National Identities and Virtual Foreign Policies among the Eastern Slavs

The three eastern Slavic states-Russia, Ukraine and Belarus-have virtual foreign policies towards each other that are a product of weakly defined national identities inherited from the former USSR. In addition, this virtuality has been compounded by the presence of centrist, former high-ranking nomenklatura elites who have led all three countries at different times since 1992. Former “sovereign communist” centrist oligarchs are ideologically amorphous, in both the domestic and foreign policy arenas. Of the three eastern Slavic states, Ukraine had the strongest ethnic national identity by 1917–1918 when the Tsarist and Austro-Hungarian empires collapsed. A Russian ethnic identity had not been promoted in the Tsarist era, in contrast to an imperialstatist one. Belarus was heavily Russified and all of its territory was to be found within the Tsarist empire. Of the three ethnic groups therefore, only Ukrainians made a major attempt, unsuccessfully, to create an independent state in 1917-1921. In the USSR the situation did not radically improve, with the exception again of Ukraine. Russian and Soviet identities were deliberately intertwined, especially after 1934. Belarus emerged from the former USSR with a stronger Soviet Belarusian than Belarusian ethnocultural identity. For Ukraine the record is mixed with nation building accompanied by nation destroying. The Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic (SFSR) was the only Soviet republic to never declare independence from the USSR, Ukraine held a highly successful referendum on independence while Belarus failed to hold a referendum after declaring independence a day after Ukraine.     

“Socialist in content,national in form:” the making of Soviet national art and the case of Buryatia

This article examines the fine art of the Soviet national republics and its discourse in the Soviet Union, which were considerably shaped under the influence of socialist realism and Soviet nationality policy. While examining the central categories of Soviet artistic discourse such as the “national form,” “national distinctness,” and “tradition,” as well as cultural and scientific institutions responsible for the image of art of non-Russian nationalities, the author reveals the existence of a number of colonial features and discursive and institutional practices that foster a cultural divide between Russian and non-Russian culture and contribute to the marginalization of art. Special attention is paid to the implications of this discursive shaping for the local artistic scene in Buryatia.     

A Very Ambiguous Empire: Russia’s Hybrid Exceptionalism

This article will widen existing analyses of Russian imperial narratives through the introduction of the concept of ‘hybrid exceptionalism’, referring to discourses and practices of hierarchy emanating from the country’s liminal position between East and West. In its various—Tsarist, Soviet, contemporary—guises, Russia is posited to have reproduced narratives of hierarchy by formulating civilising missions within a distinct sphere of interest. Transcending political discontinuities, such hierarchical civilising missions have been a defining feature of various Russian worldviews for centuries, and are poised to remain so in the absence of a major redefinition of Russian national identity.     

The national factor in Ukraine's quadruple transition

Studies of post-communist transition in central and eastern Europe initially focused on democratization and marketization as the key pillars of transition, drawing parallels with the experiences of southern Europe and Latin America in their emergence from authoritarianism. Whilst some authors have also added a third factor-that of 'stateness', this article argues that post-Soviet transition, in particular, is not a triple transition, but a quadruple one, because nationhood and nationalism should also be added. This article discusses the centrality of nationhood to liberal democracy and then applies this to post-Soviet Ukraine, by investigating its inherited Soviet legacy and the quadruple transition it is undertaking as an independent state.     

Themes in official discourses on terrorism in Central Asia

This article explores the manner in which the governments of Central Asia, in particular Uzbekistan, have analysed and portrayed the actual and perceived threat from Islamist terrorism. It examines and critiques the core themes in this discourse, including the theoretical and legal definitions of the term terrorism, the delegitimisation and depoliticisation of the terrorist and the continuation of Soviet rhetoric on terrorism. It seeks to place this discourse in the wider political culture and objectives of the regimes and the broader security considerations of these newly independent states seeking to consolidate state- and nationhood.     

