Nested Nationalism

Making and Unmaking Nations in the Soviet Caucasus

Krista A. Goff

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501753282
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Russische Geschichte

Nested Nationalism is a study of the politics and practices of managing national minority identifications, rights, and communities in the Soviet Union and the personal and political consequences of such efforts. Titular nationalities that had republics named after them in the USSR were comparatively privileged within the boundaries of "their" republics, but they still often chafed both at Moscow's influence over republican affairs and at broader Russian hegemony across the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, members of nontitular communities frequently complained that nationalist republican leaders sought to build titular nations on the back of minority assimilation and erasure. Drawing on extensive archival and oral history research conducted in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Georgia, and Moscow, Krista A. Goff argues that Soviet nationality policies produced recursive, nested relationships between majority and minority nationalisms and national identifications in the USSR.

Goff pays particular attention to how these asymmetries of power played out in minority communities, following them from Azerbaijan to Georgia, Dagestan, and Iran in pursuit of the national ideas, identifications, and histories that were layered across internal and international borders. What mechanisms supported cultural development and minority identifications in communities subjected to assimilationist politics? How did separatist movements coalesce among nontitular minority activists? And how does this historicization help us to understand the tenuous space occupied by minorities in nationalizing states across contemporary Eurasia? Ranging from the early days of Soviet power to post-Soviet ethnic conflicts, Nested Nationalism explains how Soviet-era experiences and policies continue to shape interethnic relationships and expectations today.

CHAPTER 1

Making Minorities and National Hierarchies

“I RECEIVED THE TELEGRAM. ANSWER SPECIFICALLY WHY THE FAMILY DOES NOT ANSWER. IS THE FAMILY WELL? KISSES = ZUL′FUGAR.” Strips of yellowed paper affixed to a telegram preserve the anxious message that Zulfugar Ahmedzade (Zülfüqar Əhmədzadə/Зульфугар Ахмедзаде) sent from Suslovo, part of the Gulag complex in Western Siberia, to his son, Ayyub (Əjjub), in the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR).¹ Desperate communications like Ahmedzade’s reflect the tragic circumstances of repressed people throughout the Soviet Union who, in the midst of their own tragedies, worried about the families they had been forced to leave behind and with whom they remained tenuously, if at all, connected. Extrajudicially sentenced to imprisonment by the Special Council of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) on August 23, 1938, Ahmedzade never saw his family again.² He died in 1942 in Mariinsk, the administrative center of Siblag, the sprawling central prison-camp of the Western Siberian Gulag (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei; or main camp administration).

Who was Ahmedzade? Born in 1898 in Pensar village in what is now the Astara region of Azerbaijan—an area populated mostly by indigenous Talyshes whose Iranic language bears the same name—Ahmedzade joined the Bolshevik Party in 1919. Trained as a teacher, from the early 1920s until his repression in 1938, he worked his way up through Azerbaijan’s political and national cultural ranks. He led Communist Party organization and instruction (Orgotdel) departments, a land department, and executive committees throughout the republic, including in Lankaran (Lənkəran), Kurdistan, Zaqatala, Aghdam (Ağdam), and Astara.³ He also worked for the Azerbaijan SSR Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) and from 1934 to 1938 headed the national minority department at the republic’s publishing house, Azerneshr (Azərnəşr).⁴ By the 1930s, then, Ahmedzade was one of the most prominent Talysh cultural and political figures in Azerbaijan. He produced literary materials in the Talysh and Azerbaijani languages, published poetry and fiction in both languages, created Talysh-language textbooks for new Talysh-language schools, and translated significant texts into Talysh, including The Communist Manifesto, Robinson Crusoe, and children’s stories such as Qaraca Qız, by Azerbaijani writer Süleyman Sani Akhundov (Axundov).⁵

As nations are created, determining who does and does not belong, and eliminating, marginalizing, or otherwise silencing those who represent competing identifications and ways of being, are standard and often violent activities. For many years, political and cultural elites in various Soviet republics, including Azerbaijan, debated the contours of their nationhoods among themselves and with Moscow’s representatives as part of the USSR’s ongoing effort to standardize and define national cultures, traditions, and boundaries.⁶ Purges of political and cultural workers in the 1920s and 1930s were part of this process. Although there has been a historiographical tendency to contrast “authentic” national actors (many of whom were eventually repressed) with “inauthentic” others who repress them, some of the victimizers were also enacting their own national agendas.⁷ That is, there was no requirement to disavow the nation, however one defined it, when joining the Communist Party or working for the Soviet state. As Adeeb Khalid has pointed out in the context of Uzbekistan in the 1920s, “The new political elite, those whose work lay primarily in the party or the soviet apparatus, was equally invested in the nation, and they had no problem assimilating it to their idea of the revolution … The nation had become the common currency in which political elites conducted their business.”⁸

The surge of violence and repression in which Ahmedzade was trapped, later known as the Great Terror, began in 1936. In the South Caucasus, it overlapped with the dissolution of the Transcaucasian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic (TSFSR) and the ensuing emergence of full-fledged Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian SSRs.⁹ As part of this process, the state started to classify the Tiurks of Soviet Azerbaijan as Azerbaijani in part to establish a titular nationality for the republic. Prior to this, things were blurrier. In the imperial period, the state ordered the population mainly according to religious confession and many people understood themselves in these terms as well. Therefore it was not uncommon for people in the area that became Azerbaijan and elsewhere in the Russian Empire to see themselves in religious rather than national ways. Myriad ethnonyms were also at play, including Tiurk and Türk. The Russian language distinguished between Tiurks (tiurok) and Turks (turok), but neither term was used in a consistent manner. Further, no comparable differentiation existed in the Azerbaijani and Turkish languages, meaning that until this ethnonymic break, Azerbaijani Tiurks and Turks were both commonly identified as Türk in those languages.

