JOSEPH STALIN DIED ON MARCH 5, 1953. FOUR DAYS LATER, AS part of the ceremonial farewell to the deceased, his body was placed next to Lenin’s in the Red Square mausoleum. He was mourned not just as the head of government but also as the leader of working people throughout the world.
The new leaders of the Soviet Union invited the heads of communist governments of Eastern Europe, China, and North Korea as well as the leaders of the communist parties of Western Europe, including those of Italy, France, Spain, and Britain, to join them atop the mausoleum. Those delivering eulogies included members of Stalin’s inner circle and representatives of the Soviet intelligentsia, in particular the composer Dmitrii Shostakovich and the writer and war poet Konstantin Simonov. The leaders of the Soviet republics were nowhere in sight, as they were too insignificant in the Soviet hierarchy. The global spread of communism, not the nationality question in the Soviet Union, was the top agenda item for Stalin’s successors. Officially, the Soviet nationality question was considered to have been solved by Stalin himself.
“The solution of one of the most complicated problems in the history of social development, the national question, is associated with the name of Comrade Stalin,” declared the new head of the Soviet government, Georgii Malenkov, from the top of the mausoleum. “For the first time in history the supreme theoretician of the national question, Comrade Stalin, made possible the liquidation of age-old national dissension on the scale of a huge multinational state.” Malenkov then explained exactly what the solution of the nationality question in the USSR entailed: “Under the leadership of Comrade Stalin our party has managed to overcome the economic and cultural backwardness of previously oppressed peoples, uniting all the nations of the Soviet Union into one fraternal family and forging the friendship of peoples.”
Conspicuously, Malenkov failed to mention Russia in his praise of Stalin’s achievements on the nationalities front. In fact, the Russocentrism of Soviet nationality policy constituted Stalin’s main amendment to Lenin’s formula for handling the nationality question in a multiethnic state. Apparently Stalin’s successors were not certain what to make of that part of his legacy.
The gap between official rhetoric and the less-than-satisfactory condition of the friendship of peoples in the Soviet Union was revealed soon after the state funeral by the actions of the new regime’s security tsar, Lavrentii Beria, by far the most powerful of Stalin’s successors. In his speech at the funeral, Beria talked not only about the Soviet people but also about the peoples of the Soviet Union. Shortly thereafter, he took the initiative of stopping the anti-Semitic campaign that treated Jews as aliens and agents of the West. Among those whom he released from imprisonment was Polina Zhemchuzhina, the Jewish wife of the man who was officially the second most powerful official in the land, Viacheslav Molotov. On Stalin’s orders, she had spent more than four years in prison while her terrified husband had maintained his position in the Soviet leadership. He had to watch his every step as he helped his boss—and his wife’s captor—run the country.
In June 1953, Beria gained approval from the party leadership for measures aiming to end the Russification of the non-Russian republics: the first secretaries of party committees now had to belong to the titular nationality, cadres who did not speak the local languages were to be recalled, and official correspondence was to be conducted in the languages of the republics. It sounded like the beginning of a major reform of Soviet nationality policy, turning away from the Russocentrism of the Stalin years back to the indigenization of the 1920s.
We do not know how far Beria was prepared to go in his revision of Stalin’s nationality policy. Before the end of June 1953, he was arrested as the result of a plot engineered by his main rival, Nikita Khrushchev, the former viceroy of Ukraine. By the end of the year, Beria would be shot on trumped-up charges of working for the British. He was also accused of attempts to revive bourgeois nationalist elements in the republics and undermine friendship between the peoples of the USSR and the “great Russian people.” It now appeared that Stalinist Russocentrism was again the order of the day. But the story was more complicated than that. Despite the execution of Beria, the plotters did not reverse measures taken on his initiative to check the Russification of the non-Russian republican leadership and party apparatus, or of education and culture. Some of those measures would remain in effect until the last days of the Soviet Union.
THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN STALIN’S HEIRS NOTWITHSTANDING, the dictator’s death brought about a general relaxation of the political climate. At the end of the war, Stalin had moved to reestablish party control over ideology and culture, which had been shaken during the conflict, and to restore the primacy of Russia and the Russians in the Soviet hierarchy of nations. The Zhdanov period, named after Stalin’s chief ideologue, Andrei Zhdanov, brought official attacks on all manifestations of liberalism or deviations from the party line. Real or imagined manifestations of openness to the West and writings that strayed from party-approved models of classical Russian literature of the imperial era came under fire. Among the victims were not only writers and artists but also the all-powerful head of the propaganda apparatus during the war, Georgii Aleksandrov. Aleksandrov was accused of failing to condemn idealism strongly enough in his History of Western Philosophy. The renowned film director Sergei Eisenstein was criticized for depicting Ivan the Terrible as a weak and confused leader in the second part of his film about the Russian tsar, whose first part had been admired by Stalin.
