To be sure, the Soviet state actively interfered in nation-building processes. Scholars have shown that the USSR institutionalised nationality as a form, while attempting to drain it of its content. As a result, it created territorial nations with all the symbols of nationhood but bereft of political sovereignty, although Stalin's successors were to discover the fluid border in modern nationalism between form and content.4 The Soviet nativisation programmes during
1 Ralph S. Clem, 'Vitality of the Nationalities in the Soviet West: Background and Implications', in Clem (ed.), The Soviet West: Interplay between Nationality and Social Organization (New York: Praeger, 1975), pp. 3-5.
2 Roman Szporluk, 'Introduction', in Szporluk (ed.), The Influence of East Europe and the Soviet West on the USSR (New York: Praeger, 1975), p. 10.
3 Roman Szporluk, Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 2000).
4 Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 25-7; Yuri Slezkine, 'The
the 1920s made nationalities more articulate, and if Stalinist ideologues managed to undo much of what had been achieved at that time, they never questioned the ethnic distinctiveness of non-Russian peoples. During the post-war period, the non-Russians did not make much progress in their nation-building, but managed to preserve many of their previous accomplishments. Thus, especially for the regions that had been incorporated into the USSR during 193945, the pre-Soviet experience of nation-building remained a decisive factor in national consolidation.
Nation-building in the age of revolution
The prominent Czech scholar Miroslav Hroch concluded in his study of Europe's non-dominant ethnic groups that these people usually undergo three stages in their national revival - that of academic interest in the nation's history and culture, creation and propagation of modern high culture and political mobilisation.5 All the nationalities living on the western borderland of the Russian Empire qualified as Hroch's 'small peoples' because they lacked continuous traditions of statehood, native elites and literature in an indigenous language. However, in the time of total war and global politics, these nations' geopolitical location between Russia and Germany shaped their destinies no less than did the Czech scholar's objective historical criteria.
During the late nineteenth century, Estonians and Latvians were overwhelmingly peasant peoples, albeit with the level of literacy that was one of the highest in Europe - over 90 per cent. (This high level of literacy was due to the spread of the Lutheran faith beginning in the sixteenth century and the Church's adoption of Estonian in its services.) Estonians, whose speech belongs to the Finno-Ugric family of languages and is drastically different from Indo-European languages, in a sense benefited from their cultural isolation. The Russian imperial government encouraged conversion to Orthodoxy but could not enforce serious assimilation of the peasantry Instead, the centralising efforts of the last two tsars undermined the positions of the Baltic German nobility, the land's traditional ruling caste, while placing no restrictions on the development of Estonian culture, the press and education. The decline of
Soviet Union as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism', Slavic Review 53, 2 (1994): 414-52; Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 111-12 and 129-31.
5 Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe, trans. Ben Fowkes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
the Baltic barons' power, combined with rapid industrialisation and urbanisation at the turn of the century, allowed Estonians to challenge the German domination of their cities, including Tallinn, which had become one of the empire's major ports. In 1897, Estonians constituted 67.8 per cent of urbanites in their ethno-linguistic territory.[294] The Estonian bourgeoisie and Estonian professionals were becoming increasingly prominent in public life and supported national culture, most notably the tradition of all-Estonian song festivals that began in 1869.
The Revolution of 1905 escalated the political and cultural demands of Estonian activists. Moderate loyalists, led by Jaan Tnisson and the Estonian Progressive People's Party, put forward the demand for autonomy, while radical nationalists, headed by Konstantin Pats, combined this aim with that of overthrowing the tsarist regime. But 1905 also marked the entry on the political scene of Estonian socialism. As the peasants were destroying large manors in the countryside, the Russian and Estonian Social Democratic Workers' Parties were recruiting followers among the working class. The suppression of the revolution undermined the growth of the radical Left, but had little effect on the development of Estonian society and culture.
During the First World War, Estonia remained outside the battle zone and did not suffer wartime destruction. The fall of the tsarist regime in February 1917 led to the renewed demands of autonomy. Following an impressive Estonian demonstration in Petrograd (St Petersburg), the Provisional Government indeed agreed to unite the Estonian ethnic lands into a single province and to allow elections to the provincial assembly The assembly, known in Estonian as Maapaev, was elected in May and represented all the major political parties, including the Bolsheviks. When the Bolsheviks seized power in Petro- grad in November 1917, their leader in Estonia, Viktor Kingissepp, disbanded the Maapiiev but was unable to establish an efficient administration. More important, the Bolsheviks alienated many Estonians with their attacks on the Lutheran Church and failure to divide large landed estates.
On 24 February 1918, as the German army was marching into Estonia, the underground representatives of the Maapaev proclaimed the country's independence. During the occupation, which lasted until late November 1918, the German military and the local Baltic Germans openly considered Estonia's incorporation into Germany But as Germany surrendered to the Allies and withdrew its troops from Eastern Europe, Estonia became the scene of a civil war among the Bolsheviks, the Baltic Germans and the provisional Estonian government, which was covertly supported by Finland and the Entente. To complicate matters further, the Allies forced the Estonian authorities to accept on their territory White Russian troops, which in 1919 used Estonia as a springboard in their unsuccessful attacks on Petrograd.[295] In February 1920, the war ended with the Tartu Peace Treaty, by which Soviet Russia recognised Estonia's independence.
Estonia's southern neighbours, the Latvians, although speakers ofa distinct Baltic language belonging to the Indo-European family, shared with Estonians many of their twentieth-century historical experiences. Also a Lutheran, mainly peasant people with a high level of literacy, Latvians ended the German domination of their cities during the industrial spurt of the i880s-i9i0s. The formerly German city of Riga emerged not only as a major port and a Baltic metropolis, but also as a Latvian city, with Latvians becoming its largest ethnic group (39.6 per cent in 1913).[296] Still, unlike in Estonia, the Baltic Germans remained firmly in control of municipal government, and their large estates dominated the rural economy. This led to growing frustration among Latvians. While national culture generally developed freely, the plight of the landless peasantry led radical Latvian intellectuals to an exploration of Marxism. In 1904, the Latvian Social Democratic Workers' Party came into existence and soon boasted an impressive 10,000 members. In contrast to the Estonian party, Latvian Social Democrats continued to exist after the revolution and subsequently entered into an affiliation with the Bolsheviks. The year i905 galvanised more moderate nationalists as well, but the greatest literary figure of the Latvian cultural revival, the poet Janis Rainis, symbolised the intelligentsia's embrace of socialism.
294
Toivo U. Raun,
295
Rein Taagepera,
296
Andrejs Plakans,
1995), p. 108.