Empire of Nations

Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union

Francine Hirsch

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780801455933
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Russie

When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they set themselves the task of building socialism in the vast landscape of the former Russian Empire, a territory populated by hundreds of different peoples belonging to a multitude of linguistic, religious, and ethnic groups. Before 1917, the Bolsheviks had called for the national self-determination of all peoples and had condemned all forms of colonization as exploitative. After attaining power, however, they began to express concern that it would not be possible for Soviet Russia to survive without the cotton of Turkestan and the oil of the Caucasus. In an effort to reconcile their anti-imperialist position with their desire to hold on to as much territory as possible, the Bolsheviks integrated the national idea into the administrative-territorial structure of the new Soviet state. In Empire of Nation s, Francine Hirsch examines the ways in which former imperial ethnographers and local elites provided the Bolsheviks with ethnographic knowledge that shaped the very formation of the new Soviet Union. The ethnographers—who drew inspiration from the Western European colonial context—produced all-union censuses, assisted government commissions charged with delimiting the USSR's internal borders, led expeditions to study "the human being as a productive force, " and created ethnographic exhibits about the "Peoples of the USSR." In the 1930s, they would lead the Soviet campaign against Nazi race theories. Hirsch illuminates the pervasive tension between the colonial-economic and ethnographic definitions of Soviet territory; this tension informed Soviet social, economic, and administrative structures. A major contribution to the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, Empire of Nations also offers new insights into the connection between ethnography and empire.

PART 1

Empire, Nation, and the Scientific State

CHAPTER 1

Toward a Revolutionary Alliance

I know Russia so little. Simbirsk, Kazan, Petersburg, and that’s about it.

—Vladimir Lenin, 1907, quoted in Lenin: A Biography (2000)

When the Bolsheviks staged a successful coup in October 1917, they proclaimed the dawn of a new era. Vladimir Il’ich Ul’ianov Lenin imagined that Russia’s revolution would spark European socialist revolutions, creating a new international order. In the meantime, he and his comrades turned their attention to preserving and furthering the revolution’s gains within the former Russian Empire. The Bolshevik Party engaged in agitation and propaganda, denouncing enemies and rallying mass support. It also turned to work at which the revolutionaries were unpracticed: the work of government.

As Russia’s new rulers, the Bolsheviks claimed vast lands with a multilingual and multiethnic population. This posed an ideological as well as a practical challenge. Karl Marx had not imagined that the socialist revolution would happen in an empire like Russia. As an underground political party, the Bolsheviks had given much attention to the Russian Empire’s economic and nationality problems, writing polemics on both themes. But as the new government in power in 1917, they still had much to learn about the expanse in which they hoped to put theory into practice and build socialism. Many leading Bolsheviks had spent long years in European exile and were out of touch with actual conditions in much of Russia. They advocated economic transformation and promised national self-determination, but lacked detailed knowledge about the former empire’s lands and peoples.

In late 1917, an unlikely group came to the Bolsheviks’ aid. Sergei F. Ol’-denburg, permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences, offered the Bolsheviks the expertise of ethnographers, geographers, linguists, and other scholars, many of whom had loyally served the Tsar. These experts included in their ranks leading political figures from the recently deposed Provisional Government. Ol’denburg was a member of the Constitutional Democratic Party (the Kadets) and a self-described constitutional monarchist. He and his colleagues opposed the Bolsheviks as extremists and were aware that the Bolsheviks characterized them as class enemies. But instead of fleeing Russia or collaborating with anti-Bolshevik forces, they actively sought an alliance with the Bolsheviks. They saw in this alliance the opportunity to help Russia in the war, to preserve their scientific institutions, and to pursue their own revolutionary agenda—using scientific knowledge to turn Russia into a modern state.1 The Bolsheviks, for their part, recognized Ol’denburg and his colleagues as valuable providers of direly needed information about the lands and peoples of the Russian Empire. Two Academy of Sciences commissions were already doing the types of ethnographic and economic inventories of Russia that Lenin himself deemed necessary.

