The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

alexander nikolaevich had never thought of the USSR as an empire. No one did, not even the Soviet Union's foes—even when Ronald Reagan called the country "the evil empire," his emphasis fell solely on "evil," by which he meant godless.¹⁰ Czarist Russia had been an empire, and during the civil war of 1918-1922, the Red Army took on a number of different national-liberation armies that were fighting the center more than they were fighting Bolshevism. Large chunks of the empire broke off and established independent nation-states: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine. Of these, only five countries around the Baltic Sea—Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland—got to keep their independence while Moscow reconquered the rest. Over the next several years, the Soviet government developed an entirely novel method of managing potentially troublesome regions. Historian Terry Martin has called the resulting system an "affirmative action empire."

At the basis of the affirmative action empire lay the belief that nationalism was a "masking ideology"—the need for national identity would fall away as class consciousness took hold and a stronger, socialist identity developed. National interests would naturally be superseded by class interests. Until that happened, however, national identities and national interests had to be acknowledged—but only insofar as they did not threaten the unity of the Soviet state. The Bolsheviks created a maze of national republics—starting with four (Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Transcaucasian Republic) and then subdividing them and conquering new territories for a total of eleven. Education and cultural production in the national language were encouraged in the republics. The largest, Russia, was an exception: both the expression and cultivation of a Russian national identity were strongly discouraged. Other ethnic groups living on the territory of the Russian republic were, however, pressed to assert themselves. Indeed, tiny ethnic groups were "discovered" and the number of ethnicities in Soviet Russia kept growing—for a time. In the 1930s the policy was rolled back, whether because of Russians' resentment, Stalin's paranoia (he feared subjects who might have connections to members of their ethnic groups living elsewhere in the world), or because the contradictions between the policy and its theoretical underpinnings had become too glaring—or for all these reasons. The practice of fostering national education and culture was scaled down. The Russian ethnicity was officially redeemed, and indeed the leading role of the Russian people began to be emphasized in most propaganda. The official expression of this new approach was "friendship of the peoples." The affirmative action empire was over. All peoples were equal, but the Russian nation was "first among equals." The phrase first appeared in a Pravda front-page editorial:

All the peoples [of the USSR], participants in the great socialist construction project, can take pride in the results of their work. All of them from the smallest to the largest are equal Soviet patriots. But the first among equals is the Russian people, the Russian workers, the Russian toilers, whose role in the entire Great Proletarian Revolution, from the first victory to today's brilliant

period of its development, has been exclusively great.¹¹

This was 1936—about a decade before Orwell's Animal Farm, with its principle that "some animals are more equal than others."

A campaign of concerted promotion of the Russian language, culture, art, and people began. The language was anointed the greatest of all the languages of the USSR. A 1937 editorial proclaimed: "In the center of the mighty family of peoples of the USSR stands the great Russian people, passionately loved by all the peoples of the USSR, the first among equals."¹² The constitution adopted in 1936 stated that the USSR was a "state union formed on the basis of the voluntary unification of equal Soviet Socialist Republics," each of which had the right to secede.¹³