THE NATIONAL QUESTION AND THE ‘FRIENDSHIP OF THE PEOPLES’

This was the beginning of Soviet nationality policy. The regime decided to pursue what it called a policy of autonomy and self-determination for the nationalities. It implemented a strategy known in Russian as korenizatsiya (meaning ‘nativization' in English), under which national republics were created for many of the peoples of the Soviet Union, and within these republics, national elites were fostered and national languages and cultures promoted. The idea was to give people some rights to their own national cultures and a measure of autonomy, and that if the Soviet Union did this, they would support the Soviet state and the idea of communism.

Indeed, if the state were to grant people national rights and practice a form of affirmative action based on nationality, it needed to formally know what nationality its people were. So, at first, nationality was recorded in the censuses. After internal passports were brought back in 1932, it was listed in the passports themselves. It is interesting to note that for the first fifteen years of the Soviet Union, there were no internal passports; when they were reintroduced in 1932, they included a 'nationality' line, making official identity a matter of permanent, recorded classification.

The effects of this policy changed over time. At first, the emphasis fell on local languages: all children were to attend school, with instruction provided in their native tongue. Kazakh children were taught in Kazakh, and Russian children in Russian. In regions where smaller minorities lived in a republic—Germans, Koreans, Tatars and others—they were expected to study in their own language. In the early years, this policy helped develop national languages, schooling, and cultural infrastructure.

Later, however, the balance shifted. Across the Soviet Union, Russian began to gain greater prominence in education. This began first under Stalin in the 1930s and then again under Brezhnev in the 1960s. And the influence of the language grew steadily. Despite this, non-Russian languages retained a degree of standing: newspapers were published in them, and books continued to be published in Kazakh and other local languages.

It is, however, indisputable that nationality shaped everyday life in a myriad of ways. In the worst cases, it became a vector of repression: entire groups were deported solely on the basis of ethnicity. A single line in the passport could trigger removal and punishment on the strength of that recorded identity.

Another telling example is the experience of people from mixed families. Under Soviet rules, a passport could list only one nationality. If the father was Kazakh and the mother Russian (or vice versa), the individual had to choose. For many, this became a personal dilemma: how were they not to slight either parent, remaining in constant conflict about which identity to formalize on paper. In this way, the one-nationality rule intervened directly in private life.

Internationalism was one of the fundamental contradictions of the Soviet Union as both a state and as a project. It was never fully resolved and is partly to blame for the ultimate fall of the USSR. Over time, ethnicity was increasingly strengthened, reified, and institutionalized, and this was an official policy. At the outset, when passports were introduced, a person could choose how to be recorded: a Russian, for example, might say ‘I feel more like a Tatar’ and be registered as such.

Later, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (abbreviated as NKVD) required nationality to be determined strictly by descent, by one’s parents, and prohibited any change thereafter. A category that was meant to be supra-national in ideological terms thus became bureaucratically fixed. It was precisely this mismatch, in part, that undermined the system. All the while, however, the official rhetoric continued to extol ‘internationalism’ and the ‘friendship of peoples’. In theory, the dialectic was to culminate in the nationalities dissolving into a single ‘Soviet people’, but in practice, no one had explained when or how this would take place, and so it never came to pass.

At the core of the issue were two competing imperatives. The first was to promote the national: republics, elites, languages. The second was to cultivate internationalism and a shared Soviet identity. These tracks ran in parallel and produced a persistent contradiction. Why the system sustained both logics at once remains a question for future research.

The question of whether our looks affect our opportunities in life is really a question of how phenotype and ancestry influence how we are perceived and treated—in other words, of race. The term ‘race’ itself was not used in the Soviet Union—the official line held that there was no race and no racism in the USSR—and it was used only in reference to the United States. As a result, any talk of race in Soviet society and history was largely impossible. Nevertheless, recent scholarship shows that phenotype and ancestry did influence careers and access to opportunity. This effect deepened as ethnicity came to be framed in increasingly biological terms, even though, in the early Soviet decades, Lenin and Stalin insisted that the nation was a historical and cultural construct, not a biological one.

For many decades, Soviet scholarship forbade the argument that anything in human society had a biological basis. However, this changed after the Second World War, and especially in the 1960s, when the concept of the ‘ethnos’ gained currency among Soviet ethnographers. Ethnicity came to be described almost as an organism: rooted in one place for centuries, eternal and unchanging. It encouraged a view of ethnic identity as eternal and unchanging at the level of the individual. For example, if you have a certain ethnic background, you are expected to look a certain way, to bear a name that matches the way you look, to have a certain culture, to be good at singing ‘your’ songs and speaking ‘your’ language simply because of that background. Of course, that is not how humans work. It is important to acknowledge that racial thinking was widespread. And the Soviet Union was not immune to racism.

We have previously published pieces on key aspects of Soviet national policy, including nativization, repression, and the emergence of the concept of ‘Soviet people’. You can read them here.