Economic and demographic change in Soviet Union from Cambridge history of Russia, volume 3

lewis h. siegelbaum

a 'fundamental ambivalence between the workers' director and the workers' state's director'.[151]

It would appear that with the launching of the 'socialist offensive' in the late 1920s that ambivalence was resolved in favour of directors' accountability to the state. The party's public campaign for edinonachalie, which was intended to eliminate the managerial parallelism of the director, party secretary and the factory trade union committee, and which culminated in new 'Model Regulations of Production Enterprises' of January 1930, certainly pointed in that direction.[152] So too did several resolutions ofthe party's Central Committee that granted ownership of factories' capital, the authority to plan production and set quotas and organise supplies and sales to superordinate production associations (trusts, ob"edineniia, glavki).[153]

However, these rules and resolutions were routinely violated for the simple reason that it was impossible for directors to abide by them and fulfil their pro­duction plans. From Stalin's standpoint, they were acting like 'conceited bigwig bureaucrats' who behaved as if'party decisions and Soviet laws are not written for them, but for fools'. They had to be brought down a peg or two and be 'put in their proper place', as he told the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934.[154] As for labour policy, the same directors exhibited the opposite tendency, namely, an unwillingness to exercise the punitive powers vested in them. Addressing a meeting of economic executives in 1934, M. M. Kaganovich attacked direc­tors who wanted 'to play the "liberal" . . . The ground must shake when the director goes around the factory,' he asserted. A director who has become a liberal isn't worth half a kopeck. Workers do not like such a director. They like a powerful leader.'[155]

Shake the ground though they might, directors were unlikely to obtain and hold onto a sufficient number of workers or extract from them the necessary co-operation without concessions. Successful managers down to the level of foreman thus were those who learned how to combine acting like bigwigs with playing the liberal, covering their sleights of hand and indulgence with professions of loyalty to the party line and claims to have fulfilled their respon­sibilities. This was both the cause and effect of the system of'taut' planning and the irregularity of supplies, the effects of which made a mockery of planning and efforts to standardise production. In addition to features already cited as endemic to the Soviet system ofproduction relations, mention shouldbe made of paying workers at grades higher than those outlined in wage handbooks, granting bogus 'bonuses' that amounted to permanent additions to their basic pay, paying for fictitious piecework during down time and defective output during the (inevitable) storming sessions at the end of the month or quarterly plan period, and building 'family nests' feathered by the mutual interests of managers and party officials in perpetuating such practices.[156]

Enterprise paternalism thus had little to do with the social backgrounds or 'party-mindedness' of managers. It also was not a vestige of pre-revolutionary times, but rather emerged as a 'neo-traditional' response to an otherwise unworkable set of systemic conditions. The degree to which it was exercised, of course, varied according to the strategic significance of the enterprise, the ingenuity of the enterprise administration in obtaining resources and other factors. Generally, where local or municipal soviet budgets did not permit supporting social infrastructure (and this was more often the case than not) the enterprise assumed the role of community organiser not unlike Amer­ican company towns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It provided accommodation (or the materials with which to build housing), childcare, dining facilities, access to scarce food supplies, clothing and durable household goods, and a host of other services.

In this context the well-known aphorism, 'as long as the bosses pretend they are paying us a decent wage, we will pretend that we are working', becomes fully comprehensible.[157] Wages and the buying power to which they are con­nected in market-based societies had less significance in the Soviet economy where the verb 'to get' or 'obtain' (dostat') replaced 'buy' in common par­lance. Workers who got on the wrong side of management or the trade union committee jeopardised their opportunity to receive goods and services, but management risked losing workers if it pushed them too hard. These unwrit­ten rules of the game extended to promotion, time off for family emergencies, pilferage (notoriously extensive in the Brezhnev era), use of enterprise materi­als and facilities for production 'on the side' and other informal arrangements based on personal ties.[158]

As for pretending to work, it has been argued on the basis of observation and interviews at a Samara factory in the early 1990s that 'workers love their work, dedicate themselves to it completely, although in discussion they often curse it'. This 'particular kind of love' stemmed not only from the workplace having been a refuge from overcrowded housing conditions and the primary site of sociability, but also because the 'non-technological' (i.e. unstandardised) nature of production presented workers with opportunities for exercising their ingenuity and creativity.[159] Or, as Michael Burawoy (drawing on his extensive personal experience) has put it, 'under state socialism uncertainties in materi­als, machinery, and labor call for flexible autonomy on the shop floor'.[160]

It is important here to distinguish between 'work', which included many self-defined (and self-defining) tasks, and the job for which workers were hired. It is also important to disaggregate workers. One distinction stressed by the party was between the supposedly more reliable, politically 'conscious', core or cadre workers, and the rest ofthe labour force. The former could be expected to contribute to rationalisation proposals to production conferences, participate in socialist competition and serve on trade union committees. This distinction, however, did not necessarily coincide with the status hierarchy among workers themselves. Having internalised Soviet propaganda's emphasis on the dignify­ing, self-realising dimensions of material labour, industrial workers tended to have greater respect for production than auxiliary workers regardless of skill level.[161] Finally, gender stereotyping, deeply ingrained in both official and pop­ular cultures, produced and perpetuated the segregation of occupations, and the marginalisation of women as poorly paid, low-status auxiliary workers.[162]Female workers were therefore less likely to experience the 'particular kind of love' than their male counterparts, although the affective relationships formed with other workers in their brigade or kollektiv could be no less meaningful or strong.

The end of the Soviet working class

The Gorbachev years were hardly kind to industrial labour. It is not that the last Soviet leader set out to antagonise workers, although his early campaigns for 'acceleration' and a crackdown on alcoholic consumption and labour truancy hardly won him many friends on the shop floor. Rather, the interests of labour often appeared as an afterthought in the elaboration ofglasnost' andperestroika. Even the Law on State Enterprises (1987), whose provisions for managerial elections and expanded powers for councils of labour collectives (STKs) were hailed as a great breakthrough for industrial democracy and self-management, changed little. Accordingto one estimate, over 90 percent of managers retained their positions in Soviet industry after elections, and, at least until 1989, the STKs were stacked with directors' favourites.⁸⁷

On a broader level, while perestroika rapidly eroded the centralised redis- tributive powers of the ministries, it did not succeed in replacing the inte­grative functions of the command economy or the disciplinary powers of the party. In the resultant scramble for resources (raw materials, labour, consumer goods, credits), debts piled up, rationing was reintroduced for the first time since the end of the Second World War, inflation rose sharply and workers and their unions became increasingly dependent on handouts from enter­prise directors.⁸⁸ By 1991 when Gorbachev adopted a watered-down version of the '500-day plan' for the marketisation of the economy, it was too late. A condition of lawlessness accompanied the frenzy of privatisation of industry, two-thirds of whose capital stock was judged to be obsolete.⁸⁹ The 'socialist market economy' turned out to be an oxymoron.

What has been termed 'perestroika from below' was best represented by the coal miners' strike of the summer of 1989.⁹⁰ Alarmed but at the same time emboldened by the disintegration of the state, the miners' strike committees advanced two kinds of demands. One was for more from higher authorities - more goods, more money for wages and pensions and more benefits. Another category of demands was for the restructuring of their industry, namely, full autonomy for enterprises to enable them to contract with both domestic and foreign customers at 'world' prices that were considerably higher than what the state paid and the right to retain the proceeds. Such 'bread and butter demands' gave the strike its predominantly economic cast and, despite their internal inconsistency, were not incompatible with the spirit ofperestroika from above. But other, more political demands soon surfaced, including the repeal

87 Paul T. Christensen, Russia's Workers in Transition: Labor, Management, and the State under Gorbachev and Yeltsin (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999), pp. 67-72.

88 Michael Burawoy and Kathryn Hendley 'Between Perestroika and Privatisation: Divided Strategies and Political Crisis in a Soviet Enterprise', Soviet Studies 44 (1992): 371-402.

89 Gertrude Schroeder, 'Dimensions of Russia's Industrial Transformation, 1992 to 1998: An Overview', Post-Soviet Geography and Economics 39, 5 (1998): 251.

90 Theodore H. Friedgut and Lewis H. Siegelbaum, 'The Soviet Miners' Strike, July 1989: Perestroika from Below', Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 804 (Pittsburgh: Center for Russian and East European Studies, 1990).

of Article 6 of the Soviet constitution that enshrined the Communist Party's 'leading role', and the election of the Congress of People's Deputies and its president by universal suffrage.[163]

During the remaining two-and-a-half years of the Soviet Union's existence, coal miners exhibited a militancy and degree of organisation unparalleled among Soviet workers. Their strike/workers' committees and Independent Miners' Union (NPG) spearheaded a second all-Union miners' strike in March- April 1991 which called for Gorbachev's resignation. Reflecting miners' bitter­ness about the centralised allocation of resources (commonly referred to as 'ministerial feudalism'), their organisations also advocated unrestricted free­dom of prices and markets.[164] As their hostility to the 'centre' increased, so did their support for alternative political arrangements - the complete sovereignty of the RSFSR under Boris Yeltsin, and independence for Ukraine.

An analysis of the miners' movement suggests at least two ironies. First, as Stephen Crowley has argued, 'Soviet coal miners fought against the Soviet system and for liberal reforms, including the market, but for reasons that were at odds with those of their liberal allies, reasons that at root were quite socialist'.[165] Producers of material wealth, they felt cheated by a system in which those who redistributed the wealth enriched themselves without doing real work. 'We don't earn', Crowley was told by a leader of the Kuzbass miners in May 1991. 'They give out, and they give out not according to labor but by how much they figure you need.' The market, understood as the means by which 'I earn my own, I buy my own, having sold my labor power', represented the antithesis of this system. It was a key ingredient of the 'normal', 'civilised' society for which miners and other Soviet citizens yearned.[166]

Second, although the movement threw its weight behind Democratic Rus­sia in 1991 and continued to back Yeltsin and successive 'parties of power' after the Soviet Union's collapse, neither in the 1991 and 1996 presidential elec­tions nor in the intervening parliamentary elections of 1993 and 1995 did the Kuzbass, Russia's principal mining district, vote in favour of Yeltsin or the par­ties supporting his administration.[167] As for Ukraine, the movement's support for independence, as characterised by one of its leaders, was predicated on the assumption that it would at last fulfil the Bolsheviks' slogan of October 1917: land to the peasants, factories to the workers.[168] What happened instead, according to another miner activist speaking in February 1992, was that 'we have changed from one political machine to another, with practically the same people [in power]'.[169]

Miners' activism, which extended into the post-Soviet period, was neither continuous nor universal. Nor were miners in this and other respects any more typical of Soviet workers than those in other occupations who stolidly tried to keep their heads above water in the rising tide of political and economic disintegration. The articulation of class varied a great deal in the late Soviet period, overlapping with occupation in some cases (e.g. the miners) and being overshadowed by national and regional identities in others. What was common across republic boundaries and branches of industry was that the collapse of the administrative command system and the Communist Party did not weaken but rather strengthened alliances between workers and management. This was because managerial control of enterprises and managers' role as the personification of the labour collective increased and would continue to do so in the post-Soviet era.[170]

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union workers have been major losers. Official statistics show that real wages indexed to 1985 (1985 = 100) declined to 55 by 1995. Thereafter, wages rose slightly, but in the wake of the financial crisis of 1998, fell again, and by the end of the century were approximately 50 per cent of their 1990 level. On top of this, workers in most if not all sectors of the economy experienced delays or non-payment of wages, the shrinking of benefits and a psycho-social disorientation which, though difficult to quantify, was no less real and goes a long way towards explaining an unprecedented rise in rates of alcoholism, suicide and mortality. Whatever else privatisation and other 'reforms' accomplished, they did not reverse the downward spiral in living standards that most workers experienced in the late Soviet period.

The first phase of privatisation (voucherisation and employee buy-outs) was completed by June 1994, by which time only 20 per cent of the total workforce remained within the state sector. Privatisation turned workers into shareholders. As of December 1994, some 53 per cent ofthe shares in medium and large-scale enterprises that had been privatised were held by employees. This proved to be the high-point of worker 'ownership'. By June 1995, as workers sold their shares to make ends meet and the second ('loans for shares') phase of privatisation got under way, the proportion dropped to 43 per cent and continued downward thereafter.[171] All the while, as the state reduced its subsidies to industry and directors siphoned off funds for other purposes, wage arrears mounted. By 1996, they comprised 7.7 billion roubles, or 131 per cent of the monthly wage bill in 'indebted enterprises', and by August 2000 the total wage debt stood at 40.5 billion roubles.[172]

This disguised form of unemployment was accompanied by others: the assignment ofpart-time work to wage earners interested in full-time employ­ment, and the placement ofworkers on unpaid administrative leave. According to the standard definition recognised by the ILO, there were 3.6 million peo­ple (4.8 per cent of the active workforce) unemployed in 1992 but 8.9 million (10 per cent) by 1998. Nearly three-quarters of unemployed men were listed as workers, as compared to 53 per cent of women. Women were far more likely to leave the workforce 'voluntarily', either because of declining employment opportunities or curtailment of childcare services. Thus, the proportion of women in the workforce diminished from 51 per cent in 1991 to 47 per cent in 1997.[173]

Sectorally, there were 8.2 million fewer wage earners in industry in 1998 than in 1991, a decline of 36.8 per cent. Other sectors showing significant declines over these years included 'science' (which lost more than half of its work­force), transport and construction. Net gainers included finance and insurance (where employment rose by 73 per cent), and wholesale and retail trade.[174] Not included in official statistics but also increasing significantly in numbers were the self-employed, those involved in the sex trade and bodyguards.

Ethnographies expose dimensions of what workers have endured since the collapse of the Soviet Union that official data and journalists' accounts do not reveal. 'No newspaper report or set of statistics', writes Rob Ferguson in relation to the Kuzbass miners, 'can convey the accumulation of privations, nor the mix of bitterness, anger, despondency and loss of self-esteem that wage non-payment brings in its train.' 'The scale of injustice', he adds, 'invokes rebellion and fatalism in the same breath: "Something must be done...Thereis nothing one can do".'¹⁰³ The contemporary factory (and mine) worker remains an endangered species in Russia and the other former Soviet republics.

103 Ferguson, 'Will Democracy Strike Back?', p. 461.

Women and the state

BARBARA ALPERN ENGEL

By the early twentieth century, far-reaching changes had begun to challenge Russia's traditional gender hierarchies. Industrialisation and the proliferation of market relations, the growth of a consumer culture and the expansion of education, among other processes, touched the lives of Russia's rural as well as urban population. Economic change expanded women's employment opportunities, while new cultural trends encouraged the pursuit of pleasure in a populace long accustomed to subordinating individual needs to fam­ily and community. At the same time, patriarchal relations served as both metaphor and model for Russia's political order. The law upheld patriarchal family relations, as did the institutions and economies of the peasantry, still the vast majority of Russia's people. Religious institutions governed marriage and divorce, which the Russian Orthodox Church permitted only for adultery, abandonment, sexual incapacity and penal exile, and then only reluctantly Marital law required a woman to cohabit with her husband, regardless of his behaviour.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, this system encountered a range of challenges. Liberal reformers sought to revise Russia's laws, those governing the family in particular, as a means to reconfigure the entire social and political order.[175] Among the challengers were women, who also strove to make their voices heard. Yet women were rarely in a position to influence decisively the discourse on women, or to exercise authority decisively on women's behalf. Instead, as a revolutionary wave mounted, broke and receded, women's voices grew muted, and a gendered hierarchy re-emerged that echoed pre-revolutionary patterns while assuming novel forms.

On the eve

Women had established a significant presence in public life by the early twentieth century Nearly half a million women, mainly of peasant origin, laboured in Russia's factories, constituting almost 30 per cent of the industrial labour force. Tens of thousands of educated women occupied professional or semi-professional positions. Approximately 750 women physicians prac­tised medicine in 1904, many of them employed in the public sector. Less extensive and costly training as nurses, midwives and medical aides provided employment to thousands of others. The number of women teaching in rural schools grew from 4,878 in 1880 to 64,851 in 1911.[176] Although barred by law from the civil service, ever-increasing numbers of women held clerical positions in private and government offices. Women also took up their pens, becoming novelists, poets, critics, playwrights, journalists and editors or publishers of journals. By enabling women to earn their own living, employment oppor­tunities eroded institutions that conservatives sought to preserve, such as the patriarchal family.

The burgeoning marketplace had much the same effect, encouraging the desire for individual pleasure and gratification, and fostering patterns of con­sumption that could cut across social divides. The advertising industry enticed women to consume the fashionable clothing and other items displayed in windows of department stores and on the pages of popular magazines. New pastimes such as bicycling enhanced women's mobility and personal indepen­dence. In fact, the ideology of domesticity that so dominated the world-view of the middle classes of Europe and the United States had never gained hegemony in Russia, despite support from the throne. To be sure, domestic ideas had cir­culated since the early nineteenth century, and after 1905, liberal professionals embraced a modernised version of them, according to which mothers, guided by scientific precepts, would exert a disciplinary influence on society by appro­priately raising the future generation.[177] Members of the middle class expected respectable women to be good wives and selfless mothers, echoing Victorian ideals. Physicians campaigned to modernise motherhood in the countryside. Prompted by exceedingly high infant mortality rates - almost half of rural infants perished before the age of five - physicians sought to replace the tra­ditional practices of village midwives with their own professional expertise, much as physicians had already done in the West. Nevertheless, domestic dis­courses faced considerable competition from others that endorsed women's productive role. Elite wives had long enjoyed the right to own and manage property independently of their husbands. Members of the progressive elite expressed scant sentimentality about the working class or peasant family, and stressed women's role in the workforce over motherhood. Socialists believed that the family confined women, and that women's workforce participation provided the key to their emancipation. Prominent women rarely identified themselves with the home. Marketing their own images, for example, women writers never embraced the 'rigorously domesticated' womanhood still preva­lent in Western societies.[178]

The Revolution of 1905 briefly heightened women's public presence, while gaining them very little. Women industrial workers, clerical workers, profes­sionals, even domestic servants, joined unions and walked off their jobs to attend mass meetings and demonstrations that called for an end to autoc­racy and representative government. Women's movements re-emerged on a substantial scale. Their primary goal was women's suffrage and an expan­sion of women's legal and political rights, including reform of marital law. The most active organisation, the Union for Women's Equality, also sought in vain to forge cross-class alliances. As one member lamented, to establish circles among labouring women was relatively easy, but when their political consciousness was raised, 'they quickly join the ranks of one of the [socialist] parties andbecome party workers'.[179] The October Manifesto enfranchised only men.

