Greatest controversy surrounded Khrushchev's proposals for educational reform. The theses on education he presented in November 1958 included a provision, Article 19, which affected the status of non-Russian languages.[277]It gave parents the right to decide in which language their children should receive instruction, and gave schools in the republics the option to drop the teaching of a second language. In practice this meant abandoning Lenin's principle that every child should receive instruction in the mother tongue, while also removing the requirement for Russians in the republics to study the local language. The move was opposed by Communist leaders in almost all the republics, who feared that the move would undermine the position of the titular nationality. In Azerbaijan and Latvia, opposition went as far as refusing to implement the provisions of Article 19 in new republican laws on education, leadingto the direct intervention of Moscow and high-level purges in both republics.[278]
The fears of the republic leaders were not immediately realised,[279] but in the longer term there was a substantial decline in the proportion of Ukrainians and Belorussians attending schools in the mother tongue, with Belorussian schools disappearing altogether from the capital Minsk.[280] In the RSFSR itself, mother- tongue education declined dramatically. The number of languages used in schools fell from forty-seven in the early 1960s to seventeen by 1982, twelve of which were taught only as far as the fourth grade. Russian became the standard language of instruction across the North Caucasus.[281] The Russification of schools in Ukraine and Belorussia seems to have been confined mostly to the cities, and so could be explained as a process of natural assimilation rather than a deliberate policy, but for the national minorities of the RSFSR there was a clear policy of linguistic Russification implemented from Khrushchev's time onwards.
Under both Stalin and Khrushchev, republican leaders could consider themselves fortunate to stay in office any longer than a few years. By contrast, one of the central features of Leonid Brezhnev's period of office (1964-82) was the 'stability of cadres'. Nowhere was this policy more apparent than in the union republics. In Estonia, Johannes Kabin was appointed first secretary ofthe Estonian Communist Party by Stalin in 1950, and came close to out-surviving Brezhnev himself before his replacement in 1978, while in Uzbekistan Sharaf Rashidov stayed in his post from 1959 to 1983. The average length of service for a first secretary in a union republic under Brezhnev was eleven years. Similar levels of stability extended to other posts in the republican leaderships, which also tended to become more dominated by members of the titular nationality.[282] Republican leaders did not have a completely free hand, however. Petro Shelest', first secretary in Ukraine from 1963, pursued a policy of promoting Ukrainian culture and identity to an extent that was not acceptable to the leadership and was consequently dismissed in 1972. Although the Shelest' case established that there were limits to the activities of republican leaders, for the most part they were allowed to run their republics without interference from the Centre. Especially in Transcaucasia and Central Asia, a pattern emerged of long-standing leaders building up a personal power base often centred on members oftheir own extended families or clans, and riddled with corruption. Ronald Suny has labelled these ruling elites as 'national mafias'.[283] The new stability was underpinned by a reversion to the principle of 'Brotherhood of Nations' on Brezhnev's part.
For the most part, members of the titular nationality benefited from the patronage of the party bosses. Higher education flourished in the republics. Most non-Russian citizens shared in the general relative prosperity and stability of the Brezhnev years. But national tensions never disappeared entirely. At the day-to-day level, derogatory references to nationality were commonplace in queues, on crowded public transport, at football or basketball matches or in competition over girls and alcohol.50 Mass protests erupted over the announcement of results of competitive university entrance exams in the Kazakh capital Alma Ata, and in Tbilisi over an attempt to introduce Russian as a second official language of Georgia, both in 1978. Meanwhile specific national grievances simmered away. From 1956 onwards, a series of protests, mostly by intellectuals, over the status of Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh and the Prigorodnyi district of North Ossetia prefigured the violent upheavals in these areas in the 1980s and 1990s.51 The Soviet Union's Jews, although spared the extreme official anti-Semitism of the late Stalin years, found that there was little scope for them to practise their religion or culture, leading to a growing movement in favour of emigration to Israel. This right was granted to large numbers between 1971 and 1979, inspired by a thaw in Soviet-US relations, but was denied thereafter, creating a cohort of refuseniks - Jews who had been refused permission to emigrate and faced persecution for applying. By 1968 Crimean Tatars, still denied access to their homeland, had organised an impressive series of petitions with a claimed total of 3,000,000 signatures.
Such examples of popular protest were few and generally small-scale, however. For the most part, national protest was confined to small numbers of intellectuals, who formed an important part of the dissident movement. In the 1960s and 1970s, a flourishing Ukrainian culture circulated in the form of samizdat underground publications, and in 1970 a nationalist journal, Ukrainian Herald, appeared secretly for the first time. An Estonian National Front was set up in 1971, followed by a Lithuanian National Popular Front in 1974. In a more individual act of protest, in 1972 a Lithuanian student set fire to himself in a
50 Rasma Karklins, Ethnic Relations in the USSR (Boston and London: Allen and Unwin, 1986), pp. 68-71.
51 A. A.Tsutsiev, Osetino-Ingushskii konflikt (1992- . . .) ego predistoriia i faktory razvitiia (Moscow: Rosspen, 1998), p. 80; ChristopherJ. Walker, 'The Armenian Presencein Mountainous Karabakh', in John F. R.Wright, Suzanne Goldenberg and Richard Schofield (eds.), Transcaucasian Boundaries (London: UCL Press, 1996), pp. 103-4; Stephen F. Jones, 'Georgia: the Trauma of Statehood', in Ian Bremmer and Ray Taras (eds.), New States, New Politics: Building the Post-Soviet Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 505-43; 510.
public square in Kaunas under a poster proclaiming 'Freedom for Lithuania'. In Georgia as well, underground journals flourished in the i970s. These activities were not ignored by the regime, and participants often faced persecution. Waves of arrests of those suspected of Ukrainian nationalist sympathies were conducted in 1965 and 1972, and in 1979 Moscow announced the execution of three Armenian nationalists who had allegedly been involved in a terrorist explosion on the Moscow underground.[284]
Repressions helped to keep protests in check, while the bulk of the population showed little active interest in the national question. The 'years of stagnation', however, produced a dangerous situation. Most non-Russians enjoyed a relatively privileged position in their republics, could use their mother tongue at school and in public and had controlled access to their national cultures. As a consequence, national identity was strong locally. In the Soviet Union as a whole, however, non-Russians were regarded as second rate; significant career progression depended on a sufficient mastery of Russian language; school books and history texts demeaned their national past; and occasional symbolic and arbitrary interferences from the centre could offend national feelings. This did not matter so much as long as relative economic prosperity and an adequate welfare system persisted, and Moscow could rely on the loyalty of a corrupt and affluent national leadership. Any upset to this delicate balance, however, might have drastic results.
277
George S. Counts,
278
Yaroslav Bilinsky, 'The Soviet Education Laws of 1958-59 and Soviet Nationality Policy',
279
Harry Lipset, 'The Status of National Minority Languages',
280
Kaiser,
282
Ben Fowkes, 'The National Question in the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev: Policy and Response', in Edwin Bacon and Mark Sandle (eds.),
283
Ronald Grigor Suny,