This is a revised version of a paper first presented at the National Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in Pittsburgh, in 2002 and later at the Colloquium of the Institut fur Osteuropaische Geschichte und Landeskunde, Universitat Tubingen in June 2004. I appreciate the responses of the participants there. I also thank Barry Blitstein, David Brandenberger, Adrienne Edgar, Natasha Gray, Amy Randall, Monica Rico, and Jonathan Zatlin. Comments of two anonymous reviewers for Slavic lieview helped significantly in clarifying the argument and, especially, the claims about African history.

1. Perham, Margery, Native Administration in Nigeria (London, 1937), 89 Google Scholar. For a brief biography of Perham, see Louis, William Roger, “Historians I Have Known,” Perspectives 39, no. 5 (May 2001): 16–17 Google Scholar. Her influence over colonial policy is examined in Smith, Alison and Bull, Mary, eds., Margery Perham and British Rule in Africa (Totowa, N.J., 1991)Google Scholar.

2. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI), f. m-1 op. 2, d. 134, 11. 48–49 (Stenographic Record of the Fifth Plenum of the Komsomol Central Committee, First Session, 16 February 1938, Remarks of Secretary Rassudov).

3. Martin, Terry, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, 2001), 443 Google Scholar.

4. Note the photograph of him in traditional Buriat clothing, dated 1936, in Volkogonov, Dmitrii, Triumf i tragediia: Politicheskii portret I. V. Stalina, vol. 1, pt. 2 (Moscow, 1989)Google Scholar.

5. On the significance of clothing as a marker of status and authority, see Martin, Phyllis M., “Contesting Clothes in Colonial Brazzaville,” Journal of African History 35 (1994): 401-26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Kotkin, Stephen, “Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjuncture,” Kritika 2, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 114, 151CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the potential value of such comparisons, see also Martin, Terry, “The Soviet Union as Empire: Salvaging a Dubious Analytical Category,” Ab Imperio, no. 2 (2002): 104 Google Scholar.

7. For example, Rudolph, Richard L. and Good, David F., eds., Nationalism and Empire: The Habsburg Empire and the Soviet Union (New York, 1992)Google Scholar; Barkey, Karen and von Hagen, Mark, eds., After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building. The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires (Boulder, Colo., 1997)Google Scholar; Dawisha, Karen and Parrott, Bruce, eds., The End of Empire? The Transformation of the USSR in Comparative Perspective (Armonk, N.Y., 1997)Google Scholar; and Lieven, Dominic, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (New Haven, 2001)Google Scholar. Of these works, Lieven alone extends his reach to the European colonial empires.

8. Skocpol, Theda, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge, Eng., 1979), 23, 288CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. A valuable synchronic comparative study is Roshwald, Aviel, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, 1914–1923 (London, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The work of Peter Holquist and David Hoffmann, who have examined the interwar Soviet Union in a “pan-European context” has also inspired my approach here: Peter Holquist, “‘Information Is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work’: Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Context,” Journal of Modern History 69, no. 3 (September 1997): 415–50; Hoffmann, David L., “Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in Its Pan-European Context,” Journal of Social History 34, no. 1 (Fall 2000): 35–54 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. Kotkin, “Modern Times,” 113.

11. On Soviet nationality policy in the interwar period, see Slezkine, Yuri, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 414-52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Suny, Ronald Grigor, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, 1993)Google Scholar; and Martin, Affirmative Action Empire. Important regional studies of interwar nationality policy include: Edgar, Adrienne, Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan (Princeton, 2004)Google Scholar; Liber, George O., Soviet Nationality Policy, Urban Growth, and Identity Change in the Ukrainian SSR, 1923–1934 (Cambridge, Eng., 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. The very process of identifying, classifying, and bounding was complex and contentious. See Hirsch, Francine, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, 2005)Google Scholar.

13. Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment,” 425.

14. Suny, Revenge of the Past, 160. The standard account of the formation of the Soviet Union can be found in Pipes, Richard, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism arid Nationalism, 1917–1923, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1964)Google Scholar. Works that operate in the same tradition include Stephen Blank, The Sorcerer as Apprentice: Stalin as Commissar of Nationalities, 1917–1924 (Westport, Conn., 1994) and Hélène Carrere d'Encausse, The Great Challenge: Nationalities and the Bolshevik State, 1917–1930, trans. Nancy Festinger (New York, 1992). Jeremy Smith's work balances and updates Pipes's account with archival sources: Smith, Jeremy, The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917–1923 (New York, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment,” 414.

16. Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 3, 15, 18.

17. Hirsch, Francine, “Toward an Empire of Nations: Border-Making and the Formation of Soviet National Identities,” Russian Review 59, no. 2 (April 2000): 202-3, 224–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hirsch, Empire of Nations, 4–5.

18. One could include Greece, Albania, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in this category as well; I exclude them for reasons of space and because, with the exception of Greece, their commitments to minority protection were voluntary guarantees. See Fink, Carole, Defending the Rights ofOthers: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (Cambridge, Eng., 2004), 278 Google Scholar.

19. The very idea of a “genuine” nation-state is, arguably, a Utopia. Regardless, it has been a longstanding principle in the study of nationalism that genuine nation-states have been few and far between. A classic statement is Connor, Walker, “Nation-Building or Nation-Destroying?” World Politics 24 (1972): 319-55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20. On the drafting of the minorities treaties, see Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, chaps. 4–9; Macartney, C. A., National States and National Minorities (London, 1934), 212–72Google Scholar; and Levene, Mark, “Nationalism and Its Alternatives in the International Arena: The Jewish Question at Paris, 1919,” Journal of Contemporary History 28 (1993): 511-31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21. Link, Arthur S., ed. and trans., The Deliberations of the Council of Four (March 24–June 28, 1919): Notes of the Official Interpreter, Paul Mantoux (Princeton, 1992), ii, 312 Google Scholar.

22. “The Committee on New States, Second Report” (13 May 1919), in Link, Arthur S., ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, 1988), 59:182 Google Scholar.

23. Jewish organizations had proposed separate, proportional representation for Jews and other minorities in the Polish Sejm. Two exceptions to the bias against political autonomy were sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, in Czechoslovakia, and East Galicia, in Poland. The fate of these territories is discussed below.

24. See Article 9 of the Polish minorities treaty in Augustinos, Gerasimos, ed., The National Idea in Eastern Europe: The Politics of Ethnic and Civic Community (Lexington, Mass., 1996), 34 Google Scholar. For the debate, see Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, 254; Macartney, National States and National Minorities, 283.

25. Link, ed., Deliberations of the Council of Four, 526.

26. “Preliminary Peace Conference, Protocol No. 8, Plenary Session of May 31, 1919,” United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, The Paris Peace Conference, 1919, 13 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1942–1947), 3:406.

27. On peaceful integration as the Allies’ principal concern, see Macartney, National States and National Minorities, 274–79. British official attitudes toward minority protection were especially important in pushing the Allied leaders in this direction; see Rossos, Andrew, “The British Foreign Office and Macedonian National Identity, 1918–1941,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 369-94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Finney, Patrick B., “‘An Evil for All Concerned’: Great Britain and Minority Protection after 1919,” Journal of Contemporary History 30, no. 3 (July 1995): 533-51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28. Macartney, National States and National Minorities, 157–75; Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, chap. 1. Representatives of the great powers relied upon this precedent when responding to the complaints of the new states. See United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, The Paris Peace Conference, 1919, 6:571.

29. For the workings of this system, see Macartney, National States and National Minorities, 297–419; Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, chaps. 9–10; Mair, L. P., The Protection of Minorities: The Working and Scope of the Minorities Treaties under the League of Nations (London, 1928)Google Scholar; de Azcárate, Pablo, League of Nations and National Minorities: An Experiment, trans. Brooke, Eileen E. (Washington, D.C., 1945)Google Scholar.

30. Azcárate, League of Nations and National Minorities, 14. Azcárate first served on the staff and then as director of the minorities section of the League Secretariat in the 1920s and 1930s.

31. Ibid., 88–89.

32. Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, 282.

33. On the idea of national revolution, see Berend, Ivan T., Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe before World War II (Berkeley, 1998), 145-84Google Scholar. Irina Livezeanu also notes that “the unification of the Romanian lands in 1918 constituted a national revolution.” Livezeanu, Irina, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930 (Ithaca, 1995), 7 Google Scholar.

34. Brubaker, Rogers, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge, Eng., 1996), 57, 63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35. Brubaker groups these tasks together under the general rubric of “nationalizing” practices; for comparative purposes it is useful to distinguish among them. I use the term indigenization of the political and economic elite in this context to highlight its similarity to Soviet nationality policy, though, as I argue below, its ultimate aim was different.