The Revolution of 1905 demonstrated that no organisation or individual could speak for women as a group. Undermined by political divisions, the women's movement lost membership and momentum in the post-1905 reac­tion. Educated women activists only rarely succeeded in melding socialism and feminism, and were more prone to join socialist organisations than fem­inist ones. Women constituted some 15 per cent of the membership of the

Socialist Revolutionary Party and 10 per cent of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party on the eve of the First World War.[180]

War and revolution

The First World War set the stage for the upheavals to follow. It upset gendered hierarchies and drew out to work hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of women for the first time. Women replaced men on the factory floor, their proportion in industry rising to 43.2 per cent by 1917. Thousands volunteered as nurses. Women broke into new occupations such as the postal service and transport; some even took up arms. Women's vastly expanded roles in the public arena enhanced their claims for civil rights. Even soldiers' wives (soldatki) became assertive, gaining an unprecedented sense of entitlement to public resources because of their husbands' service. Mounting female dissatisfaction contributed to the collapse of the autocracy Although women workers played a relatively minor role in the strike movement, women were prominent in the subsistence riots that rocked Russia's cities and towns, and sometimes spilled over onto the factory floor. This is what happened on International Women's Day, 23 February (8 March) 1917, when angry working-class women staged an enormous demonstration, summoning workers to join them. Their actions sparked the February Revolution.

Immediately, women claimed citizenship rights in the new order. Feminist leaders campaigned, successfully, for long-standing goals. In June 1917 women lawyers gained the right to serve as attorneys and represent clients in court. Women obtained equal rights with men in the civil service. On 20 July, all adults over the age of twenty gained the right to vote for the forthcoming Constituent Assembly. For lower-class women, economic rights appeared the higher priority. Soldatki fought to raise their monetary allotment. In May, over 3,000 laundresses struck, demanding an eight-hour day and a minimum daily wage of four roubles. They persisted in the face of employers' resistance and won a modest victory. Another strike of mainly female dye workers, lasting four months, ended in failure.

Nevertheless, as a group, women workers were far less visible than men dur­ing 1917. Many proved reluctant to strike, fearful that plants would close, depriv­ing them of the ability to support themselves and their children. Women's fears were surely heightened by the demands of male workers, when threatened with lay-offs, that women be let go first. Lower-class women were poorly represented in the trade unions, factory committees and soviets that upheld workers' interests. Women were also marginalised by revolutionary rhetoric, which reflected an intensely masculinised working-class culture. For decades, swearing, telling dirty jokes and boasting about sexual adventures with women had demonstrated the masculinity of ordinary male workers, while politi­cally and socially 'conscious' men forged a community of brothers. Women family members served both as figures against which to define themselves.[181]In 1917, this masculine brotherhood assumed symbolic significance. Images of male workers were ubiquitous, 'either as the brother of the male peas­ant and/or the soldier ... or else as the liberator of the world, breaking chains and crowns'.[182] Working-class women might themselves adopt the lan­guage of brotherhood and identify themselves with the family. 'Let us, Russian women and mothers, be proud knowing that we were the first to extend our brotherly [sic!] hand to all the mothers the world over', reads one socialist proclamation.[183]

The Bolsheviks seize power

During 1917, the Bolshevik Party made only half-hearted efforts to attract women. As membership burgeoned, the proportion of women dropped to 2 per cent; few were workers.[184] After October, the Bolsheviks suppressed the autonomous women's movement, condemning it as 'bourgeois'. For the next seventy years, the party's view of women's emancipation would determine its parameters. As Marxists, they regarded working-class men and women's interests as identical and women's full and equal participation in waged labour as the key to their liberation. Thus, they proposed to equalise the relations between the sexes by socialising housework - that is, entrusting child-rearing and other household tasks to paid workers, enabling women to work full time for wages. Once free of the need to exchange domestic and sexual services for men's financial support, women would encounter men as equals. The family itself would eventually wither away as society assumed its functions; thereafter, women and men would unite their lives solely for love.

Initially, the Bolsheviks attempted to legislate social change. In 1918, the government produced a family code that equalised women's status with men's, allowed a marrying couple to choose either the husband's or the wife's surname and granted illegitimate children the same legal rights as legitimate ones. Marriage was secularised. Divorce became easily obtainable at the request of either spouse. Labouring women gained eight weeks of paid maternity leave before and after childbirth; women engaged in mental labour gained six. In 1920, abortion became legal if performed by a physician. The law promised equal pay to women whose work equalled men's 'in quantity and in quality'. Whenever possible, new decrees used language that was deliberately gender- neutral. 'Spouses' could retain their nationality upon marriage. A 'spouse' unable to work could request support from the other.[185] Co-education became the rule.

Yet gender distinctions persisted, enhanced by the militarised atmosphere of the civil war. When the authorities decided against obligatory military service for women, the Red Army, the crucible of citizenship in the new order, became identified as a masculine domain: 'I, a son of the labouring people, citizen of the Soviet Republic, take on the calling of warrior in the Worker and Peasants Army,' pledged all new recruits (my emphasis).[186] Women experienced difficulty acquiring the toughness demanded of party members in brutalising circumstances. In any case, women's toughness evoked an ambivalence that men's did not. Moreover, even as it tried to efface distinctions of gender, the leadership emphasised the uniquely feminine contribution that women could make to the war effort. Women's independent citizenship was undermined by propaganda and entitlements based on a woman's relationship to a man.[187]Slogans that addressed working women as mothers reinforced the notion that women's responsibility was to care for fighting men and men's, to protect women and children: 'Proletarka! The Red Army soldier is defending you and your children. Ease his life. Organize care for him.'[188] Post-revolutionary iconography consistently portrayed the heroic worker as male, at the centre of action, battling the opponents of revolution or refashioning the world.

Thus, proletarian domination, connected rhetorically and visually to male domination, confirmed a gendered hierarchy.[189]

Women occupied the margins of the new civic order. They were identi­fied with private life and family, spheres denigrated by a post-revolutionary culture that privileged public life, the collective and the point of production. The leadership viewed lower-class women as inherently more 'backward' than men, more attached to the family, religion and traditional values and, conse­quently, as a potential threat to the revolution. (Formerly privileged women the leadership dismissed altogether, apart from party loyalists.) Women's his­torians argue that it was women's alleged backwardness, more than concern for women's emancipation as such, which convinced the leadership to autho­rise efforts to mobilise them. Thus, concern over women's lack of support during the civil war led the party to approve the first All-Russian Conference of Working Women, which took place in November 1918, and in September 1919 to authorise a Women's Bureau (Zhenotdel) to co-ordinate the party's work among women. Inessa Armand was designated its first director; after her death in 1920, Aleksandra Kollontai, the party's leading advocate of women's emancipation, replaced her. The party conceived of the Zhenotdel as a trans­mission belt from the top downwards to mobilise women to support party objectives and inform women of their new rights.

Instead, some Zhenotdel activists became advocates on women's behalf. Empowered as well as constrained by the Marxist vision, they regarded the emancipation of women as an end in itself and the Zhenotdel as a means to achieve it. Kollontai, the most radical, tested the limits of the organisation's mandate. Viewing women's freedom to act on their sexual feelings as essential to their emancipation, as head of the Zhenotdel she rhapsodised about the future when everyone would live in communes and 'women would be free to choose whatever sorts of romantic relationships met their needs'.[190] Kol- lontai's efforts to link personal with political change won no converts among the party's leadership. And her aggressive advocacy on behalf of women's emancipation alienated other party members. Kollontai was removed as head of the Zhenotdel early in 1922, following her association with the Workers' Opposition. Subsequent Zhenotdel leaders proved more politically astute, but also more tractable and willing to remain within the limits of their charge.

How effective was the Zhenotdel as an agent of proletarian women's emancipation? Activists sought to mobilise lower-class women on their own behalf, to keep women's issues on the party agenda, to fight for the rights of labouring women and to ensure the transformation of everyday life.[191]They fought an uphill battle. Zhenotdel-style feminism had little support even among female party members; some of them actively opposed it. Zhenot- del members themselves disagreed over tactics and goals. And in regional and local organisations, prejudice against the Zhenotdel and its work was endemic. Many party cadres resisted women's emancipation and barely con­cealed their contempt for the Zhenotdel. Trade union leaders, too, often dis­liked co-operating with the Zhenotdel or providing facilities for its meetings. Inthe course ofthe 1920s, Zhenotdel funding decreased: the organisation oper­ated on a shoestring, many of its activists really volunteers. The Zhenotdel found itself in an impossible position, dependent on party largesse and charged with mobilising a group whose negative qualities (backwardness, ignorance) justified their mission.[192]

In any case, efforts to emancipate women were often ill-suited to material realities. During the civil-war years, urban dwellers, now mostly women and children, starved or froze to death. Millions of homeless children wandered the streets. Instead of serving as shining examples of the socialist future, state- sponsored efforts to assume domestic functions, starved of resources, repelled those who used them. The New Economic Policy in some respects made matters worse. Men returning from the civil war took jobs from women. In an effort to protect their superior status in the workplace and monopoly on skilled 'male' trades, male workers routinely sabotaged women's efforts to acquire advanced skills and upgrade their work status.[193] Managers often preferred to hire men, who had higher skill levels and would not require costly maternity leave and day care. Despite decrees that forbade it, managers discriminated against women workers and dismissed pregnant and nursing women on leave. They used laws banning night work for women as an excuse to lay off women workers. To save money, the state cut back on childcare centres. As a result, working mothers had no place to leave their children and the largely female staffs found themselves without employment. Women's share ofthe labour force dropped from 45 per cent in 1918 to under 30 per cent, where it remained throughout the 1920s, even as the number of workers slowly grew.[194] Zhenotdel complaints about the situation fell on deaf ears.

Family upheaval intensified women's vulnerability. Millions of Russians, mostly urban residents, exercised their new right to divorce. Courts became swamped with alimony suits, many of them initiated by unmarried women who had borne children in unregistered unions, for which the 1918 lawmadeno provision. Unprepared to devote resources to implementing women's equality in the workplace or restructuring the family, the state instead revised the law. A new family code was issued in 1926 after considerable discussion. Designed 'to shield women and children from the negative effects of NEP', but also to promote the withering away of the family, the code granted new rights to women in unregistered unions and further simplified divorce procedures, transferring contested divorces from the courts to registry offices.[195] The code failed to ameliorate the problems it sought to address.

Other policies that targeted women served to replicate women's subor­dinate status. Reaffirming the connection between women's sexuality and reproduction, the 1920 abortion law referred to abortion as a serious 'evil', necessitated by the 'moral survivals' of the past and by difficult economic con­ditions. Once those conditions disappeared, the assumption went, so would the need to limit births.[196] Contraception was legalised only in 1923. Physicians gained greater control over reproduction and authorisation to pursue their campaign to modernise motherhood. Only qualified doctors, not midwives, were certified to perform legal abortions, which deprived most village women of access to them. Propaganda vilified village midwives, the primary source of medical care for village women, and portrayed physicians as male. Posters intended for urban women represented healthy female sexuality as linked to reproduction and offered viewers images of mothers surrounded by healthy children. Yet mothering, propaganda emphasised, was a craft that had to be learned from the physicians who best understood it. To oversee the process, the government created an organisation for the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy (OMM).[197] Women's attempts to control their own reproductive lives through the use of abortion encountered increasing criticism. Facing dif­ficult material conditions, perhaps eager to seize new opportunities, women ignored pro-natalist propaganda. By the late 1920s, abortions had become so commonplace that in some cities they considerably outnumbered births. Experts expressed profound concern about the extent of abortion, a threat to population growth in their view. Referringto the 'antisocial' nature of abortion and its 'epidemic' dimensions, they emphasised the state's need for children, not women's need to control their fertility.[198]

Revolution comes to the countryside

By contrast with urbanites, village women remained largely unaffected by post-revolutionary upheavals. To be sure, the land code that the Bolsheviks introduced in 1922 promised much on paper: it equalised women's legal posi­tion in the peasant household, and entitled women to an equal right to land and other property and to equal participation in village self-government; it provided protection for pregnant women and introduced maternity leave for agricultural labourers. The Zhenotdel and press campaigned to educate vil­lage women and mobilise them on their own behalf - to set up nurseries for their children, to divorce abusive husbands. But most of these initiatives went nowhere. The state lacked the means to pursue them, or back up its promises with the resources necessary to support real change.

Only with the collectivisation drive did the Soviet state decisively intrude on peasant women's lives, and the impact was mostly negative. The collectivi­sation campaign threatened the sphere of women. Activists seized as collective property the livestock that women customarily tended; they broke up families and dispersed their members. Although by depriving male household heads of control of household property and labour, collectivisation promised to under­mine the peasantry's patriarchal order, it failed to attract peasant women. In the regime's view, women's bitter opposition further demonstrated their greater 'backwardness' and susceptibility to 'kulak' manipulation.[199] Taking advantage of the immunity that such perceptions ensured, enormous numbers of women engaged in acts of resistance. Women also demonstrated against the closing of churches and continued to baptise their children despite prohibitions against the practice. Baptism became a 'conspicuous site of resistance' to official val­ues, if largely a hidden one.[200]

The regime mobilised to overcome women's resistance. In 1929, it instructed the Zhenotdel to work with this 'backward layer', organising peasant women to support collectivisation. Posters and films trumpeted the advantages that collectivisation brought to women and recast the image of the peasant woman to portray her as a collective farm woman (kolkhoznitsa), the antithesis of the backward peasant baba who opposed collectivisation. Young and slim, the kolkhoznitsa had become a 'new woman', the rural counterpart of her liber­ated urban sisters.[201] Enthusiastic about constructing socialism, earning her own income and prizing her independence, she was fully committed to the goals of the party-state. Those peasant women who embraced their govern­ment's values received considerable publicity, which often emphasised their freedom from traditional constraints on women and subordination to men. The regime rewarded its female supporters more concretely, too. In addition to meeting important functionaries and having their pictures displayed, such women became eligible for goods in short supply. Whether in traditionally male occupations such as tractor driver, or, far more commonly, in tradition­ally female ones such as milkmaid, such women became poster-children of the new era in the countryside, symbols of the success of the Stalinist revolution and its commitment to promoting women.

Most rural women, however, enjoyed none of these benefits. Comprising roughly 58 per cent of collective farm workers by the late 1930s, women sup­plied two-thirds of the backbreaking labour. A rigid sexual division of labour prevailed, making it hard for women to work in trades labelled 'male'. Access to health and maternity care improved only slowly. By 1939, there were 7,000 hospitals, 7,503 maternity homes, 14,300 clinics and 26,000 medical assistants in the entire USSR, serving a rural population of over 114,400,000.[202] A genuine advance over the previous decade, these facilities nevertheless remained a drop in the bucket. The network of rural day-care centres intended to free women from childcare fell far short of the goals set by the Five-Year Plan. As always, it was women who shouldered the burden of housework, and without basic amenities such as running water, indoor plumbing and electricity. Women also assumed primary responsibility for tending the private plot that fed most fam­ilies. Consequently, women's work-days lasted far longer than men's. Women earned far less, however, because most oftheir work was considered 'unskilled' and they devoted a smaller fraction of it to collective production. In any case, despite celebration of the newly independent collective farm woman with her own individual wage, collective farm payments, such as they were, customarily went to the household and not the individual.

A great retreat?

During the First Five-Year Plan, the leadership ceased even to pay lip-service to women's emancipation as a goal in itself; emancipation became linked exclusively with women's participation in production and contribution to building socialism. In December 1928, the government eliminated all women's organisers within trade unions, thereby halting efforts to train, promote and defend women workers on the shop floor. On 5 January 1930, the Zhenotdel itself was abolished, ending advocacy within party circles on behalf of women. Some women in other official organs tried but failed to fill the gap. The absence of persistent advocacy on women's behalf left the leadership free to deploy the female labour force as it chose and at the lowest possible cost. Slowly at first, and then at breakneck speed, the industrialisation drive encouraged women to take up new trades and opened the gates of the industrial labour force to them. In 1928, there were 2.8 million women in the labour force; by 1932, there were twice as many and over four times as many by 1940.[203]

However, despite claims to the contrary, industrialisation failed to provide women with equal employment opportunity. During the First Five-Year Plan, women's share of every branch ofindustry increased, including those branches, such as chemicals, metallurgy and mining, traditionally dominated by men. The introduction of machinery made women's lack of skill and education less of an obstacle to hiring them, enabling the state to replace men with women and to transfer men where needed. Old lines of gender segregation gave way. However, new ones took their place, as industries and sectors of the economy were designated 'best suited' for women's labour. Entire sectors of the economy became 'female', including food processing, textiles and the production of consumer goods, and the lower and middle ranks of white-collar and service professions.[204]

The 1930s brought some women unprecedented social mobility. The pro­portion of women in institutions of higher education grew from 31 per cent in 1926 to 43 per cent in 1937. Women's progress was particularly marked in fields such as economics, law, construction and transport, where the proportion of women students had hitherto been quite low. Most of the women who bene­fited derived from lower-class backgrounds. Female role models encouraged women to choose new paths. In September 1938, Valentina Griazodubova, Marina Raskova and Polina Osipenko set a world record for non-stop flight by women. Yet despite the highly acclaimed breakthroughs of a few, the major­ity of women workers continued to fill the lowest-paid and most physically arduous positions. Concentrated in light industries, such women were left behind by investment policies that favoured heavy industry and neglected consumption. Some experienced a worsening of working conditions and liv­ing standards so severe that they staged protests, as did about 16,000 mostly female workers in 1932.[205]

Moreover, because the state failed to socialise domestic labour as promised, working women often did two jobs rather than one. Despite ambitious goals in both the First and Second Five-Year Plans, only modest progress was made because heavy industry tookpriority. Managers even commandeered for other purposes buildings designated for childcare. According to official figures, the number of children in childcare centres in 1936 numbered 1,048,309, a tenfold increase from 1928, but still far short of the goals.[206] The First Five-Year Plan actually made housekeeping more difficult. Collectivisation severely disrupted food production. Having abolished private trade with the onset of the plan, the state experienced substantial difficulties in distributing goods. Women, not men, were encouraged to assume the housekeeping burden. In 1936, employed wives spent on housework a total of 147 of their leisure hours each month, as compared to thirty spent by husbands. Women spent almost as many hours on housework as they spent on the job.

