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“Sovietology in One Country” or Comparative Nationality Studies?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Alexander J. Motyl
Alexander J. Motyl*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Extract

Stalin must have known better. A non-Russian and the author of Marxism and the National Question, he was surely aware that his slogan of “socialism in one country“ obscured the USSR's profoundly multinational character. To the degree that he really built socialism, Stalin clearly did so not in one country but in many simultaneously. Indeed, not only did the Soviet republics lend one another what Soviet propagandists like to call disinterested proletarian assistance, but some, such as Kazakhstan, the Ukraine, and the countries of Central Asia, may have served as the involuntary base for the “primitive accumulation of capital” as well.

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Notes and Comments
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , Spring 1989 , pp. 83 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1989

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References

1. See Gouldner, Alvin, “Stalinism: A Study of Internal Colonialism,” Telos, no. 34 (Winter 1977): 5–48 Google Scholar; P. Bernstein, Thomas, “Stalinism, Famine, and Chinese Peasants,” Theory and Society, no. 3 (May1984): 339–377.Google Scholar

2. Robert F. Byrnes, “USA: Work at the Universities,” Survey, no. 50 (January 1964): 65.

3. See Hough, Jerry F. and Fainsod, Merle, How the Soviet Union Is Governed (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1979 Google Scholar; Kerblay, Basile, Modern Soviet Society (New York: Pantheon, 1983 Google Scholar; Daniels, Robert V., Russia. The Roots of Confrontation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985 Google Scholar; Lane, David, Politics and Society in the USSR, 2nd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Meyer, Alfred G., The Soviet Political System (New York: Random House, 1965 Google Scholar.

4. See Allworth, Edward, ed., Central Asia. A Century of Russian Rule (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1967 Google Scholar; Misiunas, Romuald J. and Taagepera, Rein, The Baltic States. Years of Dependence, 1940–1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983 Google Scholar; Lubachko, Ivan S., Belorussia under Soviet Rule, 1917–1957 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1972 Google Scholar; Mace, James E., Communism and the Dilemmasof National Liberation. National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918–1933 (Cambridge: HarvardUkrainian Research Institute, 1983 Google Scholar; Gitelman, Zvi, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: The Jewish Sectionsof the CPSU, 1917–1930 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Krawchenko, Bohdan, Social Change and National Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Ukraine (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lewytzkyj, Borys, Politics and Society in Soviet Ukraine, 1953–1980 (Edmonton: Canadian Instituteof Ukrainian Studies, 1984 Google Scholar.

5. See Voslensky, Michael, Nomenklatura. Die herrschende Klasse der Sowjetunion (Vienna: FritzMolden, 1980 Google Scholar; McAuley, Mary, Politics and the Soviet Union (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1977)Google Scholar; Conquest, Robert, Power and Policy in the U.S.S.R. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1961)Google Scholar; Barghoorn, Frederick C., Politics in the USSR (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966)Google Scholar; Friedgut, Theodore H., Political Participationin the USSR (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979)Google Scholar. Remarkably, Zwick's, Peter NationalCommunism (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1983)Google Scholar fits into this category as well. Mary McAuley, fortunately, does know better. See her excellent essay, “Nationalism and the Soviet Multi-ethnic State,” in Harding, Neil, ed., The State in Socialist Society (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984, pp. 179–210 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. There are some notable exceptions to these generalizations. Students of language, demography, and geography have done excellent cross-regional work. Although their research interests generally are notdirectly historical and political, their appreciation of the multinational factor should inspire historians andpolitical scientists. See Glyn Lewis, E., Multilingualism in the Soviet Union (The Hague: Mouton, 1972 Google Scholar; Barbara A. Anderson and Brian D. Silver, “Equality, Efficiency, and Politics in Soviet Bilingual EducationPolicy: 1934–1980,” American Political Science Review, December 1984, 1019–1039; Brian D. Silver, “Social Mobilization and the Russification of Soviet Nationalities,” American Political Science Review, March 1974, 45–66; Lewis, Robert A. and Rowland, Richard H., Population Redistribution in the USSR (New York: Praeger, 1979 Google Scholar; Bahry, Donna and Nechemias, Carol, “Half Full or Half Empty?: The Debateover Soviet Regional Equality,” Slavic Review 40 (Fall 1981): 366—383 Google Scholar; Ellen Jones and Fred W. Grupp, “Modernisation and Ethnic Equalisation in the USSR,” Soviet Studies, April 1984, 159–184.Within political science, Bialer's, Seweryn Stalin's Successors: Leadership, Stability, and Change inthe Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980 Google Scholar, Hodnett's, Grey Leadership in the SovietNational Republics (Oakville, Ont.: Mosaic, 1980)Google Scholar, Hough's, Jerry F. The Soviet Prefects (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1969 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Bahry's, Donna Outside Moscow. Power, Politics, and Budgetary Policy in theSoviet Republics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987 Google Scholar, Mark Beissinger's “Ethnicity, the Personnel Weapon, and Neoimperial Integration: Ukrainian and RSFSR Provincial Party Officials Compared,” Studiesin Comparative Communism, Spring 1988, 71–85, and Breslauer's, George W. “Provincial Party Leaders'Demand Articulation and the Nature of Center-Periphery Relations in the USSR,” Slavic Review, 45 (Winter 1986): 650–672 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, all integrate issues involving the republics into their analyses. In history, Robert Conquestskillfully interweaves central and peripheral developments in The Great Terror (New York: Collier, 1973).See also Azrael, Jeremy, “The ‘Nationality Problem’ in the USSR: Domestic Pressures and Foreign PolicyConstraints,” in Bialer, Seweryn, ed.,The Domestic Context of Soviet Foreign Policy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1981), 139–153 Google Scholar.

