Affirmative Writing: Empire (On new Standards in Russian Imperial Studies)

529 Ab Imperio, 3/2005 Ilya GERASIMOV Affirmative Writing: Empire (On New Standards in Russian Imperial Studies) Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 19231939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). xvii + 496 pp. Bibliography , Index. ISBN: 0-8014-8677-7 (paper). Terry Martin’s The Affirmative Action Empire was published just four years ago, but has already become a recognized study of the early history and nationalities policies of the USSR. Indeed, it is required reading for anyone who maintains a professional interest in Russian and Soviet history. While Martin may not have aspired to offer a new standard for American historical writing on the USSR, the very demand by the readership immediately made the book into a classic. Both graduate students and senior scholars interested in the first two decades of Soviet history were desperately looking for up-to-date, comprehensive research on Bolshevik nationalities policies as a systematic all-Union phenomenon . Moreover, professors wanted to be able to assign to their students a single book that could cover a good deal of post-1917 Russian history and offer an integrated narrative of different regions and events. Martin ’s well-researched and skillfully structured book has successfully met these diverse and demanding expectations. It is certainly a mark of prestige to write a book that becomes a standard text in the field, but there is also a price to be paid. The academic community will always need a canon of standard texts. Scholars writing on related themes like to support their secondary arguments with a single reference to a classic study; students need a clear system of authoritative names and 530 Рецензии/Reviews concepts in order to gain a faster grasp of the basics in a discipline; teachers need reliable literature for their syllabi. However, inertia often artificially keeps a standard text from receiving a full-scale engagement and from enduring the process of historiographic critique and revision. As a result, and possibly contrary to the author’s intent, Martin’s book remains under-analyzed and underdiscussed . To do justice to Martin’s very good book, let us forget about its quite deserved status and look closer at the historiographic canon it has come to embody. Specifically, we should look into the way Martin approaches early Soviet history as imperial history. First of all, the very easiness with which Martin gets around the problem of qualifying the USSR as an empire is remarkable, and it allows him to avoid engaging with the legacy of the term’s negative connotations . Martin addresses the issue of Cold War political rhetoric (P. 19), but ignores the more complex problem of the negative connotations of “empire” in modern political and philosophical discourse. His readers seem to be equally eager to embrace a positive or at least neutral perception of empire;1 this can be attributed to the author’s success in coining a vivid image with the catchy formula of the “affirmative action empire.” Martin wrote the book during the Clinton era, and its American readers are only too well aware of the controversies, problems, and achievements of affirmative action policies in the US academy and beyond. More likely than not, US readers were inclined to regard even an empire as progressive if it was engaged in a systematic policy of affirmative action, while all the problems and peregiby associated with the implementation of the policy were perceived with some understanding. The modern concept of affirmative action was applied to the Soviet case as a metaphor and structured the historical narrative of the book, not the other way around. Therefore, we should look closer at the logic Martin uses to legitimatize its application. The idea of the early Soviet Union being an “affirmative action empire” is introduced in the beginning of the book. Martin repeatedly formulates his thesis with some variations but, essentially, he is speaking about a system of preferential treatment for underdeveloped or historically discriminated national causes, at the expense of Russian national agendas. “In the Soviet case, where all non-Russians were to be favored, Russians alone bore the 1 See the comprehensive list of book reviews on the publisher’s promotional page at http...