Women's reproduction was likewise harnessed to the needs of the state. Between 1927 and 1935, the birth rate declined from 45 births per 1,000 people to 30.1; the working-class family decreased in size. Officials found the change alarming. As did other European states, the Soviet state sought to increase the size of its population to meet the demands of industry and modern warfare. Bearing and raising children ceased entirely to be a private matter; instead, they became women's responsibility to society and the state. As Joseph Stalin put it, the fact that a Soviet woman enjoyed the same rights as a man did not release her from the 'great and honourable duty' of being a mother.

Not a private matter, motherhood had 'great social significance'.[207] Efforts to modernise motherhood continued, now entirely directed by the state and linked to productivist goals. Media portrayed motherhood as a natural part of women's lives and avoiding motherhood as 'abnormal'.

The state attempted to strengthen the family, employing legislation and propaganda similar to that of other European nations. In 1934, homosexual acts between consenting males became a criminal offence; the regime did not outlaw female homosexuality, less publicly visible.[208] In 1936, the regime circu­lated for discussion the draft of a new family law, which would recognise only registered marriages, make divorce more complicated and expensive, and pro­hibit abortion except when childbearing threatened the mother's life or health. The draft also included incentives, similar to those offered by Catholic coun­tries and Nazi Germany, designed to encourage childbearing. Women who bore more than six children would receive a 2,000-rouble annual bonus for each additional child and a 5,000-rouble bonus for each child over ten chil­dren. The law raised both the level of child support and penalties for men who failed to pay it. Despite letters from women protesting against the pro­hibition on abortion, it was retained when the draft became law in 1936. In 1936, a secret directive from the Commissariat of Health ordered contraceptive devices to be withdrawn from sale.[209] Socialism had solved the 'woman ques­tion', the regime proudly declared. Soviet women had become the freest in the

world.[210]

The state's pro-natalist efforts enjoyed only short-lived success. The birth rate increased to 39.7 births in 1937, but thereafter declined. In 1938, as the nation prepared for war, maternity leave was reduced from sixteen weeks to nine and became contingent on seven continuous months of prior employment. The birth rate in i940 dropped below that of i936, partly in consequence. Underground abortion was primarily responsible for the decline. Despite the 'sin' they attached to it, rural women resorted to it frequently, learning to perform abortions on themselves or turning to local abortionists. Women's use ofillegal abortion constituted a form ofresistance to the demand that they produce and reproduce without support from the state. At a terrible physical, and in the case of peasant women, moral price, women took control of their fertility as best they could.[211]

The new emphasis on the family brought a redefinition of wifehood. Devot­ing oneself to one's man assumed new importance for all but peasant women. Honouring a Soviet hero, the press would also lavish praise on his wife. The celebration of socially conscious wifehood reached its peak in the movement of wife-activists (obshchestvennitsy), which lasted from 1936 until 1941. For the first time since 1917, full-time housewives were treated respectfully and invited to contribute their unpaid labour to the creation of a new society. At its height in 1936-7 the movement mobilised tens of thousands of housewives to organ­ise kindergartens and camps for children, furnish workers' dormitories, plant flowers and the like. Dominated by the wives of industrial managers and engi­neers, the movement extended women's domestic responsibilities into the public sphere and provided social services neglected by economic planners. At the same time, the neatly groomed and fashionably dressed obshchestven- nitsy served as exemplars of the 'cultured' society of the future. Working-class women often resented obshchestvennitsy, whose celebration signified increased acceptance of class distinctions.[212]

Family ties sometimes brought arrest and imprisonment. Women consti­tuted 11 per cent of those formally prosecuted by the legal system during the Terror, and 8 per cent of the prison population in 1940.[213] Many of the women political prisoners were mothers, daughters, sisters and, most com­monly, wives of arrested men. So many wives of arrested Old Bolsheviks were themselves arrested in 1937 that special camps were created to hold them. The motherhood that the regime now celebrated intensified the sufferings of women prisoners. Their children were frequently sent away to children's homes, their names changed, their pasts effaced. In the communal prison cells described by Evgenia Ginzberg and others, women who had remained stalwart under brutal interrogation and in punishment cells would succumb to hysterical weeping when they permitted themselves to think of their children.

The Second World War and its aftermath

The massive mobilisation during the Second World War both obscured and intensified gender differences. The line separating men's work from women's work dissolved. Tens of thousands of women were compelled to prepare defences when German forces threatened. To replace the labour of men under arms, on 13 February 1942, the Soviet government ordered full labour mobilisation, incorporating into the labour force the 'non-working' popula­tion aged sixteen to forty-five, except for pregnant women, nursing mothers and mothers without access to childcare. By the beginning of October 1942, women comprised 52 per cent of the labour force in military-related indus­try and 81 per cent of the labour in light industry (up from 60 per cent on the eve of invasion). In 1945, 56 per cent of the entire industrial labour force was female. Seventy per cent of the agricultural labour force was female in 1943, 91.7 per cent in 1945. Between 1940 and 1944, the proportion of trac­tor drivers who were women rose from 4 to 81 per cent.[214] The war cre­ated opportunities for women to advance on the job and in party and state institutions.

Millions of women served at the front. The government immediately drafted women medical students and established crash courses to prepare front-line medics and nurses. Forty-one per cent of physicians at the front were female, as were 43 per cent of field surgeons, 43 per cent of medical assistants and 100 per cent of nurses. Other women participated directly in the fighting, rendering the Soviet Union's wartime experience unique. Women constituted 9.3 per cent of partisan forces that appeared behind enemy lines. To shore up resistance against the invaders, Communist Party and Komsomol members were mobilised for combat immediately after war broke out, with­out regard to gender. Early in 1942 the Central Committee of the Communist Party formally accepted women into the military. By the end of 1943, when female participation reached its peak, over 800,000 served in the armed forces and partisan units; by the end of the war, over a million had performed mili­tary service. Women fought on every front and in all branches of the services, constituting about 8 per cent of military personnel overall.[215]

Yet while gender distinctions disappeared in much of early wartime prac­tice, they resurfaced in wartime propaganda and towards the end of the war, in state policy. Media reinforced the gendered imagery that had evolved by the end of the 1930s, representing women first and foremost as mothers but, more generally, as embodiments of the home and family for which men fought. Women's front-line responsibilities received relatively little attention during the war. In the rare cases when the media did depict women soldiers, it almost invariably portrayed them as feminine and girlish, by contrast with brave and manly men.[216] Towards the end of the war, gender distinctions became newly institutionalised. In 1943, co-education, the norm since 1918, was abolished in urban secondary schools in order to give proper attention to the different requirements of boys' and girls' 'vocational training, practical activities, prepa­ration for leadership and military service'.[217] A new family code was issued on 8 July 1944, the 1936 code having failed to reduce the divorce rate. Intended to strengthen the family, the code reinforced marital ties by making divorce still more difficult. The new law deprived people in unregistered unions of legal benefits and access to housing, and restored the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children. It barred women from bringing paternity suits. At the same time, the code was unabashedly pro-natalist: single people were taxed, as were married couples with fewer than three children, except for those under the age of twenty-five and attending college full time, or who had lost children during the war. The new legislation also augmented the cult of motherhood. Even unmarried mothers, otherwise stigmatised by the new laws, were eligi­ble for additional financial support from the state. In the summer of 1944, the state instituted military-style 'motherhood medals', almost identical to those awarded by the Nazis and graduated according to the number of children a woman had borne and reared. After 1944, when the press began publishing the names of women who won these awards, mothering became women's most publicised work.

In the post-war period, celebration of women's domestic roles intensified. Demobilised men often replaced women in the responsible and well-paid positions the women had gained during the war and thanks to new entry requirements that favoured male veterans, in institutions of higher education, too. The proportion of women enrolled in higher education dropped from the wartime high of 77 per cent to 52 per cent in 1955, then to 42 per cent in 1962. However, the majority ofthe adult female population continued to work, their labour essential to rebuilding the Soviet Union. To ensure that they did, food distribution was tied to the workplace. Between i945 and i950, the number of women in the workforce grew by over three million, although the propor­tion of women workers dropped from 56 to 47 per cent because of returning soldiers.[218] Yet despite the need for women's labour, fiction treated women's waged work as 'a mere adjunct' to women's domestic responsibilities, which consisted primarily of restoring men's self-esteem and faith in their own man­hood. 'Images of wives welcoming mutilated and traumatized husbands and fiances home functioned as a promise and a hope for men and as a suggestion and instruction to women.'[219]

To an unprecedented extent, the post-war media celebrated personal and family happiness. Love, peripheral at best in 1930s fiction, became central to the fiction of the post-war era, reflecting as well as shaping popular priorities. The media encouraged women to make themselves more attractive. Magazines intended for women featured advice on beautifying the home and housekeep­ing, skin care, exercise, gardening and cooking. Exhorted to work hard, make a home, comfort their shell-shocked husbands, bear children and be feminine, in the post-war period women were expected to be all things to all people. While the Soviet government continued to proclaim the equality of men and women, women were now asked to accept the 'Orwellian doctrine' that men were the more equal.[220]

Fertility rates once again reflected the pressures on women. True, roughly a quarter of a million unmarried women bore children in 1946 and sizeable numbers ofsingle women continued to bear children into the i950s, helping to replenish the decimated population. Nevertheless, despite policies penalising small families and encouraging large ones, most women continued to limit their fertility. The means they employed were the usual: abortion. In i954, abortions numbered 6.84 per thousand women, according to official figures that undoubtedly underestimate them.[221] The result of women's refusal to reproduce was that as of 1954-5, the birth rate per thousand women remained approximately 60 per cent of its pre-war level.

De-Stalinising the 'woman question'

The death of Joseph Stalin and the rise of Nikita Khrushchev brought a shift in the state's relationship to the 'question of women'. For the first time since the 1930s, the leadership toned down propaganda celebrating women's eman­cipation and took steps to address some of the worst shortcomings. Yet poli­cies were contradictory and results limited. Reproductive politics provide one example. In 1955, the leadership legalised abortion, claiming the need to pro­tect women's health. While continuing to maintain that the duty of women was to reproduce, and to warn of the danger of abortion, the Soviet state explicitly acknowledged women's freedom to choose for the first time. It was up to women to decide 'the question of motherhood', declared the newspaper Izvestiia. Women in state enterprises, although not collective farm women, regained sixteen weeks of fully paid maternity leave. Legal abortion remained a painful and humiliating procedure, however, and contraception unavailable.[222]Family policy reflected similar contradictions. In conformity with increased openness, the leadership permitted a highly critical discussion ofthe 1944 family law. Many of the proponents of liberalising the law were women, beneficiaries of post-revolutionary educational opportunities. Possessing the expertise to participate in policy debates and drawing upon early Bolshevik discourse, they spoke forcefully for a more egalitarian view of marriage and the family than that embodied in existing legislation. Reformers called for freedom of marriage and divorce and equal rights for all children, regardless of whether the biological parents were legally married. Reformers' stance evoked fierce opposition from conservatives, who upheld the double standard and feared the threat to men and family stability of women bringing unfounded paternity suits. Khrushchev sided with the conservatives; family law remained unchanged. Yet divorce became more accessible. Taking advantage of greater freedom to exercise initiative, judges responded favourably to applications for divorce, resolving a growing proportion of them in favour of the plaintiff. Perhaps in response, the number of divorce applications increased dramatically. Women initiated the majority of divorces, a sign of new assertiveness. Between 1950 and 1965, divorce rates per thousand people quadrupled.[223]

The leadership also drew attention to women's secondary economic status, but did little to ameliorate it. The entire Soviet economy rested upon the unpaid and underpaid labour of women. Women comprised two-thirds of the agricul­tural labour force, and virtually all collective farm women engaged in manual labour. The majority of the work was seasonal, unskilled and poorly paid; it remained difficult for women to advance. The most highly paid, year-round work to which rural women could aspire was dairying, which also ranked among the most arduous labour that collective farm workers performed. In the industrial sector, the low wages paid to women in female-dominated trades such as textiles helped to subsidise the entire industrial economy. Almost a quar­ter of all women workers were employed in the textile or garment industry. Work in these light industries was as intense as industrial work ever became: women were on the job more than 95 per cent of the time, with only 8 to 10 minutes of break per shift. Poorly designed machinery, inadequate ventila­tion and shifting schedules exacted an enormous physical toll. The stress of the job put workers 'right at the physiological limit of human capabilities'. Yet such workers received less annual leave than all other industrial workers, and earned less than 80 per cent of the average wage of an industrial worker and two-thirds of that of a metalworker. Women's low wages meant that light industry turned a profit, which the state used to subsidise investment in heavy industry. Women's low wages also made it 'unprofitable' to invest in the costly machinery that would have lightened their work. Gendered assumptions also contributed to restricting women to the least desirable positions. Where machinery was introduced, men often took charge of it, leaving women to perform the remaining unskilled, manual labour. This arrangement was sim­ply too advantageous for the state to abandon voluntarily, and women lacked the clout to force a change from the shop floor. The economic position of women workers continued to deteriorate.[224]

A major cause of women's poor bargaining position was their infamous 'double burden', that is, keeping house as well as working full time for wages. The double burden served to maintain Soviet women's subordinate status at work, while saving the government millions of roubles. In the post-war period, urban women spent at least an hour a day on shopping, then another one and a half to two hours preparing food and cleaning up. In the countryside, running water, indoor plumbing and central heating remained almost non­existent. Rural women, facing empty shelves in village shops, had to travel periodically to a nearby city to stock up on necessities. Roughly 13 per cent of children aged one to six could be accommodated in children's institutions, whereas over 75 per cent of women of childbearing age worked outside the

home.[225]

Under Khrushchev's leadership, the state tried to ease the double burden, which prevented women from joining the labour force in the desired numbers. Besides, consumption and comfort had become an important dimension of the socialist promise, and failure to provide them, a source of humiliation inter­nationally.[226] Khrushchev redirected resources away from defence and heavy industry and towards consumer-related production for the first time since the industrialisation drive of the 1930s. The government undertook vast new hous­ing projects: between 1955 and 1964, the state's housing stock nearly doubled. Many of the new structures, although poorly built, were nevertheless supplied with heat and water. The number of pre-school institutions increased, provid­ing spaces for 22.5 per cent of eligible children by 1965 - about half of urban children, less than 12 per cent of rural ones. The standard of living improved modestly. However, because most women worked outside the home, the need remained greater. Women still had to compensate with their time and energy for the many shortcomings of the Soviet production and distribution system - figuring out where to obtain scarce goods and cultivating the personal relations that provided access to them, standing in queues and performing by hand the work that Westerners performed by machine. Women's 'titanic efforts' kept the Soviet system functioning.[227] Their onerous double burden prevented them from upgrading skills and advancing on the job; prevented most from even seeking more demanding and well-paid employment, because such employ­ment took more energy than most women had. As a result, many women filled positions for which they were over-qualified. Ironically, such decisions confirmed people's prejudices about women's inability to perform skilled or responsible work.

Under Leonid Brezhnev the leadership finally reformed family law. In December 1965, a new divorce law simplified procedures and reduced costs. A new family law of 1968 permitted paternity suits and enabled mothers to eliminate the blank space on the birth certificate of an out-of-wedlock child.

It also contained a definition of rape that included forced sexual intercourse between spouses. Birth control became available on a limited basis, mainly bar­rier methods, intra-uterine devices, and the condoms that men half-jokingly referred to as 'galoshes' and often refused to use. Without abandoning the priority given to heavy industry and defence, the leadership nevertheless redi­rected greater resources to consumer goods. By the mid-i970s, about half of Soviet families owned a refrigerator and two-thirds, a washing machine; the places in childcare centres had grown to accommodate about 45 per cent of pre-school children. Still, improvement was relative, shortages remained endemic and women continued to bear a heavy double burden.

Growing numbers of women expressed discontent with their situation. A survey published in 1970 found that 50 per cent of women who declared themselves unhappily married were dissatisfied with the division of labour in their household.[228] Discontent spread to the countryside, where the edu­cational level of rural women had risen substantially in the post-war period. By i979, almost half of the rural female population over the age of ten had received secondary or higher education. Well-educated rural women became far less inclined than their mothers to tolerate lack of consumer amenities and low-paying jobs that required heavy labour. In the European part of the Soviet Union, the outcome was massive migration of rural women away from the countryside and to the cities in pursuit of higher education and more appealing work. Men, faced with a 'bride problem', abandoned collec­tive farms, leaving behind them dying villages, where only ageing women laboured.[229]

Everywhere in the European sectors of the Soviet Union, although not in Central Asia, urbanisation and women's rising expectations led to a reduction of the birth rate and increase in divorce. The birth rate steadily dropped, from 26.7 births per 1,000 people in 1950, to 24.9 in i960, to 23.8 in 1970, to 22.53 in 1980. Divorce rates doubled between 1963 and 1974; by 1978 a third of all marriages ended in divorce, half in Moscow and St Petersburg. Divorce also grew more common in the countryside. Women initiated most divorces, often citing men's alcohol abuse as the primary reason. To the leadership, the declining birth rate and family instability appeared a threat to productivity and military strength, and aroused fears that the European population of the Soviet Union would become a minority.

