Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (review)

Francine Hirsch has gone a long way toward reconciling notions of colonialism, resistance and cooptation with studies of Soviet nationalities policy in her fine new book Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. At its base Hirsch’s book is an investigation of the workings of what she terms “state sponsored evolutionism”—in which Soviet nationality policy was geared to quickly guide each nation through the historical stages outlined by Marx (feudalism through, capitalist nationalism, to socialist nationhood to a communism where national status eventually disappears). Arguing against Terry Martin’s understanding of the Soviet Union as an Affirmative Action Empire, in which Soviet leaders sough to promote certain ethnic groups to make up for historical disadvantages and Russian chauvinism, and against Yuri Slezkine’s argument of the Soviet Union as a “communal apartment” created by “philo-nationalists” in which nations were created for their own sake, Hirsch argues for nationalism in the Soviet context as a process of “double assimilation” in which subjects through participation in and association with their newly established nations would simultaneously participate in and associate with the newly created Soviet State. As such, Hirsch understands the process of national formation in the Soviet context in dialogue with colonial subject-creating discourses from within the European imperial powers.

Her first section, “Empire, Nation and the Scientific State,” makes these similarities clear, outlining the manner in which ethnography and ethnographers were instrumental in creating methods of control for newly created Soviet peoples. Importantly, she connects this not only to colonial ideologies of the time in the traditional imperial states, but also to Russian antecedents which she aptly points out were well informed by the goings on of the colonial powers in Africa and Asia. Soviet policy was always careful to differentiate its own work of kolonizatsiia or pereselenie (settlement), which entailed the economic and cultural progress directed from the center along the Marxist development timeline, from colonial projects outside of Europe (kolinizatorstvo) – projects defined as colonial exploitation and understood as the colonial project of capitalism and imperialism. The modes and methods for categorizing, organizing and controlling the population of the regions in both instances were, however, remarkably similar. Thus Hirsch aptly brings theorists of post-colonialism and modernity to bear on her investigation of Soviet nationality policy. Bernard Cohn’s modalities of colonial control and Benedict Anderson’s understanding of map, museum and census as a nexus of colonial discourse are starting points for Hirsch’s investigation. As such she is picking up a promising trend in recent studies of the Russian empire, which has been more inclined to embrace the theoretical work of colonial scholars than Soviet scholars who are more likely to resist these tools and stress the particularities of the Soviet case.

Ethnographers from the Russian imperial project and the leaders of the newly formed Soviet State found themselves in a mutually beneficial arrangement as they each sought to forward their agendas—ethnographers, to continue working in a strengthened and increasingly important discipline; state leaders to map and measure their new territory and peoples. From the beginning arguments over how to best organize the Soviet Union employed ethnographers to set the parameters. While Soviet policy was uniform in asserting the primary goal of nationality policy was to “speed up evolutionary time,” arguments within the organizational bureaucracy persisted on the most effective manner focused on whether or not backward nations required their own national institutions in order to progress towards refined socialist subjects, or if economic motivations should take precedence in organizing the Soviet state (in the hopes that economic advancement could mitigate the need to move through the national stage on the path to Communism).

Hirsch’s second section, “Cultural Technologies and the Nature of Soviet Rule,” outlines the negotiations between ethnographers, Soviet bureaucratic institutions and local elites in designing the national organization of the Soviet Union. Here Hirsch unveils the transformative project of Soviet nationality as a process written in concert...