The Zhdanov campaign, which sought to uphold the Russocentric character of official ideology and culture, gained new impetus with the start of the Cold War in 1948. Provoked by Soviet behavior in occupied Eastern Europe, where Stalin established communist regimes, and by the geopolitical contest in Turkey and Iran, the new international conflict pitted Moscow against its former British and American allies. The newly created Jewish state of Israel became one of the battlegrounds in an undeclared war for global influence, as the Soviets tried to turn it into their ally in the Middle East. At the same time, the Kremlin began to look with suspicion on Soviet Jewry, suspected of sympathizing with the West. A central aspect of the new ideological campaign in the USSR was an attack on “rootless cosmopolitanism,” a term used as a cover for the persecution of Jews and the promotion of xenophobic and anti-Western tendencies in the interpretation of the Russian cultural tradition and identity.
A return to Russocentrism meant a return to antinationalist campaigns in the non-Russian republics. Starting in 1946, party resolutions were passed to combat alleged nationalist deviations in the republics, including Ukraine and Belarus. Literary history became a target in both republics. In Belarus, the authors of one study were accused of drawing a direct line from the “Polish squires” and “Westernizers and liberals of old” to Soviet Belarusian literature while neglecting historical links between Belarusian and Russian democratic literature and culture. In Ukraine, party ideologues questioned details of literary history and exposed “errors,” condemning, for example, the failure to represent the progressive role of the Russian people in the opera Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Ukraine’s best-known filmmaker, Oleksandr Dovzhenko, also found himself under attack and was confined to Moscow, with no right to visit Ukraine. In 1951, a campaign was launched against one of Ukraine’s best poets, Volodymyr Sosiura, for his patriotic poem “Love Ukraine” (1944). What had been welcomed in wartime was now condemned as a manifestation of Ukrainian nationalism.
Nikita Khrushchev took part in the Stalin-inspired attack on Ukrainian cultural figures during his tenure in Ukraine, which ended in December 1949. But once he was no longer under the dictator’s thumb after Stalin’s death in 1953, he continued the turn away from Stalin’s policies. In that regard he was a continuator rather than an opponent of his archrival, Lavrentii Beria. Khrushchev and Beria emerged as contenders for power in the post-Stalin leadership, but, as noted above, Khrushchev soon outmaneuvered Beria and had him shot. Beria was dead before the end of 1953. What Khrushchev offered his supporters in the Politburo who feared Beria’s growing power and ability to use the secret police against them was a form of collective leadership. It took Khrushchev a good part of the rest of the decade to rid himself of other potential rivals in the Politburo, ranging from the head of the Soviet government, Georgii Malenkov, to the minister of foreign affairs, Viacheslav Molotov, and the minister of defense and hero of the “Great Patriotic War,” Georgii Zhukov.
Khrushchev’s years in power became known for a number of ambitious reforms, including decentralization of economic decision-making to the regions, attempts to revive struggling Soviet agriculture by paying salaries to peasants, and an ambitious campaign of building new urban housing. But few of his initiatives attracted more attention than his de-Stalinization campaign, which condemned Stalin’s crimes against the government and party elite (but not against the people), released most political prisoners from the Gulag—the state-run system of concentration camps—and launched public debate on economic, social, and cultural development. Khrushchev’s relaxation of ideological controls in the late 1950s produced a period in Soviet politics and culture that became known as the Khrushchev Thaw.
The search for a new nationality policy became part of Khrushchev’s reformist course, which was closely linked to his broader de-Stalinizing agenda. Khrushchev was originally quite hesitant to act on nationality policy. The nature and limits of his early thinking on the nationalities question are well demonstrated by changes to the Soviet anthem. The reference to Stalin was removed in 1955 and replaced with a reference to the party that had been completely absent from the original lyrics that had been written with Stalin’s participation. Thus the collective leadership and wisdom of the party replaced the power of the authoritarian leader, but the rest of the anthem, including the opening reference to the Great Rus’ uniting the other Soviet peoples, remained intact.
In January 1954, Khrushchev launched his first major public initiative, a lavish celebration of the tercentenary of Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s acceptance of Russian suzerainty. The accompanying ideological campaign illustrated that there were limits to how much the Russian imperial narrative could be combined with the non-Russian national narratives under the banner of Marxist rhetoric and Soviet-style “friendship of peoples.” The Pereiaslav Council of 1654, at which the Ukrainian Cossack officers had decided to accept the protectorate of the Muscovite tsar, was now to be officially commemorated, as the Theses on the Reunification of Ukraine and Russia, endorsed that year by the Central Committee in Moscow, made clear.