36. In Romania, young nationalist radicals “and their more moderate, more conservative elders shared … the idea of using the state for the Romanian nation, not for a society of equal citizens, and a commitment to creating an ethnic Romanian elite large enough to administer the expanded state and pure enough to do it in the Romanian way.” Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania, 304. In Poland, despite initial differences on the contours of nationhood, the socialist left and the national democratic right ultimately agreed on the nationalizing stance. After the 1926 coup, Józef Piłsudski's regime accepted similar discriminatory policies toward Jews. See Mendelsohn, Ezra, Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars (Bloomington, 1983), 39 Google Scholar.

37. Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania, 100, 130–35.

38. Cited in Sayer, Derek, The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton, 1998), 174-75Google Scholar.

39. There were very strong correlations between ethnic identity and voting, for example. Lampe, John R., Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country (Cambridge, Eng., 1996), 157 Google Scholar. More generally, see Banac, Ivo, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca, 1984)Google Scholar.

40. Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, 97–103.

41. Polonsky, Antony, Politics in Independent Poland, 1921–1939: The Crisis of Constitutional Government (Oxford, 1972), 51–52 Google Scholar; Korzec, Pawel, “The Minority Problem of Poland, 1919–1939,” in Vilfan, Sergij, ed., Ethnic Groups and Language Rights (New York, 1993), 207 Google Scholar. On the debate among the powers regarding whether East Galicia should be subordinated to Poland, see Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, 255. The debate is reproduced in United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, The Paris Peace Conference, 1919, 4:847–55. France supported her ally Poland against ineffectual British opposition.

42. Polonsky, Politics in Independent Poland, 141. On German wartime occupation policies, see the remarkable study by Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge, Eng., 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43. Korzec, “Minority Problem of Poland,” 208–9; Polonsky, Politics in Independent Poland, 142. In general, see Tomiak, Janusz, “Education of the Non-Dominant Ethnic Groups in the Polish Republic, 1918–1939,” in Tomiak, Janusz, ed., Schooling, Educational Policy and Ethnic Identity (New York, 1991), 185–209 Google Scholar.

44. Polonsky, Politics in Independent Poland, 217. See also Mair, Protection of Minorities, 92; Azcárate, League of Nations and National Minorities, 147; von Frentz, Christian Raitz, A Lesson Forgotten: Minority Protection under the League of Nations. The Case of the German Minority in Poland, 1920–1934 (New York, 1999)Google Scholar.

45. Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania, 65.

46. Article 9 of the treaty did not apply to territories added to Serbia before 1 January 1913. See the text of the treaty in Temperley, H. M. V., ed., A History of the Peace Conference of Paris (London, 1921), 5:451 Google Scholar.

47. Macartney, National States and National Minorities, 251; Banac, National Question in Yugoslavia, 319–21; Malcolm, Noel, Kosovo: A Short History (New York, 1998), 267 Google Scholar.

48. On “ghetto benches,” see Mendelsohn, Jews of East Central Europe between the World. Wars, 73; Polonsky, Politics in Independent Poland, 467. On the proportion of Jewish university students, see Hagen, William W., “Before the ‘Final Solution’: Toward a Comparative Analysis of Political Anti-Semitism in Interwar Germany and Poland,” Journal of Modern History 68, no. 2 (June 1996): 372 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the Romanian example, see Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania, 269.

49. Wolfgang Miner, “German Schools in Czechoslovakia, 1918–1938,” in Tomiak, ed., Schooling, Educational Policy and Ethnic Identity, 211–32.

50. Macartney, C. A., Hungary and Her Successors: The Treaty of Trianon and Its Consequences, 1919–1937 (London, 1937), 233 Google Scholar. For the population figures, see Rothschild, Joseph, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Seattle, 1974), 89 Google Scholar.

51. See figures for 1935 in Macartney, Hungary and Her Successors, 225.

52. Miller, Daniel E., “Colonizing the Hungarian and German Border Areas during the Czechoslovak Land Reform, 1918–1938,” Austrian History Yearbook 34 (2003): 303-17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53. Macartney, Hungary and Her Successors, 156.