Debate on the 'woman question' intensified. Women as a 'demographic resource' set the tone, as scholars and experts explored ways to induce women to bear more children. Some methods, such as encouraging women to leave the workforce, they ruled out immediately. The economy still depended on women's labour, and besides, ideology taught that labour provided the key to women's emancipation. Introducing part-time work and flexible sched­ules, which many women requested, was discussed but never implemented. Instead, the leadership offered more legal protection and financial incentives to mothers. Thus, according to the new family code of 1968, it became illegal for a man to divorce his wife without her consent while she was pregnant or raising a child under the age of one. In addition to the already existing, fully paid maternity leave of fifty-six days before and after birth, in March 1981, the government introduced a partially paid leave for working mothers, to enable them to care for a child up to the age of one. Women (but not men) gained the option of taking an additional six months of unpaid leave, with no loss of position or job status, replacing the previous policy, which offered a year's unpaid leave. Women also received a lump sum payment of 50 roubles for their first child, with double that amount for the second and third. These policy changes failed to affect the birth rate, however. Starting in i960, abor­tions outnumbered live births every year, and were the primary cause of the

decline. [230]

Concern with family instability permitted critics to attack women's alleged 'emancipation' for the first time. Ever since women began to work outside the home, men had lost 'the title of family breadwinner', 'experts' declared. Without this role, 'the very earth slips from beneath [a man's] feet'. Newly publicised social problems, such as hooliganism and alcoholism, were blamed on women's failure to be yielding and feminine. A truly feminine woman could even cure the problems of men: 'Marriage with a really feminine girl instills in a man two things. On the one hand, he becomes more masculine from the need to protect and defend her, and on the other hand, sharp traits in his character soften; gradually, he becomes more tender and kind.'[231] To preserve marital harmony, articles warned young rural women to avoid jealousy or pos- sessiveness, and most importantly, not to nag.[232] Many women came to believe that the much-vaunted emancipation, rather than incomplete emancipation, was the source of their difficult lives.

Gorbachev and after

Criticisms of the shortcomings in women's emancipation and complaints that emancipation had gone too far both intensified in the Gorbachev era. At a con­ference in January 1987, members of the Soviet Women's Committee, an offi­cially sponsored organisation hitherto utterly loyal, launched biting critiques of numerous party policies involving women. The head of the Committee, the former astronaut Valentina Tereshkova, accused the leadership of disregard­ing women workers' health and implied that men in positions of authority blocked the advance of women. Speakers even referred to infant mortality, a topic so sensitive that for decades no statistical information about it had been published. Noting that the Soviet Union's infant mortality rate exceeded rates in capitalist countries, they blamed the inadequacies of Soviet medical care and environmental pollution.[233] Their statements prepared the way for still more radical critiques. For the first time since 1930, the accusation that the Soviet Union was 'patriarchal' appeared in print. The annual yearbook Women in the USSR, having hitherto celebrated Soviet success in emancipating women, in 1990 offered instead a depressing summary of women's working conditions.

At the same time, the 'back to the home movement' erupted into the open. Male candidates in the election campaign of 1989 repeatedly called for the 'emancipation' of women from the double burden by returning them to the home. Increasingly, political leaders, the media and even the general public embraced the idea that women should withdraw from the workforce. The 'backto the home' movement was usually couched in the language of women's choice: women could be either workers or mothers; it was their choice.[234] But if 'choice' was the language, policy pointed in a different direction. Virtually every policy initiative aimed to encourage women to bear and raise children, rather than help women advance on the job or combat discrimination at the workplace. In 1987, two weeks were added to the period of fully paid maternity leave, extending it from fifty-six to seventy days after the birth, and the period of partially paid maternity leave was extended from one year to eighteen months. Women also gained up to fourteen days' paid leave each year to care for a sick child. Making the pro-natalist intent of such legislation clear, its provisions were introduced gradually, starting in the regions with the lowest birth rates. In the context of Gorbachev's economic reforms, this legislation disadvantaged working women. Generous in principle, the legislation failed to obligate the government to pay for the leaves it decreed. Instead, employers bore the cost of funding maternity-related leaves, as they had for years. Now, however, enterprises had to watch their budgets carefully and consequently, when they laid off workers, women with children were often first to go.[235]

With the fall of Gorbachev, the state completely abandoned the responsi­bility it had assumed in 1917 as an agent of women's emancipation and social welfare. The results were both positive and negative. Negatives included a dra­matic decline in women's standard of living. Millions of women lost their jobs. Poverty became feminised. By the late 1990s, at least a quarter and perhaps as much as half of the Russian population qualified as 'poor' or 'very poor', and over two-thirds of those poor were female. In 1990, responsibility for childcare establishments was transferred from the federal to the local level, with no provision made for funding. Between 1990 and 1995, the number of children in nurseries and kindergartens declined from 9 million to 6 million. The cost of existing places escalated.[236] Such changes raised serious obstacles to women's work outside the home, although some studies suggested that on the whole, women coped better than men in the new economy, and that younger women, presumably unburdened by children, adapted to it successfully.

The quality of life deteriorated. Divorce rates rose, as did rates of mortality. Between 1990 and 1997, women's life expectancy at birth dropped from 74.3 to 72.8; men's dropped even more drastically. The birth rate declined as well, from 13.4 per 1,000 in 1990 to 8.6 per 1,000 in 1997. Between 1991 and 2000, the population of Russia decreased by 3 million.[237] Motherhood itselfbecame more dangerous as a result ofmaternal ill-health and the drastic deterioration ofthe public health system. Between 1987 and 1993, the number of mothers who died during pregnancy or in childbirth rose from 49.3 to 70 for every 100,000 births; by 1998, the number had dropped to 50, still more than twice the aver­age European level of 22. Women's sexuality became commodified: product advertisements featured semi or fully nude women; job advertisements some­times openly solicited women's sexual services. The traffic in women from the former Soviet Union to Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the United States became an internationally recognised problem.

On the positive side, the collapse of the Soviet era also ended the state's monopoly on defining women's emancipation and brought new opportunities for women to organise and express themselves. By the mid-i990s, hundreds of women's groups had registered with Russia's Ministry of Justice; countless more operated 'unofficially'. Professional women, theirthinking stimulated by foreign travel and contact with Western feminists, led many of the feminist- oriented organisations. Groups that sought to improve the lot of women adopted a range of strategies, almost none of them permissible in the Soviet period. They organised conferences; campaigned for women candidates and against the war in Chechnya; ran charity events to assist women and children; established support groups for single mothers or women artists and rape crisis centres and domestic violence hotlines; offered retraining opportunities; pub­lished journals and newsletters and much, much more. Gender and women's studies centres generated women-oriented scholarship; young scholars began to explore hitherto neglected realms of women's experience. Women writers, more numerous than ever before, experimented with new forms of expression.

The movement scored one of its greatest victories in i992, when the Supreme Soviet considered a bill on the 'Protection of the family, mother­hood, fatherhood and childhood' that would have seriously eroded women's civil rights. Had the billbeenpassed, the family ratherthan the individual would have become the basis of many civil rights, such as owning an apartment or a plot of land. The law would have required women with children under four­teen to work no more than thirty-five hours a week. The women's movement successfully mobilised to defeat the bill.[238] But such clear-cut victories were few. Women experienced difficulty placing woman-oriented concerns on the political agenda. The Soviet regime had appropriated the language of women's emancipation, making it difficult to discuss women-related issues. Once quotas for female representation ended, the number of women elected to governing bodies declined precipitously. From over a third of delegates to Republic-level Supreme Soviets in the 1970s and 1980s, the proportion of women dropped to 5.4 per cent in Russia and 7 per cent in Ukraine.[239] Despite the efforts of feminists and other women activists, politics remained a man's game, even as the arena expanded.

Yet women enjoyed greater success in informal sectors of power and the cultural sphere. For the first time since 1917, autonomous organisations offered women the possibility of actively shaping social change. Everywhere, the end of the state's monopoly on media has meant the end of its monopoly on images of women, too. Women artists, film-makers, journalists, television personalities and writers have presented the public with a profusion ofimages ofwomen: 'in contrast to the unified "ideal mother and worker" of the Soviet period, there are now a myriad of masculine and feminine types'.⁶⁶ These have complicated and enriched ideas about womanhood, and offer alternatives to the essentialist notions left over from the late Soviet era, still propounded by conservatives and some experts. Nevertheless, essentialist notions remain powerful. Not least among the ironies ofthe Soviet legacy is the intensely gendered nature of the backlash against it. Rejecting the 'emancipation' that Stalinism celebrated, many post-Soviet Russians have nevertheless embraced the domesticity that became its counterpart. A blend of Soviet and pre-revolutionary gender dis­courses, and linked to dreams of national revival, these ideas have assumed new life in the vacuum left by Communism.

66 Hillary Pilkington, Gender, Generation and Identity in Contemporary Russia (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 16.

i8

Non-Russians in the Soviet Union and after

JEREMY SMITH

The end of the First World War was followed by a total reorganisation of the political geography of Europe and parts of Asia, not so much as a direct result of the defeat of Germany and her allies, as through the break-up of the three great land-based empires of the region - the Russian, Austro- Hungarian and Ottoman. From the rubble of the latter two, new nation- states emerged. From the Russian Empire, some nations followed suit - Finland, Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania - but for the others the out­come was different. Although Lenin avowedly espoused a doctrine of national self-determination similar in many ways to US President Woodrow Wilson's on which the new East European order was based, after a few years all the remaining territories of the Russian Empire had been incorporated into the world's first socialist state, renamed in 1923 as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union. Instead of encouraging outright independence, Lenin and his successors implemented nation-building policies within a ter­ritorially defined federal structure. The constitutional structure of the Soviet Union and many elements of the early policies remained largely unchanged until i99i. In other respects, however, treatment of individual nationalities varied greatly while an increasingly overt elevation of the political and cul­tural dominance of the Russian nation contradicted earlier policies. The incor­poration of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Moldova into the USSR after the Second World War further upset the balance of a system that collapsed in

1991.

The nineteenth century was the high-point of nation-building in Western Europe, and in Eastern Europe minorities also began to articulate national demands. In only a handful of cases, however, did national movements based on the intelligentsia manage to obtain anything like broad popular support. This was especially true of the Russian Empire, where from the 1880s onwards the tsars' policies of Russification initially succeeded in further radicalising the nationalist intelligentsia while in most cases limiting the spread of their influence.[240]

The general radicalisation which spread across all three empires as a result of the First World War greatly enhanced popular support for nationalist lead­ers. With central authority diminishing by the day, and the Western allies keen on promoting the development of nation-states across Europe and the Middle East,[241] national parties across the Russian Empire shifted their demands from support forbroad autonomy and rights to insistence on outright independence.

Ukraine led the way, with the formation of the Ukrainian Central Rada under the presidency of the popular historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky on 17 March 1917. The Rada's First Universal of 23 June declared the right of the Ukrainian people to order their own lives without breaking away from Russia. In Baku, Tiflis and elsewhere in Transcaucasia, effective power lay with socialist-dominated soviets, which sought to work with the Provisional Government. A series of all-Russian Muslim Congresses affirmed the right of Muslims to autonomy within Russia. The Provisional Government, however, dragged its feet over both the constitutional structure of the post-tsarist state and the question of land reform, which was crucial to the interests of the vast majority of non-Russians, and the demand for independence was raised with growing fre­quency. The Bolshevik revolution in October 1917 marked, for many national leaders, the end of any hope of autonomy or federalism within a democratic Russian state. The Rada declared Ukrainian independence on 25 January 1918, and a Transcaucasian Sejm made up of Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijani representatives followed suit on 22 April, only to split into three fully indepen­dent republics a month later. The fourth Muslim Congress held in Kokand in November-December declared autonomy for Turkestan, but soon became a focus for both Russian and non-Russian anti-Bolshevik forces in the region.

By this time, however, most of the non-Russian regions were engulfed by the civil war. As well as the Reds and Whites, the war was fought between independent peasant and nationalist armies fighting for local self-rule. No less than eight separate armies were active on Ukrainian soil at some point between 1918 and 1920.[242] The nationalist forces of Simon Petliura and Denikin's

White Army were finally defeated by November 1920, although the Ukrainian peasant bands under the anarchist Nestor Makhno continued to disrupt Soviet power until the following summer. In Central Asia resistance lasted longer in the form of the 'Basmachestvo' - a broad and disparate movement made up of a loose alliance of politically motivated opponents of Bolshevism and pan-Turkists together with local warlords. Although the movement was never united or organised enough to pose any serious threat to Soviet power, it continued to cause disruption until the end of the 1920s.[243] In Transcaucasia, following the withdrawal of Turkish forces in the summer of 1918, the three independent republics survived with little interference until Soviet power was established in Azerbaijan in April 1920, in Armenia in December and in Georgia the following February

Richard Pipes's account of the formation of the Soviet Union describes the establishment of Bolshevik rule in these areas essentially as a series of military campaigns in which the Red Army eventually overwhelmed weak national armies.[244] Only in Georgia, however, was the picture almost as straightforward as this. Elsewhere a number of complex factors undermined the independent governments. Outside Transcaucasia, workers and administrators in the cities were predominantly Russian, even where the surrounding countryside was populated by non-Russian peasants, providing an urban base for Bolshevism and opposition to separation from Russia. Bolshevik promises of land reform and the guarantee of national rights appealed to many non-Russians, among whom the idea of independence had weak roots in any case. In some areas, the Bolsheviks were able to exploit splits in the national movement and base Sovietisation on one or other sympathetic group or party, as with the Azerbai­jani socialist Hummet Party. In Armenia, the Dashnaks reluctantly accepted Soviet power as the lesser evil when faced with the imminent possibility of invasion from Turkey. Finally, even where the national governments enjoyed broad popular support, they were led mostly by intellectuals with little or no experience of either government administration or military affairs and whose political programme was not coherent or developed enough to satisfy the aspirations of even their natural supporters.[245]

By the middle of 1921, then, Soviet power extended across most of the for­mer territory of the Russian Empire. The Bolsheviks then faced the problem of how to administer the non-Russian areas and to build a socialist society there. On the one hand, they needed to ensure at least the passive support of the local population, and Lenin in particular was concerned to avoid any impression that the new Soviet state was a continuation of the old Russian-dominated one, and to hold up Soviet rule as a shining example to anti-colonial move­ments elsewhere in the world. On the other hand, the non-Russian nationalities were overwhelmingly peasant in composition, had even lower levels of liter­acy than Russians, and were less receptive to the demands of socialism than were Russian workers, leaving them vulnerable to the propaganda efforts of nationalists and religious leaders. From early 1918 onwards, the numerous smaller nationalities of Soviet Russia itself were granted limited self-rule in the form of autonomous republics and regions, whose purpose was both to satisfy the national aspirations of the population and sections of their elites, and to provide an avenue for the introduction of socialism together with cul­tural and economic development. In the summer of 1922 Joseph Stalin, as commissar for nationality affairs, drew up a plan which would have extended this system to Ukraine, Belorussia and Transcaucasia, by incorporating them directly into the existing Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Lenin opposed this on the basis that the overt subordination of the major nationalities to a Russian state would alienate their populations and send out the wrong message internationally. The alternative scheme he proposed was a formal federation of equals into what eventually became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics at the end of 1923.

The constitutional structure was only one part of early Soviet policies towards the non-Russians. Equally important was the process of korenizatsiia - roughly translated as 'indigenisation' - a set of policies aimed at developing and promoting national identity: the recruitment and promotion of members of the local nationality in the Communist Party and Soviet system; positive discrimination in other areas of employment; the creation or standardisation of national languages and scripts, together with national cultures based on earlier writers and folk traditions; the extension of local self-rule for national minorities outside the republics through a system of national soviets; and build­ing up a network of national schools with instruction in the mother tongue for all non-Russians.[246] Some historians have interpreted these measures as a product of the weakness of Bolshevik appeal to the non-Russians, as a series of temporary concessions to national feeling.[247] Terry Martin, however, empha­sises that the policies of korenizatsiia went far beyond what might have been needed to ensure loyalty from the non-Russians. Rather than representing a concession, the policies were aimed at undermining anti-Soviet nationalism through promoting national identity in a Soviet form.[248]

Korenizatsiia had a profound impact in the non-Russian republics. By 1927 local nationality representation in Soviet executive committees in the republics ranged from 68.3 per cent (Turkmen SSR) to 80.5 per cent (Armenian SSR).[249]By the end ofthe 1920s, the Communists were claiming that almost all children were receiving education in their mother tongue.[250] Opportunities in higher education also opened up for non-Russians with the nativisation ofuniversities in Tashkent, Belorussia and Ukraine, and the operation of a quota system across the country.

This strategy was not without problems. From the beginning, it aroused opposition among local Russians who felt not only a loss of their previous privileges, but actual negative discrimination, while Communist leaders in the republics were frequently seen to be pushing the policies to the extent that they were denounced as nationalists. The result was a series oflocal crises and clashes between different wings of the republican Communist parties, which reached their most acute in Ukraine.¹²

The first signs of a change of direction in policy came in 1928-9 with a series of high-profile show trials of intellectuals and less public purges of lead­ing republican figures in Ukraine, Belorussia, the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Republic, Crimea and Kazakhstan. A more general assault on the nation- building approaches of the i920s was signalled at the turn of the decade over the question ofthe interpretation of Russian history. In the 1920s a new school of history (the 'Pokrovsky School'), supported by the regime, interpreted the Russian Empire as an exploitative, brutal colonial regime. But in the 1930s the Russian people, history and culture were advanced as being superior to those of non-Russians, and the Russian Empire was now portrayed as having brought enlightenment and other benefits to the territories it had conquered. This revival of the Russians was symbolised by a law of 1938 which made

Russian, already the effective lingua franca of the Soviet Union, a compulsory subject of study in all schools.

These changes did not amount to a policy of Russification. Religion and other practises, such as nomadism, did come under attack, threatening the traditional way of life for minorities,[251] as well as for Russians, as a conse­quence of the ideological assault and the drive to industrialise the country. But throughout the 1930s, a renewed emphasis on non-Russian folk cultures was exemplified by a series of festivals held in Moscow, and language rights and the territorial structure were not threatened. The tone, however, had shifted from one of promoting entirely separate national cultures to emphasising a 'Brotherhood of Peoples' in which different cultures could share a common space within the Soviet framework, and in which the leading place went to the Russians. By the end of the decade, those national leaders who had risen to the most senior positions in the republics in the 1920s had been eliminated, without exception, before or during the Great Terror, opening the way for a new generation of leaders who perhaps did not share their commitment to nation-building.