The term “reunification” harked back to the preoccupation of Russian imperial historiography with the “reunification of Rus’.” It had made sense in the imperial period, when it was an article of faith that Rus’—or rather, Russia—had been inhabited by one people in Kyivan times, then divided by the Mongols, Lithuanians, and Poles, and then finally reunited in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries under the auspices of the Muscovite tsars. But Soviet historians claimed that Russians and Ukrainians were separate peoples, not mere branches of the same nation. How they could be reunited was a paradox never explained or resolved by Soviet propagandists. What the term made manifest, however, was that the model of the big Russian nation, first divided by foreign enemies and then reunited by Russian rulers, was again in favor.
The theses on the anniversary of the alleged reunification approved by the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow read: “By linking their destiny forever with the fraternal Russian people, the Ukrainian people freed themselves from foreign subjugation and ensured their national development. On the other hand, the reunion of Ukraine and Russia helped considerably to strengthen the Russian state and enhance its international prestige. The friendship between the working people of Russia and Ukraine grew firmer and stronger in the joint struggle against the common enemies—tsardom, the serf-owning landlords, the capitalists, and foreign invaders.”
Thus, an event condemned by Soviet historians as absolutely evil in the 1920s because of its role in strengthening tsarism, and then recast as a lesser evil within the discourse of Russian statism in the 1930s, was now declared wholly positive. By acquiring new territories, the tsars had unwittingly strengthened the ties between the Russian and non-Russian working masses. Soviet propagandists had managed to square the circle: Russian imperialism had finally found a way to use class-based discourse to justify its reappearance in the Soviet Union.
The anniversary celebrations were accompanied by a lavish gift presented by the Moscow leadership on behalf of one fraternal people to another—the transfer of the Crimean Peninsula from the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation to that of the Ukrainian republic. On the symbolic level, the transfer was supposed to manifest the level of trust that now existed between the two nations. In practical terms, it meant that the authorities in Moscow did not take the differences between them too seriously and believed that ethnocultural issues could and should be subordinated to administrative and economic considerations. The Crimea, which had had difficulty recovering economically from the devastation of World War II and the Soviet deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944, would benefit from administrative integration with the mainland republic on which it depended for most of its industrial and agricultural resources.
The official celebration of Russo-Ukrainian unity also contained an element of Slavic conspiracy against the non-Slavs. With Moscow refusing to allow the return of the Crimean Tatars to their homeland, Ukraine became implicated along with Russia in the unlawful deportation of and discrimination against an ethnic minority. Moreover, Moscow declared the anniversary a major event not only for Russians and Ukrainians, but also for the other Soviet nationalities. Indeed, the historical outline of Russo-Ukrainian relations presented in the Theses was used as a template for representing Russian relations with other Soviet nationalities until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Ukraine’s unofficial status was now elevated to that of second most important Soviet republic. Khrushchev, who had served as de facto viceroy of Ukraine for more than a decade, relied heavily on his Ukrainian clients to gain and then strengthen his position in Moscow as the sole leader of the Soviet Union. After conclusively defeating opposition to his rule in the summer of 1957, he began to bring Ukrainian cadres to Moscow and promote them. The first secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee, Oleksii Kyrychenko, became the de facto second secretary of the Central Committee in Moscow; his successor in Kyiv, Mykola Pidhorny, was installed as secretary of the Central Committee in Moscow after the ouster of Kyrychenko; and the onetime party leader of the Dnipropetrovsk region, Leonid Brezhnev, became head of the Soviet parliament. By the early 1960s, the Ukrainian party had become the junior partner of the Russian elite in running the Soviet Empire. Although Beria’s norm that the first party secretary of a Union republic was to be a member of the titular nationality remained in place, Moscow sent its own people, invariably Russians or Ukrainians, to keep an eye on the locals.
IN HIS SECRET SPEECH AT THE TWENTIETH PARTY CONGRESS IN February 1956, Khrushchev launched a major campaign to revise the Stalinist legacy in all aspects of public life. Stalin was accused of creating and promoting a cult of personality and persecuting loyal Soviet cadres within the party and the Red Army. His atrocities against national minorities were not mentioned or admitted publicly, but in practice under Khrushchev’s leadership the Soviet Union took steps to rehabilitate not only individuals but whole nations “punished” by Stalin during the war. In 1957, Khrushchev restored or formed anew the Kabardino-Balkar, Kalmyk, and Chechen-Ingush autonomous republics within the Russian Federation, allowing the minorities deported by Stalin on charges of collaboration with the Germans to return to their ancestral homelands. The rehabilitation was partial, as neither Germans nor Koreans nor Crimean Tatars were allowed to return, although police control over their settlements in exile was significantly relaxed by the authorities.
