Nation-Building in the Former USSR

In formal terms, 15 new states appeared on the Eurasian landmass with the demise of the Soviet Union. Yet “states” in the true sense do not spring full-grown from declarations of independence or extensions of international recognition. A truly sovereign state must control its own frontiers, monopolize the legitimate use of force within those frontiers, suppress all or most “private” wielders of force (such as warlords or criminal gangs), collect tolls and taxes, and the like. An administrative apparatus equal to these tasks is needed, as is a broad social consensus on the rules and routines to be used.

In the fall of 1991, as the USSR crumbled in the wake of the failed August coup, none of its prospective successor states met these preconditions. They had troops and military installations not under their command on their territories. The levers of economic policy, too, were beyond their control. Their borders with each other were undefended, unpatrolled, and in many cases not even adequately marked.

For these reasons, it makes more sense to see 31 December 1991, the day the Soviet Union officially expired, as merely the beginning of a process that will take decades. In addition to the economic and institutional problems that present themselves, there are cultural and political issues that must be resolved. The population of a modern state must share some common identity and sense of destiny. The citizens must be bound together by loyalty toward the same institutions, symbols, and values. This does not mean that all inhabitants of the state must belong to the same ethnic group. National identity may, and in many cases must, be political rather than ethnolinguistic.

The USSR prided itself on being a multinational state, with hundreds of ethnic groups living inside its far-flung borders. By contrast, all the successor states save one have proclaimed themselves “national states” or “nation-states.” ¹ In the West, the “nation-state” is generally thought of as a political and civic entity where a common territory, a common government, and to some extent a common political history—but not blood lineage—give substance to the communal bond. Rivaling this “civic” concept of the nation, however, is the organic idea of the nation as something formed by a common language, traditions, mores, religion, and so on; in short, an ethnos.

Ethnic nationalism has put down deep roots in Russia, for several reasons. In Western Europe, the key force behind the consolidation of the nation-state was the bourgeoisie, which tends to be “civic” rather than “ethnic” in outlook. In Russia, by contrast, the commercial and professional middle classes were numerically small and politically weak, and the dynastic, imperial state remained dominant. Under such conditions, the various language groups subject to the czar developed strong ethnonational identities. ²

The Soviet era continued and reinforced this tendency. When the victorious Bolsheviks and their Red Army reconstituted the empire as a union of socialist republics in the early 1920s, part of their plan was to mollify all major ethnic groups by giving them some of the trappings of statehood. These groups became the titular nationalities of the various Union republics: the Ukrainians in Ukraine, the Turkmen tribes in the Turkmen SSR, and so on. Each titular nationality, moreover, received certain cultural rights within its “own” territory, particularly as regards educational opportunities and language policy. ³ At the same time, Soviet authorities did nothing to make any Union republic ethnically homogeneous. On the contrary, in some cases officials encouraged interrepublican migration. Coupled with the geographical intermingling of ethnic groups that had been present for centuries, this made for a complicated ethnic map.

Hence the dual legacy with which the fledgling states of Eurasia must grapple: the intellectual predominance of exclusionary nationalism coexists uneasily with the concrete reality of disparate ethnic groups living cheek-by-jowl within the same republics. With the exception of Armenia, nontitular groups make up considerable minorities in the Soviet-successor states, in some cases comprising close to half the total population (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Ethnicity in the Soviet-Successor States, 1989 (in percentage of the total population)

State	Titular...