54. Banac, National Question in Yugoslavia, 299–300, 320; Lampe, Yugoslavia as History, 146–48; Malcolm, Kosovo, 278–80.

55. Macartney, National States and National Minorities, chap. 12.

56. Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 16.

57. Of course, in the process of determining which communities could be “nations” and which “ethnic minorities,” the regime and its expert anthropologists left some possibilities out. Some small peoples never made it to the official list of groups; as Francine Hirsch argues, “from the start Soviet policies were oriented toward the amalgamation of ethnohistorical groups.” Hirsch, Empire of Nations, 9–10n21, and chap. 3 (emphasis in the original). No less important, in certain republics and regions the local Russian minority could be subject to nationalization as Ukrainians, though this was a very short-lived possibility, limited to the late 1920s. See Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 282–91.

58. As the prime minister of Romania, Ion Bratianu, complained, establishing the minority treaties created two different classes of membership in the League of Nations itself. “Preliminary Peace Conference Protocol, No. 8, Plenary Session of May 31, 1919,” 3:400. Efforts to universalize the minority protection regime failed twice in the League Council. Azcárate, League of Nations and National Minorities, 26.

59. My thinking on colonial rule in Africa has been especially influenced by the work of Mahmood Mamdani and Crawford Young. See Mamdani, Mahmood, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, 1996)Google Scholar; Mamdani, Mahmood, “Historicizing Power and Responses to Power: Indirect Rule and Its Reform,” Social Research 66, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 859-86Google ScholarPubMed; Young, Crawford, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven, 1994)Google Scholar. Overviews of British indirect rule include: Cell, John W., “Colonial Rule,” in Brown, Judith M. and Louis, William Roger, eds., The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume IV: The Twentieth Century (New York, 1999)Google Scholar; Crowder, Michael, “Indirect Rule—French and British Style,” in Collins, Robert O., ed., Historical Problems of Imperial Africa (Princeton, 1994)Google Scholar; Iliffe, John, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge, Eng., 1979), 318-41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Low, D. A. and Pratt, R. C., Buganda and British Overrule, 1900–1955 (London, 1960)Google Scholar; Perham, Margery, Lugard: The Years of Authority, 1898–1945 (London, 1960), chaps. 7–8Google Scholar. On “association,” see Betts, Raymond F., Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890–1914 (New York, 1961)Google Scholar; Conklin, Alice L., A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford, 1997)Google Scholar. For a concise statement of the purpose of indirect rule by one of its principal advocates, see Perham, Margery, “Some Problems of Indirect Rule in Africa,” Journal of the Royal African Society 34, no. 135 (1934): 1–23 Google Scholar.

60. Cooper, Frederick, Decolonization and African Society: ‘The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, Eng., 1996), 11 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61. Low and Pratt, Buganda and British Overrule, 163–64; Burroughs, Peter, “Imperial Institutions and the Government of Empire,” in Porter, Andrew, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume HI: The Nineteenth Century (New York, 1999), 196 Google Scholar; Young, African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective, 107.

62. Benton, Lauren A., Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, Eng., 2002), 6, 127-66Google Scholar.

63. Spear, Thomas, “Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa,” Journal of African History 44, no. 1 (2003): 16 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On key differences between the British and French approaches, see Crowder, Michael, West Africa under Colonial Rule (Evanston, 1968)Google Scholar; Crowder, “Indirect Rule—French and British Style.” Spear's article is an excellent survey of the debates among Africanists about the extent to which Europeans “invented” tribes and chiefs in this period. For the classic statement, see Vail, Leroy, ed., The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Berkeley, 1989)Google Scholar.