The shifts in policy and tone of the 1930s are open to a variety of interpreta­tions. For those historians such as Pipes and Blank who viewed the approach of the 1920s as a purely temporary concession, the turn against national lead­ers and cultures was merely a recognition of the fact that Soviet power was securely established and an 'internationalist' programme of national assimi­lation could now be implemented without fear. For some, most notably the historian Robert Conquest, the turn against non-Russian nationalities went much further, amounting in some cases to a policy ofvirtual genocide. In par­ticular, controversy has raged over the devastating famines of 1932-3, which hit the Ukrainian (and Kazakh) countryside to a far greater extent than it did in Russia. Conquest has argued that the famine was deliberately engineered by Stalin in an effort to break the back of the Ukrainian nation through the pur­poseful starvation of a large part of its population.[252] Others have challenged both his figures and interpretation, concluding that the famine was a natural disaster, albeit one which the leadership did little to alleviate, and which also devastated Russian areas. [253]

More recently scholars have predominantly accepted the picture of the 1920s as an era of nation-building, and have offered various interpretations of the new direction in the 1930s. The persistence of the federal form and the emphasis on national cultures has led Yuri Slezkine to underplay the extent of changes in the 1930s.[254] Other interpretations invariably see the change in national policies against the background of the dramatic political, social, eco­nomic and international developments of the decade. Geoffrey Hosking has noted that the destruction of traditional ways of life associated with collec­tivisation and industrialisation was an inevitable consequence of economic modernisation which applied to Russians and non-Russians alike.[255] But in itself this is not enough to explain the more positive attitude to Russians vis-a-vis other nationalities in the 1930s. A direct consequence of the combined impact of collectivisation and industrialisation was a massive mobility of population across the Soviet Union as peasants flocked to the cities, and workers and administrators moved from the more industrialised regions to those embark­ing on the rapid building of industry. In particular, this meant a movement of Russians into the non-Russian republics. The proportion of Russians in the overall population increased between 1926 and 1939 from 21.2 per cent to 40.3 per cent in Kazakhstan and from 52.7 per cent to 72 per cent in the Buriat ASR, for example.[256] Given that a high proportion of these new migrants were engineers and skilled workers, maintaining the earlier anti-Russian stance in the republics was no longer tenable.

Afurtherfactorwasthegrowingprospect ofthe Soviet Unionbeing involved in a major war, the fear of which increased in the late i920s and early i930s. The possibility of protracted conflict raised the importance of the loyalty of the disgruntled members of the largest nationality, the Russians.[257] The overt appeal to Russian national feeling contained in the new history books and, increasingly, in the public statements of Stalin and other leaders, underlined the shift from the development of separate national identities towards a Broth­erhood of Nations united under the Soviet system and in which Russians had

pride ofplace.[258]

Connected with this new emphasis was a change in the theoretical underpin­ning of attitudes towards nationalities in the second half ofthe 1930s, which now tended to treat national characteristics as something primordial and unchang­ing.[259] This was no mere theoretical nicety. In the 1930s this thinking was man­ifested in campaigns of terror against specific groups, the so-called 'national operations' against Cossacks (now regarded as an ethnic group) and, from 1935, Poles, Germans and Finns. The policy reached new levels in the autumn of 1937 with the decision to deport every single ethnic Korean from a large area in the Far East. This set a precedent for even more large-scale deportations during the course of the Second World War. Between September 1941 and November 1944 the following nationalities were deported: 382,000 Germans ofthe Volga region; 73,737 Karachai; 131,271 Kalmyks; 407,690 Chechens; 92,074 Ingush; 42,666 Balkars; 202,000 Crimean Tatars; 200,000 Meskhetian Turks.[260]The operations were carried out by NKVD squads descending on towns and villages with no notice given to the population - in the Crimea, Tatars were given fifteen minutes to leave their homes[261] - and typically were completed over the course of a few days. Every man, woman and child was loaded into cattle trucks and transported by train across the country to Kazakhstan or Siberia in a journey lasting weeks. Lacking food, water and sanitation, up to half died on the journey. On arrival at their new destinations, the popula­tions were often abandoned on arid land without housing and were left at the mercy of local officials and dependent on charity. Apart from the Meskhetians, each of the deported nationalities had inhabited an autonomous republic, which was subsequently renamed or simply disappeared from the map. The Balkars, Chechens, Ingush, Karachai and Kalmyks had their rights restored by Khrushchev in 1956. The Germans and Meskhetians were never officially allowed to return to their homelands, while many of the Crimean Tatars, after years of protest, eventually returned to the Crimea without official sanction.

Such a large expenditure of NKVD manpower, railway engines and rolling stock at a time when a war was still to be won defies rational explanation. Pre- ventative measures against ethnic Germans can perhaps be explained, and can reasonably be compared to the simultaneous internment of Japanese

Americans in the USA. Similar thinking probably underlay the deportation of the Meskhetian Turks, who inhabited an area of Georgia too close to the Turkish border for comfort. But in the Crimea, which was under German occupation for some time, it seems that anecdotal evidence of collaboration with the occupying forces on the part of a small number of Tatars was enough to convince Stalin and the head of the NKVD, Lavrentii Beria, that the entire national group was worthy of punishment.²⁴ With the Chechens and Ingush, accusations of collaboration with the Germans were barely credible, and it is more likely that this was a matter of settling scores with peoples who had proved particularly resistant to Soviet rule before and during the war,²⁵ while the Balkars appear to have been deported on the whim of Beria as an afterthought to the Chechen and Ingush operations.²⁶ Whatever the exact reasoning, underpinning it was the assumption that all members of a given nationality should be tarred with the same brush.

Although most of the deported nations were eventually allowed to return to their homelands, the long-term consequences were serious. The territories from which they had been removed had been repopulated by others, causing grievances which stoked the ethnic conflicts that erupted in the North Cau­casus in the 1980s and 1990s. For the Chechens in particular, the experience of exile produced a hardening of attitudes and an even deeper antipathy to Soviet or Russian rule.²⁷

The deported peoples were not the only nationalities to suffer in the course of the Second World War. Ukraine and Belorussia witnessed some of the most destructive battles of the war and were occupied for much of it by a Nazi regime which treated all Slavs as inferior Untermenschen, and planned to rid the territories of much of their population in order to make space for Aryan settlers. Greatest suffering was reserved for the substantial Jewish population of the Soviet Union, up to a million of whom were exterminated in the Holocaust. Over 33,000 Jews were shot in the infamous Babii Yar ravine outside of Kiev, where they were joined by similar numbers of Ukrainians and Russians who had dared to put up resistance, while entire villages were wiped out in reprisal for partisan attacks - this in spite of the fact that many

24 Aleksander Nekrich, The Punished Peoples: The Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of the Second World War (New York: Norton, 1978), pp. 13-35.

25 Abdurahman Avtorkhanov, 'The Chechens and the Ingush during the Soviet Period and its Antecedents', in Marie Bennigsen Broxup (ed.), The North Caucasus Barrier: The Russian Advance towards the Muslim World (London: Hurst, 1992), pp. 146-94,181-4.

26 Tak eto hylo: natsional'nye repressii v SSSR 1919-1952 gody, 3 vols. (Moscow: Insan, 1993), p. 265.

27 For the whole of this section, Pavel Polian, Nepo svoei vole ... Istoriia i geografiia prinudi- tel'nykh migratsii v SSSR (Moscow: O.G.I-Memorial, 2001).

Ukrainians had initially welcomed the Germans in i94i as liberators from the suffering they had endured in the previous decade. The scale of atrocities against the local population inspired many to take up arms behind enemy lines. By mid-1942 up to 100,000 partisans were operational, concentrated in Ukraine. Whatever their initial motivation, many of these partisan groups came to embrace a fully nationalist agenda, leading them to continue to wage their guerrilla war against the Soviets after the German forces were driven out. The Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists continued to operate in the forests of Ukraine well into the 1950s.

For the rest of the Soviet population, the war meant a number of conces­sions from a regime desperate to mobilise resistance and enthusiasm for the war effort. While suspect nationalities were subjected to deportation, attempts were made to secure the loyalty of others through organisational and propa­ganda efforts. National units in the Red Army, abolished as recently as 1938, were restored. Particular attention was paid to publicising the part played by some national units in resisting invasion, such as the Kazakh division's role in the defence of Moscow.[262] The national heroes of the various non-Russian peoples, who had been lauded in the i920s and vilified in the i930s, were again restored to favour. National religions, as well as the Russian Orthodox Church, were granted new freedoms to function. The unity and common struggle of the peoples of the Soviet Union were stressed in propaganda, and were sym­bolised in victory when the Red Army flag was raised over the Reichstag in Berlin in 1945 by an ordinary Russian soldier, M. A. Egorov, together with a Georgian soldier, M. V Kantaria.

However, following the German occupation of Ukraine it had been Russia which supplied most ofthe manpower and industry behind the war effort, and it was the Russian people whose role was glorified above all others in official propaganda, especially in the ever more strident glorification of the heroes of Russia's past. The mood of the war led political leaders and academics so far as to declare open support for Russian nationalism. The emphasis was most famously illustrated in Stalin's well-known toast at the end of the war to 'the health of our Soviet people, and in the first place the Russian people... the most outstanding nation of all the nations forming the Soviet Union'.[263] In the later years of the war, this apparent contradiction between appeals to non-Russian national sentiment and affirmation of the leading role of the Russians was the cause of serious disputes between leading historians in the USSR, a conflict which was ultimately resolved in favour of the pro-Russian line, setting the tone for propaganda and particular interpretations of Russian history for the remainder ofthe Soviet period.[264] In the post-war period, this line was reinforced by official condemnation of what had previously been considered important parts of national culture - the visual arts and epic poetry especially.[265]

Nevertheless, the net effect of wartime propaganda, the brutality of the Nazi occupation and the eventual victory of the Red Army were to provide the concept ofthe Brotherhood ofNations under the leadership ofthe Russians with an effective series of myths that served to promote a deeper sense of Soviet patriotism and affection for the USSR and its leadership than had been possible before the war.

One group of nationalities unable to subscribe to these myths were those that were newly incorporated into the USSR as a direct result of the war. Under the terms of the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939, Nazi Germany recognised the Soviet Union's right to determine the fate of eastern Poland, Bessarabia (eastern Romania), Latvia and Esto­nia, a sphere of influence that was later extended to include Lithuania. In September-October 1939, the three Baltic republics, which had gained inde­pendence in 1918, were forced to accept the stationing of Soviet troops under the pretext of the strategic demands of defence, making it easy for the Soviets to engineer Communist takeovers in the summer of 1940 and formal incor­poration into the USSR. In the year before the German invasion, rapid steps were taken towards Sovietisation - nationalisation of industry, confiscation of all bank accounts above a minimal amount, expropriation oflarge estates, new curricula in the schools and universities. The process was completed following the reoccupation of the republics in 1945, culminating in full collectivisation of agriculture by the end of the decade.

Both the occupations of 1940 and the reoccupations of 1945 were followed by deportations on a massive scale. Unlike the other national deportations, these were targeted against specific groups - members of most political parties, army officers, high-ranking civil servants, clergymen, estate owners, anyone with a dubious past as a White or even an expelled Communist, anyone suspected of collaboration with the Nazis and so on. The numbers of those deported or killed was staggering: in 1940,61,000 Estonians, 35,000 Latvians and 39,000 Lithuanians; in i945-6, a further i00,000 Lithuanians, 4i,000 Estonians and 60,000 Latvians.[266] Caught between the twin evils of Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, large numbers took to the forests and formed partisan units which fought against both sides, many of the 'Forest Brethren' holding out until i952. Soviet control over the new territories was reinforced by a deliberate long-term policy of migration of Russians and other Slavs into the republics, causing a substantial demographic shift, especially in Estonia and Latvia. Thus, in Estonia the proportion of Estonians in the overall population fell from 88 per cent in 1939 to 76 per cent in 1950 and 61.5 per cent in 1989.

By annexing the Baltic republics and other territories, Stalin had not only secured a strategic advantage on his borders but had gone a long way towards obtaining for the Soviet Union the same borders that had bounded the Russian Empire. But the long-term costs for the USSR were high. Unlike most of the other nationalities who owed much of their sense of mass national identity to the nation-building period of the 1920s, for Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians, nationhood was linked to the experience of independent statehood between 1918 and 1939. Incorporation into the Soviet Union remained for much of the population an occupationby a foreignpower, and the massive influx of Russians after the war, often into top jobs, only served to further antagonise the locals. Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians never really joined the Brotherhood of Peoples, and it is no coincidence that they played a major part in the events leading to the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In the last years of Stalin's life, the balance of national rights and repub­lican powers established before the war and reinforced during it continued to consolidate. For one group, however, the situation took a dramatic turn for the worse. Before 1917, Jews had suffered more than any other national­ity from official government policies, which in their turn spurred on popular anti-Semitism, culminating in a series of massacres or 'pogroms' of Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A renewal of pogroms in the civil war, carried out primarily by anti-Bolsheviks, led thousands ofJews to see the Bolsheviks and the Red Army as their surest source of protection, many of them joining the ranks of the Communist Party, which already counted a number of Jews among its leading members. Jews benefited from the policies of korenizatsiia on top of the removal of former restrictions, and in the 1920s Jewish organisations, culture and Yiddish schools flourished, with an unusually high proportion of Jews going into higher education. As the Jews did not have their own territory, this made them difficult to fit into the overall pattern of Soviet nationality policies that favoured the construction of distinct national regions and republics, a situation which the Soviet government, enthusiasti­cally spurred on by the USSR President Mikhail Kalinin, sought to remedy by creating a Jewish autonomous region in Birobidzhan in the Far East.[267] Some historians, however, have seen the Birobidzhan project as a continuation of tsarist policies whose main aim was to transform Jews from traditional artisan and entrepreneurial occupations into productive agricultural labourers.[268] In any case, Birobidzhan did not attract enough Jewish migrants to act as an effec­tive homeland or cultural centre for Soviet Jews, although at times it succeeded in attracting positive international attention, funds and even immigrants from the Americas. [269]

There is a good deal of anecdotal testimony to Stalin's personal anti- Semitism,[270] but in many respects Jewish life continued to prosper in the 1930s. Tens of thousands of Jews lost their lives in the Great Terror and Jewish cul­ture, especially religion, was subject to restrictions similar to those imposed on other nationalities, including a marked reduction in university enrolment. After the suffering of the war years, Jews in the Soviet Union were subjected to a further attack. In 1944, leading members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Com­mittee (JAC), set up in 1942 to co-ordinate Jewish participation in the war effort and to attract international support, began to discuss the idea of an alternative homeland for the Jews in the Crimea or the Volga region. This was later to provide the pretext for accusations of 'bourgeois Jewish nation­alism' and Zionism that culminated in the arrest and execution of former JAC leaders in 1952. In January 1948 the prominent Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels died in mysterious circumstances, almost certainly murdered by the security services. Later that year a campaign against 'cosmopolitanism' pro­vided the pretext for the harassment and arrest of leading Soviet Jews, the closure of theatres and other cultural institutions, and the disbanding of the JAC and other Jewish organisations. From 1948 to 1953, any Jew who had been active in politics or in Jewish culture lived in permanent fear of arrest, a fate suffered by thousands of them.[271] A series of prominent articles and speeches raised the spectre of an international Jewish conspiracy to overthrow Soviet power. The campaign culminated in the so-called 'Doctors' Plot' early in 1953, when a number of leading Jewish doctors were arrested and charged with having caused the deaths of the former Politburo members Zhdanov and Shcherbakov and of plotting to kill Stalin and other leaders. Goaded on by official propaganda, popular anti-Semitism was turned against Jews from all walks of life. There is now strong evidence that Stalin, Malenkov and others were preparing a plan for the wholesale forced deportation of Jews from the western parts of the Soviet Union to Siberia, with the intention that up to half should die on the way.[272] They were spared this fate only by Stalin's death on 5 March 1953.

The Jews were the only nationality to be persecuted in this way in the post­war years. No clear explanation for the anti-Jewish campaign has yet emerged, but a combination of Stalin's personal anti-Semitism, fear that Jewish organi­sations would gain undue influence as a result of sympathy for the Holocaust and a foreign policy that supported new-found allies in the Arab world against the new Israeli state all played a role. Although the overt government cam­paigns died with Stalin, anti-Semitism remained a significant feature of Soviet life and the experience of 1948-53 did much to stimulate the movement for emigration among Soviet Jews in later years.

For other non-Russians, the post-war years were a period of reconstruction, of grief and of the consolidation of a sense of pride in the Soviet system. The overt appeals to Russian nationalism of the war and the subsequent anti- cosmopolitanism campaign encouraged some elements of the leadership to propose a more Russifying line, but by and large these were defeated. Thus proposals to abolish mother-tongue instruction in schools of the autonomous republics of the RSFSR beyond the fourth grade were abandoned in favour of retaining the principle of mother-tongue education for all.[273]

The union republics of the USSR played an important role in the com­petition for power which followed Stalin's death (i953-57). Of the Politburo contenders to succeed Stalin, Lavrentii Beria, Lazar Kaganovich and Nikita Khrushchev had all spent a significant period of their earlier careers in the republics. Ultimately the balance of power could be decided by votes in the Central Committee of the CPSU, many of whose members came from the republics, especially Ukraine where both Khrushchev and Kaganovich had served. During the few months of his ascendancy prior to his arrest, Beria had time to launch an attack on Stalin's later nationality policies, accusing him of abandoning Leninist principles, and was able to initiate significant changes in republican leaderships which favoured local nationals over Russians, such as the replacement of Mel'nikov by Kirichenko as party leader in Ukraine. The general principle that the first party secretary in each republic should be a local national was established at this time. Beria also moved quickly to release the accused in the 'Doctors' Plot' from prison and to condemn the anti-Semitism of the late Stalin years.

Although 'activating remnants of bourgeois-nationalist elements in the union republics' was one of the charges laid against Beria at the time of his arrest in June 1953, the republics continued to enjoy advantages relative to their position in the late Stalin years. Khrushchev in particular used his position as General Secretary to promote former colleagues from Ukraine, increasing Ukrainian representation in the Central Committee from sixteen in 1952 to fifty-nine in 1961. Ukraine also benefited from the decision to transfer the Crimean peninsula from the RSFSRto Ukrainian jurisdiction in 1954, while the rehabilitation of most of the deported peoples in 1956-7 also signalled that non-Russians would no longer be subject to the kind of arbitrary treatment they had reason to fear under Stalin. In seeking to impose his authority over economic policy against his rival Malenkov, Khrushchev decentralised a num­ber of economic ministries and the Ministry of Justice, considerably increasing the decision-makingpowers of the republics. While there was sound economic reasoning behind these moves, Khrushchev also reckoned that such measures might stand him in a more powerful position in any future inner-party conflicts.[274]

The strategy paid off. When his main rivals in the Politburo sought to remove him in June 1957, Khrushchev successfully appealed to the Central Committee, which was by now packed with supporters from Ukraine and other republics. But it would be a mistake to view Khrushchev as a keen sup­porter ofthe rights of non-Russians. After all, he owed much ofhis rise to the top of the Soviet system to the reputation he had earned in crushing all displays of Ukrainian nationalism after 1937. Having consolidated his power in 1957,

Khrushchev soon moved to reverse most of the decentralising measures intro­duced in the preceding years. More significantly, he signalled a far-reaching ideological shift by abandoning talk of the 'Brotherhood of Peoples' in favour of the 'merging of peoples'.

It was inevitable that such a merged identity should be centred on the Slavic languages and cultures. Khrushchev took care to include other Slavs, especially Ukrainians, alongside Russians when it came to defining the leading nations of the state, as evidenced in both his promotions and his cultural policies. No doubt he was mindful of the need to retain his personal base of support among Ukrainians, but some commentators have noted another possible factor: the relatively high birth rate among the Soviet Union's Muslims compared to that of the Russians, which threatened their overall majority in the population.[275]Modernising economic strategies also led to a renewed period of internal migration as Russians and Ukrainians moved into less-developed regions.[276]

Greatest controversy surrounded Khrushchev's proposals for educational reform. The theses on education he presented in November 1958 included a provision, Article 19, which affected the status of non-Russian languages.[277]It gave parents the right to decide in which language their children should receive instruction, and gave schools in the republics the option to drop the teaching of a second language. In practice this meant abandoning Lenin's principle that every child should receive instruction in the mother tongue, while also removing the requirement for Russians in the republics to study the local language. The move was opposed by Communist leaders in almost all the republics, who feared that the move would undermine the position of the titular nationality. In Azerbaijan and Latvia, opposition went as far as refusing to implement the provisions of Article 19 in new republican laws on education, leadingto the direct intervention of Moscow and high-level purges in both republics.[278]

The fears of the republic leaders were not immediately realised,[279] but in the longer term there was a substantial decline in the proportion of Ukrainians and Belorussians attending schools in the mother tongue, with Belorussian schools disappearing altogether from the capital Minsk.[280] In the RSFSR itself, mother- tongue education declined dramatically. The number of languages used in schools fell from forty-seven in the early 1960s to seventeen by 1982, twelve of which were taught only as far as the fourth grade. Russian became the standard language of instruction across the North Caucasus.[281] The Russification of schools in Ukraine and Belorussia seems to have been confined mostly to the cities, and so could be explained as a process of natural assimilation rather than a deliberate policy, but for the national minorities of the RSFSR there was a clear policy of linguistic Russification implemented from Khrushchev's time onwards.

Under both Stalin and Khrushchev, republican leaders could consider them­selves fortunate to stay in office any longer than a few years. By contrast, one of the central features of Leonid Brezhnev's period of office (1964-82) was the 'stability of cadres'. Nowhere was this policy more apparent than in the union republics. In Estonia, Johannes Kabin was appointed first secretary ofthe Estonian Communist Party by Stalin in 1950, and came close to out-surviving Brezhnev himself before his replacement in 1978, while in Uzbekistan Sharaf Rashidov stayed in his post from 1959 to 1983. The average length of service for a first secretary in a union republic under Brezhnev was eleven years. Similar levels of stability extended to other posts in the republican leaderships, which also tended to become more dominated by members of the titular national­ity.[282] Republican leaders did not have a completely free hand, however. Petro Shelest', first secretary in Ukraine from 1963, pursued a policy of promoting Ukrainian culture and identity to an extent that was not acceptable to the leadership and was consequently dismissed in 1972. Although the Shelest' case established that there were limits to the activities of republican leaders, for the most part they were allowed to run their republics without interference from the Centre. Especially in Transcaucasia and Central Asia, a pattern emerged of long-standing leaders building up a personal power base often centred on members oftheir own extended families or clans, and riddled with corruption. Ronald Suny has labelled these ruling elites as 'national mafias'.[283] The new stability was underpinned by a reversion to the principle of 'Brotherhood of Nations' on Brezhnev's part.

For the most part, members of the titular nationality benefited from the patronage of the party bosses. Higher education flourished in the republics. Most non-Russian citizens shared in the general relative prosperity and stability of the Brezhnev years. But national tensions never disappeared entirely. At the day-to-day level, derogatory references to nationality were commonplace in queues, on crowded public transport, at football or basketball matches or in competition over girls and alcohol.⁵⁰ Mass protests erupted over the announcement of results of competitive university entrance exams in the Kazakh capital Alma Ata, and in Tbilisi over an attempt to introduce Russian as a second official language of Georgia, both in 1978. Meanwhile specific national grievances simmered away. From 1956 onwards, a series of protests, mostly by intellectuals, over the status of Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh and the Prigorodnyi district of North Ossetia prefigured the violent upheavals in these areas in the 1980s and 1990s.⁵¹ The Soviet Union's Jews, although spared the extreme official anti-Semitism of the late Stalin years, found that there was little scope for them to practise their religion or culture, leading to a growing movement in favour of emigration to Israel. This right was granted to large numbers between 1971 and 1979, inspired by a thaw in Soviet-US relations, but was denied thereafter, creating a cohort of refuseniks - Jews who had been refused permission to emigrate and faced persecution for applying. By 1968 Crimean Tatars, still denied access to their homeland, had organised an impressive series of petitions with a claimed total of 3,000,000 signatures.

Such examples of popular protest were few and generally small-scale, how­ever. For the most part, national protest was confined to small numbers of intellectuals, who formed an important part of the dissident movement. In the 1960s and 1970s, a flourishing Ukrainian culture circulated in the form of samizdat underground publications, and in 1970 a nationalist journal, Ukrainian Herald, appeared secretly for the first time. An Estonian National Front was set up in 1971, followed by a Lithuanian National Popular Front in 1974. In a more individual act of protest, in 1972 a Lithuanian student set fire to himself in a

50 Rasma Karklins, Ethnic Relations in the USSR (Boston and London: Allen and Unwin, 1986), pp. 68-71.

51 A. A.Tsutsiev, Osetino-Ingushskii konflikt (1992- . . .) ego predistoriia i faktory razvitiia (Moscow: Rosspen, 1998), p. 80; ChristopherJ. Walker, 'The Armenian Presencein Moun­tainous Karabakh', in John F. R.Wright, Suzanne Goldenberg and Richard Schofield (eds.), Transcaucasian Boundaries (London: UCL Press, 1996), pp. 103-4; Stephen F. Jones, 'Georgia: the Trauma of Statehood', in Ian Bremmer and Ray Taras (eds.), New States, New Politics: Building the Post-Soviet Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 505-43; 510.

public square in Kaunas under a poster proclaiming 'Freedom for Lithuania'. In Georgia as well, underground journals flourished in the i970s. These activi­ties were not ignored by the regime, and participants often faced persecution. Waves of arrests of those suspected of Ukrainian nationalist sympathies were conducted in 1965 and 1972, and in 1979 Moscow announced the execution of three Armenian nationalists who had allegedly been involved in a terrorist explosion on the Moscow underground.[284]

Repressions helped to keep protests in check, while the bulk of the popula­tion showed little active interest in the national question. The 'years of stagna­tion', however, produced a dangerous situation. Most non-Russians enjoyed a relatively privileged position in their republics, could use their mother tongue at school and in public and had controlled access to their national cultures. As a consequence, national identity was strong locally. In the Soviet Union as a whole, however, non-Russians were regarded as second rate; significant career progression depended on a sufficient mastery of Russian language; school books and history texts demeaned their national past; and occasional symbolic and arbitrary interferences from the centre could offend national feelings. This did not matter so much as long as relative economic prosperity and an adequate welfare system persisted, and Moscow could rely on the loy­alty of a corrupt and affluent national leadership. Any upset to this delicate balance, however, might have drastic results.

Shortly after his appointment as General Secretary of the CPSU in i985, Mikhail Gorbachev declared that Soviet socialism had definitively resolved the nationalities problem and that the population of the Soviet Union constituted 'a single family - the Soviet people'.[285] This confidence was shattered by mass conflicts between Russians and Yakuts in Yakutia in June 1986, and when in December of that year Gorbachev dismissed the corrupt first secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan, Dinmukhamed Kunaev, and replaced him by a Russian, Gennadii Kolbin, subsequent riots made the capital of Kazakhstan, Alma Ata, ungovernable for days and, according to unofficial estimates, cost the lives of up to 250 protestors and members of the security forces.[286] Subsequently Gorbachev adopted a far more cautious approach to the national question, accusing officials of lack of sensitivity, decentralising economic decision-making, reforming the Council of Nationalities at the apex of the Soviet system and repealing unpopular language laws. In November 1990 he published the draft of a new Union Treaty, which was to remodel Soviet federalism to the advantage ofthe republics. Having secured apopular mandate from most of the republics in a referendum held on 17 March 1991 to pursue a new Union Treaty, he was in the final stages of negotiation when a failed coup attempt in Moscow in August 1991 brought the Communist system crashing down around him.

By that time, however, events had proceeded at such a pace that it is unlikely that a new treaty or the continuation of Gorbachev's rule could have preserved the Soviet Union in anything like its old form. For many non-Russians, the introduction of market-style economic reforms led to particular hardship as it meant that relatively underdeveloped regions such as Central Asia and the Caucasus could no longer rely on unconditional central investment. Mean­while, for more prosperous regions such as the three Baltic republics, eco­nomic decline only made clearer the potential benefits of independence from Moscow. Economic decline upset the delicate balance which had underpinned passive acceptance of Soviet central rule in the Brezhnev era. Gorbachev's ham- fisted handling of relations with republican elites, typified by the Kunaev case, further undermined the old system and subsequent insecurity led national leaders to begin to mobilise around national demands as a means of securing their own long-term positions.[287]

Gorbachev's policy of glasnost' encouraged the articulation of a broad set of demands. Environmentalist movements which sprang up in the republics increasingly couched their complaints in national terms. By the spring of 1988, single-issue campaigns were developing into mass national movements, nowhere more so than in the Baltic republics. Here intellectuals were initially given encouragement by Gorbachev and other reformers who saw the Baltics as an ideal testing ground for building up a market-based economy and devel- opingforeign trade, but found the road to reform blockedby conservative polit­ical leaders. For the population, glasnost' provided the opportunity to revive memories of independence and the brutality of Sovietisation, to celebrate their resilient national culture and identity and to call for an increased share in the output of their own economies. The first Popular Front was established in Esto­nia in April 1988, followed in May and October by Latvia and Lithuania respec­tively. Membership of the popular fronts was open to anyone with a grievance, but was mostly restricted to members of the relevant nationality. The appoint­ment of new reform-minded leaders in all three republics in the autumn led to a period of co-operation between government and popular fronts during which declarations of sovereignty, new language laws and the readoption of separate flags and national anthems emphasised the determination to estab­lish and maintain a separate identity for each nationality. But if the republi­can leaders, and even Gorbachev, had hoped to co-opt the growing national movements in this way, their actions only served to encourage mass action and an escalation of demands to the point where nothing short of outright independence would satisfy a large section of the population. Huge protest demonstrations became a regular occurrence, culminating on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in August 1989 when over a million Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians joined hands in a human chain stretching across all three republics. By the end of the year the pressure was so great that the Supreme Soviet in each republic had declared their 1940 incorporation into the Soviet Union illegal, providing a strong formal basis for any declaration of independence. This demand was now adopted by all three popular fronts, no doubt encouraged by the ease with which Commu­nism and obedience to Moscow had collapsed across Eastern Europe in 1989. Free elections in 1989 and 1990 resulted in victories for the Popular Fronts, and independence was declared in Lithuania on 11 March 1990, Estonia on 30 March and Latvia on 4 May.[288]

Not far behind the Baltic republics in raising the demand for secession was Georgia, where nineteen demonstrators were killed by the Red Army at an independence rally in April 1989. Elsewhere, economic collapse and the perception that the centre was losing its grip led sections of the population not to demand independence, but to attack other ethnic minorities. Long­standing disputes over territory, living space, access to jobs and resources and the constitutional status of minority territories came to the fore. The most serious and protracted case of ethnic conflict broke out between Armeni­ans and Azeris over the status of the largely Armenian-populated region of Nagorno-Karabakh in late 1987 and spread to large cities like Sumgait and Baku by March 1988. While genuine grievances and irreconcilable claims lay at the root of the conflicts, the population was goaded on by political lead­ers in both the Armenian and Azerbaijani republics seeking a populist base for their own positions, culminating in all-out war between the two follow­ing independence.[289] Serious conflicts also emerged between Georgia and her Abkhaz and Ossetian minorities in 1989, between Ossetians and Ingush in the

North Caucasus in 1992 (a result of the fall-out from the earlier deportations of Ingush) and between Kirgiz and Uzbeks in the Osh region of Kirgizia in 1990.⁵⁸

The final nail in the coffin ofthe Soviet Union came from the largest repub­lic - the RSFSR (later renamed the Russian Federation). On his election as chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet in March 1990, Boris Yeltsin sought to use the republic as a power base in his personal struggle with Gorbachev. He quickly assured the Baltic republics that he would not stand in the way oftheir secession, and followed their lead in declaring sovereignty in the summer of 1990. Sensing the power of the national movements in his struggle with Gor­bachev, Yeltsin encouraged this process by calling on the autonomous republics to 'take whatever helping of power that you can gobble up by yourselves'.⁵⁹ The RSFSR therefore became a major driving force in the break-up of the USSR.

The failed coup of August 1991 served to strengthen Yeltsin's personal stand­ing and to make even more remote the possibility of keeping Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which now appealed for international recognition, within the fold. The only remaining question was if any of the other union republics could be retained within some sort of federal system. Fearing the possibility of another coup, encouraged by Yeltsin and seeing how the Baltic bids for independence had been welcomed in the West, the other non-Russians who had voted overwhelmingly for retention of the Union in the March referen­dum now moved quickly in support of independence. Political elites could no longer be sure of their privileges and power being preserved by either Yeltsin or Gorbachev, and moved to position themselves as leaders of potential new states. As events unfolded at a dizzying pace, popular national movements and Communist politicians engaged in a circular competition of demands, reinforcing the radicalisation of each other in the process. Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk was the key player in the Soviet endgame. When he refused to send a representative to sign a Treaty on the Economic Commonwealth on 18 October and the Ukrainian people voted for independence in a sepa­rate referendum on 1 December, the fate of the Union was sealed. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Georgia were by now in effect independent states. On 8 December the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus agreed to the for­mation of a loose Confederation of Independent States (CIS) (see Map 12.1), and when they were joined at the eleventh hour by Moldova, Armenia, Azer­baijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan it was all over. The

58 Tishkov Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict, pp. 135-82.

59 Robert Service, A History of Twentieth-Century Russia (London: Penguin, 1997), pp. 488-95.

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formally dissolved on midnight of 31 December 1991.

For most of the nationalities of the former Russian Empire the process of nation-building was carried out not so much by their own efforts but on their behalf by a multinational state which was, for a time, committed to reinforcing and even creating national identities alongside a radical social and economic agenda. Though the demands ofmodernisation, centralisation and geograph­ical mobility undermined many of these measures, enough had been achieved to lay the basis for the further development of modern nations. Propaganda and policies that switched clumsily between promoting separate national feelings, developing Soviet patriotism and celebrating the leading role of the Russians, seemed to offer enough to everyone. The rise in urbanisation and education contributed to the growth of personal and group awareness which could be channelled into controllable paths so long as relative prosperity and national elite co-operation was assured. But the crisis in the Soviet economic and polit­ical system arrived at a time when three decades of dissident activity and sporadic outbursts of broader national feeling suggested that the non-Russian nations had matured politically to a degree which made separatism a viable and eventually popular option.

For the fourteen new non-Russian states, the period since 1991 was a sec­ond, independent, period of nation-building. Lacking alternative sources of experienced political leaders, most of the states remained in the hands of Communists-turned-nationalists who had already been in power locally for many years before the break-up. Across the southern states and in Moldova, a series of border disputes, civil wars and ethnic conflicts in the first part of the 1990s left the impression that independence might have been a mistake and that the region would remain unstable for decades to come. But the resolution of most of the conflicts by force, negotiation or inertia, combined with the return of relative economic stability, made it clear that independence was there to stay, with the possible exception of Belarus, whose overtures for some form of renewed federation with Russia were rebuffed by Moscow.

The biggest controversy for the new states was how to establish a firm basis of united identity and, in particular, how to deal with the substantial Russian populations that remained within theirborders. In 1989 over 25 million Russians were living in other republics of the Soviet Union, and in the years after 1990 migration out of some of the republics, most notably in Central Asia, stood at over 5 per cent of the total population each year.⁶⁰ Strict language laws were

60 Paul Kolstoe, Russians in the Former Soviet Republics (London: Hurst, 1995), pp. 2, 228,

293-300.

introduced in all three Baltic republics which clearly discriminated against Russians, who were further disadvantaged by constitutional moves basing property and citizenship rights on the situation before 1939. Russian protests and threats were backed up by international pressure, leading to revisions of all the language laws by 1996. By the end of the decade, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had adapted so successfully to a free-market economy and West European norms of citizenship and human rights that they were preparing for entry into the European Union. The other states did not progress as rapidly in the same direction, partly as a result of different cultural backgrounds and a less sure economic base. In Central Asia, the clan-based patron-client networks, which had become so firmly established in Brezhnev's time, were perpetuated into the post-Soviet period. But in other respects the break with the Communist past was clear-cut, many observers' fears of the potential of Islamic fundamentalism proved unfounded and stable modern nation-states

were emerging.[290]

The Russian Federation inherited the Soviet system of autonomous republics and regions, and after the break-up of the USSR over 18 per cent of its population remained non-Russian. Almost all had declared their own sovereignty, with Yeltsin's encouragement, in 1990. In March 1992 Yeltsin, now head of an independent but still multinational state, devised a Federal Treaty that recognised the rights that the republics enjoyed in practice anyway. Even this was not enough for the largest republic, Tatarstan. A popular referendum rejected the treaty and led Russia and Tatarstan to the brink of a secession crisis. The imposition of a new constitution by Yeltsin following the consolidation of his own power in December 1993 restricted the rights granted a year and a half earlier and pushed Tatarstan ever further away. Although a strong Tatar national independence movement, Ittifak, encouraged the brinkmanship of the Tatar leadership, in the end the republic, surrounded by Russian terri­tory and dependent on the Russian economy, could not afford to go it alone, while the Russian Federation could not afford an open conflict with such a large region. The result was a bilateral treaty signed in February 1994 which granted Tatarstan virtual self-rule in return for remaining a loyal part of the federation. In general the nationalities of the autonomous republics, who had seen the status of their national languages seriously eroded from Khrushchev's time on, engaged in an intensive ethno-national revival under perestroika and after. While this process fuelled ethnic conflict and disputes with the Centre in some areas, notably the North Caucasus, in most cases it did not lead to secessionist movements or present any serious threat to stability in the Russian Federation (see Map 13.1).

