During the 1930s, Soviet officials continued to encourage the development of national cultures and institutions under the rubric 'national in form, socialist in content'. This policy, begun in the 1920s, included the rooting (korenizat- siia) of different ethnic groups in their own republics, autonomous regions and oblasts. In contrast to the relatively laissez-faire policies of the 1920s, however, nationality policies of the 1930s reflected the same highly structured, top-down character of other Stalinist state-building projects. Rather than allowing different ethnic groups to develop their own cultural traditions, Soviet officials in the 1930s aggressively organised officially sanctioned forms of nationality. Ethnographic studies burgeoned as scholars worked closely with officials to create over fifty written languages for peoples who had had no written forms of culture. Small nationalities were created and consolidated out of various nomadic cultures, and the state assigned to them their own territories. Alphabets were reformed and folk traditions were officially celebrated, all within the encompassing context of the brotherhood of Soviet peoples.
Stalinist nationality policies had a sharp political edge to them, and not all nationalities were encouraged equally, as had been the policy in the 1920s. Stalin elevated Russian national culture, in particular, to pride of place and it was celebrated as the predominant culture among all the Soviet cultures. The ascendancy of Russian culture and Russian forms of patriotism was reinforced during the war, and several attempts were promoted, although rejected by Stalin, to create a specifically Russian Communist Party alongthe lines of other republic party organisations. Stalin rejected this trend, fearing that a Russian party could potentially form a rival centre of power. While he rejected an openly assimilationist nationality policy, Stalin nonetheless permitted Russians a dominant role in party affairs. Russian migration was encouraged into non- Russian areas, and Russian national culture went with the new immigrants. Russian language was instituted as the universal language of education and state affairs. Leaders took care to foster indigenous national elites, especially within the party structure, but most ofthe leading party and state positions at the republic and oblast levels were held by ethnic Russians, usually outsiders appointed from Moscow. Non-Russian institutions, organisations and journals inside the Russian republic were closed or scaled back as the Russian republic was Russified, and nationalities were territorialised in the 1930s in a way that had not been the case earlier. Institutions promoting ethnic consciousness and culture were confined, generally, to the territories designated for particular national groups.[18]
As the discussion above implies, national identity gained a new prominence in Soviet society, even as categories ofsocial class began to wane in importance as a means to determine one's identity and relation to state authority. In the early 1930s, when the state first issued internal passports, citizens were required to identify their national identity as well as their social-class status, yet class still counted as the primary defining criterion of inclusion and exclusion. The mass repressions associated with collectivisation and de-kulakisation were based on class and, initially, residence and rationing privileges associated with the new passport system were also based on social criteria of class and occupation. Then came the so-called victory of socialism in 1934, the officially announced defeat of organised class opposition in the country. The announcement of this victory did not end political repression, nor did it signal the end of class struggle, according to Stalin. Indeed, Stalin anticipated that the struggle against the enemies ofSoviet socialism would intensify as the socialist state grew stronger and anti-Soviet 'elements' grew more desperate, but Stalin also anticipated that the character of the state's struggle against its enemies would change as the nature of resistance also changed. What, exactly, Stalin anticipated is impossible to know, but the nature of repression and the criteria of inclusion and exclusion underwent a marked change during the i930s. As early as i933, deportations of so-called anti-Soviet elements from western border regions targeted specific national groups of Poles, Belorussians and Ukrainians. Stalin was especially suspicious of Ukrainian separatism, since resistance to collectivisation had been particularly strong in that republic and in the western border areas of the country. As the 1930s wore on, Stalin also came to mistrust certain other ethnic groups, which he suspected of having potential loyalties outside the USSR. By 1936, most campaigns of mass repression were being carried out against groups defined by national or ethnic rather than social criteria, and while the great mass purges of i937-8 started against so-called kulak and other marginalised social categories, these were quickly superseded by the great campaigns against Germans, Poles, Finns and Asian populations in the Soviet Far East. During the war, mass deportations continued, especially of ethnic groups from the Caucasus regions, which Stalin suspected of separatist and collaborationist tendencies, and in the years after the war, Soviet police and military units fought against strong Ukrainian separatist movements. By the early 1950s, nationality had almost all but replaced class as the most important criterion of Soviet identity, at least within the pre-Second World War borders of the USSR.
Mass repression, police and the militarised state
In late July 1937, N. I. Ezhov, the head of the political police and the Commissariat of the Interior, issued the now infamous operational order no. 447. That order began one of the most bizarre, tragic and inexplicable episodes of Soviet history - the mass operations of repression of 1937 and 1938. By decree of the Politburo, the political police were charged to begin mass shooting or imprisonment of several categories of what regime leaders considered socially harmful elements. Leaders regarded former kulaks, bandits and recidivist criminals among the most dangerous of these groups, alongside members of anti-Soviet parties, White Guardists, returned emigres, churchmen and sectarians and gendarmes and former officials of the tsarist government. By the end of November 1938, when leaders stopped the operations, nearly 766,000 individuals had been caught up in the police sweeps. Nearly 385,000 of those individuals had been arrested as category I enemies. Those who fell into this category were scheduled to be shot, while the remaining arrestees, in category II, were to receive labour camp sentences from five to ten years.
There exists almost nothing in open archives and other sources to explain fully the motivation behind these massive social purges, but we can at least understand the dynamics of the purges and something of the motivation behind them. We can compare the great social purges of the late 1930s to the campaigns of repression that preceded and followed them, and in this way place them within the context of a larger discussion of mass repression under Stalin. As in the early 1930s, and after several years of relative stability, the regime turned again on peasants during the Ezhovshchina. Collective and state farmers, as well as individual farmers (kolkhozniki, sovkhozniki, and edinolichniki), were arrested in the tens of thousands. Yet, the mass repressions of the late 1930s were more than a second de-kulakisation. Criminal elements, former convicts, sectarians and a host of other marginalised populations, along with farm workers, local Soviet officials and freeholder peasants, became targets of the state's campaigns of mass repression. As noted above, the repressions of 1937 and 1938 also encompassed significant numbers of national minorities, arrested under analogous operational orders. If the campaigns of mass repression began as a purge of socially suspect groups, they turned into a campaign of ethnic cleansing against 'enemy' nations.[19]
18
Terry Martin,
19
Terry Martin, 'The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing',