ethnicity—that is, an understanding of ethnicity as something eternal, inherent, essential, and unchanging. Ethnicity became racialized. A study of how the children of interethnic marriages in Central Asia experienced late Soviet life helps us to better appreciate how the Soviet racialization of nationality affected citizens’ lives in both pronounced and subtle ways. Officially, the Soviet state celebrated interethnic 84

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marriage as a testament to the lived internationalism of the mature Soviet people and hailed the “mixed” offspring of these partnerships as living icons of the Soviet Friendship of Peoples. The children born of Soviet interethnic marriages, however, often experienced painful feelings of being out of place—within both Soviet society and their individual families. Many struggled with the requirement that they officially identify with one singular nationality on their passports—a choice that raised uncomfortable questions of familial loyalty, societal expectations, and existential meaning. When called upon at age sixteen to legally declare the nationality to be listed on their passport, children of interethnic marriages wrestled with questions of what—if anything—their phenotype, language, name, or cultural practices said about them and their belonging within Soviet society. Some longed to be able to list their nationality as “Soviet”—an option denied to them by a state that likewise insisted that one and only one ethnicity be listed on their Soviet passport. One Ukrainian-Korean woman in Kazakhstan considered herself to be Ukrainian but “looked” Korean. When it was time to formalize her passport, she asked her mother in anguish, “Mama, how can I write that I’m Ukrainian, when I look like this? What kind of Ukrainian am I?” Another woman—born to an Azerbaijani father and Russian mother—insisted: “I’m Russian. I simply don’t know anything else.” Yet, her physical resemblance to her Azerbaijani father meant that she was constantly peppered with unpleasant questions asking that she explain her Russianness from people who reminded her that “you don’t look like a Russian.”13 These women’s struggles to come to terms with their mixed ethnicity in the USSR help us to grasp a central paradox at the heart of the Soviet Union’s evolving approach to governing ethnic difference and mandating ethnicity as a fundamental component of every Soviet citizen’s identity. Whereas the Bolsheviks had initially deployed nationality as an empty instrument of strategic state-guided Sovietization, nationality over time became a de facto marker of racialized ethnicity. Individual Soviet citizens had become physical embodiments of what were understood as primordial “ethnic types.” The Bolsheviks may have originally anticipated that nationality would wither away—that is to say, dissolve into obsolescence 85

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and irrelevance—as the Soviets approached the achievement of communism. Yet, the Bolsheviks’ own insistent approach to incorporating ethnicity into the building of socialism meant that nationality did not become less, but, instead, more meaningful in Soviet citizens’ lives. The Soviet insistence on ethnicity as an organizing principle of Soviet life meant that it increasingly became inconceivable for Soviet citizens to imagine a world without ethnic identities or to think beyond the essentialized, stereotyped “ethnic types” that Soviet culture embraced and that Soviet citizens themselves reinforced and reproduced in their daily lives. The struggles of Soviet children born of interethnic marriages starkly capture this elemental paradox in how Soviet conception of nationality evolved over time. The Soviet state hailed interethnic marriage as evidence of the ethnic harmony and internationalist progress possible only under socialism. Yet, for the children born of Soviet interethnic marriages, choosing one’s official nationality at age sixteen could feel more oppressive than liberating—more like a flattening or even an erasure of self rather than a freedom to define one’s self. Forced to choose a singular nationality for one’s official ethnic identity, children born of Soviet interethnic marriages often felt painfully entangled in what had become a Soviet obsessiveness with racialized ethnicity. Nationality never withered away under Soviet socialism. Rather, being Soviet required—and with increasing rigidity—that individuals identify as belonging to a singular, descentbased nationality and to understand themselves as representatives and embodiments of essentialized ethnicity. Although the Bolsheviks had originally intended for nationality to function as a plastic identity that its citizens could gladly discard once the tasks of Sovietization and building socialism were achieved, what they created, instead, was a political and institutional culture premised on hardened, racialized conceptions of ethnicity. Race and racism entered everyday Soviet life in the postwar period in other conspicuous ways. In the late Soviet era, tens of thousands of Soviet citizens from Central Asia and the Caucasus sought new horizons for themselves in the distant capitals of Soviet power, education, and culture—Moscow and Leningrad. The 1970s and 1980s 86

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witnessed unprecedented mobility as migrants to the capital sought professional opportunities and economic and cultural advancement for themselves and for family members left behind in their native union republics. For these Soviet migrants, the promises of the Friendship of Peoples were incredibly dear. Moscow and Leningrad were not alien cities, but theirs too—they belonged to all the Soviet people, at least in theory. Moscow and Leningrad were embodiments of the Friendship of Peoples—multicultural and multiethnic even if Russian-dominated. Despite their enthusiasm and optimism in chasing the Soviet dream in the Soviet capitals, migrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus frequently encountered hostility, discrimination, and open racism. They were taunted with racially charged insults—especially if they had dark hair or skin. They were met with suspicious or haughty stares in public spaces and often recalled being excluded from work events or student networks. Those who did not speak fluent Russian were mocked and chastised. Many migrants recalled such incidents with a wince and understood that Russians sat atop the Soviet ethnic hierarchy. Yet, they remained grateful for the USSR’s broader commitment to the Friendship of Peoples. Despite the racist epithets thrown at them or the discrimination they sometimes encountered in the Soviet capitals, many Central Asian and Caucasian migrants experienced the Friendship of Peoples as a framework for self-advancement—a framework for both social and physical mobility within the vast Soviet Union to which they fully belonged.14 Akmal Bobokulov, an Uzbek, later emphasized the USSR as a shared, common home: “It was one country: the Soviet Union. We had the same system, the same rules, the same ideology, so that made it very easy to move around and adapt without any problems.”15 Bakyt Shakiev, an Azeri, felt similarly, and expressed a nostalgia for the Soviet Union and its Friendship of Peoples: “We felt the same in Bishkek and in Leningrad. That’s what the Soviet Union was about. All peoples had the same rights, even as Russians.”16 Yet, layers of inequality permeated the ethnic dimensions of Soviet life, and not just in the prestige capitals of Moscow and Leningrad. The disadvantages faced by minority peoples within the union republics of the USSR only grew more pronounced in the postwar decades of the 87

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USSR. In postwar Azerbaijan, republican leaders moved aggressively to fully nationalize their republic—to create an Azerbaijan for Azeris and of Azeris first and foremost. In schools, the Azerbaijani language was privileged over all other non-Russian languages natively spoken by the peoples of Azerbaijan. Everyone who lived in Azerbaijan was expected to assimilate to the language and culture of the titular Azeris. Azeri census-takers, meanwhile, statistically “assimilated” minority groups to the Azeri majority by denying them the opportunity to identify themselves as belonging to any other ethnic group. In this manner of manipulating census results in order to statistically homogenize Azerbaijan, the Talysh population of Azerbaijan— numbered at 87,510 in the 1939 Soviet census—was whittled down to a mere eighty-five persons in the 1959 census.17 As one Talysh later explained his experience of ethnic erasure within Soviet Azerbaijan: “If I went to the local authorities and said ‘I’m Talysh, write Talysh in my passport’—had it even been possible—I wouldn’t have had any opportunities in Azerbaijan. I had to work and there was nothing to being Talysh then—no schools, no alphabet, no books, no jobs.”18 As Soviet scholars and officials denounced capitalist countries for exploiting and destroying indigenous peoples and people of color in their quest for profits, they simultaneously praised the example of Talysh “assimilation” within Azerbaijan as evidence of the harmonious merging of familial peoples within the USSR. In this telling, Talyshes were not victims of coerced ethnic erasure, but, instead, were “liberated” via a benevolent Soviet ethnohistorical evolution culminating in their assimilation to the titular nationality of their homogenizing Soviet Socialist Republic, Azerbaijan. In the postwar Soviet Friendship of Peoples, some ethnic groups like the Talyshes were deemed so “small” as to be ripe for “merging” with larger, more powerful groups who stood above them on the Soviet ethnic hierarchy—whether they liked it or not.19

Anti-Semitism and Emigration Despite evidence of the USSR’s own homegrown racism, structural inequalities, and ethnic hierarchy, Soviet leaders insisted on the USSR’s 88

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pedigree as an anti-racist state undergirded by an internationalist ideology faultlessly put into practice. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was adamant on the global stage that ethnic discrimination was not a problem that existed in the USSR. At the start of his tour of the United States in 1959, Khrushchev responded to an American reporter’s pointed question about the status of Jews in Soviet society with an uncompromising defense of the Soviet Friendship of Peoples. “In our country,” he said, “the attitude toward anyone is not determined by his nationality or his religion. . . . We look upon a man primarily as a man.” The multiethnic Soviet people, Khrushchev claimed, “live in peace and harmony” and “all the peoples of our country trust each other.” Jews enjoyed Soviet interethnic “peace and harmony” like every other ethnic group. This was evidenced, Khrushchev claimed, by the fact that Jews were prominent in the Soviet Union’s vaunted space program.20 Khrushchev’s invocation of Soviet Jews at work building the highpriority Soviet space program was a thin attempt to gloss over what for many Soviet Jews was the inescapable reality of Soviet anti-Semitism. While the grim years of the late Stalinist anti-cosmopolitanism campaign haunted Jewish memory, anti-Semitism was no less a feature of Soviet daily life in the post-Stalin years. In some ways, antiSemitism only worsened in the final decades of the USSR as Soviet Jews faced discrimination in higher education, the workplace, and on the street. Anti-Semitism was a norm of late Soviet life; long gone were the days of the early Soviet Union when the state would make an example of prosecuting Soviet citizens for anti-Semitic acts or utterances. Meanwhile, prerevolutionary Jewish culture had largely been effaced by the unrelenting drive to assimilate all nationalities to an increasingly Russocentric Sovietism. Neither Yiddish nor Hebrew were taught in Soviet schools. Jewishness was stigmatized and young Jews knew little of the old ways—Yiddish songs, Jewish holidays, bat and bar mitzvahs. After the Second World War, some Soviet Jews sought non-Jewish spouses out of a desire, at least in part, to give their children a so-called “normal” Soviet life unrestrained by the liabilities that Jews faced in a society of worsening anti-Semitism.21 Yosef Mendelevich’s response to the anti-Semitism that saturated his life was in most ways atypical. As a young boy growing up in 89