Khrushchev and his supporters tried to strike a balance between the legacy of Stalinism and what they called a return to Leninist norms—that is, the policies of the 1920s. One of Khrushchev’s initiatives that was deeply rooted in the policies of that period was the antireligious campaign, which he launched in the late 1950s. In the course of World War II, Stalin had ended the open persecution of religious believers while putting religious organizations under strict government control. The main beneficiary of that change was the Russian Orthodox Church, which became an agent of the state in the process of Russifying and Sovietizing the western borderlands. In 1946, Stalin arranged the liquidation of the Ukrainian Catholic (formerly Uniate) Church in Galicia and Belarus by following the Russian imperial model of “reunifying” the Uniates with the Russian Orthodox Church. As in the nineteenth century, Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians were united in one Russian church. In official terms, however, the liquidation was carried out under the slogan of reunifying the Ukrainian nation in territorial and cultural terms—most Ukrainians had traditionally been Orthodox.
Khrushchev, who was not above using the Russian Orthodox Church as a tool of international policy, allowed its representatives to join the World Council of Churches and even attend the Second Vatican Council as observers in 1962, but he had little use for it inside the country. Moreover, at a party congress in 1961, he announced the construction of the foundations of communist society as the party’s main goal for the next twenty years. With the expected advent of communism, a proletarian paradise on earth, promoted as tantamount to a new official religion, the government was not about to tolerate competition in the realm of faith. Khrushchev promised to show the last religious believer in the USSR on a television screen—a manifestation of secular belief in the power of technological progress to crush belief in the supernatural. As a result of this antireligion drive, the government closed half of all Orthodox parishes in the country. Out of forty-seven Orthodox monasteries, only sixteen remained open. Especially harsh measures were taken against the Protestant groups, Baptists and Pentecostals who refused to succumb to government pressure and continued their activities in the underground.
The antireligion campaign turned out to be a major blow to the religious component of traditional Russian identity, which had been tolerated under late Stalinism. It also had the unintended effect of increasing the importance of the Ukrainian clergy in the Russian Orthodox Church. Although the authorities closed Orthodox churches en masse in the traditionally Orthodox regions of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, they were much more careful in western Ukraine, where excessive pressure might well have caused believers to abandon government-controlled Russian Orthodoxy and join the “nationalist” Ukrainian Catholic Church, which maintained an underground existence. Most of the approximately 8,000 parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church that survived Khrushchev’s antireligious campaign were located in Ukraine, and the majority of those were in the formerly Uniate regions of the republic.
The Russian Orthodox Church was never as crypto-Uniate or as ethnically Ukrainian as during Khrushchev’s years in power. In the eighteenth century, most of the Russian Orthodox had been led by Ukrainian bishops, and now Ukrainians constituted the majority of believers as well. No one seemed to bother about the implications of this new development for nationality policy. After all, few in the government saw any future for the church, or, indeed, for nationalities, in the new communist society that Khrushchev and his entourage were busily promoting.
THE YEAR 1961 MARKED THE HIGH POINT OF KHRUSHCHEV’S political career. His power at the top of the Soviet pyramid seemed unshakable. He had gained sufficient authority to remove Stalin’s body from the Red Square mausoleum and change the name of Stalingrad to Volgograd. In April, the Soviet Union sent the world’s first astronaut, Yurii Gagarin, into outer space. The Soviets were ahead of the Americans in the space race, and now no one doubted that Soviet missiles could threaten them on earth as well. There were problems with fulfilling immediate economic plans, and droughts were affecting agriculture, but overall economic growth was proceeding at a healthy pace of at least 5 percent per year, and the long-term future looked bright.
Khrushchev used the occasion of the Twenty-Second Party Congress, convened in October, to announce an ambitious program for the transformation of Soviet society. He and his aides had been working on it for several years. There was a stunning promise in its concluding sentence: “The party triumphantly proclaims that the present generation of Soviet people will live under communism!” Khrushchev promised the country and the world that in twenty years, the Soviet government would complete the creation of the material and technical basis for communism and build the foundations of a communist society. According to Marxist dogma, national differences would disappear under communism. In 1929, Stalin had rejected demands for the immediate merger of nationalities, noting that differences between nations were supposed to continue under socialism. But now, with socialism running its course and communism around the corner, there was no reason to maintain distinctions between Soviet nationalities—if anything, their merger should be accelerated.