Historiography and the politics of land,identity, and belonging in the twentieth-century North Caucasus

Intercommunal, socio-economic, and political relations in the North Caucasus have historically revolved around access to this mountain region’s prized pasturage and scarce farmland. Given the centrality of the land question in the North Caucasus, it is unsurprising that historiography on land relations in the region has been highly politicized. This article examines how indigenous writing on the history of land relations in the central Caucasus – a region inhabited by today’s Kabardians, Balkars, Ossetians, Ingushes, and Karachais, and dominated by the princely confederation of Kabarda before the tsarist conquest – has been subject to wide revision in response to changes in local and national political dynamics and the emergence of ethnicized identity politics. In the late-imperial and early Soviet periods, Karachai, Balkar, and Ossetian elites-cum-historians, writing for an audience of imperial policy-makers, crafted histories to influence state policies toward land reform. By the 1930s, historians from the region tailored their histories of land relations to the prerogatives of Soviet nationality policies. The ideas contained in these histories impacted the construction of national identities in the Soviet period. Post-Soviet Karachai and Balkar intellectuals, seeking to establish new post-colonial national histories for their peoples, have reinterpreted the history of land relations in order to depict their ancestors as independent of Kabarda’s land-based dominance. This revisionism is part of the struggle of the Karachais and Balkars against their historiographical erasure, which was a product of the exclusion of the Karachais and Balkars from the family of Soviet nations during their deportation and exile to Central Asia from 1944 to 1957 and their subsequent political and cultural marginalization.     

History,memory and nation building in the post-Soviet colonial space

This is an article on Bolshevik nationalities policy and ethnic engineering, asking who, in fact, decided which populations belonged together as ethnic groups (narodnost') and thus had the right of national self-determination, and how the level of autonomy was determined for each ethnic unit. Scholars have dealt with Russian and Soviet nationalities issues for decades already, but they have turned their attention mainly to the larger nationalities (at the level of SSR, and to a lesser degree the levels of ASSR and autonomous oblast). I argue that the lower levels of national territorial autonomy in the Soviet Union (national okrug, raion, volost', and selsovet) are worthy of greater academic attention, at least from the ethnological point of view. Having this kind of low-level territorial autonomy has often been a question of to be or not to be for the small ethnic groups concerned, and hence the subject is connected with the question of preservation of cultural and linguistic diversity in Russia.     

In the Shadow of Nikolai Danilevskii: Universalism,Particularism, and Russian Geopolitical Theory

In order to contribute to our understanding of Russian geopolitical theory, this article investigates closely the figure of Nikolai Danilevskii. The article pays special attention to the thinker’s increased influence on contemporary Russian geopolitical thought, by presenting qualitative and quantitative evidence of this influence. It explains Danilevskii’s rise by looking at Western pressures on Russia and the country’s internal vulnerabilities. Such vulnerabilities emerged from the breakup of the Tsarist and the Soviet state, respectively, by providing the required context for the emergence of defensive nationalist ideas.     

Muslim identity in the Balkans before the establishment of nation states

The background of the contemporary Macedonian “antiquization” can be found in the nineteenth century and the myth of ancient descent among Orthodox Slavic speakers in Macedonia, adopted partially due to Greek cultural inputs. The idea of Ancient Macedonian nationhood has also been included in the national mythology during the Yugoslav era. An additional factor for its preservation has been the influence of the Macedonian Diaspora. After independence, attempts to use myth of ancient descent had to be abandoned due to political pressure by Greece. Contemporary antiquization on the other hand, has been revived as an efficient tool for political mobilization. It is manifested as a belated invention and mass-production of tradition, carried out through the creation of new ceremonies, interventions in the public space and dissemination of mythological and metaphysical narratives on the origin of the nation. There have also been attempts to scientifically rationalize claims to ancient nationhood. On the political level, the process of antiquization reinforced the political primacy of its promoters, the ruling Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization – Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity (VMRO-DPMNE), but had a negative impact on the interethnic relations and the international position of the country.     

Stepan Bandera: The resurrection of a Ukrainian national hero

This article discusses the reinterpretations of the career of Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera and his place in contemporary Ukraine by examining scholarly debates in academic books and articles, school textbooks and media sources from the late 1980s to the present. The article seeks to elucidate the place of Bandera in modern Ukrainian history and illustrates his metamorphosis from arch-villain and alleged traitor in Soviet works to a modern and mythical national hero with a firm place in the historical narrative of twentieth century Ukraine.     