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Riga, Mendelevich daydreamed about Israel. As a teenager, he began spending his weekends with other Jewish youth—tending to the abandoned mass grave of some 25,000 Jews murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators in Rumbuli, a wooded area outside of Riga. They hoped to erect a proper memorial there. As he came of age during the Soviet 1960s, Mendelevich learned Israeli songs on the bus rides out to Rumbuli. He deepened his faith. His boyhood daydreams developed into a conscious Zionism—a relatively fringe position of Soviet dissidence at the time. In late 1968, Mendelevich applied for a rare exit visa to emigrate to Israel but was refused. The rebuff radicalized Mendelevich. When a friend presented him with a plan to hijack a plane and escape to Israel along with fifteen other Soviet Jews, Mendelevich signed on enthusiastically. The scheme seemed to promise Mendelevich’s passage to Israel no less than an opportunity to publicize internationally the plight of Soviet Jews. Soviet authorities foiled the hijacking plot before Mendelevich and his co-conspirators could take flight on June 15, 1970. Denied his escape to Israel, Mendelevich succeeded in helping to call global attention to the plight of Soviet Jews, especially those who wanted to emigrate to Israel. While Mendelevich served a prison term, sympathizers in the West more energetically lobbied on Soviet Jews’ behalf and the Soviet state began approving more exit visas to those Jews willing to renounce their citizenship.22 Among the Soviet Jews applying for exit visas were the families of the contemporary American writers Masha Gessen, Lev Golinkin, and Gary Shteyngart—each of whom has written about their early childhood as Jews in the Soviet 1970s and 1980s. Gessen, Golinkin, and Shteyngart recall how a certain anxiety permeated their households in those years, the alienation of belonging to a nationality whose members were treated as malign, unwelcome outsiders to late Soviet society. They describe the final decades of the USSR as a time when Jews were subjected to routine microaggressions in daily life, no less than to structural prejudice in Soviet institutions of higher education and obstacles to professional advancement. Gessen’s parents agonized over the prospect of their children being denied university education for the sole fact of their Jewish ethnicity. Gessen remembered elementary school as a time when “I had been beaten almost daily 90

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for being Jewish.”23 Golinkin’s memoir conjures the schoolmates in Ukraine who knocked him down, spat in his face, and called him a “kike.” Golinkin and Shteyngart remember their parents’ worry and humiliation as they applied for exit visas, disassembled their Soviet lives in anticipation of a final departure from the Soviet Union, and were throttled by Soviet custom agents before their anguished even if hopeful exit to the West.24 Gessen’s parents decided that to remain in the USSR—“a country where we were hated,” Gessen emphasized— was “irresponsible and immoral.”25 The Shteyngarts, Gessens, and Golinkins became refugees in search of a better life, one free of Soviet anti-Semitism. Their families were among the roughly 1.2 million Jews who departed the USSR (or its successor states) between 1968 and 1994.26 In a twist of fate, Yosef Mendelevich was deported from the USSR on the same flight that the Gessens boarded on the first leg of their emigration journey.27 The Jewish exodus from the Soviet Union that began in the 1960s and picked up a still more brisk pace in the 1970s and 1980s reflected the singularity of the Jewish experience of the Soviet Union in more ways than one. Only Jews were permitted exit visas that would allow them to abandon their Soviet citizenship and emigrate abroad. This exceptional status, as configured by the Soviet state, was owed officially to the fact of their Jewish ethnicity and to the post-Second World War establishment of the state of Israel.28 Jewish out-migration from the USSR in these decades was accelerated by the energetic efforts pursued by Jewish organizations and activists in the United States, Europe, and Israel to not only lobby on behalf of Soviet Jews’ right to emigrate, but also financially and logistically support Soviet Jewish emigrés in building their lives anew outside the USSR. Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union only exacerbated popular anti-Semitism in the USSR’s final decades. Jews were further demonized as ungrateful, traitorous, cunning, and greedy. Those Jews who remained in the Soviet Union now faced the added resentment of Soviet citizens who begrudged what they perceived as Jews’ privileged access to emigration. Meanwhile, so-called refuseniks—that is, Soviet Jews who had applied for but been denied exit visas—often faced extra layers of discrimination and hostility. 91

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Development in the Cold War’s Shadow Soviet efforts during the Cold War to portray itself as a patron of the decolonizing world, an ardent defender of people of color, and an unimpeachable benefactor to all those oppressed and left “underdeveloped” by capitalism had effects that went well beyond the USSR’s foreign policy. Soviet posturing during the Cold War as a virtuous superpower devoted to anti-racism abroad, interethnic harmony at home, and generous aid for the developmental “uplift” of the Third World offered strategic opportunities for non-Russian peoples within the USSR to advocate for increased Soviet investment in their national development. The postwar Tajik intelligentsia, for example, effectively lobbied Moscow for greater investment in Tajikistan by arguing that their union republic had been left behind economically and culturally. Its persistent backwardness was at odds, they claimed, with Soviet modernity. Tajikistan remained overwhelmingly agricultural, with a standard of living that lagged well behind the rest of the Soviet Union. Among the architects of the postwar development of Tajikistan was the economist Ibadullo Narzikulov. Born in 1909, Narzikulov came of age during Stalin’s industrial revolution. After earning an engineering degree in Leningrad and returning to Tajikistan, Narzikulov could not fail to notice that Stalin’s industrial revolution had scarcely touched the landscape or the living standards of his Central Asian republic. After the war, he completed a dissertation titled “The Development of Socialist Industry in Tajikistan” as his first contribution to what would become a lengthy academic career devoted to persuading central planners in Moscow of the necessity of industrializing Tajikistan. In the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, Narzikulov worked alongside other highly motivated Tajik social scientists, politicians, and cultural figures in advocating for Moscow to devote precious resources into transforming Tajikistan into a modern industrial society.29 Among the large-scale modernization projects pushed by Tajik activists in the postwar period was the construction of the Nurek Dam on Tajikistan’s Vakhsh river. Tajik advocates of the project envisioned not only the hydroelectric power that the Nurek Dam would produce, 92

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but also the industrial and urban development that they hoped the dam’s construction would stimulate. As a conspicuous investment in underdeveloped Tajikistan, they argued, the Nurek Dam would concretize the Soviet Union’s anti-colonialism no less than its domestic internationalism.30 Construction of the dam, launched in 1961, took nearly two decades to complete. The city of Nurek—built to anchor the project—welcomed legions of domestic and foreign tourists in the final decades of the USSR; the city was celebrated as a model communist city and a testament to the Friendship of Peoples in action. Tajiks living in the region invoked this rhetoric when they pressed Soviet officials to extend the modernity that Nurek symbolized to outlying villages in the region. They, too, wanted gas stoves, electricity, indoor plumbing, and sidewalks in their villages. They wanted schools, apartments, and clinics.31 As Tajiks demanded that Moscow invest more resources into modernizing their union republic, Soviet officials applauded the Nurek Dam project for its successes in Sovietizing the Tajik people. “Almost every family has a television, radio receiver, and each family gets three copies of newspapers and magazines,” one report from the late 1970s noted approvingly.32 When the USSR extended development aid to Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and other socalled Third World countries in the 1960s and 1970s, Tajikistan was held up as a model of Soviet technological and ideological success to be emulated and exported.33 When Artemy Kalinovsky traveled to the region in 2013 to conduct oral histories among residents of the city of Nurek, he found that people there continued to understand the Nurek Dam project in terms of the benefits of industrial modernity that it had brought to the region. Kalinovsky’s interviewees associated the Nurek Dam with improvements in their quality of life—the availability of running water and electricity in their homes, an expansion of professional opportunities, and the construction of vital infrastructure such as schools and hospitals. The inhabitants of Nurek balanced the tradeoffs of Soviet-style modernity. While villages had been bulldozed and locals resettled in order to make way for the vast construction project, they generally welcomed and recognized the tangible benefits of Soviet modernization in terms of infrastructure and access to an improved 93

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standard of living—one characterized by paved roads, electricity, healthcare, and education.34 Yet, Nurek was an exception to the rule in Tajikistan, which remained by Soviet standards “underdeveloped”— overwhelmingly rural, dependent on a cotton monoculture, and with a relatively low standard of living that secured its status as the most impoverished of the Soviet Union’s republics.35 When the anthropologist Bruce Grant conducted fieldwork among Nivkhi on Sakhalin Island in 1990, he frequently encountered similar responses to the legacies of Soviet modernization. Emptied out “ghost villages” dotted Sakhalin’s coastline because, in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, the Soviet state sought to further rationalize the local fishing industry by requiring indigenous Nivkhi to move to larger kolkhozes, located in more concentrated settlements that were outfitted with modern Soviet infrastructure. One Nivkh interviewee told Grant, “My parents wanted to stay behind, but I didn’t. Here we have running water and gas.” Another looked back on the postwar resettlement saying, “Sure, I wanted to go. We got an apartment immediately, with a bathroom and a kitchen. I got a good job too. Today I would choose an old village over anything, but I didn’t think twice about it then.” Another woman credited the Soviet government for the fact that she gave birth in a hospital rather than a tent. Grant’s Nivkhi interlocutors understood the trade-offs inherent to the Soviet mission to modernize their way of life. Sovietization meant schools, hospitals, apartment blocks, and indoor plumbing. But it also meant that, with each new generation, fewer Nivkhi remembered the old folklore or the recipes for traditional dishes. Fewer Nivkhi remembered life in the old fishing villages and fewer Nivkhi fished for a living. Becoming Soviet had hollowed out the old fishing villages left abandoned on the Sakhalin coastline, and it had also hollowed out what remained of traditional Nivkh culture.36 Or, as one Stalinera newspaper produced on Sakhalin had put it in the early 1930s: “Overcoming the past is a prerequisite for full membership in the family of peoples of the USSR.”37

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CHAPTER 6 PERESTROIKA AND COLLAPSE

In March 1985, the relatively youthful Mikhail Gorbachev was entrusted with the task of leading the CPSU and the Soviet Union. The previous three years had witnessed the shuffling of slippers and the frequent succession of elderly leaders at the helm of the CPSU. After leading the USSR since 1964, Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982. Both his ailing, white-haired successors Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko also died in office, thereby rounding out what has come to be remembered as the late Soviet gerontocracy. At age fifty-four, Gorbachev seemed to promise a new vigor, a new breath of life for the Soviet Union. What no one expected was that Gorbachev, an ambitious reformer, would usher in a brief era of upheaval and destabilization that would witness the crumbling of communist regimes throughout East Central Europe and the demise of the Soviet Union itself. Gorbachev was a Soviet optimist. He believed that the USSR needed to be and could be reformed. He wanted the USSR to more reliably and faithfully fulfill its potential as a welfare state. He wanted the USSR to truly, and at long last, blend socialism and democracy. Born on a collective farm in 1931, Gorbachev was a native son of the Soviet empire. His peasant parents had enjoyed little in the way of formal education and his mother, born in 1911, was illiterate. Too young to serve in the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War, Gorbachev came of age in the final years of the Stalinist regime. He joined the Komsomol and committed himself to his education. In 1950, Gorbachev—newly admitted to the prestigious Moscow State University—arrived in the Soviet capital as a wide-eyed rube and ambitious young communist. He excelled, and upon graduation, began his determined ascent within the CPSU.

