Nationalism in the USSR: Historical and Comparative Perspective
A report by Andrey Shcherback at the regular LSCR seminar
On September, 19, 2013, Andrey Shcherbak (Senior Research Fellow at the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research) delivered a report “Nationalism in the USSR: Historical and Comparative Perspective ” at the LCSR regular weekly seminar.
The late 1980s and early 1990s were characterized by a sudden rise of nationalist movements in almost all Soviet ethnic regions. The research is focused on exploring the reasons for nationalist rise inSoviet ethnic republics and its contribution to the fall of the communist bloc.
The researcher distinguishes two types of nationalism – cultural and political. Cultural nationalism is defined as support of the titular official language, the expansion of its teaching in schools, introduction of incentives for representatives of non-titular nation to learn the titular language. Political nationalism is a demand for declaration of national sovereignty and recognition of the right to national self-determination (up to secession).
Andrey tries to find a causal link between these two types of nationalism using a unique methodology, ‘ quantification of history’, following D. Treisman and E. Giuliano’s approach . He assigns quantitative values to some historical events and trends, constructs indices of political and cultural nationalism for 49 USSR regions (Union Republics, Autonomous Republics, Autonomous Oblast’, National Autonomous Districts) using this data and analyzes it using statistical method of structural equation modeling. Additional variables in the model are religion (orthodox/other religions) and formal status of the region in the Soviet administrative hierarchy for different historic periods.
This interdisciplinary approach makes a prominent contribution for studying nationalism in post-communist countries.
Analysis shows that cultural nationalism was an important predictor for political nationalism in USSR in 1917-2000; this result challenges the concept of cultural autonomy as a solution for multiethnic states. The researcher explains it by the fact that development of local culture in Soviet period led to emergence of local national intellectuals who later became the driving force of ethnic movements during the Perestroika. The main conclusion is that the rise of political nationalism in the late 1980-s was not related solely to the crisis and the collapse of the communist state, but it can be predicted by latent cultural nationalism that was an unintended by-product of communist cultural policy.
by Ekaterina Turanova