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Rag Doll Nations and the Politics of Differentiation on Arbitrary Borders: Karelia and Moldova*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Extract
“Tell a man today to go and build a state,” Samuel Finer once stated, “and he will try to establish a definite and defensible boundary and compel those who live inside it to obey him.” While at best an oversimplification, Finer's insight illuminates an interesting aspect of state-society relations. Who is it that builds the state? How and where do they establish territorial boundaries, and how are those who live within that territory compelled to obey? Generally speaking, these are the questions that will be addressed here. Of more immediate concern is the fate of peoples located in regions where arbitrary land boundaries fall. Are they made loyal to the state through coercion or by their own compulsions? More importantly, how are their identities shaped by the efforts of the state to differentiate them from their compatriots on the other side of the borders? How is the shift from ethnic to national identities undertaken? A parallel elaboration of the national histories of the populations of Karelia and Moldova will shed light on these questions. The histories of each group are marked by a myriad of attempts to differentiate the identity of each ethnic community from their compatriots beyond the state's borders. The results of such overt, state-initiated efforts to differentiate borderland populations by encouraging a national identity at the expense of the ethnic, has ranged from the mundane to the tragic—from uneventful assimilation to persecution and even genocide. As an illustration of the range of possibilities and processes, I maintain that the tragedies of Karelia and Moldova are not exceptional, but rather are a consequence of their geographical straddling of arbitrary borders, and the need for the state to promote a distinctive national identity for these populations to differentiate them socially from their compatriots beyond the frontier.
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References
Notes
1. Samuel Finer, “State-Building, State Boundaries, and Border Control,” Social Science Information, August-October 1974, p. 79. This statement, and indeed this entire paper, unavoidably privileges notions of place of being over space of movement in describing the interactions of populations, identity, and the state. For more on the debate between the two, see: Nick Baron and Peter Gatrell, “Population Displacement, State-Building, and Social Identity in the Lands of the Former Russian Empire, 1917–1923,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2003, pp. 51–100.Google Scholar
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71. Ibid., p. 116. Similar findings are noted as problematic in analysis of the data from the 1979 Soviet census: Rasma Karklins, “A Note on ‘Nationality’ and ‘Native Tongue’ as Census Categories in 1979,” Soviet Studies, Vol. 32, No. 3, 1980, p. 420.Google Scholar
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86. William Crowther uses similar terminology in his description of the Soviet-era Moldova: “Moldavia … stands out as a backwater within the Soviet system in its social and economic development.” William Crowther, “The Politics of Ethno-national Mobilization: Nationalism and Reform in Soviet Moldavia,” Russian Review , April 1991, p. 184. I. Sergeyev uses almost identical language in his description of Karelia: “Once again Karelia became a sleepy backwoods.” Sergeev, Saga of the Karelo-Finnish Republic, p.6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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99. The parallels with the Karelian experiences were noted by many, including the Ukrainian Commissar for Enlightenment, V. P. Zatons'kyi, in 1931: “In the far north, there is a republic that is completely analogous to your own. There, 100,000 Karelians live inside the Soviet Union and around 400,000 in Finland. But it happens that a lot of ‘clever’ leaders, because of the underdeveloped nature of Karelian culture, decided that it was necessary to take the Finnish language and to build the Karelian Republic on that basis. Obviously, the Finnish language is related to Karelian, although perhaps not as closely as Romanian to your Moldovan language, but it is unknown and unintelligible to the Karelians. Nevertheless, for a number of reasons, it turned out that they tried to build Karelian national culture on the basis of the Finnish language.” He would continue that minor linguistic differences could assume greater significance given the political Situation on the border, and that it would be a mistake to fennicize the Karelians or romanicize the Moldovans. Ibid., pp. 81–82.Google Scholar
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132. “The geographic location of the Karelian lands in the area where the Russian and Swedish spheres of interest collided in the late Middle Ages had a great influence on ethnic development because a political boundary divided the nationality beginning from the armistice of 1323 in Noteborg (Orekhovets).” Lallukka, “Assimilation of the Karelians in the Soviet Union,” p. 111.Google Scholar
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135. They would continue: “In this context, strong understandings of national identity as deeply rooted in the precommunist history of the region, frozen or repressed by a ruthlessly antinational regime, and returning with the collapse of communism are at best anachronistic, at worst simply scholarly rationalizations of nationalist rhetoric.” Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond Identity,” Theory and Society, Vol. 29, 2000, p. 26Google Scholar
136. Much of the literature on the wave of national liberation that accompanied the collapse of communism was written in terms of a nationalist “reawakening”—the return of nationalist development from where it left off in Eastern Europe in 1917. However, as Rogers Brubaker reminds us, “What ‘returns’ in the postcommunist present is not something from the precommunist past; it is something constituted in important ways by the communist past. In the Soviet case, many national identities were first invented, imagined, and institutionalized under communism.” Rogers Brubaker, “Myths and Misconceptions in the Study of Nationalism,” in John Hall, ed., The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 288.Google Scholar