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By the time he took the Soviet helm in 1985, Gorbachev was convinced that change was needed. The Soviet Union needed to be reenergized with “perestroika” (restructuring), “glasnost’” (openness and transparency), and “democratization.” The Soviet economy needed a jolt of technological “acceleration” and the population could benefit from a greater commitment to sobriety and productivity at work. Gorbachev himself did not yet know how to give meaningful substance to his vocabulary of reenergizing reform. Yet, from the getgo he endeavored to rally the CPSU and the Soviet people behind his vague program for a better, more dynamic Soviet future. It was nuclear catastrophe in Ukraine that prompted Gorbachev to move beyond his recitation of flashy talking points toward more radical efforts to actually implement the reforms he had spent his first year in office describing as necessary. On April 26, 1986, a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, blasting some fifty million curies of radiation into the atmosphere. The lethal radiation unleashed by the Chernobyl blast soon saturated huge swaths of Ukrainian and Belarussian territory and traveled, via wind, as far as Sweden.1 Gorbachev, who had spoken so much and so vaguely about glasnost’ in the previous year, did not address the Soviet people about this nuclear disaster until May 14. Even then, he was hardly forthcoming about the extent of the disaster or the grave threat it presented to the Soviet citizens whose homes and bodies were absorbing the radiation. People wanted answers, and they began to demand that Gorbachev make good on his promises of transparency. The summer of 1986 witnessed a sea change in Soviet life as ordinary citizens demanded honesty and answers to the pressing questions of the day—about Chernobyl, but also about the other failings of a stagnant economy and an unresponsive CPSU leadership. They wanted to debate the Soviet Union’s present, but also its past and future—and to do so openly and with candor. In August, Gorbachev noted that during a public relations trip to the Soviet Far East, “people attacked me on the streets and in factories, especially women; they just let me have it.”2 Glasnost’ became real thanks to the growing chorus of Soviet voices demanding honest answers to tough questions. In Ukraine and in Belarus, the Chernobyl disaster increasingly came to be seen as distinctly national 96

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catastrophes. The disaster, and the Soviet government’s blundering response to it, galvanized ordinary people in both republics to lean into glasnost’ as a framework for pursuing an “eco-activism” that “soon took on the features of eco-nationalism.”3 The energetic pursuit of glasnost’ that followed upon the Chernobyl disaster led to feverish public discussions of the Stalin-era skeletons still hiding in the CPSU’s jealously guarded archival closets. Journalists and intellectuals wrote exposés of Stalin’s crimes, but also of the disproportionate Soviet inequalities that had long been papered over by rhetorical paeans to the Friendship of Peoples. In Central Asia, for example, Soviet citizens engaged in frank and painful discussions about how the standard of living in the region lagged far behind the USSR’s average, while infant mortality rates were significantly higher than elsewhere in the multiethnic Soviet Union. Central Asians decried the Soviet imposition of a cotton monoculture in the region and the environmental degradation it had caused—not least in the shrunken, desiccated Aral Sea.4 The Chernobyl crisis pushed the Soviet people and the Soviet press to blow the lid off of Gorbachev’s slogans so as to give meaning to his promise of openness and transparency. It also pushed Gorbachev to pursue perestroika, glasnost’, and ultimately democratization in earnest. In 1987, he launched a series of radical reforms in an effort to set in motion a wide-ranging transformation of the USSR’s politics, economy, and society. In rapid succession, his idealistic efforts to renew and refresh Soviet socialism instead dynamited the already lagging Soviet economy, radically destabilized society, and called into question the foundations upon which the USSR stood—among them, the so-called Friendship of Peoples.

Perestroika and its Discontents Gorbachev’s reforms produced unintended consequences that rippled out and reverberated in every direction in the late 1980s. As the Soviet economy sputtered, Moscow reduced already lagging investments in the republican budgets, thereby exacerbating the relative economic 97

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disadvantages long shouldered by the so-called Soviet “periphery.” As the Soviet economy nosedived, more and more young Central Asians and Caucasians sought new possibilities in Leningrad and Moscow. Already long demeaned in the capitals as “Blacks” on the bottom rungs of the Soviet ethnic hierarchy, migrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus seemed to dominate trade within the street markets upon which Soviet citizens came increasingly to depend to buy expensive and scarce goods. As store shelves gaped with an alarming emptiness, native Muscovites and Leningraders were ever more dependent on a widening black market to satisfy their basic needs. They soon associated the high prices and chaos of the perestroika years with the migrants who shuttled produce and other goods from the Caucasus and Central Asia to be sold in the capitals. Interethnic resentments flourished under the stresses of perestroika, and Caucasian and Central Asian migrants to the capitals joined Jews as the scapegoats for the socioeconomic dislocations of Gorbachev’s reforms. Russian nationalists publicly vented their frustrations with the “Blacks” who were said to be taking economic advantage of the Russians who had spent decades investing in the “uplift” of the USSR’s “backward” ethnic groups.5 As Soviet society convulsed under the worsening stresses of perestroika, racism spilled onto the streets of Soviet cities, calling into question both the sincerity and durability of the Soviet Friendship of Peoples.6 Rumors swirled that anti-Semitic violence would overtake Soviet cities. While these rumors did not become reality, they reflected Soviet Jews’ fears for their own safety within their multiethnic country. In 1989, one Jewish writer in Lithuania spoke in anguish to his fellow Soviet Jews, warning them of the “leaden pogrom clouds . . . hanging over our heads”—storm clouds that signaled once again Jews’ precarious and unequal status in a Soviet Union.7 Glasnost’ emboldened nationalists, anti-Semites, and xenophobes, but it also empowered even those nationalities that had been silenced in earlier eras of Soviet history. The Talyshes of Azerbaijan who had been statistically erased from the 1959 census found new opportunities to assert their Talyshness in 1989—not least when some 21,169 of them insisted on being counted as Talyshes in that year’s Soviet census.8 A Talysh Cultural Center was established in Azerbaijan 98

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and community activists produced a new Talysh-language newspaper devoted to asserting Talysh interests. One article entitled “Who are the Talysh?” argued that glasnost’ had given Talysh the urgent opportunity to reclaim and resurrect their nationality’s history—a history suppressed in previous decades—and teach it proudly to their children.9 As glasnost’ seemed to welcome open, even if painful, discussion of long-simmering problems in Soviet society, it also prompted Armenians to mobilize in their bids for a contested territory, NagornoKarabakh, to be returned to the Armenian republic. NagornoKarabakh was a mountainous patch of territory in the Caucasus with a majority Armenian population but which the Bolsheviks had placed under the jurisdiction of Azerbaijan. For many Armenians, glasnost’ and perestroika invited the opportunity to peacefully lobby for Nagorno-Karabakh to be transferred to Armenia. Gorbachev, they insisted, could prove his commitment to openness, restructuring, and democracy by listening to and helping the Armenians of NagornoKarabakh who had suffered discrimination and national suppression under Azerbaijan. Armenians took to the streets in large numbers in 1988, demanding Nagorno-Karabakh’s transfer to Armenia. As Gorbachev made appeals to the Friendship of Peoples in a limp effort to quiet Armenian protesters, the Nagorno-Karabakh question quickly exploded into a violent crisis that Moscow failed to control. In late February 1988, riots erupted in the Azerbaijani town of Sumgait, and roving bands of Azeris brutally attacked the city’s Armenians, killing at least thirty-one of them.10 Sumgait seemed to poison any possibility of a peaceful resolution to the worsening Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. In 1989, the Azeri Yashar Mamedov said of the Sumgait massacre, “The pogrom was a nightmare, and what has come after, the hatred between Azerbaijanis and Armenians, is even worse. We see no way out. We cannot talk to each other.”11 Recriminations ricocheted between Armenians and Azeris as each side blamed the other for the conflict and its growing threat of further violence. Armenians organized countless demonstrations, demanding Nagorno-Karabakh’s incorporation into the Armenian republic. Azeris fled Armenia and Armenians fled 99

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Azerbaijan. Gorbachev fumbled in pursuit of an elusive compromise solution that could satisfy both Armenians and Azeris. Already in 1988 he had concluded that the Nagorno-Karabakh question concerned not just Armenians and Azeris, but also “the fate of our multi-national state . . . the fate of our nationalities policy, laid down by Lenin.”12 The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict took on new urgency in the wake of a devastating earthquake that struck northwestern Armenia in December 1989. The earthquake claimed 24,817 lives and destroyed some 35,000 homes.13 Gorbachev may have hoped that this epic tragedy would displace Nagorno-Karabakh from the center of Armenians’ political attention and convince them again of the essential solidarity of the Soviet Friendship of Peoples. Yet, the crisis only deepened, as did animosities between Azeris and Armenians. In 1990, Armenia announced its intention to become an independent nation-state, of which the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh would be considered citizens. In the Armenian capital of Yerevan, Lenin’s statue was removed in an act meant to symbolize a parting of ways and Armenia’s choice of independence over the false promises of Soviet interethnic friendship. By this time, Nagorno-Karabakh was not the only test of the Soviet nationality policy that Gorbachev was facing in what threatened to become a fatally fractured Soviet Union. It was not only Gorbachev, furthermore, who failed to arrive at a peaceful solution to the NagornoKarabakh conflict. Even today, the conflict is an open wound. Violent battles between Armenia and Azerbaijan erupted over NagornoKarabakh most recently in fall 2020.