With Moscow and Ankara’s relationship worsening, these sorts of muddled ethnic boundaries were increasingly undesirable. Thus, although the idea of an Azerbaijani nation can be traced to the local intelligentsia in the late imperial period, theirs was generally an expansionist vision that included pan-Turkish elements and linked Azerbaijanis in the Russian Empire to Azeris in Iran.¹⁰ In contrast, the Bolshevik definition of the Azerbaijani nationality in the late 1930s looked inward, seeking to root Tiurks-cum-Azerbaijanis in the USSR and isolate them from the Turco-Persian world that extended beyond its borders. During the Great Terror, many historians, linguists, and writers associated with pre-Bolshevik or Turco-Persian understandings of Azerbaijani nationhood were repressed as the party standardized its definition of the Soviet Azerbaijani nation.

These geopolitical anxieties also disrupted the nascent national hierarchies and nontitular communities that are my focus here. The term minority had always been ambivalent in the Soviet context. Because national minorities (natsional′nye menʹshinstva, or natsmen) were negatively stereotyped as backward, they were targeted, for better or worse, by various forms of national cultural programming that aimed to mature and standardize their national cultures and consciousnesses to advance their ethnohistorical development. The term natsmen sometimes was used broadly to describe all non-Russians, but increasingly came to denote nontitular minorities.

It also acquired overwhelmingly negative connotations over time.¹¹ Janet Klein has defined minoritization as a process through which minorities start “to be regarded as threats to the territorial integrity and sovereignty of ‘the nation’ and to the imagined privilege and power of the dominant (named) group, now envisioned as the ‘majority,’ or the real citizen.”¹² During the Great Terror, political leaders in both Moscow and the republics increasingly conceptualized nontitular minorities as potential threats both to the security of the Soviet state and to the viability of titular nations. As the rights and visibility of nontitular minorities were curtailed and the complicated hierarchy of nationalities simplified to advance titular nation-building and Soviet ethnohistorical progress, prominent members of these national communities like Ahmedzade became marked.

This chapter traces this uneven process of minoritization from the early 1920s through the late 1930s and makes a case for rethinking some conventional understandings of early Soviet nationality policy. Although we write in broad strokes about nontitular and titular nationalities in the Soviet Union, inconsistent national cultural investments meant not only that Moscow treated various titular populations differently but also that there was often little coherence to the nontitular category. The example of Azerbaijan shows us that national cultural resources varied widely across nontitular populations throughout this period. Korenizatsiia—the striving to promote native languages and cadres in governmental affairs, education, workspaces, and cultural arenas—continued, and even expanded, in some communities even as others were being erased. Avars and Lezgins, for example, maintained census and passport recognition in Azerbaijan but lost access to other institutional forms of state support at the close of the 1930s. Others, such as Kurds, faced deportation as well as assimilation (at least from the state’s perspective) into the Azerbaijani nationality category. Georgians and Armenians in Azerbaijan, meanwhile, entered the 1940s with comparatively stable access to native-language schools, media, and books, as well as representation in censuses and, to a lesser extent, local governance. Although consistently categorized as national minorities alongside other non-Tiurk/Azeri communities in Azerbaijan, Georgians and Armenians were also distinct because they had titular co-ethnics in neighboring republics. Throughout the Soviet period, they received external support from Soviet Georgia and Soviet Armenia, allowing them to be treated more like people who had a kin republic in the Soviet Union than nontitular minorities.

More generally, viewing Soviet history through the nontitular lens offers new ways of thinking about early nationality policies. Multiple scholars have argued, for example, that the drive for centralization during the cultural revolution of the late 1920s and early 1930s impaired korenizatsiia in national republics. This argument has intersected with debates about whether these changes precipitated a “Great Retreat” from or prefigured an intensification of extant efforts to amalgamate national groups and achieve ethnohistorical progress over the course of the mid- to late-1930s.¹³ The period looks quite different, however, when the nontitular perspective is taken into account because it was only at this time that many nontitular minorities were first brought into korenizatsiia and—years after most titular nations—started to experience well-known aspects of Soviet nationhood, including access to state-sponsored national cultural resources and local political representation. In a pattern that repeats itself throughout the Soviet era, the disciplining of titular nations and some titular elites during the cultural revolution created new opportunities for nontitular development. This, in turn, reinforced an emerging dynamic wherein nontitular and titular national interests were often counterposed to one another.

Shifting the perspective from titular to nontitular nationalities similarly decenters debates about Russifying policies in the 1930s. When nontitular minorities were expunged from the census in 1939 they often were folded into the titular nationality of the republic in which they lived. People who might have been categorized as Tats in the 1926 census, for example, would now be Azerbaijani (and not Russian) in 1939. Similarly, it was common to convert nontitular schools to titular-language schools rather than to Russian ones when the Soviet minority school network was stripped down...