Constructing Grievance

Ethnic Nationalism in Russia's Republics

Elise Giuliano

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780801461200
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Demands for national independence among ethnic minorities around the world suggest the power of nationalism. Contemporary nationalist movements can quickly attract fervent followings, but they can just as rapidly lose support. In Constructing Grievance, Elise Giuliano asks why people with ethnic identities throw their support behind nationalism in some cases but remain quiescent in others. Popular support for nationalism, Giuliano contends, is often fleeting. It develops as part of the process of political mobilization—a process that itself transforms the meaning of ethnic identity. She compares sixteen ethnic republics of the Russian Federation, where nationalist mobilization varied widely during the early 1990s despite a common Soviet inheritance. Drawing on field research in the republic of Tatarstan, socioeconomic statistical data, and a comparative discourse analysis of local newspapers, Giuliano argues that people respond to nationalist leaders after developing a group grievance. Ethnic grievances, however, are not simply present or absent among a given population based on societal conditions. Instead, they develop out of the interaction between people's lived experiences and the specific messages that nationalist entrepreneurs put forward concerning ethnic group disadvantage.

In Russia, Giuliano shows, ethnic grievances developed rapidly in certain republics in the late Soviet era when messages articulated by nationalist leaders about ethnic inequality in local labor markets resonated with people's experience of growing job insecurity in a contracting economy. In other republics, however, where nationalist leaders focused on articulating other issues, such as cultural and language problems facing the ethnic group, group grievances failed to develop, and popular support for nationalism stalled. People with ethnic identities, Giuliano concludes, do not form political interest groups primed to support ethnic politicians and movements for national secession.

1

ETHNIC ENTREPRENEURS, ORDINARY PEOPLE, AND GROUP GRIEVANCE

This era no longer wants us! This era wants to create independent nation-states! People no longer believe in God. The new religion is nationalism. Nations no longer go to church. They go to national associations.

—Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

In the late 1980s ethnonationalist movements were springing up all over Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Initiated by intellectuals but carried out by mass publics through protest cycles, popular referenda, and elections for independence, nationalist movements sought to gain political control of their region away from rulers they considered foreign. As the states of Eastern Europe suddenly dislodged communist rule and union republics in the Soviet Union unexpectedly acquired independent statehood, the federal integrity of the new Russian state balanced precariously. Home to sixteen autonomous republics (ARs) that were ranked just below the union republics (URs) in the USSR’s ethnoterritorial administrative hierarchy, Russia shared the same ethnofederal structure as the Soviet Union and was experiencing the same colossal upheaval.1 Entrenched ideologies were thrown to the wind, central economic planning was disassembled, and the Communist Party—with its system of political appointments at every level of state administration—disintegrated. Amid these transformations, opposition nationalist movements in the republics were attracting growing levels of popular support. When a struggle for power developed in Moscow between the proreform executive and the conservative legislature, several republics took advantage of central state weakness to accelerate their quest for sovereignty.

Throughout the early 1990s the Russian Federation faced a serious threat of dissolution along ethnic lines. In nearby Yugoslavia, violent ethnic conflict and war loomed. The Russian state, for its part, identified—and as part of the Soviet Union had itself reified over time—more than one hundred ethnic minorities. Russia also contained over twenty ethnically defined subfederal territories. An outbreak of ethnic violence there, given the country’s enormous nuclear arsenal, could have produced untold destruction. At the time, Russian leaders and Western observers alike feared that Russia would follow the disintegration of the Soviet Union along ethnic lines.2 Yet such fears were proven wrong. Within a few years ethnofederal implosion had become increasingly unlikely as nationalist separatism in Russia’s republics faded away, with the exception of the Republic of Chechnya. Why did mass publics mobilize behind nationalist movements in certain Russian republics but fail to do so in others?3 Why did some republics mount strong secessionist campaigns against Moscow while others remained quiescent? In this book I examine variation in mass nationalist mobilization and regional secessionism across Russia’s republics in order to address one of the thorniest and most undertheorized issues in the literature on nationalism: why ordinary people respond to the appeals of nationalist leaders calling for radical transformation of the status quo.