On 11 December 1994, Russian armed forces crossed into the North Cau­casian Republic of Chechnya, initiating a conflict which was to cost 40,000 lives in the next eighteen months. The republic's president, former Soviet air force commander Johkar Dudayev, had come to power with Moscow's backing. But on 2 November 1991 the Chechen parliament declared full independence and in June 1992 Dudayev expelled Russian troops from the region. By late 1994, Yeltsin faced a drastic decline in his own popularity which threatened his chances in the next presidential election, due for the summer of 1996. This pro­vided one of the motives for the invasion. In words attributed to the secretary of the Security Council Oleg Lobov, 'We need a small victorious war to raise the President's ratings.'[291] But Dudayev had also done a great deal to antago­nise Moscow. Allegations of connections with organised crime groups in the Russian capital, although greatly exaggerated at the time, were not entirely without basis. The hijacking of a bus near the town of Mineral'nye Vody in the North Caucasus by Chechens in July 1994 further reinforced the notion that Chechnya was a threat to Russia's internal security. Moreover, if Chechnya was allowed to get away with a unilateral declaration of independence, what would stop the rest of the North Caucasus and other republics following suit? The presence of a small amount of oil and a major pipeline linking Russia with the major oilfields of Azerbaijan were a further incentive for Russia to re-establish control.

Whatever the motive, it is clear that Russia's leaders and military com­manders expected that the overthrow of Dudayev would be an easy task. In November 1994 the defence minister, Pavel Grachev, famously boasted that 'we would need one parachute regiment to decide the whole affair in two hours'.[292] But the invasion was a disaster. The ill-equipped and demoralised Russian army, for all its numerical superiority in manpower and weapons, found the stubbornness and guerrilla tactics of Chechen fighters far more of a handful than they had expected. After fierce fighting, Russian forces captured the Chechen capital, Groznyi, on 26 January 1995, but the Chechen rebels mounted effective resistance in the mountains despite Dudayev's death from a Russian missile in May 1996. On 6 August 1996, the day of Yeltsin's rein- auguration as Russian president, in a move of astonishing daring, Chechen forces attacked and retook Groznyi from a Russian force supposedly three times the size of their own. Yeltsin, faced with military humiliation, and con­demned internationally for human rights abuses, sent his former presiden­tial electoral rival General Aleksandr Lebed' to Khasavyurt in Dagestan to negotiate an effective ceasefire marking the end of the first Chechen war. In January 1997, Aslan Maskhadov was elected president of Chechnya in mostly fair elections.[293]

Underthe Khasavyurt agreement, the question ofthe future status of Chech­nya was deferred for five years. For the next three years Chechnya enjoyed virtual self-rule beyond Moscow's reach, but was divided internally as com­peting 'warlords' squabbled over influence and territory, leaving Maskhadov an often helpless observer. In the summer of 1999, the bombing of apart­ment blocks in Moscow, widely blamed on Chechen terrorists, was followed by an incursion into Dagestan by a Chechen force under Shamil Basaev. These events provided the pretext for a second Russian invasion, although there is ample evidence that preparations had been under way since at least the spring of that year. This time the Russian army was much better pre­pared and benefited from the vigorous political leadership of Vladimir Putin, who was soon to become president of the Russian Federation. Although not without setbacks, the second invasion was more effective than the first, and within a few months the Russian army had established control of Groznyi and most of the Chechen lowlands. Chechen guerrillas continued to hold out in the mountains, however, and a final end to the fighting seemed a long way off.

Having apparently solved the Chechen question, Putin also moved to curtail the powers of the autonomous republics by dividing the Russian Federation into seven 'super-regions', each overseen by a personal appointee. The move was accepted without much protest by the republics, underlining their depen­dence on Moscow and the lack of will for further secession struggles. Putin benefited from a revival in the Russian economy, as well as the weak founda­tion of republican national identity. The policies of Khrushchev and Brezhnev had ensured that the national minorities ofthe Russian Federation, apart from the Chechens, would not be as vigorous in their pursuit of national demands as the larger nationalities ofthe union republics. But the failure ofthe Russian Federation to reach a consensus on a non-ethnic conception of Russian citi- zenship⁶⁵ means the potential remains for the national question to continue to pose problems for Russia's leaders.

65 Tishkov, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict, pp. 272-93.

The western republics: Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and the Baltics

SERHYYEKELCHYK

The Soviet west, an arch of non-Russian republics extending from the Gulf of Finland in the north to the Black Sea in the south and separating Russia proper from other European states, came to the attention of scholars during the late 1960s and early 1970s. While Western sovietologists have long studied each individual country in the region - Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belorussia/ Belarus, Ukraine and Moldavia/Moldova-before the 1960s, they didnotthink of the Soviet west as an entity. But the region's prominence in the dissident movement during the 1960s suggested that the western fringe of the USSR might become a catalyst of nationalist unrest and, possibly, a channel for the spillover of democratic ideas from Eastern Europe. The region was now seen as a place where the Soviet collapse might begin.

Yet, as North American scholars pioneered the use of the term 'Soviet west', they soon discovered the difficulties of defining this region in economic or social terms - which was at the time considered a clue for understand­ing nationality perseverance there. In his lead article in the 1975 collection The Soviet West: Interplay between Nationality and Social Organization, Ralph S. Clem proposed that the area was characterised by 'high to moderate levels of economic development with relation to other areas of the USSR', but had to qualify this generalisation by excluding the republic of Moldavia, as well as some areas of Ukraine, Belorussia and Lithuania. Of the usual social con­sequences of economic development, except perhaps for low fertility, neither high educational level nor high urbanisation qualified as defining character­istics of the region. In any case, European Russia displayed similar economic and social trends. In the final analysis, history was the only factor unques­tionably uniting the western republics and setting them aside from the rest of the Soviet Union. All had historical ties to other European countries. In the recent past, some had experienced independence, while others were divided territorially, with some of their territories forming part of another European country.¹

Another contemporary collection, The Influence of East Europe and the Soviet West on the USSR (1975), takes a more productive approach to the region as defined more by its past and present links to Eastern Europe than by any soci­ological criteria. Its editor, Roman Szporluk, suggests in his introduction that the USSR's post-1939 extension westward made the Soviet nationality ques­tion much more pressing and sensitive.² In his subsequent work on Western Ukraine, which was incorporated into the Ukrainian republic during 1939-45, Professor Szporluk shows that, owing to the pre-existing high level of national consciousness, the Soviet authorities never managed to fully absorb this area. Western Ukraine remained the mainstay of popular nationalism, later con­tributing greatly to the disintegration of the USSR.³

Although this argument would not apply to all western republics, it under­scores an important factor in their historical development. The vitality of nationalities on the Soviet Union's western fringe was to a considerable degree determined by the successes or difficulties of their pre-Soviet nation-building. The areas that were able to preserve a high level of national consciousness were those where Sovietisation had come late and where during the twentieth century nationalists had had a chance to mobilise the masses for their cause, as was the case especially in the Baltic states and Western Ukraine. In contrast, in countries where an early interruption of nationalist agitation or lack of infras­tructure for such work had prevented nationalist mobilisation of the masses, the population's national identities remained frustratingly ambiguous. This was the case in Belorussia, Moldavia and eastern Ukraine.

To be sure, the Soviet state actively interfered in nation-building processes. Scholars have shown that the USSR institutionalised nationality as a form, while attempting to drain it of its content. As a result, it created territorial nations with all the symbols of nationhood but bereft of political sovereignty, although Stalin's successors were to discover the fluid border in modern nation­alism between form and content.⁴ The Soviet nativisation programmes during

1 Ralph S. Clem, 'Vitality of the Nationalities in the Soviet West: Background and Implica­tions', in Clem (ed.), The Soviet West: Interplay between Nationality and Social Organization (New York: Praeger, 1975), pp. 3-5.

2 Roman Szporluk, 'Introduction', in Szporluk (ed.), The Influence of East Europe and the Soviet West on the USSR (New York: Praeger, 1975), p. 10.

3 Roman Szporluk, Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 2000).

4 Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 25-7; Yuri Slezkine, 'The

the 1920s made nationalities more articulate, and if Stalinist ideologues man­aged to undo much of what had been achieved at that time, they never ques­tioned the ethnic distinctiveness of non-Russian peoples. During the post-war period, the non-Russians did not make much progress in their nation-building, but managed to preserve many of their previous accomplishments. Thus, espe­cially for the regions that had been incorporated into the USSR during 1939­45, the pre-Soviet experience of nation-building remained a decisive factor in national consolidation.

Nation-building in the age of revolution

The prominent Czech scholar Miroslav Hroch concluded in his study of Europe's non-dominant ethnic groups that these people usually undergo three stages in their national revival - that of academic interest in the nation's history and culture, creation and propagation of modern high culture and political mobilisation.⁵ All the nationalities living on the western borderland of the Russian Empire qualified as Hroch's 'small peoples' because they lacked con­tinuous traditions of statehood, native elites and literature in an indigenous language. However, in the time of total war and global politics, these nations' geopolitical location between Russia and Germany shaped their destinies no less than did the Czech scholar's objective historical criteria.

During the late nineteenth century, Estonians and Latvians were over­whelmingly peasant peoples, albeit with the level of literacy that was one of the highest in Europe - over 90 per cent. (This high level of literacy was due to the spread of the Lutheran faith beginning in the sixteenth century and the Church's adoption of Estonian in its services.) Estonians, whose speech belongs to the Finno-Ugric family of languages and is drastically different from Indo-European languages, in a sense benefited from their cultural isolation. The Russian imperial government encouraged conversion to Orthodoxy but could not enforce serious assimilation of the peasantry Instead, the centralis­ing efforts of the last two tsars undermined the positions of the Baltic German nobility, the land's traditional ruling caste, while placing no restrictions on the development of Estonian culture, the press and education. The decline of

Soviet Union as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism', Slavic Review 53, 2 (1994): 414-52; Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 111-12 and 129-31.

5 Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe, trans. Ben Fowkes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

the Baltic barons' power, combined with rapid industrialisation and urbani­sation at the turn of the century, allowed Estonians to challenge the German domination of their cities, including Tallinn, which had become one of the empire's major ports. In 1897, Estonians constituted 67.8 per cent of urbanites in their ethno-linguistic territory.[294] The Estonian bourgeoisie and Estonian pro­fessionals were becoming increasingly prominent in public life and supported national culture, most notably the tradition of all-Estonian song festivals that began in 1869.

The Revolution of 1905 escalated the political and cultural demands of Estonian activists. Moderate loyalists, led by Jaan Tnisson and the Estonian Progressive People's Party, put forward the demand for autonomy, while rad­ical nationalists, headed by Konstantin Pats, combined this aim with that of overthrowing the tsarist regime. But 1905 also marked the entry on the political scene of Estonian socialism. As the peasants were destroying large manors in the countryside, the Russian and Estonian Social Democratic Workers' Parties were recruiting followers among the working class. The suppression of the revolution undermined the growth of the radical Left, but had little effect on the development of Estonian society and culture.

During the First World War, Estonia remained outside the battle zone and did not suffer wartime destruction. The fall of the tsarist regime in February 1917 led to the renewed demands of autonomy. Following an impressive Esto­nian demonstration in Petrograd (St Petersburg), the Provisional Government indeed agreed to unite the Estonian ethnic lands into a single province and to allow elections to the provincial assembly The assembly, known in Esto­nian as Maapaev, was elected in May and represented all the major political parties, including the Bolsheviks. When the Bolsheviks seized power in Petro- grad in November 1917, their leader in Estonia, Viktor Kingissepp, disbanded the Maapiiev but was unable to establish an efficient administration. More important, the Bolsheviks alienated many Estonians with their attacks on the Lutheran Church and failure to divide large landed estates.

On 24 February 1918, as the German army was marching into Estonia, the underground representatives of the Maapaev proclaimed the country's inde­pendence. During the occupation, which lasted until late November 1918, the German military and the local Baltic Germans openly considered Estonia's incorporation into Germany But as Germany surrendered to the Allies and withdrew its troops from Eastern Europe, Estonia became the scene of a civil war among the Bolsheviks, the Baltic Germans and the provisional Estonian government, which was covertly supported by Finland and the Entente. To complicate matters further, the Allies forced the Estonian authorities to accept on their territory White Russian troops, which in 1919 used Estonia as a spring­board in their unsuccessful attacks on Petrograd.[295] In February 1920, the war ended with the Tartu Peace Treaty, by which Soviet Russia recognised Estonia's independence.

Estonia's southern neighbours, the Latvians, although speakers ofa distinct Baltic language belonging to the Indo-European family, shared with Estoni­ans many of their twentieth-century historical experiences. Also a Lutheran, mainly peasant people with a high level of literacy, Latvians ended the Ger­man domination of their cities during the industrial spurt of the i880s-i9i0s. The formerly German city of Riga emerged not only as a major port and a Baltic metropolis, but also as a Latvian city, with Latvians becoming its largest ethnic group (39.6 per cent in 1913).[296] Still, unlike in Estonia, the Baltic Ger­mans remained firmly in control of municipal government, and their large estates dominated the rural economy. This led to growing frustration among Latvians. While national culture generally developed freely, the plight of the landless peasantry led radical Latvian intellectuals to an exploration of Marx­ism. In 1904, the Latvian Social Democratic Workers' Party came into existence and soon boasted an impressive 10,000 members. In contrast to the Estonian party, Latvian Social Democrats continued to exist after the revolution and subsequently entered into an affiliation with the Bolsheviks. The year i905 galvanised more moderate nationalists as well, but the greatest literary figure of the Latvian cultural revival, the poet Janis Rainis, symbolised the intelli­gentsia's embrace of socialism.

The trials of the First World War only increased the sway of political radical­ism in Latvia. Unlike Estonia, the country was devastated by warfare, evacua­tion and the refugee crisis. Aimingto take advantage ofthe Latvians' traditional hatred oftheir German masters, the Russian government created separate units of Latvian infantry, known as strelnieki or, in Russian, Latyshskie strelki (Latvian sharpshooters). By 1917, the Latvian units were 30,000 strong and, like most of the Russian army, completely demoralised. The Bolsheviks were able to gain mass support among the strelnieki, many of whom would later move to Russia as Lenin's most trusted guards. The collapse of the monarchy briefly brought to prominence Latvian moderate nationalists, represented politically by Karlis Ulmanis and the Agrarian Union, but the Left soon regained the initia­tive. During the November elections to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, the Bolsheviks, who were led by Peteris Stucka, won in Latvia an impressive 71. 9 per cent.

Nevertheless, following Soviet Russia's diplomatic concessions at Brest- Litovsk, the German forces in February 1918 occupied all of Latvia. After the German capitulation, representatives of most Latvian political parties met secretly in Riga on 18 November 1918 and proclaimed the Republic of Latvia with Ulmanis as prime minister of its provisional government. It soon tran­spired that the victorious Entente wanted to perpetuate the German occupa­tion as protection against the Bolsheviks, who from December 1918 to May 1919 again controlled a considerable part of Latvian territory. In the ensuing civil war, Latvian nationalists relied on support consecutively from Germany, the Entente and Poland to defeat the Bolsheviks, White Russians and the Baltic German forces. The war ended in early 1920, and in August, Soviet Russia recognised Latvia as an independent state.

Further south, Roman Catholic Lithuanians could not boast the same level of literacy and social organisation. Closely related to Latvians by language, their modern history was, however, shaped by Polish political domination and the Polonisation of native elites. Unlike their two Baltic neighbours, the Lithuanians could claim to be the heirs of a mighty medieval state, the grand duchy of Lithuania, but the tsarist assimilationist drive greatly hindered the development of their modern high culture. Seeking to separate the peasantry from the rebellious Polish nobility in the region, the government outlawed the use of the Roman alphabet and imposed on Lithuanians the Russian educa­tional system. Equally important, in contrast to Estonia and Latvia, at the turn of the century Lithuania remained an agrarian backwater. Landless peasants did not have an option of becoming industrial workers, and Vilnius remained the only big city in the area, a multinational metropolis that Lithuanians, Poles, Belorussians and Jews all claimed as their cultural centre.

After a slow start, the national movement spurted during the Revolution of 1905, when a national congress, the so-called Great Diet of Vilnius, demanded autonomy and political freedom. Although Social Democrats had long been influential in Lithuania, new opportunities for cultural expression channelled the revolutionary events there more in the direction of national liberation. Such a trend suited the Germans, who occupied all of Lithuania early during the First World War and eventually modified plans for annexation towards the creation of a puppet Lithuanian government. However, when the German military allowed the formation of a Lithuanian national assembly or Taryba, in September 1917, this body proved less than obedient. It did proclaim indepen­dence 'in alliance with the German Reich' (11 December 1917), but immediately pressed for more rights and subsequently issued another declaration of inde­pendence without mention ofthe Germans (16 February 1918).[297] At one point in 1918, the balance of military powers forced the Taryba to accept the German Prince Wilhelm of Urach as a Lithuanian king, but the Lithuanian nationalists, led by Antanas Smetona, gradually took over the administration. Following the German capitulation, Lithuanian forces managed to fight off the Bolsheviks and the Whites, yet lost Vilnius to the new Polish state.