64. British theorists, such as Perham, saw important connections between Malinowski's anthropology, with its concern for maintaining the integrity of African culture in the face of contact with Europeans, and the principles of indirect rule. Anthropologists could allegedly correct the initial mistakes of colonial officials in identifying traditional customs and chiefs. Lucy Mair, one of Malinowski's followers, agreed with her. In practice, however, as Henrika Kuklick points out, colonial administrators on the ground were often suspicious of anthropologists. By the 1930s, French colonial officials were much more likely to have been trained in anthropological thinking than British ones. Kuklick, Henrika, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 (Cambridge, Eng., 1991), 204 Google Scholar; Mair, L. P., “Colonial Administration as Science,” Journal ofthe Royal African Society 32, no. 129 (1933): 367 Google Scholar; Perham, “Some Problems of Indirect Rule in Africa,” 8–10. For retrospective defenses of this aspect of indirect rule, see Gellner, Ernest, “The Political Thought of Bronislaw Malinowski,” Current Anthropology 28, no. 4 (August 1987): 557-59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mair, Lucy, “Anthropology and Colonial Policy,” African Affairs 74, no. 295 (1975): 191-95CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the growing importance of anthropology for French colonial rulers, see Conklin, Mission to Civilize, 196–98; Wilder, Gary, “Colonial Ethnology and Political Rationality in French West Africa,” History and Anthropology 14, no. 3 (September 2003): 219-52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65. Quoted in Iliffe, Modern History of Tanganyika, 320. See also SirCameron, Donald, The Principles of Native Administration and Their Application (Lagos, 1934)Google Scholar.

66. Conklin, Mission to Civilize, 164. See chapter 6 of Conklin's book for the relationship between association and the civilizing mission, as well as Genova, James E., “Conflicted Missionaries: Power and Identity in French West Africa during the 1930s,” The Historian 66, no. 1 (2004): 45–66 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, 6.

68. Flint, John, “Planned Decolonization and Its Failure in British Africa,” African Affairs 82, no. 328 (1983): 394 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69. French efforts at conscription of Africans led to widespread revolt. See Conklin, Mission to Civilize, 143–51.

70. Cell, “Colonial Rule,” 249.

71. Conklin, Mission to Civilize, 253.

72. Advisory Committee on Native Education in the British Tropical African Dependencies, “Education Policy in British Tropical Africa,” in Cowan, L. Gray, O'Connell, James, and Scanlon, David G., eds., Education and Nation-Building in Africa (New York, 1965), 46 Google Scholar.

73. Lugard, Lord, “Education and Race Relations,” Journal of the Royal African Society 32, no. 126 (1933): 5 Google Scholar.

74. Kelly, Gail P., “The Presentation of Indigenous Society in the Schools of French West Africa and Indochina, 1918–1938,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26, no. 3 (July 1984): 525 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75. Prosser Gifford and Weiskel, Timothy C., “African Education in a Colonial Context: French and British Styles,” in Gifford, Prosser and Louis, William Roger, eds., France and Britain in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule (New Haven, 1971), 675 Google Scholar; Chafer, Tony, “Teaching Africans to Be French? France's ‘Civilizing Mission’ and the Establishment of a Public Education System in French West Africa, 1903–1930,” Africa 56, no. 2 (2001): 190–209 Google Scholar. Schools in British colonies often used vernaculars as the medium of instruction, at least in the primary grades. Hailey, Lord, An African Survey (London, 1938), 1257-59Google Scholar.

76. Genova, “Conflicted Missionaries.”

77. Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, 56.

78. Ibid., 23, 169.

79. On the idea of the peasant strategy of development, see Phillips, Anne, The Enigma of Colonialism: British Policy in West Africa (Bloomington, 1989)Google Scholar; Dimier, Véronique, “For a Republic ‘Diverse and Indivisible’? France's Experience from the Colonial Past,” Contemporary European History 13, no. 1 (February 2004): 53–55 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilder, “Colonial Ethnology and Political Rationality in French West Africa,” 235.

80. Phillips, Enigma of Colonialism, 139; Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, chap. 3.

81. Lugard, Lord, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, 5th ed. (1922; Hamden, Conn., 1965), 211 Google Scholar.

82. SirCameron, Donald, “Native Administration in Tanganyika and Nigeria,” Journal of the Royal African Society 36, no. 145 (1937): 5 Google Scholar.

83. On these issues, see Peter A. Blitstein, “Stalin's Nations: Soviet Nationality Policy between Planning and Primordialism, 1936–1953” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1999), chap. 5.

84. As John Flint describes the British case, “The emergence of ‘classes,’ whether bourgeois or proletarian, betokened a failure of policy.” Flint, “Planned Decolonization and Its Failure in British Africa,” 394.

85. Lieven, Empire, 313.

86. Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 344–431. See also Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment,” 441.

87. Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, 179.

88. Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 244, 319–25. See also Ken, O. N. and Rupasov, A. I., Polilbiuro Tsk VKP(b) i otnosluniia SSSR s zapadnymi sosednimi gosudarstvami (konets 1920—1930-khgg.) (St. Petersburg, 2000), 508-14Google Scholar. Many Poles and Germans sought to emigrate to their eponymous homelands.

89. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 114, d. 633, 11. 3–4 (“O likvidatsii natsional'nykh raionov i sel'sovetov,” Protocol 75/6 of the Orgburo, 1 December 1937); RGASPI, f. 17, op. 114, d. 633, 1. 4 (“O natsional'nykh shkolakh,” Protocol 75/7 of the Orgburo, 1 December 1937).

90. N. Okhotin and A. Roginskii, “Iz istorii ‘nemetskoi operatsii’ NKVD 1937–1938 gg.,” in Shcherbakova, I. L., ed., Nakazannyi narod (Moscow, 1999)Google Scholar; N. Y Petrov and A. B. Roginskii, ““Pol'skaia operatsiia NKVD 1937–1938 gg.,” in A. E. Gur'ianov, ed., Repressii protiv poliakov i pol'skikh grazhdan (Moscow, 1997).

91. On this question see Blitstein, “Stalin's Nations,” 164–67. Nor were schools operating in Yiddish abolished at this point.

92. I examine this decision in detail in Blitstein, Peter A., “Nation-Building or Russification? Obligatory Russian Instruction in the Soviet Non-Russian School, 1938–1953,” in Suny, Ronald Grigor and Martin, Terry, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation- Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (New York, 2001), 253-74Google Scholar.

93. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 628, 11. 121–22 (12 October 1937).

94. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 997, 1. 103.

95. Stalin first formulated the idea of “socialist nations” in Natsional'nyi vopros i Leninizm, in Sochineniia (Moscow, 1949), 11:333–55. Dated 18 March 1929, the piece was presented as a response to letters inquiring into the fate of nations under socialism. On “Stalinist primordialism,” see Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 442–51, and Slezkine, Yuri, “N. Ia. Marr and the National Origins of Soviet Ethnogenetics,” Slavic Review 55, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 826-61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

96. A useful survey is Cooper, Frederick, Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (New York, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Hargreaves, John D., Decolonization in Africa (London, 1988)Google Scholar; Chafer, Tony, The End of Empire in French West Africa: France's Successful Decolonization? (Oxford, 2002)Google Scholar.

97. I do not claim that Soviet nationality policy was a precursor to these colonial policies. But the logic of managing cultural diversity in modern conditions certainly offered limited options, and in choosing the available alternative, colonial powers moved in the direction of the Soviet approach.

98. For a fascinating discussion of the debate on the formation of the French Union, sec Dimier, “For a Republic ‘Diverse and Indivisible’?”

99. Cooper, Africa since 1940, 77–80.

100. Deák, István, “How to Construct a Productive, Disciplined, Monoethnic Society: The Dilemma of East Central European Governments, 1914–1956,” in Weiner, Amir, ed., Landscaping the Human Garden: 20th Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework (Stanford, 2003) , 206 Google Scholar.

101. Kirk-Greene, A. H. M., “Introduction,” in Kirk-Greene, A. H. M., ed., The, Principles of Native Administration in Nigeria: Selected Documents, 1900–1947 (London, 1965), 18 Google Scholar.

102. Lord Lugard, “Lugard's Political Memoranda (1918),” in Kirk-Greene, ed.,Principles oj Native Administration in Nigeria, 76.

103. Stalin, Sochinmiia, 11:348.

104. Margery Perham, Foreword, in Kirk-Greene, ed., The Principles of Native Administration in Nigeria, xii.

105. Slezkine, Yuri, “Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Socialism,” Russian Review 59, no. 2 (April 2000): 231 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Payne, Matthew J., “The Forge of the Kazakh Proletariat? The Turksib, Nativization, and Industrialization during Stalin's First Five-Year Plan,” in Suny, and Martin, , eds., A State of Nations, 223-52Google Scholar.

106. RGASPI, f. m-1, op. 2, d. 134, 11. 48–49.

107. Michaels, Paula, Curative Powers: Medicine and Empire in Stalin's Central Asia (Pittsburgh, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Northrop, Douglas, Veiled, Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, 2004)Google Scholar. An older, less sophisticated, literature took a similar approach; e.g., Kolarz, Walter, Russia and Her Colonies (New York, 1953)Google Scholar.

108. Kotkin, “Modern Times,” 152.