For the rest of the Soviet population, the war meant a number of concessions from a regime desperate to mobilise resistance and enthusiasm for the war effort. While suspect nationalities were subjected to deportation, attempts were made to secure the loyalty of others through organisational and propaganda efforts. National units in the Red Army, abolished as recently as 1938, were restored. Particular attention was paid to publicising the part played by some national units in resisting invasion, such as the Kazakh division's role in the defence of Moscow.[262] The national heroes of the various non-Russian peoples, who had been lauded in the i920s and vilified in the i930s, were again restored to favour. National religions, as well as the Russian Orthodox Church, were granted new freedoms to function. The unity and common struggle of the peoples of the Soviet Union were stressed in propaganda, and were symbolised in victory when the Red Army flag was raised over the Reichstag in Berlin in 1945 by an ordinary Russian soldier, M. A. Egorov, together with a Georgian soldier, M. V Kantaria.
However, following the German occupation of Ukraine it had been Russia which supplied most ofthe manpower and industry behind the war effort, and it was the Russian people whose role was glorified above all others in official propaganda, especially in the ever more strident glorification of the heroes of Russia's past. The mood of the war led political leaders and academics so far as to declare open support for Russian nationalism. The emphasis was most famously illustrated in Stalin's well-known toast at the end of the war to 'the health of our Soviet people, and in the first place the Russian people... the most outstanding nation of all the nations forming the Soviet Union'.[263] In the later years of the war, this apparent contradiction between appeals to non-Russian national sentiment and affirmation of the leading role of the Russians was the cause of serious disputes between leading historians in the USSR, a conflict which was ultimately resolved in favour of the pro-Russian line, setting the tone for propaganda and particular interpretations of Russian history for the remainder ofthe Soviet period.[264] In the post-war period, this line was reinforced by official condemnation of what had previously been considered important parts of national culture - the visual arts and epic poetry especially.[265]
Nevertheless, the net effect of wartime propaganda, the brutality of the Nazi occupation and the eventual victory of the Red Army were to provide the concept ofthe Brotherhood ofNations under the leadership ofthe Russians with an effective series of myths that served to promote a deeper sense of Soviet patriotism and affection for the USSR and its leadership than had been possible before the war.
One group of nationalities unable to subscribe to these myths were those that were newly incorporated into the USSR as a direct result of the war. Under the terms of the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939, Nazi Germany recognised the Soviet Union's right to determine the fate of eastern Poland, Bessarabia (eastern Romania), Latvia and Estonia, a sphere of influence that was later extended to include Lithuania. In September-October 1939, the three Baltic republics, which had gained independence in 1918, were forced to accept the stationing of Soviet troops under the pretext of the strategic demands of defence, making it easy for the Soviets to engineer Communist takeovers in the summer of 1940 and formal incorporation into the USSR. In the year before the German invasion, rapid steps were taken towards Sovietisation - nationalisation of industry, confiscation of all bank accounts above a minimal amount, expropriation oflarge estates, new curricula in the schools and universities. The process was completed following the reoccupation of the republics in 1945, culminating in full collectivisation of agriculture by the end of the decade.
Both the occupations of 1940 and the reoccupations of 1945 were followed by deportations on a massive scale. Unlike the other national deportations, these were targeted against specific groups - members of most political parties, army officers, high-ranking civil servants, clergymen, estate owners, anyone with a dubious past as a White or even an expelled Communist, anyone suspected of collaboration with the Nazis and so on. The numbers of those deported or killed was staggering: in 1940,61,000 Estonians, 35,000 Latvians and 39,000 Lithuanians; in i945-6, a further i00,000 Lithuanians, 4i,000 Estonians and 60,000 Latvians.[266] Caught between the twin evils of Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, large numbers took to the forests and formed partisan units which fought against both sides, many of the 'Forest Brethren' holding out until i952. Soviet control over the new territories was reinforced by a deliberate long-term policy of migration of Russians and other Slavs into the republics, causing a substantial demographic shift, especially in Estonia and Latvia. Thus, in Estonia the proportion of Estonians in the overall population fell from 88 per cent in 1939 to 76 per cent in 1950 and 61.5 per cent in 1989.
By annexing the Baltic republics and other territories, Stalin had not only secured a strategic advantage on his borders but had gone a long way towards obtaining for the Soviet Union the same borders that had bounded the Russian Empire. But the long-term costs for the USSR were high. Unlike most of the other nationalities who owed much of their sense of mass national identity to the nation-building period of the 1920s, for Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians, nationhood was linked to the experience of independent statehood between 1918 and 1939. Incorporation into the Soviet Union remained for much of the population an occupationby a foreignpower, and the massive influx of Russians after the war, often into top jobs, only served to further antagonise the locals. Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians never really joined the Brotherhood of Peoples, and it is no coincidence that they played a major part in the events leading to the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In the last years of Stalin's life, the balance of national rights and republican powers established before the war and reinforced during it continued to consolidate. For one group, however, the situation took a dramatic turn for the worse. Before 1917, Jews had suffered more than any other nationality from official government policies, which in their turn spurred on popular anti-Semitism, culminating in a series of massacres or 'pogroms' of Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A renewal of pogroms in the civil war, carried out primarily by anti-Bolsheviks, led thousands ofJews to see the Bolsheviks and the Red Army as their surest source of protection, many of them joining the ranks of the Communist Party, which already counted a number of Jews among its leading members. Jews benefited from the policies of korenizatsiia on top of the removal of former restrictions, and in the 1920s Jewish organisations, culture and Yiddish schools flourished, with an unusually high proportion of Jews going into higher education. As the Jews did not have their own territory, this made them difficult to fit into the overall pattern of Soviet nationality policies that favoured the construction of distinct national regions and republics, a situation which the Soviet government, enthusiastically spurred on by the USSR President Mikhail Kalinin, sought to remedy by creating a Jewish autonomous region in Birobidzhan in the Far East.[267] Some historians, however, have seen the Birobidzhan project as a continuation of tsarist policies whose main aim was to transform Jews from traditional artisan and entrepreneurial occupations into productive agricultural labourers.[268] In any case, Birobidzhan did not attract enough Jewish migrants to act as an effective homeland or cultural centre for Soviet Jews, although at times it succeeded in attracting positive international attention, funds and even immigrants from the Americas. [269]
262
Shirin Akiner,
264
David Brandenberger, '". . . It is imperative to advance Russian nationalism as the first priority": Debates within the Stalinist Ideological Establishment, 1941-1945', in Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (eds.),
265
Ben Fowkes,
266
Aleksandras Shtroma, 'The Baltic States as Soviet Republics: Tensions and Contradictions', in Graham Smith (ed.),
267
Chimen Abramsky, 'The Biro-Bidzhan Project, 1927-1959', in Lionel Kochan (ed.),
268
Robert Weinberg, 'Jews into Peasants? Solving the Jewish Question in Birobidzhan', in Yaacov Ro'i (ed.),
269
Robert Weinberg,