The new party program fully reflected that new thinking even as it gave assurances about the free development and even flourishing of nations in the USSR. Khrushchev declared from the podium of the party congress: “A new historical community of peoples of various nationalities with common characteristics—the Soviet people—has taken shape in the USSR. They have a common socialist Motherland—the USSR, a common economic base—the socialist economy, a common social class structure, a common worldview—Marxism-Leninism, a common purpose—the building of communism, and many common characteristics in their spiritual outlook and psychology.” The concept of a Soviet people was not novel per se—Nikolai Bukharin had championed it in the 1930s, and Stalin himself had often used the term—but now it was expected to supersede nations in a few decades, reducing them to mere nationalities.
Khrushchev had moved away from Stalin’s view of the nation as defined mainly by a common language, culture, and territory. State, economy, class, and ideology were the main markers of the new Soviet political nation. Although the party program pledged to defend and develop the languages of the peoples of the USSR, in fact there was no alternative to building the new Soviet people on the foundations of the Russian language and culture. The program reflected that fact by pointing not to the future but to the existing situation: “The process now taking place of voluntary acquisition of the Russian language along with the native language has a positive significance, as it promotes the mutual exchange of experience and the access of every nation and nationality to the cultural achievements of all the other peoples of the USSR and to world culture. The Russian language has in fact become the common language of international exchange and cooperation among all the peoples of the USSR.”
There was more than just belief in the attainment of communism and ideological fervor in Khrushchev’s embrace of the concept of the Soviet people. Some scholars divide his nationality policies into two periods. The first, which preceded his consolidation of power in Moscow in 1957, was marked by the appeasement of republican elites. During this period, the republican elites received greater administrative and economic freedom than they had possessed under Stalin, with the creation of republican ministries and regional economic councils that reduced central control over economic decision-making. In Ukraine, the second Soviet republic, the share of industrial enterprises under republican control increased from 34 to 97 percent. The republics also were given more freedom to establish their own cultural policies. All of this helped Khrushchev secure the support of republican elites in his struggle for power in Moscow. His former clients in Ukraine and the leaders of other republics saw him as their man at the top of the Soviet hierarchy.
The second, sharply different period came after 1957, with Khrushchev firmly in control in Moscow. It brought purges of republican elites in the republics of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Baltics as well as new initiatives aimed at the cultural Russification of the borderlands. The Ukrainian and Belarusian elites escaped the purge but not the impact of the cultural Russification policies initiated by Moscow. In 1958, the Union parliament passed a law removing the provision according to which children of non-Russian families were to be educated in their native language, and allowing parents to choose the language of instruction. With most universities teaching in Russian, and highly paid jobs and careers open to Russian speakers only, the law made the rapid Russification of the Soviet educational system all but inevitable.
Particularly hard hit by the new regulations were the Slavic republics, where the language barrier between the local languages and Russian was easy to cross. The situation in Belarus was especially precarious. While Ukraine got its first native party boss in 1953, Belarus had to wait until 1956 for its first Belarusian-speaking party leader, Kiryl Mazuraŭ (Kirill Mazurov). But Mazuraŭ’s proficiency in Belarusian gained him no respect in Moscow. In early 1959, when Khrushchev visited Belarus to mark the fortieth anniversary of the proclamation of the Soviet Belarusian republic, Mazuraŭ delivered his address in Belarusian. Khrushchev, who had no problem understanding another East Slavic language after his years in Ukraine, protested. During a visit to the Belarusian State University, he declared: “The sooner we all speak Russian, the more quickly we shall build communism.” Decades later, during the years of Soviet rule, when the university sought a professor capable of teaching Belarusian history in Belarusian, there was no suitable candidate.
No Ukrainian leader was reprimanded for delivering his speeches in Ukrainian—they continued to do so into the 1970s—but the lesson was learned. Whereas in 1958, 60 percent of all books published in Ukraine were in Ukrainian, in 1959 only 53 percent were in that language. The figure continued to decline: by 1960, it was 49 percent, and by 1965 it was 41 percent. The decrease in Ukrainian-language titles meant a concomitant increase in Russian-language ones. In Belarus, the decrease of publications in the native language was even more dramatic. Book titles in Belarusian fell from 85 percent in 1950 to 31 percent in 1965.
The rising number of Russian-language publications reflected the Russification of the educational system. In Ukraine, between 1951 and 1956 the percentage of students in Ukrainian-language schools fell from 81 to 65 percent. During the same period, the share of those studying in Russian increased from 18 to 31 percent. Especially worrisome was the status of Ukrainian-language education in the big cities. In 1959, only 23 percent of students in Kyiv were being taught in Ukrainian, while 73 percent were being taught in Russian. As Russification of the educational system gained speed, more and more students in Russian-language schools refused to take Ukrainian or Belarusian even as a subject. By the end of the 1960s in Minsk, 90 percent of students were taking no Belarusian classes at all.
