The Soviet Nationality Reader

The Soviet Nationality Reader PDF Author: Rachel Denber
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429975465
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 896

Book Description
Setting the context for the crisis that has fragmented the former USSR, this reader presents key essays by notable Western scholars who have shaped the debates within the field of Soviet nationality studies. Focusing first on the historical development of the Soviet multiethnic state, the discussions then turn to specific problem areas, including federalism, elites, economy, language policy, and nationalism. An introductory essay by the editor discusses how the works in teh book contribute to our understanding of the current disintegration and analyzes opposing perspectives in the debates. Intended for use as a textbook in undergraduate or graduate courses on Soviet nationality problems or Soviet and post-Soviet domestic politics, this anthology will be valuable for students and professors alike.

The Soviet Nationality Reader

The Soviet Nationality Reader PDF Author: Rachel Denber
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813310268
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 635

Book Description
This reader presents key essays by notable Western scholars who have shaped the debates within the field of Soviet nationality studies.

The Affirmative Action Empire

The Affirmative Action Empire PDF Author: Terry Dean Martin
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801486777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 532

Book Description
This text provides a survey of the Soviet management of the nationalities question. It traces the conflicts and tensions created by the geographic definition of national territories, the establishment of several official national languages and the world's first mass "affirmative action" programmes.

Russian Citizenship

Russian Citizenship PDF Author: Eric Lohr
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674067800
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
In the first book to trace the Russian state’s citizenship policy throughout its history, Lohr argues that to understand the citizenship dilemmas Russia faces today, we must return to the less xenophobic and isolationist pre-Stalin period—before the drive toward autarky after 1914 eventually sealed the state off from Europe.

Thinking Theoretically about Soviet Nationalities

Thinking Theoretically about Soviet Nationalities PDF Author: Alexander J. Motyl
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231075138
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Book Description
In the wake of the Soviet Union's disintegration, the nationality question has assumed centre stage. This text aims to offer an insight into the conflict which rages widely across the fledgling post-Soviet nations.

Nested Nationalism

Nested Nationalism PDF Author: Krista A. Goff
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501753282
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Book Description
Nested Nationalism is a study of the politics and practices of managing national minority identifications, rights, and communities in the Soviet Union and the personal and political consequences of such efforts. Titular nationalities that had republics named after them in the USSR were comparatively privileged within the boundaries of "their" republics, but they still often chafed both at Moscow's influence over republican affairs and at broader Russian hegemony across the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, members of nontitular communities frequently complained that nationalist republican leaders sought to build titular nations on the back of minority assimilation and erasure. Drawing on extensive archival and oral history research conducted in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Georgia, and Moscow, Krista A. Goff argues that Soviet nationality policies produced recursive, nested relationships between majority and minority nationalisms and national identifications in the USSR. Goff pays particular attention to how these asymmetries of power played out in minority communities, following them from Azerbaijan to Georgia, Dagestan, and Iran in pursuit of the national ideas, identifications, and histories that were layered across internal and international borders. What mechanisms supported cultural development and minority identifications in communities subjected to assimilationist politics? How did separatist movements coalesce among nontitular minority activists? And how does this historicization help us to understand the tenuous space occupied by minorities in nationalizing states across contemporary Eurasia? Ranging from the early days of Soviet power to post-Soviet ethnic conflicts, Nested Nationalism explains how Soviet-era experiences and policies continue to shape interethnic relationships and expectations today.

New Soviet Gypsies

New Soviet Gypsies PDF Author: Brigid O'Keeffe
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442665874
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 524

Book Description
As perceived icons of indifferent marginality, disorder, indolence, and parasitism, “Gypsies” threatened the Bolsheviks’ ideal of New Soviet Men and Women. The early Soviet state feared that its Romani population suffered from an extraordinary and potentially insurmountable cultural “backwardness,” and sought to sovietize Roma through a range of nation-building projects. Yet as Brigid O’Keeffe shows in this book, Roma actively engaged with Bolshevik nationality policies, thereby assimilating Soviet culture, social customs, and economic relations. Roma proved the primary agents in the refashioning of so-called “backwards Gypsies” into conscious Soviet citizens. New Soviet Gypsies provides a unique history of Roma, an overwhelmingly understudied and misunderstood diasporic people, by focusing on their social and political lives in the early Soviet Union. O’Keeffe illustrates how Roma mobilized and performed “Gypsiness” as a means of advancing themselves socially, culturally, and economically as Soviet citizens. Exploring the intersection between nationality, performance, and self-fashioning, O’Keeffe shows that Roma not only defy easy typecasting, but also deserve study as agents of history.

Soviet Nationalities Problems

Soviet Nationalities Problems PDF Author: Ian Bremmer
Publisher: Stanford University, Center for Russian & East European Studies
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Book Description


The Nationalities Factor In Soviet Politics And Society

The Nationalities Factor In Soviet Politics And Society PDF Author: Lubomyr Hajda
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000303764
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Book Description
The editors express their gratitude to the John M. Olin Foundation for its financial assistance and to the Harvard University Russian Research Center for the facilities and staff support that made this project possible. We wish to thank those who contributed their invaluable scholarly advice, including Vernon Aspaturian, Abram Bergson, Steven Blank, Walker Connor, Robert Conquest, Murray Feshbach, Erich Goldhagen, Richard Pipes, and Marc Raeff. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Barbara A. Anderson and Brian D. Silver with Soviet demographic data used throughout the volume. Susan Zayer and Karen Taylor-Brovkin provided able administrative help. For skillful technical assistance with the manuscript we are indebted to Jane Prokop, Elizabeth Taylor, and Alison Koff. Catherine Reed, Susan Gardos-Bleich, Christine Porto, and Alex Sich helped generously in diverse ways. Finally, the editors profited at every stage from the congenial working atmosphere and the encouragement of colleagues at the Russian Research Center too numerous to mention. To all of them goes our deep appreciation.

Empire of Nations

Empire of Nations PDF Author: Francine Hirsch
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801455944
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 389

Book Description
When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they set themselves the task of building socialism in the vast landscape of the former Russian Empire, a territory populated by hundreds of different peoples belonging to a multitude of linguistic, religious, and ethnic groups. Before 1917, the Bolsheviks had called for the national self-determination of all peoples and had condemned all forms of colonization as exploitative. After attaining power, however, they began to express concern that it would not be possible for Soviet Russia to survive without the cotton of Turkestan and the oil of the Caucasus. In an effort to reconcile their anti-imperialist position with their desire to hold on to as much territory as possible, the Bolsheviks integrated the national idea into the administrative-territorial structure of the new Soviet state. In Empire of Nations, Francine Hirsch examines the ways in which former imperial ethnographers and local elites provided the Bolsheviks with ethnographic knowledge that shaped the very formation of the new Soviet Union. The ethnographers—who drew inspiration from the Western European colonial context—produced all-union censuses, assisted government commissions charged with delimiting the USSR's internal borders, led expeditions to study "the human being as a productive force," and created ethnographic exhibits about the "Peoples of the USSR." In the 1930s, they would lead the Soviet campaign against Nazi race theories . Hirsch illuminates the pervasive tension between the colonial-economic and ethnographic definitions of Soviet territory; this tension informed Soviet social, economic, and administrative structures. A major contribution to the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, Empire of Nations also offers new insights into the connection between ethnography and empire.