Coming Apart Gorbachev had long worried that “one spark” would “ignite a fire” that would spread ethnic unrest throughout the USSR.14 Such a wildfire threatened to upend the claims of the Friendship of Peoples and feed on the inherent instabilities of perestroika. Gorbachev had avoided decisive action in Nagorno-Karabakh precisely because he worried about the potential for this conflict to erupt in all-consuming flames. 100

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By 1989, however, sparks of ethnic tension were igniting in various corners of the USSR. In February, the Baltic states rejected Russian as the official language of their respective republics, reclaiming the title, instead, for Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian, respectively. In April, nationalist demonstrations in Georgia turned deadly when skirmishes between protesters and troops erupted in Tbilisi. In August, on the fiftieth anniversary of the notorious Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, approximately two million Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians came together to link arms and hold hands in a human chain that knitted the Baltic peoples together in a defiant protest of Soviet rule that spanned the territories of their republics and weaved through their capital cities of Talinn, Riga, and Vilnius. The Baltics presented an especially sharp challenge to Gorbachev’s quest for interethnic stability during perestroika. Ordinary Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians protested what they angrily referred to as the unlawful fifty-year Soviet occupation and the Russian colonization of their countries. Nationalist politicians and ordinary people alike in the Baltic states insisted that only a brutal Soviet domination—orchestrated in connivance with the Nazis in 1939— stood in the way of their rightful claim of, and their rightful return to, independent nationhood. Gorbachev eyed the Baltics warily, warning that “irresponsible slogans, political provocations, setting one nation against another, could lead to a disaster for all of us.”15 Yet, it was not only ordinary Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians who imagined the Baltic republics as different from the rest of the Soviet Union. In her memoir of growing up in the postwar Soviet Union, Dildora Muzafari, an Uzbek, recalled the imaginative disconnect that the Baltics represented in her mind; these union republics were part of her vast and diverse Soviet homeland, she knew, but they felt and seemed to belong to an “abroad”—distant, different, seemingly of the “West.” Muzafari remembered how her father had visited the Baltic republics on a work trip and returned to Tashkent with a stock of precious consumer goods not available in Tashkent. He returned home also with the distinct feeling that he had traveled to foreign countries rather than to constituent republics of the diverse USSR. Muzafari traveled to Riga herself in the 1980s as an adult and 101

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experienced this disconnect on a still more uncomfortable, pained level. A Russophone Uzbek, she was greeted with hostility at a Riga cafe—treated coldly, she explained, as if she were a Russian occupier. Only once she addressed her waiter in German, Muzafari claimed, was she able to order coffee. The so-called Friendship of Peoples seemed to her a cruel mirage as she sat uncomfortably in a cafe in the Latvian capital.16 Abdul Khalimov, a Tajik, had a similar experience in 1988 while visiting Vilnius. The “tension” of the USSR’s fracturing interethnic relations was palpable, he recalled. Lithuanians refused him service if he spoke to them first in Russian. The trick, Khalimov discovered, was to approach Lithuanians by speaking in his native Tajik. In that way, he signaled that he was not ethnically Russian and certainly not a native Russian speaker. Assured that he wasn’t a Russian occupier, Lithuanians would then communicate freely with him in Russian.17 The situation in the Baltics represented what ordinary Soviet citizens increasingly experienced as a breakdown in social relations. Already in 1990, there was a palpable sense throughout the country that the Soviet Union was coming undone. Inflation soared. Goods were scarce. People were laid off from their jobs. Homelessness became a conspicuous reality on Moscow and Leningrad streets.18 Gorbachev’s popularity plummeted. In the year 1990 alone, some 2.7 million CPSU members left the party. This hemorrhaging of party membership only worsened in the following year.19 To many, perestroika seemed to produce only chaos, disorder, hunger, want, instability, and discord. Yet, perestroika and its failings also produced opportunities for nationalist movements in the Baltics, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova to push against the framework of the Soviet Union and toward independence as sovereign nation-states. As the layered crises of perestroika worsened, nationalist appeals to beleaguered Soviet citizens grew louder and more insistent. The confidence of nationalist politicians grew even as a stalemate set in and more and more union republics joined a growing so-called parade of sovereignties that challenged the nature, meaning, and future of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.20 102

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In January 1990, Gorbachev traveled to Vilnius, urging Lithuanians to remember that in the USSR “no republic can live without the other republics. . . . We’re all tied together now.”21 His plea fell on deaf ears. On March 11, 1990, the Lithuanian parliament declared independence from the USSR. The Lithuanians insisted they were not establishing a new republic, but, rather, restoring the independent Lithuania that the Soviets had occupied in 1940. The Soviet occupation, they declared, had violated international law. In subsequent weeks, Latvia and Estonia also formally announced they would seek an exit from the USSR as independent nation-states. Gorbachev refused to recognize the Baltic states’ right or intention to secede from the USSR. In another devastating blow to Gorbachev, in June 1990 the Russian republic—under the lead of a brash, barnstorming politician named Boris Yeltsin—declared its constitutional sovereignty within the Soviet framework. While not a bid for full independence as seen in the Baltics, Russia was now asserting the precedence of Russian republic authority over federal, Soviet authority. An unabashed populist, Yeltsin had risen within the CPSU but now saw the potential to lead a pro-Russia, pro-democracy movement from within a destabilized Soviet Union and from without the faltering CPSU. Then an exuberant and savvy politician, he played masterfully to the idea that he was a man of the people—and not just any people, but the Russian people. Yeltsin vowed to protect, defend, and promote ethnically Russian interests. This promise went far among the many Russians who, under the multiple strains of perestroika, had grown increasingly frustrated with the apparently diminishing returns of the USSR’s long-vaunted domestic internationalism. For Gorbachev, the idea of Russian sovereignty was anathema. Russia, he insisted, was “the core of the Union.”22 Without it, the USSR was unimaginable. In late 1990, the pro-independence Uzbek activist Mohammed Salikh argued that the idea of the Soviet Union outlasting the nationalist movements energized by Gorbachev’s reforms was “as utopian as communism itself.” Dinas Ivans—a young legislator in Latvia—said, “We are not naive. The Roman Empire did not fall in one day. But we are also sure that Moscow can no longer hold on to us through brute force. I don’t think they have the will for that anymore.”23 103

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Ivans was not wrong. Gorbachev at least had little appetite by late 1990 for quelling nationalist protests by force. While some of his Communist Party colleagues considered his refusal to squash the growing nationalist movements as suicidal, Gorbachev insisted on seeking compromises. Some of Gorbachev’s own advisers grew impatient with what they saw as his absurd fantasy of a reconciled union built from a patchwork of sovereign republics. Stanislav Shatalin, one of Gorbachev’s former economic advisers, scoffed, “I’m all for as much decentralization as we can stand, but it starts to get ridiculous when every little region and hamlet wants to be sovereign. It’s getting to the point where sooner or later someone is going to declare his apartment an independent state.”24 The chaos, uncertainty, and exhilarating sense of possibility felt by many on the ground in Soviet society at this time are revealed in a series of letters that Ukrainian poet Salomea Pavlychko wrote to a friend abroad in 1990. In June she marveled, “It’s amazing how incredibly quickly the time goes. What yesterday was not even thought, let alone expressed, is today said out loud and becomes a subject of dispute.”25 Soviet politics in this era of disintegration was dizzying and anxious even when Soviets felt hopeful. The future loomed as a question mark—a door behind which an enormous unknown was taking shape. Rumors swirled. Prices soared. Everyday life presented new tests of survival—the simple matter of buying groceries was a feat. The only consistency, Pavlychko wrote in October, was “the unpredictability of each successive day.”26 On the anniversary of the October Revolution, Pavlychko anticipated that she would soon be unable to afford her basic needs.27 The stress was such, Pavlychko admitted in one letter, “that my soul is on the point of utter collapse.”28 The Uzbek Abdul Khalimov also recalled 1990 as a turning point—a time when a sinking feeling set in that the worsening problems of perestroika could not be overcome. “There was no bread or groceries to be had,” Khalimov recalled. “I guess that is when it started: interethnic tensions. There wasn’t anything bad that happened to me directly, it was just a feeling . . . I could feel it on the streets. People were cold and hungry.”29 104

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It was the Baltics that seemed, in the end, to push Gorbachev to take more desperate and, ultimately, fatal measures to rein in the ethnic conflicts and nationalist separatism that tugged against the fraying fabric of the Soviet Friendship of Peoples. The world had observed, in shock and admiration, as Gorbachev had refused to deploy Soviet troops to stand in the way of the revolutions that toppled communism throughout East Central Europe in 1989. Gorbachev had likewise demonstrated an unwillingness to use force to quell the growing domestic disputes erupting throughout the USSR during perestroika. Yet, in January 1991, Gorbachev changed tactics. He dispatched Soviet troops to Vilnius and demanded that Lithuania retract its bid for independence. When Lithuania’s Supreme Council refused Gorbachev’s ultimatum, he ordered Soviet troops to occupy key buildings in Vilnius. On January 13, at Vilnius’s television tower, Soviet troops confronted and opened fire on hundreds of Lithuanians who had come out to defend it. Fifteen Lithuanians perished and hundreds were injured in what immediately came to be seen at home and abroad as an unjust massacre. Gorbachev was widely criticized for having lost his way.30 Needing a way forward and wanting to marshal identifiable support among the Soviet people to do so, Gorbachev announced a referendum to take place on March 17, 1991. The referendum posed one question for Soviet voters to decide: “Do you consider it necessary to preserve the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal, sovereign republics in which human rights and freedoms of all nationalities will be fully guaranteed?” One woman in Ukraine scoffed at the question on Soviet TV, asking “How am I supposed to say yes or no to that? It’s four or five questions all rolled into one!”31 Yet, Gorbachev insisted that the referendum was key to keeping the USSR together. He warned that “a breakup of our union . . . would be a disaster for this country, for Europeans, and for the entire world.”32 Six of the USSR’s republics refused to participate in the referendum: Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Moldova. Yet, 93 percent of the Soviet population did participate in the referendum and 76.4 percent voted “yes”—for preservation of the Soviet Union.33 105

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In April 1991, Gorbachev took the referendum’s result as the mandate he had hoped for and set out to negotiate a new union treaty with the leaders of the nine union republics who were then still willing to work with him for a renewed USSR. Together, they agreed on a framework for a new “Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics” and set the date of August 20, 1991 to ink their names to the treaty. While the nine republics stood to gain new powers under the treaty, the reimagined USSR would remain a unified state, undergirded by a shared economy and military, and governed by a popularly elected president and legislature. Yet, the new union treaty was never signed. It was never signed because on August 18, while Gorbachev was nearing the end of a family vacation in Crimea and preparing his speech for the intended signing of the treaty, a crew of CPSU hardliners attempted a coup. They placed Gorbachev under house arrest, disconnected his phone lines, and sent tanks into the streets of Moscow. “It may end badly for all of us, the whole family,” Gorbachev warned his wife.34 The orchestrators of the coup declared themselves The State Committee on Emergency Rule. They reasoned that desperate times called for desperate measures. Gorbachev had led the Soviet Union to a historic dead end, plunging it into chaos, disorder, and strife. Their mission was to block the signing of the new union treaty and force Gorbachev’s resignation. They wanted to restore order and dignity to the once mighty Soviet Union, placing it once again under strong CPSU leadership. They wanted to turn back time. They wanted to heal the potentially fatal wounds of perestroika. In an appeal to the Soviet people, the hardliners explained they had been forced to take drastic action because “the country has become ungovernable.” They invoked the threat posed by those “political adventurists” who sought to secede from the union, to forge separatist, nationalist paths. “The cynical exploitation of national feelings is only a screen for satisfying ambitions,” they warned. It was “because of them” the appeal cried, that “tens of millions of Soviet people who yesterday were living in a united family” now “find themselves outcasts in their own homes.”35 The economic and social disorder unleashed by perestroika was grave. Yet, the hardliners cast the prospect of a dismembered Soviet Union as a graver threat still. 106