This alliance between Bolsheviks and liberal experts was facilitated by the fact that Ol’denburg and Vladimir Ul’ianov had a personal history. The two men met for the first time in 1891.2 Ol’denburg, who had recently returned from a two-year trip to Paris, London, and Cambridge, was completing his graduate work in Oriental Studies and teaching Indian languages and literatures at St. Petersburg University. At age twenty-nine, he was a published scholar with an international reputation.3 Ul’ianov, a law student whose revolutionary activities had led to his expulsion from Kazan University, had recently been granted permission to take the jurisprudence exams as an external student at St. Petersburg University. In March 1891, the twenty-one-year-old Ul’ianov went to St. Petersburg for the exams and while in the capital visited Ol’denburg.4 He hoped to learn more about his older brother Aleksandr, who had been executed in 1887 for his part in an unsuccessful conspiracy to assassinate Tsar Aleksandr III. Aleksandr Ul’ianov had attended St. Petersburg University in the 1880s, where he and Ol’denburg had traveled in the same circles. Both had been members of the Student Scientific-Literary Association, a brotherhood and haven for liberal and radical idealists.5

Ol’denburg and Vladimir Ul’ianov belonged to the same small world of educated society (obshchestvo) which was frustrated with what it saw as Russia’s political, social, and economic “backwardness” vis-a-vis the West. Both men were critics of the tsarist state, as well as advocates of rational government and science-based reform. Both shared a broad European orientation, a fascination with the French Revolution, a secular (materialistic) worldview, and a desire to see Russia’s transformation. But Ol’denburg and Ul’ianov imagined this transformation in different terms and chose different personal paths. Ul’ianov’s path took him through the Russian and European revolutionary underground: to prison, forced Siberian exile, and eventually to Europe.6 From Europe, he published his strategies for revolution under the pseudonym Lenin. While Ul’ianov dreamed of overthrowing the imperial government, Ol’denburg rapidly rose through the ranks of its scholarly institutions. He became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1901 and was chosen to serve as its permanent secretary in 1904.7 After 1905 he became increasingly active in the Imperial Russian Geographical Society (IRGO).

By 1905, Ol’denburg and Ul’ianov had established their career paths and their politics; over the course of the next decade, each in his own way undertook a study of the Russian Empire’s “nationality question.” For most of the period between 1905 and 1917, Ul’ianov lived in Western Europe and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, debating with other socialists and developing his own theory about the role of national movements in a socialist revolution. Ol’-denburg spent these years in Russia, organizing research expeditions and studying the lands and peoples of the empire. Upon becoming reacquainted in November 1917, the two men discovered that they had a similar appreciation for the potential of scientific government and a shared interest in the nationality question. They forged a working relationship between radical revolutionaries and liberal experts—a relationship that shaped the very formation of the Soviet Union.

This chapter treats Soviet nationality policy as the product of a collaborative effort between Bolsheviks and imperial experts—two groups whose ideas took shape within a broader pan-European framework and crystallized in the wake of the First World War. Unlike many studies of Soviet nationality policy, which begin in 1917 or 1923 and treat Lenin and Joseph Stalin as the sole architects of Soviet policies and practices, this chapter takes as its focus the years between 1905 and 1917 and weaves together two separate but related stories.8 The first of these stories traces how Bolshevik theories about nationalism and national movements evolved in response to the intense politicization of the “national idea” in Europe. The second investigates how European ideas about Volk and “nation” and about the scientific management of empire crossed into Russia via a group of ethnographers and other experts. The two stories converge after October 1917, when the Bolsheviks and the experts came together and began to formulate a unique “Soviet” approach to the peoples of the Russian Empire—by drawing on a range of European and Russian practices and ideas (including the theories of Marx and Friedrich Engels) as well as responding to certain “facts on the ground” such as the appearance of new national separatist movements, which themselves drew inspiration from the European context. The Bolsheviks and the experts were driven by conflicting long-term goals. But in 1917 both groups put their differences aside and began the work of transforming the former Russian Empire into a new type of multinational state based not on “God” and “Tsar,” but on a secular vision of progress.