7. See Fitzpatrick, Sheila, The Russian Revolution, 1917–1932 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984 Google Scholar; Lewin, Moshe, The Making of the Soviet System (New York: Pantheon, 1985, 151–156 Google Scholar; Conquest, Robert, The Harvest of Sorrow. Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1986 Google Scholar; James E. Mace, “Famine and Nationalism in Soviet Ukraine,” Problems of Communism, May-June 1984, 37–50. See also the Commission on the Ukraine Famine, Report to Congress, Investigation ofthe Ukrainian Famine 1932–1933 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1988).This unfortunate state of affairs is painfully evident in the recent discussion in The Russian Review ofFitzpatrick's “revisionist manifesto.” Not one of the participants—neither Fitzpatrick herself nor her critics Stephen F. Cohen, Geoff Eley, Peter Kenez, or Alfred G. Meyer—devotes any attention whatsoever to thenon-Russian role in social history. It is particularly distressing that Fitzpatrick's proposed research agendahas nothing to say about the ethnic variety in Soviet society and the regional disparities in social, economic, and cultural developments in the 1920s and 1930s. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, “New Perspectives on Stalinism “;Stephen F. Cohen, “Stalin's Terror as Social History “; Geoff Eley, “History With the Politics Left Out—Again? “; Peter Kenez, “Stalinism as Humdrum Politics “; G. Meyer, Alfred, “Coming to Terms with thePast … And with One's Older Colleagues,” The Russian Review 45 (1986): 357–408.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. Arch Getty, J., Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; W. Thurston, Robert, “Fear and Belief in the USSR's'Great Terror': Response to Arrest, 1935–1939,” Slavic Review 45 (Summer 1986): 213–234 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. This is not the place to discuss the totalitarian model. Suffice to say that what passed and stillpasses for this “model” in Sovietological circles is merely a set of descriptive statements applicable only, if at all, to the Stalinist USSR. See Frederic J. Fleron, Jr., “Soviet Area Studies and the Social Sciences: SomeMethodological Problems in Communist Studies,” Soviet Studies. January 1968, 313–339. Unfortunately, Juan Linz's sophisticated and analytically suggestive work on totalitarianism appears to have had little effecton Sovietology (“Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes” in Fred Greenstein and Nelson Polsby, eds., Handbook of Political Science [Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975], 3: 175–411).

10. For a prime example of this approach, see Kolarz, Walter, Russia and Her Colonies (New York: Praeger, 1952 Google Scholar.

11. The objection that the republics are not fully sovereign state actors is besides the point and reflectsonly a lingering preference for large units of analysis. States need not be fully sovereign—and most contemporarystates are not—to be interesting and analytically suggestive. Indeed, this very fact has prompted somefascinating work among the dependency, internal colonialism, and imperialism theorists. Neither must statesbe major world actors for a comparison of them to generate hypotheses that are potentially applicable to abroader range of political actors. Katzenstein's, Peter excellent work, Small States in World Markets (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, which examines western Europe's minor states from the perspectiveof their adaptation to the constraints of the international economic system, can serve as a model for Sovietologistsinterested in comparing republics.