STALIN’S ETHNIC POLICIES
In the 1930s Joseph Stalin laid the foundations of what would result in large numbers of Russians and Russophones residing in territories from the Baltic Sea to Central Asia. The Georgian-born robber-revolutionary turned leader-dictator spent his life trying to be more Russian than the Russians themselves despite his heavy Georgian accent in Russian and his distinctive appearance betraying his Caucasian roots.18 He did not trust the loyalty of the different nationalities of the Soviet Union and in the end sought to eliminate or Russify them. Many of his policies resulted in deporting various nationalities from their native countries into other parts of the Soviet Union and importing Russian workers to create ethnically mixed populations. As American historian Timothy Snyder has argued, Stalin took a different course in ethnic policies from his predecessor Lenin and other Bolsheviks.19 Stalin did not believe in positive discrimination in selecting non-Russians for the project of building the Soviet Union (though he himself had been selected and favored). He was searching for tools to consolidate Soviet society ideologically and find a basis for its common identity. Stalin perceived nationalism, especially in other Soviet nations, to be a threat to Bolshevism.20 Therefore, promoting the Russian language and culture together with the idea of Russians being “first among equals” in a “friendly Soviet family of nations” was meant to create a sense of unity in the Soviet state.
In his quest to strengthen the Soviet empire and his rule, Stalin ordered mass murder and the deportation of many nations (including the Russians) to Soviet labor camps, or the so-called Gulag.21 Already by the end of 1930s, Stalin had a quarter of a million Soviet citizens shot, solely on the grounds of their nationalities.22 Before the Second World War, the labor camps had the dual purpose of providing free labor to contribute to the growth of the Soviet economy and punishing “enemies of the state.”23 As the war approached, Stalin was increasingly concerned with the security of the Soviet Union’s borders. Therefore, ethnic cleansings were carried out to relocate minorities from border regions inward into Russian territories, on the assumption that separation from their homelands would lead to a faster assimilation into Soviet society.24 In their places, other nationalities (often Russians) were brought in.
In the period of 1935 to 1938 at least nine Soviet nationalities suffered ethnic cleansing, and from 1941 to 1948 the total of exiled or resettled people reached an estimated 3.3 million people.25 Before, during, and after the Second World War Poles, Romanians, Volga Germans, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Finns, Crimean Tatars, Crimean Greeks, and other nationalities experienced mass deportations to labor camps. Although motives for cleansing varied (for example, Crimean Tatars allegedly posed a fifth column risk and Chechens were suspected to have separatist aspirations), after such deportations Russian immigration into the newly cleansed territories followed.26 The allegedly deliberate famine in Ukraine of 1933–33, which has been called “the classic example of Soviet genocide,” took around 5 million Ukrainian lives.27 In 1944 more than 190,000 Crimean Tatars were deported from Crimea to Uzbekistan and lost their national autonomy.28 Only 40 percent of the prewar population of Crimean Tatars remained in the peninsula by 1945.29 During the resettlement and industrialization campaign in the Baltic States, Russian workers, military personnel, and (in the 1980s) convicts arrived from other parts of the Soviet Union.30 As a result, the number of Russians in Latvia increased from 10.5 percent in 1935 to 35 percent in 1989 and in Estonia grew from 8 percent in 1934 to 30 percent in 1989.31 Only in Lithuania was the increase much lower, from 3 percent in 1939 to 9 percent in 1989.32 Thus, the Baltic States, Ukraine, Crimea, Central Asian countries, and others were left with mixed ethnic populations and large numbers of Russian minorities. At the same time, the Soviet Union pursued the contradictory national policy of preserving national boundaries of the Soviet republics and trying to create a monolithic Soviet (but Russified) identity. This further contributed to the large populations of Russian-speaking peoples of various ethnicities residing across the territory of the Soviet Union.
Stalin’s rule lasted nearly thirty years, and during those brutal decades he did achieve much that he set out to accomplish. By 1991 when the Soviet Union fell, the former Soviet republics that gained independence were ethnically mixed. Large numbers of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers were concentrated in certain territories in every independent state of the former USSR, and this situation remains largely unchanged until the present day. The Russian Federation that emerged in 1991 inherited this problem and an ideological dilemma. Should the concept of the Russian nation in the new Russian state include the Soviet diaspora? Should the Russian nation be based on civic, ethnic, or imperial concepts? These were the questions that Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin and their advisers would in time have to answer.
THE RUSSIAN NATION AND COMPATRIOTS
The present-day concept of the Russian compatriot both stems from and relates to a broader understanding of the Russian nation. Professor of Russian studies Vera Tolz in her book Russia identifies five distinct conceptions of the Russian nation in the post-Soviet period derived from intellectual debate and political statements.33 The first conception emphasizes the Union (or imperial) identity. It sees the Russians as destined to create and maintain a multinational state. This viewpoint is supported by nationally minded Communists, rhetorical ultranationalists, and Eurasianists. The political project of these people, in its maximal form, is the restoration of the Russian Empire or of the USSR. According to this conceptualization of Russian nationhood, Russian compatriots would include all former citizens of the USSR and their descendants. A second way to conceptualize the Russian nation is to include the entire community of Eastern Slavs: the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians who speak closely related languages and traditionally share the Orthodox Christian faith. This vision of Russian identity could present a narrower notion of Russian compatriots based on religious and cultural affinities. The third conception of the Russian nation inclines instead to a broader vision, including all who use Russian as their first or habitual language, regardless of their ethnicity. This view would lead to a redrawing of Russian borders to include Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Latvia, and Estonia, and most if not all of Belarus. The fourth conception offered by Tolz is racial, including only those who are Russian by blood. This is aimed above all at excluding Jews and peoples from the Caucasus and Central Asia. As these approaches suggest, the range of ways of conceiving the Russian nation includes visions that emphasize ancient historical and religiously rooted prejudices, while other visions emphasize more secular ways of thinking.
The fifth conception of the Russian nation is civic, embracing the citizens of the Russian Federation. Tolz points out that Yeltsin, Putin, and some of their ministers, while in theory committed to this civic definition of the Russian nation, have in practice on many occasions implicitly extended it to ethnic Russians and “Russian-speaking populations” residing in the former Soviet republics, only a few of whom are citizens of the Russian Federation. As scholar of Russia Charles Ziegler notes, the term “compatriot” generally refers to culturally Russified peoples and to ethnic Russians living in the fourteen independent states of the former Soviet Union.34