What differentiated the Ukrainian situation from the Belarusian one was the role played in cultural policy by the former Polish territories annexed to the two republics on the basis of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 and sanctioned by the Western powers at Yalta in 1945. The Ukrainians in Galicia, Volhynia, and, to a lesser degree, in formerly Romanian Bukovyna and Czechoslovakian Transcarpathia had a highly developed national identity that retarded the pace of Russification there and in other parts of the republic. The integration of the Ukrainian west required major cultural concessions long after the war.
In Belarus, urban dwellers in the western part of the country often manifested even less attachment to the Belarusian language, culture, and history than their counterparts in the east. After all, the east had undergone a brief period of cultural Belarusization in the 1920s, while there had been nothing similar in the Polish-ruled west. In 1959, 23 percent of Belarusians in the cities of western Belarus claimed Russian as their native tongue, as opposed to 4 percent of Ukrainian city dwellers residing in western Ukraine. By 1970, the share of Belarusians claiming Russian as their native tongue in the same localities had increased to 26 percent, while the similar category of Ukrainians had decreased to 3 percent—a consequence of migration to the cities by Ukrainian villagers who refused to give up their language.
A major ideological shift occurred in the Soviet Union with the ouster of Nikita Khrushchev in October 1964 by a group of his former protégés led by Leonid Brezhnev. It was a palace coup carried out by conservative elements in the party and state leadership who believed that Khrushchev’s reforms were threatening the stability of the regime. The new rulers put an end to a number of Khrushchev’s initiatives, including his decentralization of power and his ideological obsession with communism. Brezhnev announced that Soviet society had developed socialism and would have to be satisfied with that for a while. No new dates for the arrival of communism were announced. But while the new leadership removed the promise that the “current generation of Soviet people would live under communism” from the party program, it did not discard the program itself or its commitment to the idea of one Soviet nation.
By the early 1970s, Brezhnev had made the concept of the Soviet nation the centerpiece of his nationality policy. Official propaganda launched a campaign promoting the Soviet way of life, while the new edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia included a new definition of the Soviet people. That definition dropped the reference to communism as a common goal helping to create one political nation but left references to Marxist-Leninist ideology and the Russian language intact. It added the category of common citizenship: “The Soviet people have one set of supreme organs of state power and state administration in the USSR, and the same all-Union citizenship has been established for all Soviet people,” stated the Encyclopedia. “The common language of international communication in the USSR is the Russian language.”
Cultural Russification was now official policy. The marginalization of non-Russian languages and their elimination from the educational system began in 1970, when a decree was issued ordering that all graduate theses be written in Russian and approved in Moscow. In 1979, the authorities organized an all-Union conference in Tashkent on ways to improve Russian-language instruction; beginning in 1983, bonuses were paid to teachers of Russian in schools with non-Russian-language instruction. Cultural Russification was being intensified, as the future of the Soviet nation-building project depended on its success.
LEONID BREZHNEV AND HIS IDEALOGUES INHERITED FROM NIKITA Khrushchev and his aides a conflicting legacy in the realm of Soviet nation-building. Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign, which resulted in a political, ideological, and cultural “Thaw,” brought to the fore a generation of activists who believed in the possibility not of building communism, but of reforming socialism in order to make its politics and culture more pluralistic. That entailed the idea of the flourishing of nations and their cultures as opposed to their merging. It was during the Thaw that readers became acquainted with the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the future spiritual leader of Russian opposition to the regime.
The preservation of historical monuments, including religious ones, and ecological concerns found their way into the works of Russian authors, who often focused on the plight of the Russian village devastated by collectivization. They became known as representatives of a new genre of writing called “village prose.” Similar concerns were raised by writers in other republics, including Ukraine and Belarus. All of them were driven by loyalty not to the Soviet land or nation but to their republic’s nation and identity. While the party was building one Soviet nation on the basis of the Russian language and culture, the writers organized themselves on the basis of national languages and defined their concerns in ethnocultural terms.
In Russia, the cultural revival triggered by the Khrushchev Thaw produced two political and cultural camps among writers and artists. The first group, closely associated with the literary journal Molodaia gvardiia (The Young Guard), was characterized by a conservative and antiliberal brand of Russian nationalism. Its members decried the fate of the Russian village and culture but also praised the idea of a powerful state and promoted thinly veiled anti-Semitism. Russian liberals, for their part, rallied around their own journals, the most prominent of which was Novyi mir (The New World): while publishing “village prose,” it maintained an antinationalist stance. The clash of different visions for the development of the Russian culture and nation came to the fore in the late 1960s, with Russian conservatives using their journals to accuse their opponents of promoting the Americanization of Russian culture. Liberals responded with attacks on their opponents for their manifestations of Russian nationalism, their desire to preserve the conservative traditions of imperial Russia, and their attempts to isolate Russian culture from the rest of the world.