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The putschists insisted, “The pride and honor of Soviet people must be restored in full.”36 It was time to put an end to perestroika’s chaos, not least to the interethnic conflicts and nationalist movements that fed on the flames of the USSR’s widespread disorder. The State Committee on Emergency Rule called on all patriotic citizens to join together in restoring the trust and unity that had for so long cemented the Soviet Friendship of the Peoples.37 The August coup was a failure—one that ended the lives of three young Muscovites overrun by tanks. For several days, the coup’s beleaguered architects attempted but failed to establish control in the Soviet capital. A performance of Swan Lake was repeatedly broadcast on Soviet television as they fumbled to assert their authority. Gorbachev, meanwhile, sat under house arrest in a Crimean villa while the fate of the Soviet Union was being decided without him. In the streets of Moscow, ordinary Soviet citizens banded together to protest the putsch. They were joined by Yeltsin, who seized the moment and famously climbed a tank to rally the people of Russia against the coup and to urge the Soviet soldiers sent to Moscow to stand down. Yeltsin’s aides had remembered to raise the Russian tricolor flag behind him. By the time Gorbachev returned to Moscow on August 22, the Soviet Union had been utterly transformed, but not in the manner the putschists had intended.​ After the coup, the Soviet Union effectively disintegrated—and swiftly. Those Soviet republics that had not previously declared their independence did so in the months following the failed August coup. One after the other, like dominoes, they declared their break from what had once been a Union of fifteen Soviet Socialist Republics. In the name of the Russian people and the Russian Federation, Yeltsin claimed jurisdiction over all economic enterprises and assets on Russian territory. Realizing he had the upper hand, Yeltsin also pushed Gorbachev to suspend the Communist Party on Russian territory. In September, the United Nations welcomed the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia as members—each one an independent nation-state. Even in the Central Asian republics—where people had demonstrated little if any appetite for independence prior to the coup—there was a quick move toward independent nationhood. 107

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Figure 8  Soldier waves a Russian flag, August 21, 1991. © Getty Images. In late 1991, Central Asian powerbrokers mobilized popular national identities that were forged in the Soviet period. They readily embraced the rhetoric and style of national politicians at the helm of their emerging nation-states. Ukraine’s path to independence proved pivotal to the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union. On December 1, Soviet citizens in Ukraine went to the polls, deciding an election for their republic’s presidency and voting on a referendum to decide if Ukraine should become an independent state, divorced from the USSR and any potential reimagining of it. More than 90 percent voted for independence. Leonid Kravchuk, a former communist who restyled himself as a nationalist, was elected Ukraine’s president.38 A week later, on December 8, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus met and forged the so-called Belavezha Accords. Thereby, they agreed not to a new union treaty, but, instead, to the formal dissolution of the USSR. They also resolved upon the creation of what they called a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) that would loosely unite willing former Soviet republics in a regional organization centered on shared interests. Expanded to include eleven republics, the CIS met on December 21 to confirm the Belavezha Accords. 108

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Gorbachev, who had initiated radical reforms in the hope of reenergizing the USSR, watched—dazed, angry, and, ultimately, powerless—as the leaders of the once unquestionably Soviet Socialist Republics set an expiration date for the Soviet Union and began the complex task of charting new paths for their independent nationstates.39 He had not been invited to the meetings on December 8 and December 21 that formally decided the fate of the USSR and that confirmed the reality on the ground. The Soviet Union was no more.

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CHAPTER 7 AFTERLIVES

On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev delivered his resignation speech to the Soviet people. Gorbachev acknowledged his failure to keep the Soviet Union together, his failure to succeed in the reforms that he had once hoped would rejuvenate it. Yet, he wanted to defend himself before the Soviet people and the judgment of history. “Destiny so ruled that when I found myself at the helm of this state it already was clear that something was wrong in this country,” he said. Ultimately, Gorbachev argued, the Soviet Union was felled by the faulty logics of its own system, the costly burdens of Cold War competition, and the moribund defenders of stale orthodoxy within the Communist Party itself. Even before he had assumed the position of Soviet premier, Gorbachev sighed, “this country was going nowhere and we couldn’t possibly live the way we did. We had to change everything.” To pretend otherwise, Gorbachev said, would have been “irresponsible and immoral.”1 “We’re now living in a new world,” Gorbachev confessed. Much remained uncertain, much remained undefined and troubling. Yet, he celebrated the possibilities of democratic change and what he hailed as the end of the Cold War. He emphasized the need for peace, solidarity, and mutual respect as the once unified Soviet people embarked on new relationships with the rest of the world and with one another. As he acknowledged the suffering that his attempt to reform the Soviet Union had imposed, he urged the peoples of the once mighty Soviet Union to proceed peaceably as they all transitioned into the uncertain new world of post-Soviet nations. Resigning as the leader of a country that no longer existed, Gorbachev signed off by wishing “everyone all the best.”2 That same evening, the Kremlin lowered the Soviet flag.

The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise

The Soviet Union was gone. With it went the socialist economy that linked together all the peoples of the USSR. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had, in the phrase so often attached to the event, effectively “collapsed.” It was dismantled from within. Cold Warriors in the West congratulated themselves on their presumed “victory” and heaved a sigh of relief that the USSR’s demise had not been “won” in apocalyptic fashion. Yet, for ordinary people all over the once united Soviet Union, the USSR’s dissolution was variously experienced as bewildering, exhilarating, frightening, energizing, demoralizing, cataclysmic, euphoric, and—for some—all of those things at once. In the USSR’s early years, the Bolsheviks had devised their nationality policy with the aims of stabilizing and furthering their revolution. They envisioned a unified Soviet citizenry comprised of modern people integrated into the socialist economy and bound by a shared Soviet, socialist culture. Nationality policy—national in form, socialist in content—would help them to reach this destination both as a vehicle of non-Russian peoples’ assimilation to the new Soviet way of life and as a bonding mechanism that would hasten the interethnic harmonization of the USSR’s diverse peoples. The Bolsheviks believed that their nationality policy—with its generous promises of aid, uplift, and recognition—would also disarm the potential for interethnic antagonisms or nationalist separatism to disrupt and threaten the unified, multiethnic state. The Bolsheviks established ethnicity as a pillar of Soviet rule and culture because they came to see it as a strategic investment in furthering their revolutionary agenda and as a necessary tool for building socialism. In key ways, ethnicity served Bolshevik interests in precisely the foundational ways that they intended. Yet, establishing ethnicity as a cornerstone of Soviet life produced unintended consequences too. Soviet ethnic politics at times helped to reinforce Soviet unity and cohesion. At other times, Soviet ethnic politics were a key source of instability and division. Under the strain of Gorbachev’s destabilizing reform agenda and its revolutionary consequences on the ground, Soviet ethnic politics failed to buttress the crumbling Soviet state. Instead, they facilitated the USSR’s fracturing along national lines. 112

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Since the USSR’s demise in 1991—a process that surprised Kremlinologists and ordinary people the world over—scholars have engaged in a rich exploration of the ethnic dimensions of Soviet politics, culture, and daily life. They discovered, in the words of Francine Hirsch, that “no issue was more central to the formation of the Soviet Union than the nationality question.”3 Likewise, few questions were as important to the nature of its collapse. This book has endeavored to explain how and why ethnicity came to be a cornerstone of Soviet civilization. I have argued that ethnicity was central to not only how ordinary people lived and died in the USSR, but also how they imagined themselves within the Soviet Union and the wider world. Today when we look to the vast and diverse region known by the clunky brushstroke designation, “the former Soviet Union,” with the hopes of understanding the people who live there, we would do well to appreciate how the histories explored in this trim book live on, even if under new guises. It is, however, well beyond the capacity of this short book to even scratch the surface of the complex histories of how the people of the former Soviet Union rebuilt their lives and their new independent nation-states after the USSR’s dissolution. Instead, it seems most fitting to conclude by featuring the words and diverse viewpoints of ordinary people who experienced, in similar and different ways, the multiethnic Soviet Union and its demise.

Echoes After the USSR’s collapse, Mukhamet Shayakhmetov looked back on his life in bewilderment. “Upon joining the Young Communist League and right until the dismantling of the Communist Party,” he wrote, “I sincerely believed in the viability of the Communist ideas. I remained true to its spirit. My work consisted of propagandizing these ideas.” In the end, not only did the Soviet Union fail to achieve communism, but the civilization that Shayakhmetov had helped to build and protect— despite the famine and loss he suffered during the Stalin revolution— also fell apart, like a house of cards. “Everything good that was created 113

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under the leadership of the Communist Party,” he wrote in disbelief, “has simply, it seems, gone up in a puff of smoke.”4 Disillusionment greeted many in the aftermath of the multiethnic Soviet Union’s demise. Likewise, many citizens of the new “postSoviet” world looked ahead with hope for their independent nationstates. Yet, it should not surprise us that those who experienced the Soviet Union as non-Russians often looked back on the Soviet past with measured appreciation and even gratitude—for not only the Soviet insistence on modernization in general, but also the so-called national development under the red star of socialism. In the eyes of Tajik Safar Samiev, the Soviet past was a glorious one and the Friendship of Peoples was real and meaningful. In 2013, he reflected on his time in the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War. “Look,” Samiev told his interviewer, “ten people smoke one cigarette, is that not friendship? Ten people drink from one glass of tea. . . . Is that not friendship?” In his view, Tajikistan had thrived under the Soviet umbrella and benefited from the “fraternal help” that the Soviet people extended to one another. After the war, Samiev worked on the construction of the Nurek Dam—an industrial feat that he proudly credited to Soviet domestic internationalism.5 Others have expressed disillusionment with the Soviet past and gratitude for the post-Soviet national inheritance. Consider the oral history testimony offered by Nŭrziya Qajïbaeva, a Kazakh born into a nomadic family in 1926. Reflecting on the question of how to judge the Soviet past, she concluded that “any sensible and honest person would admit that the Soviet power caused much more harm than good. What is more precious than human life? Millions of human lives were ruined!” Qajïbaeva lamented, too, how millions of Soviet citizens—including her own husband—had been divorced from religious faith, exchanging the Koran for the words of Marx and Lenin.6 An aged retiree at the time of her interview in 2011, Qajïbaeva was hopeful about independent Kazakhstan’s future. It was important, she instructed, for her compatriots “to love the Kazakh land, know the Kazakh language, and remember and revere their ancestors.”7 When journalist and oral historian Svetlana Alexievich traveled the former USSR in her efforts to record the memories and sentiments of 114