The Nationality Question and the Bolsheviks

The Russian Empire’s nationality question became the focus of increasing official attention after the failed revolution of 1905. Newspapers reported that demonstrations that year had taken on a “national character” in the western borderlands, Transcaucasia, and even Siberia. Tsar Nicholas II attempted to appease the empire’s non-Russian population by guaranteeing its participation in the new constitutional assembly, the State Duma.9 But nationality-based political parties, which gained visibility in 1905, had more ambitious goals: they demanded that the Tsar grant the empire’s nationalities cultural and (some form of) political autonomy. These parties were relatively small and did not represent mass movements, but after 1905 they attained a disproportionately important role in the empire’s civic life. Some sought and achieved representation in the Duma. Others did not participate directly in imperial politics, but instead worked out their programs in European exile; the socialists among them fraternized with Russian Social Democrats.10

Most of the empire’s nationality-based political parties drew on proposals that had been advanced over the previous ten years for the nationalities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Some appropriated the argument made by the Austrian Social Democrats at the 1899 Bruenn Congress that nationalities were entitled to national-territorial autonomy—to administrative regions established on the basis of ethnographic criteria.11 Others adopted the argument advanced by the South Slavs at the Bruenn Congress that every nationality was entitled to extraterritorial (cultural) autonomy or “self-rule in linguistic and cultural matters” regardless of territorial divisions. The South Slav proposal (later adopted and further developed by the Austrian Social Democrats Otto Bauer and Karl Renner) became a critical part of the national program of the Jewish Socialist Party, the Bund; the Bund then introduced it to other nationality-based parties in the Russian Empire.12

By 1905 Lenin and the Russian Social Democrats had started to formulate their own position on the nationality question. They too developed their ideas in dialogue with the Austrian Social Democrats and with the Bund. At this time, Lenin dismissed the importance of the nationality question in the Russian Empire, arguing that there was nothing particularly “nationalist” about the demonstrations of 1905: that these local populations were expressing the universal desire for equal rights. He was, however, concerned about the threat that nationalism posed to the international unity of the Social Democrats; this threat seemed especially acute as Jewish, Georgian, and other groups of socialists advocated the reorganization of the Social Democratic Party into national divisions.13 Lenin critiqued the Bruenn Congress proposals that had become popular among these socialists, maintaining that they would delay the socialist revolution. Extraterritorial autonomy would erect barriers between workers of different nationalities; federalism would decentralize the state and impede economic development.14 Yet Lenin also dismissed the argument of Polish Social Democrat Rosa Luxemburg that socialists, as committed internationalists, should not support national movements at all. According to Lenin, to not uphold the right of an oppressed nation to secede from an oppressive state would be to support despotism.15

By all accounts, Lenin began to take a greater interest in Russia’s nationality question in 1912, when he took up residence in Krakow, a hotbed of national tension in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In Krakow, Lenin became better acquainted with the national struggles among Austria-Hungary’s multinational population.16 These struggles seemed all the more serious against the backdrop of the Balkan wars, which were being fought by Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Bosnians in the name of “national liberation.”17 It was an episode in St. Petersburg, however, that most strongly impressed on Lenin the importance of clarifying the Bolshevik position. In a December 1912 speech before the Fourth State Duma, the Georgian Social Democrat Akaki Chkhenkeli, a Menshevik, demanded extraterritorial autonomy for the nationalities of the Russian Empire. Lenin was irate that the Georgian Mensheviks had adopted the “South Slav solution” (by this time espoused enthusiastically by Austrian Social Democrats) and had introduced it before the Duma as part of the Russian Social Democratic program.18

The following month at a party meeting in Krakow, Lenin condemned the Georgian Menshevik position and asked a young Georgian Bolshevik to write an...