Red Nations: The Nationalities Experience in and after the USSR by Jeremy Smith (review)

The legacy of Soviet nationality policies and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 persists to the present. Until recently, the most dramatic instance of that legacy was associated with the intervention of Russian troops in the struggle over South Ossetia’s separation from Georgia. As Jeremy Smith notes in Red Nations, “[a]t the time of writing, the Russian-Georgian war of 2008 was the first and only occasion on which Russian armed forces had engaged in action against one of the other former Soviet states” (P. 320). With the recent (and ongoing) conflict in Ukraine, this statement seems outdated. The book, however, is not, as it provides a useful reading to access the background of current and future events in former Soviet territories.

Smith’s undertaking is ambitious: to give an account of Soviet nationality policies and their effect on the many peoples of the USSR from the union’s founding until its breakup requires a swift hand that captures central directives devised and propagated by the Soviet government, while not losing sight of the vagaries and complexities of these directives’ implementation in the different republics.

Following the introduction, each of the twelve chapters covers roughly a decade; the exceptions are Chapters 2, 3, and 4, which focus on the early Soviet period and the intense debates during the Revolution, civil war, and the 1920s. The 1940s are discussed in a similarly detailed way; the Great Patriotic War and the deportations of specific national groups are analyzed in separate chapters.

Smith develops a comprehensive overview of Soviet nationality policies, tracing them from their ideological foundations developed before and during the Revolution, through the revival and then destruction of national cultures in the 1920s and 1930s, the effect of Nazi violence and Stalinist deportation and annexation, and uncertain prospects for national specificity in the 1960s and 1970s, to increasing disillusion among non-Russian ethnicities with the internationalist project. He ends with a cursory discussion of recent and ongoing trends in the former constituent republics of the USSR that highlights the resonance of Soviet policies in the post-Soviet states.

Red Nations clearly shows that the question of how to balance the promotion of national cultures with the creation of multinational statehood was never fully resolved. The casualties and injuries brought about by collectivization combined with antireligious campaigns, forced settlement programs targeting Kazakh nomads, purges among non-Russian functionaries, and deportations of selected nationalities are the clearest but not the only indicators of this failure. Public suicides and state-sanctioned killings of national activists in the late 1960s and 1970s, and finally the breakup of the union in 1991 evidence that the vision of an internationalist state remained unfulfilled. Overall, the book offers a good survey for newcomers to the field and the interested public. Scholars of the Soviet Union, however, will find few new insights, as the book is based on secondary literature rather than original research.

Interestingly, the author has consciously “passed over the numerous works produced by scholars from Russia or from the nationalities which are treated in this book” because of the “high level of politicization of history in the states that emerged from the rubble of the Soviet Union, including Russia” (P. xii). While in many instances this may be an accurate diagnosis, the author implicitly absolves scholars from outside the former Soviet Union (whom he favors to develop his narrative) from political bias and ascribes to them a level of objectivity that scholars from the region are, supposedly, unable to attain. Smith admits that his choice may be controversial, but it nonetheless left this reader with some unease. Recent analyses of Soviet nationalities policies and their aftermath, many of which have been published in the pages of this journal, as well as documentary histories and collections of personal accounts may have contributed more detailed insight into local dynamics resulting from...