An unlikely bulwark of Sovietness: cross-border travel and Soviet patriotism in Western Ukraine, 1956–1985

Focusing on the development of travel between the borderlands of Ukraine and Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe, this article explores what it meant to be Soviet outside the Russian core of the USSR between the mid-1950s and the mid-1980s. The cautious opening of the Soviet border was part of a larger attempt to find fresh sources of popular support and enthusiasm for the regime's “communist” project. Before the Prague Spring of 1968 in particular, official policies and narratives of travel thus praised local inhabitants who crossed the Soviet border for supposedly overcoming age-old hatreds to build a brighter future in Eastern Europe. By the 1970s, however, smuggling and cultural consumption discredited the idea of “internationalist friendship.” This encouraged residents of Ukraine to speak and write about the continuing importance of the Soviet border. The very idea of Sovietness was defined in national terms, as narratives of travel emphasized that Soviet citizens were inherently different from ethno-national groups in the people's democracies. Eastern Europe thus emerged as an “other” that highlighted the Soviet character of territories incorporated into the USSR after 1939, helping to obscure western Ukraine's troubled past and leading to the emergence of new social hierarchies in the region.     

Historical origins of the party-army relations in the Soviet Union and China

It is established that Party-army relation followed a "separated" pattern in the Soviet Union as opposed to an "infused" pattern in China. This article explores the historical origin of this difference in the revolutionary periods. By analyzing the biographies of communist military elites, it argues that this discrepancy took shape before the revolutionary takeover and resulted from the differentiated intensities of warfare across Russia and China. In China, the numerous civil wars and military defeats, radicalized the old military structure and boosted societal militarization; thus, eroding the mutual exclusion between the military and revolutionaries. The effect was lesser in Tsarist Russia than in prerevolutionary China, making the old military a conservative and professional corporate that the Bolsheviks could not completely subordinate to Party control.     

“Why not love our language and our culture?” National rights and citizenship in Khrushchev's Soviet Union

This paper highlights campaigns for national rights among two non-titular communities in the Soviet Union and places them in local historical contexts. Drawing on archival sources and oral history interviews, the author not only delves into the campaigns themselves, but also explores broader debates about the nature of Khrushchev's Thaw and Soviet citizenship, which was far from an empty concept in the Khrushchev era. Petitioners invoked discourses that indicate both an awareness of national rights and an expectation of the state's obligation to protect them. Oral history interviews with surviving petitioners and community members support the notion that petition language can serve as a reflection of how petitioners viewed their place in Soviet society and interpreted the Soviet citizen contract.     

Modern at last? Variety of weak states in the post-Soviet world

Scholarly interest has recently shifted from issues of democratic transition to those of state formation and state viability. The paper reviews scholarly contributions to understanding state weakness and suggests criteria and indicators to capture stateness in the former Soviet region. It suggests a preliminary ranking of the post-Soviet states along dimensions of national order, economic efficiency and political viability. The paper hypothesizes a causal mechanism through which state development in the region may occur by incorporating both structural and policy-related factors. It concludes that most states in the region can only be characterized as weak, and their urge to become modern is therefore yet to materialize.     

The Use and Abuse of Postcolonial Discourses in Post-independent Kazakhstan

The article explores the concept of political postcolonialism and how political groups appropriate and contest this discourse. Elites and contesting political groups utilise postcolonial rhetoric to legitimate their political goals by projecting that their country, in this case Kazakhstan, was colonised by the Tsarist Russia and then by the Soviet Union. For President Nursultan A. Nazarbayev’s nationalising regime the status of Kazakhstan as a colony represented a vital item in post-1991 nation-building projects. Political opposition and Kazakh national-patriots contested this official discourse, blaming the regime for scarce efforts towards ‘full decolonisation’. The absence of major intellectual discussion allowed these elites and political players to reappropriate these discourses in the political rather than critical intellectual domain.     

The Komi of the Kola Peninsula within ethnographic descriptions and state policies

For more than 100 years, ethnographic accounts have highlighted the non-nativeness of the Komi diaspora to the Kola Peninsula, contrasting it with the indigenous Sami population. Their legal status there has been a vexed issue unresolved by Tsarist administrators, Soviet ethnic policies, present-day ideas of multiethnic civic nation, and global indigenous activism. In the everyday life, however, there are no apparent differences between the two ethnic groups and their traditional lifestyles in the rural area of Murmansk region. Juxtaposing historical ethnographic accounts on the Izhma Komi with my fieldwork experiences among the Komi on the Kola Peninsula, I show how ethnographers uphold dominant ideologies and promote different state policies. The ambiguous ethnic and indigenous categorizations from their accounts reverberate in popular stereotypes, political mobilizations from below, and state policies from above. In this way, they make an interesting case for the practical problems of generalization and essentialism.     