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her fellow former Soviet citizens, she remarked on one of the enduring achievements of the Bolsheviks: the creation of a distinctly Soviet civilization. “Homo sovieticus isn’t just Russian,” Alexievich has written. “He’s Belarussian, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Kazakh. Although we now live in separate countries and speak different languages, you couldn’t mistake us for anyone else.” Former Soviet citizens, she insists, are the orphaned natives of a country that no longer exists. But, for many who survive today, they are also natives of a shared way of life that still lives on in their memories, attitudes, and manner of interacting with one another and the world—even after decades of revolutionary upheavals that have transformed their political, economic, social, and cultural realities since the USSR’s demise.8 For Alexievich, there could be no surprise in hearing the bitter words that one of her fellow former Soviet citizens angrily sputtered at her: “I hate Gorbachev because he stole my Motherland. I treasure my Soviet passport like it’s my most precious possession.”9 It is difficult to capture in words the profound loss felt by those who still look back mournfully as well as with pride on their Soviet homeland. For many of its citizens, the Soviet Union had been much more than an abstract idea—a scrawl of words across their passports. It had been their political, social, economic, and cultural framework of existence. For many, though not all, it had provided existential meaning and a prism through which to understand the world and themselves. With the hardening of boundaries that divided the citizens of the new nation-states born of the USSR’s demise, many experienced the pain of losing a shared history, culture, and purpose. Alina Yakubova was a teenager in Kyrgyzstan when the Soviet Union came undone, opening up what she has since described as a “bottomless pit of a future.” The collapse of the Soviet Union, for Yakubova and so many others, meant socioeconomic chaos and political upheaval—disorientation and despair. Yet, at its most wrenching, the Soviet Union’s demise meant for Yakubova the loss of a way of life, a meaningful community, a home, and a shared culture that suddenly shattered into what are now memory shards of a country that no longer exists. Several years after the collapse, Yakubova immigrated to the United States. Looking back thirty years 115

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after the USSR’s disintegration, Yakubova reflected wistfully that the Soviet Union’s demise “was the most fundamental loss of my entire life.”10 Others have looked back with dismay, bitterness, and anger at what they saw as the Soviet failure to create a lasting civic compact of a harmonious multiethnic citizenry. In her memoir, Dildora Muzafari recalled her upbringing in the postwar Soviet Union with an appreciation that “as a child, I always believed the Soviet slogan about us being the happiest children in the world.”11 For her, a happy Soviet childhood meant meaningful friendship with her schoolmates: Greeks, Germans, Russians, Tatars, and Jews. Yet, Muzafari shook her head at the realization that “in the Soviet Union, the nationalities problem was never resolved.” An Uzbek who immigrated to the United States after the USSR’s collapse, Muzafari understood her experience of the Soviet Friendship of Peoples as ambiguous. She recalled the splendor of the multiethnic, multilingual bazaars of Tashkent—the kimchi proffered by Koreans, the bright cherries sold by the Meskhetians, the fresh milk offered by ethnic Germans—and the haggling conducted in a variety of tongues, including heavily accented Russian. As Muzafari experienced it, the multiethnic Soviet Union was the vibrant “tower of Babel” of the Tashkent markets of her youth. Yet, she resented Russians’ presumed superiority as a structural and ultimately fatal feature of Soviet life.12 For some, the Soviet Friendship of Peoples appeared in the rearview mirror as a mirage, a collective delusion. Seen most cynically, it had not been a socialist covenant of interethnic solidarity but, rather, a conjurer’s trick with which the CPSU gambled with people’s lives. For others, the Soviet Friendship of Peoples had been very real and profoundly meaningful. Although divided on how to interpret the Soviet past and the Friendship of Peoples—Uzbeks, Georgians, Azeris, Roma, Russians, Ukrainians, Chechens, Tatars, and Chukchi—they had all once been united under the Soviet flag. “We were all citizens of the Soviet Union,” Eteri Gugushvili emphasized in an oral history interview, his words echoing the bewilderment that still today is felt across Eurasia by ordinary people whose shared multiethnic homeland suddenly ceased to exist in 1991.13 116

NOTES

Chapter 1 1. A.I. Mikoaian, The Path of Struggle, trans. Katherine T. O’Connor and Diana L. Burgin (Madison, CT: Sphinx Press, 1988). 2. Lisa Kirschenbaum, “Michael Gruzenberg/Mikhail Borodin: The Making of an International Communist,” in The Global Impacts of Russia’s War and Revolution, Book 2, Part 1: The Wider Arc of the Revolution, ed. Choi Chatterjee, Steven G. Marks, Mary Neuburger, and Steven Sabol (Bloomington: Slavica, 2019): 337–65. 3. Stephen M. Norris and Willard Sunderland, eds., Russia’s People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 5. 4. Leon Trotsky, The First Five Years of the Communist International. Volume I, trans. and ed. John G. Wright (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1945), 267–8.

Chapter 2 1. “Soviets Endorse Nationalities Policy,” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, http://soviethistory​.msu​.edu​/1917​-2​/the​-empire​-falls​/the​-empire​ -falls​-texts​/resolution​-endorsing​-the​-nationalities​-policy​-of​-the​-soviet​ -government/ (accessed December 28, 2021). 2. “Appeal to the Moslems of Russia and the East,” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, http://soviethistory​.msu​.edu​/1921​-2​/the​-muslim​-east​/ the​-muslim​-east​-texts​/appeal​-to​-the​-moslems​-of​-russia​-and​-the​-east/ (accessed December 28, 2021). 3. Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 7–9. 4. Ibid., chapter 3 and appendixes. 5. Ibid., especially chapter 4.

Notes 6. Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), cited estimates given on 2 and 133. 7. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), chapter 2. 8. Jeremy Smith, “Was There a Soviet Nationality Policy?” Europe-Asia Studies 71, no. 6 (2019): 972–93. 9. Yuri Slezkine, “Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Socialism,” The Russian Review 59, no. 2 (2000): 227. 10. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), quoted on 8. 11. Erik Scott, Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Chapter 3 1. The operational ethnonym in the USSR was “Gypsies (tsygane)” whereas today in the West the preferred ethnonym is Roma (Romani, adjective). 2. Elissa Bemporad, Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Land of the Soviets (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), chapter 1. 3. Anna Shternshis, When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life Under Stalin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 6. 4. Ibid., 8. 5. Brigid O’Keeffe, New Soviet Gypsies: Nationality, Performance, and Selfhood in the Early Soviet Union (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), chapter 1. 6. Elena Marushiakova and Vesselin Popov, ed., Roma Voices in History: A Sourcebook (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 926–9. 7. Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 6–8; chapter 1. 8. Quoted in Ibid., 7. 9. Ibid, chapter 6. 10. Ibid. 118

Notes 11. Adeeb Khalid, Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), chapter 12. See also Adrienne Edgar, Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), especially chapter 2. 12. Khalid, Central Asia, 6–7. 13. T. Z. Semushkin, “Opyt raboty po organizatsii shkoly-internata chukotskoi kul’tbazy DVK,” Sovetskii Sever no. 3–4 (1931): 171–92 (quoted on 177, 183). 14. Quoted in Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019), 154. 15. Ibid., 162. 16. Ibid., 172–3. 17. Bathsheba Demuth, “The Walrus and the Bureaucrat: Energy, Ecology, and Making the State in the Russian and American Arctic,” The American Historical Review 124, no. 2 (2019): 496–8. 18. Demuth, Floating Coast, 126–7; 243–4. 19. I. I. Finkel’shtein and Kh. S. Shukurova, Probuzhdennye velikim oktiabrem (Tashkent: Gosizdat UzSSR, 1961), 3. 20. Ibid., 6. 21. Ibid., 67. 22. Ibid., 130–8 (quoted on 130). 23. Marianne Kamp, The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling Under Communism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 186. 24. Ibid., 197. 25. Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, 256. 26. Finkel’shtein, Probuzhdennye velikim oktiabrem, 109. 27. Marianne Kamp, “Jahon Obidova,” in Russia’s People of Empire, 309–16. 28. Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, 361. 29. Sarah Cameron, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), 5. One and a half million people died in the Kazakh famine as a whole; see Ibid., 2. 30. Ibid., 3. 31. Mukhamet Shayakhmetov, The Silent Steppe: The Memoir of a Kazakh Nomad under Stalin, trans. Jan Butler (New York: Overlook/Rookery, 2007), 3. 119

Notes 32. Ibid., 5. 33. Ibid., 3. 34. Ibid., 31. 35. Ibid., 56. 36. Ibid., 32–3. 37. See, for example, Ibid., 18, 22, 33. 38. Ibid., 49–51. 39. Ibid., 184. 40. Ibid. 41. Cameron, Hungry Steppe. 42. Maya K. Peterson, Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 14. 43. Serhy Yekelchyk, Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 112. 44. On the estimates of famine-related deaths suffered in Ukraine, see Cameron, Hungry Steppe, 4 and 200 fn 22; Yekelchyk, Ukraine, 112. 45. Oksana Kis, “Women’s Experience of the Holodomor: Challenges and Ambiguities of Motherhood,” Journal of Genocide Research (2020), quoted on 10. 46. Ibid., 12–19. 47. Yekelchyk, Ukraine, 104–7 (quoted on 104). 48. Zara Witkin, An American Engineer in Stalin’s Russia: The Memoirs of Zara Witkin, 1932–1934 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 62–3, http://ark​.cdlib​.org​/ark:​/13030​/ft18700465/. 49. Quoted in Masha Gessen, Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region (New York: Schocken, 2016), 60. 50. Quoted in Robert Weinberg, Stalin’s Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 64–5. 51. O’Keeffe, New Soviet Gypsies, chapter 5; Alaina Lemon, Between Two Fires: Gypsy Performance and Romani Memory From Pushkin to Postsocialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), chapter 4. 52. Jeffrey Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).

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Notes 53. O’Keeffe, New Soviet Gypsies, 234–6; Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater, 139–46. 54. Vadim Volkov, “The Concept of Kul’turnost’: Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Process,” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London: Routledge, 2000): 223–5. 55. Ali F. Igmen, “Four Daughters of Tokoldosh: Kyrgyz Actresses Define Soviet Modernity,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 32, no. 1 (2012): 40. 56. Mayhill C. Fowler, Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge: Stage and State in Soviet Ukraine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), especially chapter 2. 57. “Rech’ tov. Stalina na soveshchanii peredovykh kolkhoznikov i kolkhoznits Tadzhikistana i Turkmenistana,” Pravda no. 335, December 6, 1935. 58. Quoted in David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 43. 59. Ibid. 60. Quoted in Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 458. 61. See, for example, O’Keeffe, New Soviet Gypsies, 95–7. 62. Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 444. 63. Terry Martin, “The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,” The Journal of Modern History 70, no. 4 (1998): 813–61 (figure cited on 851). 64. Michael Gelb, “An Early Soviet Ethnic Deportation: The Far-Eastern Koreans,” The Russian Review 54, no. 3 (1995): 400. 65. Quoted in Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 174. 66. Quoted in Martin, “The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,” 854. 67. Ibid., 855–6. 68. Ibid., 858. 69. Krista A. Goff, Nested Nationalism: Making and Unmaking Nations in the Soviet Caucasus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020), 19–20; 54–9. 70. Quoted in Khalid, Making Soviet Uzbekistan, 333.