A series of articles published in Novyi mir in 1969 attacking the Russian nationalism of Molodaia gvardiia forced the party leadership to intervene in the conflict. In the course of 1970, the party bosses dismissed the editors in chief of both journals from their positions. While the removal of the editor of Molodaia gvardiia signaled a victory for Aleksandr Yakovlev, the interim head of the party propaganda apparatus, his triumph was short-lived. After he published an article in 1972 attacking manifestations of Russian nationalism in literary and cultural life, Yakovlev was dismissed from his high position in the party’s Central Committee and sent to Canada as Soviet ambassador. A decade later, he would be discovered there by a rising star of Soviet politics, Mikhail Gorbachev, who brought him back to Moscow in the mid-1980s. Yakovlev would become one of the architects of Gorbachev’s reforms.
In the mid-1970s, however, the party leadership preferred to sacrifice Yakovlev in order to make peace with the rising nationalist trend in the Russian intelligentsia, and, more important, to co-opt the rebels and keep that trend under party control. Those who would not be cowed into submission, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the unofficial leader of the Russian nationalist intelligentsia, were sent out of the country (Solzhenitsyn was expelled in 1974). Others—such as the new editor of Molodaia gvardiia, Anatolii Ivanov, one of the leading authors of “village prose”—had to accommodate their cultural program to the guidelines imposed on them by the party leadership.
The party would continue its support for the Russification of Soviet political and cultural life, sponsoring multimillion-copy press runs of works by Ivanov and other Russian nationalist writers and supporting their cultural initiatives. One such initiative was the celebration of the six-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of the Kulikovo Field in 1980. Although that battle had ended in defeat for the Mongols, aggressors from the East, it was turned on its head in the Soviet media to inspire anti-Western sentiment in Russian society. The Russification of the borderlands and anti-Westernism were two ideological elements that kept Soviet apparatchiks and Russian nationalist writers together throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
While making peace with moderate Russian nationalism, Moscow strongly attacked non-Russian nationalism in the republics, particularly in Ukraine, where the 1960s had witnessed a revival of national-communist ideas, according to which Russification under the guise of internationalism was a betrayal of Leninist policy, and Ukraine could be both culturally Ukrainian and Soviet without contradiction. Leading figures of the 1920s, including Mykola Skrypnyk, who had committed suicide in 1933 after being accused of nationalist deviations, were rehabilitated in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Major literary and cultural figures of the earlier era, including the poet Pavlo Tychyna and the filmmaker Oleksandr Dovzhenko, became active again, providing inspiration, support, and political cover for a new generation of writers and artists, the shestydesiatnyky (generation of the sixties). These included the poets Ivan Drach, Lina Kostenko, and Vasyl Stus, who was later arrested and sent to the Gulag, where he died. This generation of cultural activists emphasized the flourishing, not the merging, of the Soviet nations. Scholars began submitting their analyses of historiographic trends and the current cultural situation to party officials. Their memoranda, which can be characterized to some degree as policy papers, challenged the Russocentric approach to history as represented by the 1954 Theses on the Reunification of Ukraine and Russia and protested the Russification of Ukrainian education, culture, and politics as a violation of Leninist nationality policy.
The Ukrainian national revival came to an end in May 1972 with the dismissal of the strong-willed first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Petro Shelest, who had run the republic for almost a decade. He had not only tolerated but also supported the development of Ukrainian culture and a distinct Ukrainian identity. A national communist by conviction, Shelest had secured a large degree of autonomy, if not independence, from Moscow by supporting Leonid Brezhnev in his struggle against numerous opponents in the Moscow Politburo. Brezhnev paid him back by giving him a free hand in economic and cultural matters. But once Brezhnev marginalized his main rival in the Politburo, the former head of the KGB, Aleksandr Shelepin, Shelest’s days were numbered.
Like the Ukrainian party leaders of the 1920s whom Stalin had no longer needed after eliminating his opponents, Shelest became expendable. In both cases, what followed the removal of Ukrainian party leaders was an attack on the revival of Ukrainian culture that had taken place on their watch. After being transferred to Moscow and appointed to the politically insignificant position of deputy head of the Soviet government, Shelest was accused of idealizing Ukrainian Cossackdom and other nationalist deviations. Meanwhile, the KGB was arresting nationally minded intellectuals and purging Ukrainian institutions. Under the party leadership of the Brezhnev loyalist Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, Ukraine was turned into an exemplary Soviet republic. With dissidents confined to the Gulag, there was nothing to stop the triumphal march of Soviet nation-building, which in Ukraine meant the reincarnation in socialist guise of the imperial model of the big Russian nation.