There is no shortage of studies on the phenomenon of nationalist mobilization, yet most overestimate the power of ethnicity as a basis of political action. Some accounts view ethnic masses as passive actors who automatically respond to the manipulations of ethnic elites; others treat masses as highly likely to support elites when the right combination of economic and political variables is present. They view people with ethnic identities as members of ethnic groups—and ethnic groups as political actors with interests distinct from those of other actors in the same society. In this approach, ethnic groups exist in multiethnic societies as bounded, self-aware actors prior to an episode of political mobilization. Thus they respond automatically when a political entrepreneur asserts that national independence serves the interest of the group. In this view, nationalist mobilization is a relatively common outcome.

Yet ethnic groups in plural societies are not simply “there.” People may come to develop a sense of solidarity with others and feel that they are part of an ethnic group, but ethnic groups are not entities in the world with a bounded set of interests.4 Because ethnic identities are socially salient categories for the subjects of study and because those subjects themselves reify ethnic groups, analysts tend to take ethnic groups as social givens; they tend to adopt their subjects’ categories as their own.5 Ethnic identities are a social reality for many people and have real effects on outcomes, but this does not mean that people with ethnic affiliations constitute a group with common interests and a sense of political destiny prior to a moment of political mobilization. Instead, a sense of “groupness”6 comes into being as a result of a political process. The process of nationalist mobilization transforms previous meanings of ethnic identity in a particular society into something that denotes a cultural community deserving control of its own state. It is political mobilization itself that makes people start to categorize themselves as being on one or another side of a group boundary and to perceive information in terms of how it affects their group.7

This means that whereas certain political and economic conditions may establish an environment that offers incentives for political leaders to play the ethnic card, mass nationalism does not automatically spring from these conditions. Rather, nationalist mobilization occurs when political and economic conditions become imbued with particular kinds of meanings at the microlevel. These meanings are not self-evident; it takes intentional action by political entrepreneurs to portray a given set of conditions in a way that connects to the lived experiences of ordinary people. Nationalist entrepreneurs must define the ethnic group that they seek to represent as an organic body that is a victim of forces beyond its control. They must attribute blame for that victimization to current circumstances or political authorities. Nationalists must articulate a position that makes the solution to the problem—establishing a nation-state—look like the only and essential way to redress group victimization and an unjust status quo. Finally, this message has to resonate with people’s lived experiences. When it does, a sense of nationhood can develop rapidly and nationalist mobilization may occur. But it is also possible, or even likely, that people who identify with a particular ethnic identity never come to see themselves as part of a victimized group. They do not place blame on other actors for conditions facing the group and thus do not view control of the state as a necessity. In this case, support for nationalism never gets off the ground. Both of these phenomena—mass nationalist mobilization and the absence of mass mobilization despite the appeals of nationalist leaders—took place in Russia’s republics. In short, mass nationalism is a political process, not a fixed set of preferences on the part of people who maintain ethnic identities. Nationalism can come and go while ethnic identities remain strong and deeply felt.

In several of Russia’s republics, mass nationalism developed out of the interaction between people’s experiences in local labor markets and issue framings articulated by ethnic entrepreneurs. Nationalist entrepreneurs articulated issues about what I call ethnic economic inequality. They described obstacles to economic achievement facing members of titular ethnic groups8 by claiming that ethnic Russians held the most prestigious jobs and enjoyed access to desirable resources, while titulars were concentrated in low-status jobs or rural economies. At first glance this looks like a standard story of nationalist politics: inequality develops among communities in a given society; one community becomes aware of its subordinate position and mobilizes to rectify the inequality by establishing its own nation-state. A closer look at labor markets and Soviet state policies, however, indicates that not only did people with titular identities face relatively few obstacles to achievement, but in fact titulars had achieved considerable occupational success during the Soviet era. Thus titular nationalities in the late 1980s could be considered either subordinate to or more privileged than Russians. On the one hand, titulars were subordinate: they held a larger portion of rural agricultural jobs than ethnic Russians while Russians occupied the most prestigious positions in republican economies. On the other hand, titulars were privileged: they had undergone significant socioeconomic mobility as a result of the Soviet state’s korenizatsiia, or affirmative action policies, and had moved into urban factory jobs and white-collar positions. So economic conditions in the republics during the late glasnost period and early post-Soviet period can be (and were) interpreted in multiple ways.9

In republics where nationalist entrepreneurs articulated issues concerning ethnic economic inequality, they were able to attract a substantial degree of popular support even though their claims did not accurately portray the socioeconomic opportunities open to titular nationalities. However, in republics where nationalists focused on articulating other issues, including cultural and language issues, they failed to win popular support. Mass nationalist mobilization took place only in those republics where nationalist entrepreneurs put forward ethnified framings of economic issues.