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Notes 71. Ibid., chapter 12. 72. Quoted in Anthony Swift, “The Soviet World of Tomorrow at the New York World’s Fair, 1939,” The Russian Review 57 (July 1998): 373. 73. Ianka Kupala, Cultural Progress among the Non-Russian Nationalities of the USSR (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1939), 19.

Chapter 4 1. Svetlana Alexievich, Last Witnesses: An Oral History of The Children of World War II, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky (New York: Random House, 2019), 5–6; 10; 82; 84; 192; 215. 2. Glennys Young, ed., The Communist Experience in the Twentieth Century: A Global History through Sources (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 262. 3. Quoted in Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 223. 4. Ibid., 59–63. 5. Jochen Hellbeck, Stalingrad: The City That Defeated the Third Reich, trans. Christopher Tauchen and Dominic Bonfiglio (New York: Public Affairs, 2015), 12. 6. Alexis Peri, The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 4. 7. Ibid., illustration 13. 8. “The Invasion of the Soviet Union and the Beginning of Mass Murder,” Yad Vashem, https://www​.yadvashem​.org​/holocaust​/about​/final​ -solution​-beginning​/mass​-murder​-in​-ussr​.html (accessed August 2, 2021) and “Genocide of European Roma (‘Gypsies’), 1939–1945,” United States Holocaust Historical Museum, https://encyclopedia​ .ushmm​.org​/content​/en​/article​/genocide​-of​-european​-roma​-gypsies​ -1939​-1945 (accessed August 2, 2021). 9. “Priyska Gordievskaya,” Soviet Survivors of Nazi Occupation: The First Testimonies, https://survivors​.hypotheses​.org​/151 (accessed June 23, 2021). 10. Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 62. 11. Quoted in Ibid., 66. 122

Notes 12. Ibid., 33. 13. GARF f. 7021 o. 44 d. 1091 l. 13ob. 14. Quoted in Manley, To the Tashkent Station, 215. 15. See, for example, Peri, War Within, 31–2. 16. Stephen Lovell, Russia in the Microphone Age: A History of Soviet Radio, 1919–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 5. 17. James von Geldern, “New National Anthem,” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, http://soviethistory​.msu​.edu​/1943​-2​/new​-national​ -anthem/ (accessed July 29, 2021). 18. Shayakhmetov, Silent Steppe, part 3. 19. Brandon M. Schechter, The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 25. 20. Quoted in Ibid., 245. 21. Elena Zubkova, Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1957, trans. Hugh Ragsdale (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 79. 22. Mukhamet Shayakhmetov, A Kazakh Teacher’s Story: Surviving the Silent Steppe (London: Stacey International, 2012), 59–65. 23. Michael Herceg Western, “Nations in Exile: ‘The Punished Peoples’ in Soviet Kazakhstan, 1941–1961,” PhD diss. (University of Chicago, 2012). 24. Quoted in Walter Comins-Richmond, “The Deportation of the Karachays,” Journal of Genocide Research 4, no. 3 (2002): 433. 25. Western, “Nations in Exile,” 149–51; Michaela Pohl, “‘It Cannot Be that Our Graves Will Be Here’: The Survival of Chechen and Ingush Deportees in Kazakhstan, 1944–1957,” Journal of Genocide Research 4, no. 3 (2002): 406. 26. Ibid., 407. 27. Westren, “Nations in Exile,” chapter 3. 28. Kate Brown, “Securing the Nuclear Nation,” Nationalities Papers 43, no. 1 (2015): 8–26. 29. Quoted in Westren, “Nations in Exile,” 388. 30. Pohl, “‘It Cannot Be that Our Graves Will Be Here,’” (quoted on 424). 31. Westren, “Nations in Exile,” 420–1. 32. Eric J. Schmaltz and Samuel D. Sinner, “‘You Will die under Ruins and Snow’: The Soviet Repression of Russian Germans as a Case Study of Successful Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 4, no. 3 (2002): 334. 123

Notes 33. Brian Glyn Williams, The Crimean Tatars: From Soviet Genocide to Putin’s Conquest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), chapter 7. 34. Norman M. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 89. 35. Kevin C. O’Connor, The History of the Baltic States. Second Edition (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2015), 181–3. 36. Dalia Leinarte, Adopting and Remembering Soviet Reality: Life Stories of Lithuanian Women, 1945–1970 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010), 125–41 (quoted on 134 and 136). 37. See Schechter, Stuff of Soldiers, 224–5. 38. Vasily Grossman, A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941–1945, trans. and ed. Antony Beevor and Lyuba Vinogradova (London: Harvill Press, 2005), 251. 39. Ibid., 252. 40. Zvi Gitelman, ed., Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 11. 41. Quoted in Alexandra Popoff, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 162. 42. Quoted in Ibid., 169. 43. Vasily Grossman, “The Hell of Treblinka” in The Road, trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler (New York: New York Review Books, 2007): 116–62 (quoted on 121, 126, 144, 159). 44. Popoff, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century, 179. 45. Ibid., 191. 46. Weinberg, Stalin’s Forgotten Zion, 71–82. 47. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “Babi Year,” Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi Racial State, PBS, accessed on May 18, 2021, https://www​-tc​.pbs​.org​/auschwitz​ /learning​/guides​/reading1​.4​.pdf. 48. Quoted in Andrej Kotljarchuk, “Babi Year and the Nazi Genocide of Roma: Memory Narratives and Memory Practices in Ukraine,” Nationalities Papers (2021): 7. 49. Ibid. 50. David Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 226. 51. Scott, Familiar Strangers, 1. 52. Ibid., 87. 124

Notes 53. Quoted in Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, 130–1. 54. Shternshis, When Sonia met Boris, 38, 161–2. 55. See O’Keeffe, New Soviet Gypsies, epilogue. 56. Manley, To the Tashkent Station, figures cited on 1 and 2. 57. Ibid., 111–15, 229–36, and 267–9. 58. Veidlinger, Yiddish Theater, 108. 59. Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov, ed. Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 31–2. 60. Veidlinger, Yiddish Theater, 6. 61. Emil Draitser, Shush! Growing Up Jewish under Stalin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 18. 62. On Zhemchuzhina’s life, see Karl Schlögel, The Scent of Empires: Chanel No. 5 and Red Moscow, trans. Jessica Spengler (Medford: Polity, 2021), 104–25. 63. Ibid., quoted on 115. 64. Quoted in Golda Meir, My Life (New York: Putnam, 1975), 249. 65. Ibid., 250. 66. Ibid., 254. 67. Schlögel, Scent of Empires, 116. 68. “Podlye shpiony i ubiitsy pod maskoi professorov-vrachei,” Pravda, January 13, 1953, 1. 69. Draitser, Shush, 269–81. 70. Flora Litvinova, Ocherki proshedshikh let (Moscow: Zven’ia, 2008), 251. 71. Ibid., 258.

Chapter 5 1. Greg Castillo, “Peoples at an Exhibition: Soviet Architecture and the National Question,” in Socialist Realism without Shores, ed. Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 1997), 105. 2. Anya von Bremzen, The Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing (New York: Broadway Books, 2013), 244–5. 125

Notes 3. Ibid., 127. 4. Scott, Familiar Strangers, quoted on 89. 5. Ibid., chapter 3. 6. Ibid. 7. Peter Camejo, “To Escape Jim Crow: Negro Girl Learns Russian,” Young Socialist (February 1962): 3. 8. Brigid O’Keeffe, “A Cold War Cold Case: What Huldah Clark Can Teach Us About Teaching Soviet History,” Slavic Review 80, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 299–306 (quoted on 305). 9. Anika Walke, “Was Soviet Internationalism Anti-Racist? Toward a History of Foreign Others in the USSR,” in Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in Global Context, ed. David Rainbow (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), 284–311; Julie Hessler, “Death of an African Student in Moscow: Race, Politics, and the Cold War,” Cahiers du Monde russe 47, no. 1/2 (2006): 33–63. 10. Andrea Lee, Russian Journal (New York: Random House, 1979), 15. 11. David Rainbow, ed., Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in Global Context (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019). 12. Ibid. 13. Adrienne Edgar, “Children of Mixed Marriage in Soviet Central Asia: Dilemmas of Identity and Belonging,” in Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in Global Context, ed. David Rainbow (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), 208–33 (quoted on 214, 219, and 220). 14. Jeff Sahadeo, Voices from the Soviet Edge: Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019). 15. Quoted in Ibid., 42. 16. Quoted in Ibid., 43. 17. Goff, Nested Nationalism, chapter 3 (statistics cited on 136). 18. Quoted in Ibid., 142. 19. Ibid., 150–1. 20. Khrushchev in America (New York: Crosscurrents Press, 1960), 31. 21. Shternshis, When Sonia met Boris, 63. 22. Gal Beckerman, When They Come For Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle To Save Soviet Jewry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2010). 126

Notes 23. Gessen, Where the Jews Aren’t, 4. 24. Gary Shteyngart, Little Failure: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2014); Lev Golinkin, A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka (New York: Anchor, 2014). 25. Gessen, Where the Jews Aren’t, 5. 26. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 358. 27. Gessen, Where the Jews Aren’t, 142. 28. Slezkine, Jewish Century, 354. 29. Artemy M. Kalinovsky, Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), 69–71. 30. Ibid., 132. 31. Ibid., 132–41. 32. Quoted in Ibid., 139. 33. Ibid., 200–8. 34. Ibid., 93–4 (quoted on 93). 35. Ibid., 242. 36. Bruce Grant, In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), quoted on 142–3. 37. Quoted in Ibid., 90.

