The nationalities question in the former Soviet Union (FSU) bedeviled Soviet policymakers and continues to trouble post-Soviet authorities and scholars alike, even after the dissolution of the Soviet state. Russia, Ukraine, and other former Soviet republics remain multinational states, subject to interethnic tensions and secessionist tendencies. The recent situation in Chechnya shows that the FSU is still subject to fragmentation along national lines and underscores the urgent need to understand these incendiary issues.
Roman Szporluk, a well-known authority on Eastern Europe, Russia, and Ukraine, has grappled for years with the questions of Sovietiza-tion. Russification, and the rise of nationalism in the Soviet Union and the adjacent world. This volume, a seleaion of Professor Szporluk*s essays published between 1972 and 1997, tells a story crucial to understanding the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the emergence of its fifteen successor states. Szporluk examines the historical relationship of Ukraine and Russia and the parallel processes of nation building before and during the Soviet period. These nascent nationalisms not only affected Ukrainian-Russian relations but ultimately played a pivotal role in the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
On which to judge the merits of their own system. In short order, the Baltics were acknowledged as Russia’s “own abroad,” and Balts evinced the greatest resistance to Sovictization and concomitant Russification. The Baltic republics strategically refrained from questioning the superiority of Soviet communism to capitalism and instead championed the preservation of their national distinctiveness. However, the implicit assertion that the road to modernity may be attained through nation building, rather than Soviet internationalism, paved the way for the emergence of explicit nationalisms and nationalist critiques of the Soviet system in Russia as well as in the other union republics.
Ultimately, peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union would not have occurred if Russia had not embraced its own brand of nationalism. Suppressed in deference to Soviet and internationalist ideology, nationalist sentiments began to manifest themselves in anti-Soviet and anticommunist critiques by dissident intellectuals, as well as in the literary works known as “Village Prose” during the 1970s. Russian nationalism was already full blown when Boris Yeltsin played the national card in 1991. The great irony, as Szporluk and others have noted, is that Russification pursued with such vigor from the 1960s to the 1980s alienated non-Russians from the Soviet project without securing Russian devotion to the Soviet system or preempting the emergence of Russian nationalism.
In his early essays, Szporluk examines the tensions of Russification and Soviet internationalism with reference to Ukraine. Szporluk illuminates the way in which the Ukrainian question posed a unique challenge to Russians’ self-definition. Before 1917, the Russians perceived the Ukrainians in terms of familial metaphors—as “little brothers,” distina but akin and, most important, subordinate. When the Bolsheviks assumed power, they sought to win Ukrainian allegiance by endowing the Ukrainian SSR with the trappings of administrative and ethnic sovereignty. Stalinist Russification policies and political purges, however, exposed these trappings as so much window dressing. After the postwar unification of West and East Ukraine, regional diversity added a further twist to the Ukrainian question. How would West Ukraine’s different historical experience affect intra-Ukrainian intergration and, ultimately, Ukrainian-Russian relations? In the wake of the Soviet Union’s precipi-utc collapse, would Ukraine split into West and East, as many augured? Would the Ukrainian language, long displaced by Russian, serve as the lingua franca and basis of national unity? Would the old Soviet elite foster or impede the transition to Ukrainian national statehood?
Finally, would national statehood become the basis of a reformed polity or a reactionary stronghold?
Roman Szporluk approaches the intriguing questions he poses in various ways. In order to assess the viability of the Russification of the vast and multiethnic Soviet state, he compares census data from 1959 and 1970. Would urban centers in the union republics have the critical mass of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers necessary to clinch Russification? Would Donetsk—the exemplar of Sovietization in the heart of Ukraine—become the primary urban center, the “future,’* as it were, of Ukraine? Szporluk also reviews the expressed attitudes of non-Russian speakers toward Russian-language usage. What positive effects ought exposure to and use of the Russian language have, according to the members of other Soviet ethnicities? Szporluk then considers the official stance: Did Soviet leaders act as if they believed that social and economic modernization would encourage assimilation? What administrative measures did the party adopt in order to effect linguistic assimilation?
This volume is the fruit of Szporluk’s many years of assiduous research and expertise. He was particularly qualified to undertake this study. His intellectually formative years were spent in Poland, where he did his secondary and college education and began his graduate studies. He completed his graduate work at Oxford and Stanford. This accounts for the objectivity and insight with which he approaches the mixed Polish, Ukrainian, and Western political and intellectual milieu.
Between east and west, Ukraine has been frequently overlooked in studies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. I concur with the author’s contention that no national history should be studied in isolation from the larger historical context: Ukraine must be thoroughly integrated into the history of the Soviet Union and that of non-Soviet Eastern Europe, just as the history of the Soviet Union cannot be understood independently of Eastern—or Western—Europe. Professor Szporluk has substantially enriched Ukrainian and post-Soviet studies with his depth of analysis and historical and geographical breadth. Needless to say, the prescience of his conclusions is all the more striking in retrospect.
Wayne S. Vucinich Mcdormel Professor Errteritus History Department Stanford University
World History