The party official who seemingly needed no instruction in conducting a nationality policy appropriate to Brezhnev’s USSR was the leader of Belarus, Petr Masheraŭ (Masherov). Masheraŭ ran the republic for fifteen long years, from 1965 until his death in a car accident in 1980. The rapid economic development of Soviet Belarus, a former backwater of Poland and imperial Russia, on Masheraŭ’s watch in the 1960s and 1970s made loyalty to the Soviet regime a basic component of the new Belarusian identity. Masheraŭ was reportedly supported by the Soviet premier, Aleksei Kosygin, and on bad terms with Leonid Brezhnev and his group. But unlike Shelest, Masheraŭ survived in office until his unexpected death. While defending the republic’s economic interests, he never embraced the revival of the Belarusian language and culture as a cause. Unlike Shelest, Masheraŭ never spoke in public in the titular language of the republic; nor did he show an interest in the premodern history of his country. A partisan fighter during World War II—he received the highest Soviet award, Hero of the Soviet Union, in 1944, at the age of twenty-six—Masheraŭ was interested in only one kind of history, that of the Great Patriotic War.
Masheraŭ built monuments to heroes and victims of the war, turning the history of partisan resistance to the Nazis into a founding myth of the Soviet Belarusian nation. Unlike the Ukrainians, who looked with pride to the times of Kyivan Rus’ and the Cossack Hetmanate, the Belarusians lacked a founding myth of their own and readily accepted the all-Soviet mythology of the Great Patriotic War. Masheraŭ had few problems with the local intelligentsia. One of its most talented representatives, the writer Vasil Bykaŭ, dedicated most of his writing to the experience of World War II—Masheraŭ’s own principal interest and a theme that was used to create a close bond between Belarusian and Soviet identity. While Russia and Ukraine produced nationalist dissidents en masse, Belarus remained loyal and grateful to the regime.
BY THE EARLY 1980S, THE TIME WHEN KHRUSHCHEV HAD PROMISED the dawning of communism, it was nowhere in sight. But one of its elements, the formation of a single political nation called the Soviet people, had been making real progress. Nowhere was that clearer than in the expansion of the lingua franca of that nation, the Russian language, formally designated as the language of interethnic communication in the USSR. In 1970, 76 percent of the Soviet population claimed proficiency in Russian. Between 1970 and 1989, the number of non-Russians claiming a good working knowledge of Russian increased from 42 million to 69 million. It was a major success, largely achieved in the East Slavic republics of the Union.
The increase in the number of Russian-speakers was unevenly distributed throughout the USSR. Close to 75 million of the 290 million Soviet citizens did not claim proficiency in Russian, and almost all of them lived outside the East Slavic core of the Union. The central authorities were particularly concerned about Central Asia and the Caucasus, where insufficient working knowledge of Russian hindered the effective integration of recruits into the Soviet army, which was then fighting in Afghanistan. Non-Russians in those regions continued to live within their own ethnic groups, with exogamous marriage the exception rather than the rule. Only the Eastern Slavs and highly urbanized Jews freely intermarried. Most of the non-Russians who claimed fluency in Russian to census takers were Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Jews. Out of 65 million Soviet citizens who claimed proficiency in Russian in 1989, 55 million were Ukrainians and Belarusians.
In the course of the 1970s and 1980s, Russification gathered speed in the East Slavic republics of the Soviet Union. This led not only to a dramatic increase in the use of Russian at work and in educational institutions in the large urban centers (with the notable exception of western Ukraine), but also to a decline of national consciousness among Ukrainians and Belarusians as measured by identification with a mother tongue rather than Russian for census purposes. The number of ethnic Ukrainians who gave Russian as their mother tongue increased from 6 percent in 1959 to 10 percent in 1979 and 16 percent in 1989. Even more dramatic was the decline in national consciousness in Belarus, where the number of Belarusians giving Russian as their mother tongue increased during the same period from 7 to 16 and, finally, 20 percent. Thus, every fifth Belarusian considered himself Russian, no matter what the nationality recorded on his or her passport.
While the prospect of forging one Soviet nation out of Slavs and non-Slavs was clearly in trouble, the formation of a big Russian nation out of the Eastern Slavs was just as clearly under way. There appeared to be no barrier to the realization of the old dream of the imperial nation-builders—the formation of an all-Russian nation. The only thing their successors needed to complete the project was time, but by the late 1980s they had run out of it.