Chapter 6 1. Serhii Plokhy, Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe (New York: Basic Books, 2018), viii. 2. Quoted in William Taubman, Gorbachev: His Life and Times (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), 243. 3. Plokhy, Chernobyl, 305. 4. Khalid, Central Asia, 403–5. 5. Sahadeo, Voices from the Soviet Edge, chapter 7. 6. Ibid., 186. 7. Quoted in Zvi Gitelman, “Glasnost, Perestroika, and Antisemitism,” Foreign Affairs 70, no. 2 (1991): 146. 127

Notes 8. Goff, Nested Nationalism, 176. 9. Ibid., 232. 10. Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 198. 11. David Remnick, “Hate Runs High in Soviet Union’s Most Explosive Ethnic Feud,” The Washington Post, September 6, 1989: A31. 12. Quoted in Thomas de Waal, Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 59. 13. Ibid., 65. 14. Quoted in Taubman, Gorbachev, 371. 15. David Remnick, “Gorbachev Warns of Ethnic Violence, Rejects Autonomy Calls,” The Washington Post, July 2, 1989, A30. 16. Dildora Damisch Muzafari, Sunshine Girl: My Journey from the Soviet Orient to the Western World (self-published, 2020), 289–91. 17. Sahadeo, Voices from the Soviet Edge, 170. 18. Ibid., 187. 19. Serhii Plokhy, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 31. 20. Ibid., 37. 21. Quoted in O’Connor, History of the Baltic States, 217–18. 22. Quoted in Plokhy, Last Empire, 36. 23. David Remnick, “Soviet Union or Disunion: A Nation’s Fate,” The Washington Post, December 31, 1990, a01. 24. Ibid. 25. Young, The Communist Experience in the Twentieth Century, 348–9. 26. Ibid., 351. 27. Ibid., 352. 28. Ibid., 353. 29. Quoted in Sahadeo, Voices from the Soviet Edge, 191. 30. Taubman, Gorbachev, 575–6. 31. David Remnick, “Soviet Referendum May Aggravate Woes,” The Washington Post, March 17, 1991, a29. 32. David Remnick, “Soviets Vote on Future of Union,” The Washington Post, March 18, 1991, a01. 128

Notes 33. Stephen Cohen, Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 90. 34. Quoted in Taubman, Gorbachev, 608. 35. Richard Sakwa, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union, 1917–1991 (London: Routledge, 1999), 479. 36. Ibid., 481. 37. Ibid., 482. 38. Taubman, Gorbachev, 629. 39. Ibid., 634–9.

Chapter 7 1. “End of the Soviet Union; Text of Gorbachev’s Farewell Address,” The New York Times, December 26, 1991, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/1991​ /12​/26​/world​/end​-of​-the​-soviet​-union​-text​-of​-gorbachev​-s​-farewell​ -address​.html (accessed November 18, 2020). 2. Ibid. 3. Hirsch, Empire of Nations, 5. 4. Shayakhmetov, Kazakh Teacher’s Story, 65. 5. Kalinovsky, Laboratory of Socialist Development, 161. 6. Nazira Nurtazina, “Great Famine of 1931–1933 in Kazakhstan: A Contemporary’s Reminiscences,” Acta Slavica Iaponica 32 (2012): 128. 7. Ibid., 129. 8. Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, trans. Bela Shayevich (New York: Random House, 2016), 3. 9. Ibid., 21. 10. Alina Yakubova, “How Strange It Feels to Watch Your Country Die,” Jacobin, December 26, 2021, https://www​.jacobinmag​.com​/2021​/12​/ kyrgyzstan​-ussr​-soviet​-communism​-fall​-1991 (accessed December 26, 2021). 11. Muzafari, Sunshine Girl, 54. 12. Ibid., quoted on 45. 13. Quoted in Sahadeo, Voices from the Soviet Edge, 196.

129

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berkhoff, Karel C. Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Brandenberger, David. National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Cameron, Sarah. The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018. Demuth, Bathsheba. Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. New York: W. W. Norton, 2019. Edgar, Adrienne. Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Fowler, Mayhill C. Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge: Stage and State in Soviet Ukraine. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Goff, Krista A. Nested Nationalism: Making and Unmaking Nations in the Soviet Caucasus. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020. Hirsch, Francine. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Kalinovsky, Artemy M. Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018. Kamp, Marianne. The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling Under Communism. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. Khalid, Adeeb. Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. Khalid, Adeeb. Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. Manley, Rebecca. To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. Martin, Terry. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Norris, Stephen M. and Willard Sunderland, ed. Russia’s People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. O’Keeffe, Brigid. New Soviet Gypsies: Nationality, Performance, and Selfhood in the Early Soviet Union. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.

Selected Bibliography Peterson, Maya K. Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Rainbow, David, ed. Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in Global Context. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019. Sahadeo, Jeff. Voices from the Soviet Edge: Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. Schechter, Brandon M. The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. Scott, Erik. Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Shternshis, Anna. When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life Under Stalin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Veidlinger, Jeffrey. The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Yekelchyk, Serhy. Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

131

INDEX

African students  83–4 Ahmedzade, Zulfugar  47–8 Alexievich, Svetlana  51, 114–15 anti-cosmopolitan campaign  72–5 anti-racism  78, 80–4, 89, 92 anti-Semitism  20, 37, 53–4, 66–8, 71–5, 88–91, 98 Aral Sea  33–4, 97 Armenia  2, 99–100, 102, 105 August coup  106–7 Azerbaijan  47–8, 88, 98–100 Babyn Yar  54, 67–8 backwardness  5–6, 9–11, 13, 21, 24–6, 29, 30, 92 Baltics  53, 62–3, 77, 101–3, 105, 107 Belarus  96, 108 Belavezha Accords  108 Birobidzhan  37–8, 66–7 Black Book of Russian Jewry  65, 66 Bolsheviks civilizing mission  6, 11, 13, 23–6 ethnic diversity  1–3 ethnic politics  3–4, 6–13, 112 census-taking  12–13, 88, 98 Central Asia cotton monoculture  34, 94, 97 delimitation  22–3 irrigation  33–4 nation-states  107–8 revolutionary upheaval  26–33, 48 Chechens  59–61 Chernobyl  96–7 Chukotka  24–6 civil war  8, 20 Clark, Huldah  82–3 Cold War  78, 81–3, 92, 111

collectivization  13–14, 25, 29–32, 34–6, 40 Commonwealth of Independent States  108 Crimean Tatars  59, 61 cuisine  79–81 “culturedness”  39 dekulakization  14, 30, 32, 35 Doctors’ Plot  74–5 domestic internationalism  17–18, 44, 77–9, 103 Draitser, Emil  73, 75 emigration, Jewish  90–1 empire  16–17 Estonia  62, 102, 105 ethnic cleansing  17, 34, 45–7, 58–61 First Five-Year Plan  13, 24–5, 29, 34–6 Friendship of Peoples  Cold War  83, 89, 93 exclusion  45–7, 88 meaning/metaphor  41–2, 85 memory  52, 114, 116 monument  77–8 perestroika  97, 99, 100, 102, 105 Russocentrism  43–5, 56, 57, 68 social mobility  87–8 World War II  52, 56, 57, 68 Georgia  2, 79–81, 101, 102, 105 Germano, Alexander  70 Gessen, Masha  90–1 glasnost’  96–9 Golinkin, Lev  90–1 Gorbachev, Mikhail biography  95–6

Index ethnic conflicts  97–101 house arrest  106, 107 reforms  96–9, 102, 111, 112 resignation  111 sidelining  106–9 Great Terror  45–8, 73 Grossman, Vasily  64–6, 74 Gulag  14, 41, 46–8, 58–61, 73, 74 Gypsy Union  21 Holocaust  53–5, 63–8 Holodomor  34–6 hujum  26–9 Ingush  59, 61 interethnic marriage  69, 84–6, 89 Islam  8, 21–2, 26, 29, 114 Israel  72, 74, 90, 91 Jadids  21–3, 48 Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee  71–4 Jews. See also Holocaust anti-Semitism  20, 37, 53–4, 66–8, 71–5, 88–91, 98 Birobidzhan  37–8, 66–7 emigration  90–1 social mobility  20 theater  37, 39 Karachays  59, 61 Kazakh famine  14, 29–33, 56, 113, 119 n.29 Kazakhstan  23, 29–33, 46, 58, 114 Khrushchev, Nikita  67, 83, 89 Koreans  45, 46 korenizatsiia  9 Kulish, Mykola  40–1 Kumushalieva, Sabira  40 Latvia  62, 77, 101–3, 105, 107 Lenin, Vladimir  1, 100  Lithuania  62–3, 77, 98, 101–3, 105, 107 Meir, Golda  74 Mendelevich, Yosef  89–91

Mikhoels, Solomon  39, 71–2, 74 Moldova  62, 102, 105 Muzafari, Dildora  101–2, 116 Nagorno-Karabakh  99–100 nationalism “bourgeois”  10, 40–1, 47–8, 73–4 Russian  98, 103, 107 threat to revolution  4, 8 USSR’s demise  97, 101–8 nationality  4, 15, 16 nationality policy  8–13, 16–18, 20–3, 41, 45, 84–6, 112 Nazi Germany  18, 43–5, 52, 61–2, 81, 84 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact  49, 61–3, 81, 101 Nivkhi  94 nomadism  13, 29–30, 40 Nurek dam  92–4, 114 Obidova, Jahon  27–9 passport, internal  14–15, 35, 54, 85, 88 perestroika  96–109 “punished peoples”  58–61 race/racism  18, 78, 81–8, 98 Red Army  1, 51, 56–8, 63–6, 68–9, 114 referendum of March 17, 1991  105–6 Roma  21, 38–40, 53, 54, 65–8, 70, 118 n.1 Russian language  21, 43–5, 56–7 Russian nationalism  98, 103, 107 Russocentrism  41–4, 56, 57, 69–70, 89, 116 Shayakhmetov, Mukhamet  31–2, 56–8, 113–14 Shteyngart, Gary  90–1 Soviet Union dissolution  108–9, 111–13 ethno-territorialization  11, 12, 22–3, 36–7, 61 post-Soviet memory  113–16

133

Index Stalin, Joseph  2, 13, 24, 32, 41–5, 48, 55, 58, 61–2, 68–9, 72, 75, 79 state-sponsored evolutionism  11, 13

Uzbekistan  22–3, 28–9, 33, 46, 48, 58, 62, 64, 71, 116

Tajikistan  23, 57, 59, 92–4, 114 Talyshes  47–8, 98–9 territorialization  9–13, 22–3, 36–7, 61 theater  38–41 Trotsky, Lev  1, 5–6

World War II Baltics  62–3 ethnic cleansing  58–62 genocide  53–5, 64–8 memory  52–3, 55, 66–8 Nazi invasion  51 Nazi occupation  53, 64–5 Russocentric patriotism  68–70 Soviet losses  53 Soviet unity  55–8 Soviet victory  52, 55, 68

Ukraine famine  34–6 independence  108 industrialization  35–6 perestroika  96–7, 104 theater  40–1 World War II  53–4, 60, 63–4, 66–8 union treaty (1991)  106, 108 unveiling. See hujum

134

VDNKh  77–8

Yeltsin, Boris  103, 107 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny  67 Zhemchuzhina, Polina  73–4

135

136