The experience of nationalist leaders in Russia suggests that ethnic entrepreneurs face considerable constraints. They cannot easily or mechanically attract support from ordinary people who share their ethnic identity by assuming that as coethnics they have common interests. Yet at the same time, economic issues do not work mobilizational magic. There are limits to the kinds of claims nationalists can make about economic inequality. Nationalist leaders in Russia were able to attract mass support in certain republics because their framing of issues of ethnic economic inequality resonated with people’s anxieties about job insecurity in an economy undergoing severe crisis.

In the late 1980s the Soviet economy entered a massive recession. Economic production began to contract throughout the country. At the same time, perestroika-era reforms introduced shortages of consumer goods, long lines for food, and the beginnings of unemployment.10 Soviet citizens who had become accustomed to state-provided educations, jobs, and occupational security in an expanding economy found the new conditions tremendously unsettling. As more citizens than ever before were obtaining education and training to work in an industrialized economy, people began to sense a tightening of labor opportunities. Massive fear of unemployment set in. Against this background, the nationalists’ story of titular underrepresentation and blocked opportunity in local economies persuaded people with titular identities to interpret their experiences and feelings of job insecurity in ethnic terms—as something related to the fortunes of the ethnic group. Nationalist entrepreneurs alleged that titulars were socioeconomically subordinate to Russians and depicted them as victims. Then they placed the blame for this situation on a discriminatory state. Finally they offered a solution by claiming that attaining republican sovereignty would eliminate oppression and restore justice.11 Nationalists connected people’s ethnic identity to their material interest in a desirable job and to their sense of self-worth concerning their socioeconomic status. They helped to define individual interests by linking personal life chances to the fate of the nation. Even though the frame of ethnic economic inequality was not entirely accurate, the fact of rising job insecurity in a contracting, centrally planned economy made people receptive to it. Thus a group grievance developed, crystallizing a sense of ethnic nationhood among people with titular identities and inspiring them to support the call to replace the status quo with a new, national order. The framework developed in this book focuses on how a dynamic interaction between economic structures, the experiences of ordinary people, and the discourse of political entrepreneurs produces group grievances that inspire support for nationalist transformation.

The Puzzle of Nationalism in Russia’s Republics

On a campaign swing through Kazan, Tatarstan, in 1990, Boris Yeltsin told that republic’s residents, “Take as much sovereignty as you can swallow.”12 At the time, demands for sovereignty were radiating from the autonomous republics inside the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) to Moscow. The Soviet Union collapsed a year later, and Yeltsin, who had since become president of the new Russian Federation, inherited one of Mikhail Gorbachev’s most intractable problems. As he struggled to consolidate control of the central state, several of Russia’s republics stepped up their demands on Moscow for sovereignty. They asserted control over natural resources, defied federal laws, and introduced republican presidencies. The decisions some republics made to boycott federal elections, stop paying federal taxes, and hold referenda on “state” sovereignty lent momentum to a process that seemed likely to end in Russia’s disintegration.

In several republics, opposition nationalist movements were attracting rising levels of popular sup...

Table of contents

• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• 1. ETHNIC ENTREPRENEURS, ORDINARY PEOPLE, AND GROUP GRIEVANCE
• 2. VARIATION IN MASS NATIONALISM ACROSS RUSSIA’S REPUBLICS
• 3. DOES STRUCTURE MATTER?
• 4. SUPPORTING NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY IN TATARSTAN
• 5. NATIONALISM IN A SOCIALIST COMPANY TOWN
• 6. ETHNIC ENTREPRENEURS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF GROUP GRIEVANCE
• 7. SECESSIONISM FROM THE BOTTOM UP
• 8. LESSONS FROM RUSSIA
• Bibliography