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144. “One of the effects of the Russification of the western Soviet languages was an artificial widening of the differences between Eastern and Western Ukrainian, Eastern and Western Belorussian, Moldavian and Rumanian, Karelian and Finnish. This is quite consistent both with the isolationist and the Russian-nationalist strains in Soviet policy. But it is in basic contradiction to the communist myth about the freedom of form which their minority cultures are supposed to enjoy.” Weinreich, “The Russification of Soviet Minority Languages,” p. 55.Google Scholar
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153. Nevalainen, “Kareliya posle 1917 goda,” p. 307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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155. Self-identified ethnic Russians comprise 74.3%, and the combination of Slavic peoples (Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians) comprises 84.9% of the population on Karelian territory. The corresponding numbers for the Russian Federation (RSFSR) at the time of the last census in 1989 are 81.5% and 85.3%—slightly higher than the corresponding numbers for Karelia alone. Karelian statistics: Goskomstat Rossii, Regiony Rossii , pp. 7–10; 1989 Soviet census figures: Goskomstat RSFSR, Natsional'nyi sostav naseleniya RSFSR (Moscow: Republic Information Publication Center, 1990), p. 7.Google Scholar
156. Eyal and Smith, “Moldova and the Moldovans,” p. 232.Google Scholar
157. Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, p. 274. See also Terry Martin, “Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,” Journal of Modern History, Vol. 70, No. 4, 1998, pp. 829–831; Laitin, Identity in Formation, pp. 52–53. Both Martin and Laitin cite the use of the “Piedmont principle” in the case of Moldova, and to a lesser extent Ukraine and Belorussia, while ignoring similar processes in Karelia and Buryatia.Google Scholar
158. “The MASSR was part of the broader Soviet policy of using the logic of national liberation to draw border regions away from bourgeois states. In the 1920s, in addition to the MASSR, two other autonomous republics were set up in border regions that were especially contentious: the Karelian autonomous republic, established on the border with Finland in 1920 and upgraded, as the Karelo-Finnish republic, to the status of a union republic from 1940 to 1956; and the Buriat-Mongol autonomous republic, established on the border with Mongolia in 1923 but considerably reduced in size and renamed after 1937. Each of these territorial-administrative entities was the putative political instantiation of a nation separated by international frontiers. They were meant to place pressure on neighboring states—Finland, Romania, and Mongolia—for the relinquishment of all or part of their territory and were styled as the bridgeheads of Soviet influence in northern Europe, central Europe, and the Far East as a whole. In each of the ASSRs, the content of cultural policy at various times stressed the divisions between local populations and related groups across the international border and at other times underscored the basic commonalties of language and culture between the two. The focus, however, was largely the same: the effort to use nationalities policy and nation-building as tools of foreign policy, thus countering the claims of ‘bourgeois nationalists’ in neighboring states on their own terms.” King, The Moldovans , p. 55.Google Scholar
159. “To understand this dramatic shift from ethnic proliferation to ethnic cleansing, three further factors must be considered: Soviet xenophobia, the category of the border regions, and the politics surrounding immigration and emigration.” Martin, Affirmative Action Empire , p. 313.Google Scholar
160. “In the Baltic republics and those along the USSR's western or southern tiers, the possibility of special relations with kindred states and authorities outside the Soviet Union—Sweden, Finland, Turkey, Iran, the European Community, and NATO—offered political leverage and economic opportunity the Soviet Union itself was decreasingly capable of providing.” McAdam et al., Dynamics of Contention , p. 250. See also O. Akintola-Bello, “The Political Economy of Artificial Boundaries,” in A. I. Asiwaju and P. O. Adeniyi, eds, Borderlands in Africa (Lagos: University of Lagos Press, 1989), p. 336; Vaclav Lamser, “A Sociological Approach to Soviet Nationality Problems,” in Edward All worth, ed., Soviet Nationality Problems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), p. 207.Google Scholar
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162. By 1995, 61% of all private businesses in Karelia were joint ventures with Finnish entrepreneurs, since Karelia has found new markets for its timber and other industries. Nevalainen, “Kareliya posle 1917 goda,” p. 301. Indeed, Karelia consistently ranks among the highest regions of the Russian Federation in terms of hard-currency export earnings as well as general income indexes. Douglas Sutherland and Philip Hanson, “Structural Changes in the Economies of Russia's Regions,” Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 48, No. 3, 1996, pp. 382–383; Bert Van Selm, “Economic Performance in Russia's Regions,” Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 50, No. 4, 1998, p. 612. Perhaps as a result of these developments, Karelia has been a staunch defender of political and economic reform: consistently voting for progressive over anti-reformist parties in national elections. Darrell Slider, Vladimir Gimpel'son, and Sergei Chugrov, “Political Tendencies in Russia's Regions: Evidence from the 1993 Parliamentary Elections,” Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 3, 1994, pp. 718–722.Google Scholar
163. This body of work is exemplified by Benedict Anderson's discussion of the nation as, at root, an “imagined community.” Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism , 2nd edn (New York: Verso, 1991).Google Scholar
164. Furthermore, the ability of the state to manipulate such identities supports notions of state autonomy and capacity distinct from the society in which it is embedded. See Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back in: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds, Bringing the State Back in (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 9–20.Google Scholar
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