Belorussians represented in the extreme the same case of belated national development and German manipulation. Numbering some 5.5 million in 1897, they were an East Slavic nationality close to Russians in language and Orthodox religion. With their cities dominated by Poles, Jews and Russians, the over­whelming majority of Belorussians were illiterate peasants unfamiliar with the modern notion of national identity. Although it distrusted the Polish gentry in the area, the Russian government did not encourage the development of Belorussian culture. On the contrary, it repressed book publishing in Belorus- sian, and, when it provided the peasants with any education at all, it was in Russian. With less than 3 per cent of them residing in cities and towns, Belorus- sians were quite possibly the least urbanised people in Europe. Their national awakening began late, the idea of a separate Belorussian nationality emerging only in the 1890s in the work of the poet Francisak Bahusevic. As other nations of the region were entering the mass mobilisation stage, Belorussians during 1906-15 were undergoing a belated literary revival, which was made possi­ble by the temporary softening of restrictions on the Belorussian language. Belorussian cultural life of this period centred around the weekly Nasa niva (Our Cornfield) edited by the brothers Ivan and Anton Luckievic.[298]

The First World War brought destruction and population dislocation on Belorussian soil. By the time of the February Revolution, half of Belorussian territory was occupied by the Germans, but in the other half, patriotic activists managed in December to convene the All-Belorussian Congress, only to have it disbanded by the Bolsheviks. By the terms ofthe Brest-Litovsk Treaty, Belorus- sia was divided between Germany and Soviet Russia. The former allowed the local nationalists to proclaim the Belorussian Democratic Republic (9 March 1918), while the latter created the Belorussian Soviet Republic (1 January 1919). Subsequently, Belorussia became a prize in the Polish-Soviet War, which ended with the final incorporation of western Belorussia into Poland and the re- establishment of the Belorussian SSR.

Belorussia's neighbour to the south, Ukraine, presented a more complex case. Eastern or Dnieper Ukraine, which was part of the Russian Empire, shared many characteristics with Lithuania and Belorussia. A large nation of some 22 million people in 1897, Ukrainians spoke an East Slavic language closely related to Russian and were overwhelmingly Orthodox. The imperial government imposed harsh restrictions on the development of their national culture, but the national revival that had begun in the mid-nineteenth century was unstoppable. By the early twentieth century, the Ukrainian intelligentsia boasted developed literary, theatrical and musical traditions. Still, national­ist agitators did not have free access to the peasant masses, which remained largely illiterate. Cities, including Kiev, changed their Polish cultural character to Russian because the peasants who moved there or joined the industrial workforce adopted Russian identity. The new working class responded bet­ter to agitation by Russian socialists, and, indeed, all-Russian socialist parties had an impressive following in eastern Ukraine. Only the Revolution of 1905 enabled Ukrainian activists to publish their first daily newspaper, Rada (Coun­cil), and to start popular education societies in the countryside - concessions that the government would take back by the beginning of the war. Except for a brief period after 1905, political parties could only operate underground, and only socialist Ukrainian parties could muster any significant support.

Western Ukraine, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had a very different historical experience. Numbering 3.5 million in 1910, Ukraini­ans in East Galicia (with its centre in Lemberg (L'viv)) suffered from Polish dominion in the crown land of Galicia but benefited from education in their native tongue, freedom of cultural development and - however limited - the experience of political participation. Downsides included the lack of indus­trial development in the region and Polish and Jewish control of the cities. The national movement began in the mid-nineteenth century and, in time, greatly benefited from Ukrainian identification with the Greek Catholic (Uni- ate) Church that clearly set Ukrainians apart from the Poles. By the turn of the century, a massive network of Ukrainian printed media, co-operatives, reading rooms and cultural societies produced a generation of nationally conscious peasants.¹¹ Intellectuals, meanwhile, finally established that their people were

11 John-Paul Himka, Galician Villagers and the Ukrainian National Movement in the Nineteenth Century (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1988).

not just 'Ruthenians', but a part of a larger Ukrainian nation. With political parties legally operating, the moderately nationalistic National Democrats dominated Western Ukrainian politics.

In the province of Bukovina, where the ruling class was Romanian, rather than Polish, and most Ukrainians belonged to the Orthodox Church, the growth of the national movement largely followed the Galician model. This was not the case in Transcarpathia, which belonged to the Hungarian part of the dual monarchy. In Transcarpathia, Hungarian upper classes encouraged assimilation and hindered the spread of the Ukrainian national idea.

The First World War initially had the greatest impact on Western Ukraine. As the Russian army occupied Galicia and Bukovina early during the war, it sought to 'reunite' these lands with Russia. In the spring of 1915, Nicholas II paid a triumphant visit to Lemberg, where his civil administration was actively sup­pressing organised Ukrainian life. Austria-Hungary, in the meantime, autho­rised the creation of a Ukrainian legion within its army. When the tsarist regime collapsed, Ukrainian activists in Kiev promptly created the Central Rada (council), which was headed by the respected historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky. In December, the nationalists proved unable to organise effective resistance to the Bolshevik army, which had invaded from Soviet Russia. Just before aban­doning Kiev, on 22 January 1918, the Central Rada proclaimed the independent Ukrainian People's Republic. However, soon it was back in the capital on the heels of the German advance. Because the German high command disliked the socialist views of the Rada's leaders, such as Volodymyr Vynnychenko, it installed the conservative General Pavlo Skoropadsky as Ukraine's monarch or hetman (April-December 1918). Following the German withdrawal, the re­established Ukrainian People's Republic saw its authority collapse in the chaos and violence of the civil war during which the Reds, the Whites, the Ukrainian forces, the anarchists and bands of looters fought each other until, by the end of 1920, the better-organised Reds established their control.

In Western Ukraine, the revolution started later and had a national, rather than social colouring. As the Austro-Hungarian Empire began disintegrat­ing, in November 1918 the Ukrainian activists proclaimed the creation of the Western Ukrainian People's Republic. In January 1919, the republic entered a union with its east Ukrainian counterpart, but the unification was never implemented because Western Ukrainians had to fight their own civil war against the Entente-supported Poles, which they lost in July. Subsequently, the Allies approved Polish control over all Galicia, as well as the inclusion of Bukovina in greater Romania and that of Transcarpathia in the new state of Czechoslovakia.

Bordering Dnieper Ukraine in the south-west was Bessarabia, which we currently know under its historical name of Moldova. (The old Moldavian principality was considerably larger, and the present-day Republic of Moldova is only slightly bigger than Bessarabia proper.) In the early nineteenth cen­tury, the tsars wrested this province from the Ottoman Empire, thus depriving Moldavians of a chance to participate in the later unification of Romanian principalities. Although known as Moldavians, the region's population was ethnically Romanian and spoke dialects of the Romanian language. Econom­ically, Bessarabia was the most backward agricultural region on the empire's western fringes, and literacy among ethnic Moldavians stood at a meagre 6 per cent (1897). When the national awakening began after the Revolution of 1905, it manifested itself primarily in the discovery of the common pan-Romanian cul­tural heritage. Nationalists in Romania proper also sought to establish contacts with Moldavian intellectuals hoping for eventual reunification, but, before the war and revolution, this aim looked more like a pipe dream.

The February Revolution gave Moldavians an unexpected chance to organ­ise. By October i9i7, various civic and military groups managed to convene in Chi§inau a national assembly, which declared Bessarabia autonomous. The elections to a national council, Sfatul Tarii, followed, but before this body could establish its authority, in January 1918 the Romanian army arrived in force - ostensibly by invitation of the Moldavian authorities with the aim of protecting the country from the Bolshevik peril. The Sfatul Tarii proclaimed first the independent Moldavian Democratic Republic of Bessarabia (24 Jan­uary) and then its union with Romania (27 March).[299] However, the USSR never recognised the Romanian annexation of Bessarabia, and Romanians failed to win a complete international recognition of this act.

One productive way to analyse the revolutionary events in the non-Russian borderlands is to look at the complex interaction of 'class' and 'nation' as two principal identity markers, which competed in contemporary political dis­course and influenced the nationalities differently.[300] But given that the west­ern borderlands were positioned strategically between Russia and Western Europe, their internal ideological struggles and nation-building projects were time and again overridden by the intervention of the Great Powers, which reshaped states and nations based on their own global interests.[301]

States and nations in the era of mass politics

Rogers Brubaker has suggested that the new nation-states that after the First World War replaced multinational empires were essentially 'nationalising' states, protecting and promoting the political domination, economic welfare and culture of their 'core' nations.[302] This is, of course, an ideal model, useful in comparative analysis but too generalising to be sustained in most case studies. Nevertheless, the notion of a 'nationalising state' captures a significant feature ofthe post-warperiod, when states, armed with the techniques of mass politics, interfered aggressively in the nation-building processes.

At the final stages of their wars of independence, the republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania benefited from the Entente's intention to create a cordon sanitaire around Soviet Russia. But independence brought the need for eco­nomic reorientation towards the West, for the region's economy previously had depended on the Russian market. As hopes of remaining a mediator in Russia's trade with Western Europe did not materialise, all three countries moved to create export economies specialising in dairy and meat products. This task was made easier by the redistribution of large landed estates with little or no compensation. (Most landlords in any case belonged to another nationality, Baltic German in Estonia and Latvia, and Polish in Lithuania.) The new Baltic governments realised that, in order to prevent social discontent, they needed to turn the landless peasantry into small farmers. Indeed, the independent farming class eventually came to constitute the backbone of the Baltic states' social structures. A modest industrial sector survived in Estonia and Latvia, but failed to develop in Lithuania.

Politically, the 1920s were turbulent. All three states were established as parliamentary republics, but political parties were numerous and fragmented. The left and right wings were strong, while the centre weak. Frequent changes of government indicated the inherent instability of a political system, which contemporaries perceived as being in permanent danger of a coup from either the radical Left orthe radical Right. Liberal democracy, indeed, did not survive long in the Baltics, but the authoritarian regimes that emerged in the region were not established by the extremists -ideological cousins of either Bolsheviks or Nazis - but by the traditional Right. Lithuania was the first to take flight in 1926, when the army overthrew a coalition government of populists, socialists and minorities and installed a prominent conservative nationalist, Antanas Smetona, as an authoritarian president.

In Estonia, a coup followed the Great Depression. As disappointment with parliamentary democracy grew, so did the popularity ofthe fascist-like League of Freedom Fighters, a paramilitary organisation of veterans of the war of inde­pendence. Before the veterans' candidate could win the presidential elections of 1934, however, Prime Minister Konstantin Pats organised a pre-emptive coup on 12 March 1934. He declared a state of emergency, dissolved the parliament and all political parties and ruled by decree until the decade's end. Latvia followed the path to authoritarianism later the same month. Faced with the challenge from the extreme right Thunder Cross movement, Prime Minister Karlis Ulmanis organised a similar coup on 16 March 1934.

Authoritarian regimes in the Baltic region had many features in common. The dictators forbade all political parties (in some cases, except for their own) and censored the press, but did not completely suppress civic rights. Influenced by Italian Fascist corporatism, they actively involved the state in the regulation of the economic and social spheres. In 1938-9, the worsening international sit­uation forced all three leaders to relax their rule somewhat. Although in the 1920s the promotion of the region's national cultures had not infringed the rights of minorities, this changed with the transition to authoritarianism. The regimes of Pats, Ulmanis and Smetona were not racist or xenophobic, but their aggressive support of national languages undermined the system of Polish and German schooling and the cultural autonomy of minorities in the Baltic countries.[303]

In foreign policy, all three states pursued a policy of neutrality. Lithuania was in a more difficult situation as it had long-running territorial conflicts with Poland because of the Polish incorporation of Vilnius in 1920 and with Germany because of the Lithuanian annexation of Memel (Klaipeda) in 1923. (Memel, with a predominantly German population, was then under the con­trol of the League of Nations.) In 1938, Poland forced Lithuania to recognise Vilnius asbelongingto Poland, while in March 1939 Germany wrested Klaipeda back by force. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Baltic states concluded non-aggression or neutrality agreements with the Soviet Union, followed in 1939 by similar pacts with Nazi Germany. These documents, however, offered little protection when the Great Powers again took it upon themselves to rearrange the map of Europe.

Western Belorussia and the largest part of Western Ukraine found them­selves within the new Polish state. In Belorussian lands, where a modern national consciousness was slow in developing, the population's grievances found their expression in the popularity of socialism. Following a brief inter­lude in the early 1920s, when minority rights had been well protected, Poland, which became an authoritarian dictatorship after 1926, adopted a policy of assimilating Belorussians by closing their schools and encouraging the spread of Roman Catholicism. In addition, Poland handled the redistribution of large landed estates in such a way that the primary beneficiaries were not the local Belorussian peasants, but Polish colonists. The Polish government repeatedly manipulated census results to play down the domination of Polish colonists in the area that was ethnically Belorussian. As a result of such policies and contin­ued land hunger, the Communist Party of western Belorussia and its legal arm, the Belorussian Peasant and Workers' Union, grew in popularity until they were suppressed in i927.The 1930s saw further government repressions against Belorussian cultural institutions and the forcible closure of Orthodox churches.

In Galicia, the Polish government attempted similar policies against the local Ukrainian population, but the response was different, namely, the birth of Ukrainian radical nationalism. With civic discipline and a highly developed national consciousness, Ukrainians were frustrated by the defeat of the West­ern Ukrainian People's Republic and the ensuing Polish domination. Assimila- tory pressures only added to their sense of injustice. By the mid-i930s, it became clear that a decade of political participation, including several attempts at com­promise between the leading Ukrainian party, the Ukrainian National Demo­cratic Alliance, and the authorities, had failed to stop the national oppression. A new generation of disaffected young men and women grew disappointed with the fruitless 'collaborationism' of their elders. The moral failure of mod­erate nationalists cleared the way for the radical Right. At a conference in Vienna in 1929, veterans of the Ukrainian-Polish war, students and nationalist intellectuals created the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). The ideology ofthe new group emphasised the nation as an absolute value and the willpower of a strong minority as the way to restore a nation to its greatness. The radical Right soon grew into a mass movement.

Ukrainians in inter-war Romania also experienced a policy of assimila­tion, if only formulated more clearly and enforced more strictly. Although the Ukrainian and Romanian languages had little in common, the ideologues ofthe ruling Romanian National Liberal Party classified the Ukrainian popula­tion in Bukovina as Romanians who had forgotten their ancestral tongue.[304] In contrast, the position of Ukrainians in Transcarpathia improved greatly. The

Czechoslovak Republic, which was the only new state in Eastern Europe that remained a liberal democracy during the entire inter-war period, provided government support for minority education and culture and allowed the use of minority languages in local administration.

When Hitler began his dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in the autumn of 1938, Transcarpathians took advantage of the situation to press for auton­omy (October) and even proclaimed the short-lived independent Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine under President Avhustyn Voloshyn (15 March 1939). Nazi Germany, however, assigned Transcarpathia to its Hungarian ally, and in the spring of 1939, Hungarian troops easily overran the Ukrainian defences in what was one of the precursor conflicts of the Second World War.

Finally, Romania spent much of the inter-war period trying to integrate Bessarabia. This effort involved agrarian reform, the construction of roads and railroads and the promotion of literacy. Naturally, the government sought in the process to promote a sense of Romanian patriotism in a backward bor­derland. Still, the province remained poor. Its only significant export, wine, diminished when the province was separated from the Russian regions. Large minorities such as Russians, Ukrainians and Jews complained about their treat­ment during the Romanian cultural offensive, and even many Moldavians found it difficult to switch from the Cyrillic alphabet to Latin script. (In addi­tion, the modern Romanian language borrowed most new political, technical and scientific terminology from French, while Moldavians were accustomed to using the Russian words.)[305] All in all, not just minorities, but the Moldavians themselves made it difficult for Romania to 'nationalise' the region.

The Soviet Union, meanwhile, offered its own answer to the challenge of modern nationalism. The Bolshevik state attempted to disarm nationalism by promoting the forms of minority nationhood - national territories, languages, cultures and elites.[306] Duringthe 1920s and early 1930s, the policy of korenizatsiia (nativisation) resulted in the creation of national republics or autonomous units, as well as in the state's major investment in the development of non- Russian cultures. The Ukrainian and Belorussian Socialist Soviet (after 1936, Soviet Socialist) Republics were among the beneficiaries of these policies.

Although promulgated in 1923, the policy of Ukrainisation began in earnest in 1925 with the appointment of Lazar Kaganovich as the General Secretary of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) ofUkraine (CP(b)U). Although Kaganovich and his successor Stanislav Kosior were certainly not sympathetic to the

Ukrainian national cause, they felt it necessary to enforce the 'party line'. The practical guidance of Ukrainisation fell to two remarkable people's com­missars of education, Oleksandr Shumsky and Mykola Skrypnyk, both sub­sequently denounced as nationalist deviationists. Still, the results of state-run Ukrainisation were impressive. Between 1924 and 1933, the Ukrainians' share among CP(b)U members increased from 33 to 60 per cent. Literacy increased markedly, and, by i929, an impressive 97 per cent of elementary-school stu­dents were receiving instruction in Ukrainian. In contrast to 1922, when only one Ukrainian newspaper was in existence, in 1931, 89 per cent of the repub­lic's newspapers were published in Ukrainian.[307] A number of political emigres returned, including the leading historian and former head of the Central Rada, Mykhailo Hrushevsky.

Like the rest ofthe USSR, however, in the late i920s Soviet Ukraine began to experience a violent transition to rapid industrialisation and forced collectivi­sation of agriculture. Stalinist social transformations went hand in hand with the denunciation of 'national communists' (i928), the trial of the fictitious Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (1930) and the condemnation of Skrypnyk (who shot himself in 1933). The state's murderous grain collection policies in the republic resulted in the catastrophic famine of i932-3, which took an estimated 4 to 6 million lives. As new archival research demonstrates, Stalin and his associates blamed problems with grain collection on nationalist sab­otage within the CP(b)U.[308] This made them even more determined to starve the Ukrainian peasantry into submission. At the same time, active Ukrainisers were condemned as nationalists and many of their reforms reversed, includ­ing Skrypnyk's standardisation of the Ukrainian language, which was allegedly designed to distance it from Russian. By the late i930s, the authorities returned to the promotion in Ukraine of the Russian language and Russian culture.