Living with Non-recognition: State- and Nation-building in South Caucasian Quasi-states

The dissolution of the Soviet Union led to the establishment of several non-recognised statelets, three of which—Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh—are located in the South Caucasus. This article sets aside the question of whether these quasi-states ought to be internationally recognised, and focuses on whether they exist as functioning state entities. To what extent are the authorities in these would-be states able to provide the populace with the services expected of contemporary states—like internal and external security, basic infrastructure and welfare? All three insist that they are not only functioning states, but also nation-states that command the allegiance of their population. We thus also discuss their claim to embody real nationhood.     

The Partition of Khorezm and the Positions of Turkestanis on Razmezhevanie

Cold War historiography, in many instances, explained the delimitation of borders in Central Asia as a part of Moscow's divide and rule policy in Turkestan. However, the viability of this approach can be challenged by an examination of the archival documents of the time and the actual publications of the nationalities commissariat under Stalin. Among the Bolsheviks of Turkestan, Uzbeks were leading the drive towards the repartition of Turkestan, along with their Turkmen comrades who were trying to gain land from the former Khivan Khanate, at that time the People's Soviet Republic of Khorezm. The partition of Khorezm between three newly created administrative divisions, Uzbekistan, Turkmenia and Kirgizia, played a key role in the demarcation of borders in 1924. However, from the point of view of communists from the European parts of the former Tsarist Empire, as well as others from the region, delimitation was first a betrayal of internationalism; second it was an immature project both economically and theoretically; and third, it was believed that the liquidation of the traditional Muslim states of Turkestan, namely the Bukharan Emirate and the Khivan Khanate, would have a negative impact on the image of the Soviet revolution in the eyes of reformers in other Muslim countries in the Middle East.     

Bar Kochba’s Homelands: Prague Zionists on National Soil and Rootedness

In late-Habsburg Prague, in the years before the Great War, the members of the Zionist Student Association Bar Kochba were remarkably ambivalent regarding the “objective” constituents of “genuine” nationalism claimed by the national movements of that place and time: territoriality, “blood,” distinctive cultures, national languages, etc. As Zionists, they desired such “objective” national attributes for themselves, even as they remained fully aware that these were ultimately inapplicable to their Jewish reality. The article illustrates this complexity by examining how these Prague Zionists theorized the concepts of national lands, national homelands, and national rootedness. Their deep-seated ambivalence toward the territoriality of nations, then, has been in response to Jews’ particular condition in the Diaspora. It does, however, expose a broader tension manifested in some shape or form in other national movements: many of the concepts of what nationhood is are adopted from alien cultures and often from the very culture from which the national movement seeks to dissociate.     

Language,nation and citizenship: contrast,conflict and convergence in Estonia's debate with the international community

This paper investigates the clash of (language) ideologies in Estonia in the post-Communist period. In an analysis of changing Western recommendations and Estonian responses during the transition of Estonia from Soviet Socialist Republic to independent state, we trace the development of the discourses on language and citizenship rights. Different conceptions of the nation-state and of how citizenship is acquired, together with different approaches to human rights, led to disagreement between Estonian political elites and the political actors attached to international institutions. In particular, the Soviet demographic legacy posed problems.

We use a context-sensitive approach that takes account of human agency, political intervention, power, and authority in the formation of (national) language ideologies and policies. We find that the complexities of cultural and contextual differences were often ignored and misunderstood by both parties and that in their exchanges the two sides appeared to subscribe to ideal philosophical positions. In the following two decades both sides repositioned themselves and appeared to accommodate to the opposing view. In deconstructing the role of political intervention pressing for social and political inclusion and in documenting the profound feeling of victimhood that remained as a legacy from the Soviet period and the bargain that was struck, we hope to contribute to a deeper understanding of the language ideological debates surrounding the post-Communist nation-(re)building process.