There was more than just belief in the attainment of communism and ideological fervor in Khrushchev’s embrace of the concept of the Soviet people. Some scholars divide his nationality policies into two periods. The first, which preceded his consolidation of power in Moscow in 1957, was marked by the appeasement of republican elites. During this period, the republican elites received greater administrative and economic freedom than they had possessed under Stalin, with the creation of republican ministries and regional economic councils that reduced central control over economic decision-making. In Ukraine, the second Soviet republic, the share of industrial enterprises under republican control increased from 34 to 97 percent. The republics also were given more freedom to establish their own cultural policies. All of this helped Khrushchev secure the support of republican elites in his struggle for power in Moscow. His former clients in Ukraine and the leaders of other republics saw him as their man at the top of the Soviet hierarchy.
The second, sharply different period came after 1957, with Khrushchev firmly in control in Moscow. It brought purges of republican elites in the republics of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Baltics as well as new initiatives aimed at the cultural Russification of the borderlands. The Ukrainian and Belarusian elites escaped the purge but not the impact of the cultural Russification policies initiated by Moscow. In 1958, the Union parliament passed a law removing the provision according to which children of non-Russian families were to be educated in their native language, and allowing parents to choose the language of instruction. With most universities teaching in Russian, and highly paid jobs and careers open to Russian speakers only, the law made the rapid Russification of the Soviet educational system all but inevitable.
Particularly hard hit by the new regulations were the Slavic republics, where the language barrier between the local languages and Russian was easy to cross. The situation in Belarus was especially precarious. While Ukraine got its first native party boss in 1953, Belarus had to wait until 1956 for its first Belarusian-speaking party leader, Kiryl Mazuraŭ (Kirill Mazurov). But Mazuraŭ’s proficiency in Belarusian gained him no respect in Moscow. In early 1959, when Khrushchev visited Belarus to mark the fortieth anniversary of the proclamation of the Soviet Belarusian republic, Mazuraŭ delivered his address in Belarusian. Khrushchev, who had no problem understanding another East Slavic language after his years in Ukraine, protested. During a visit to the Belarusian State University, he declared: “The sooner we all speak Russian, the more quickly we shall build communism.” Decades later, during the years of Soviet rule, when the university sought a professor capable of teaching Belarusian history in Belarusian, there was no suitable candidate.
No Ukrainian leader was reprimanded for delivering his speeches in Ukrainian—they continued to do so into the 1970s—but the lesson was learned. Whereas in 1958, 60 percent of all books published in Ukraine were in Ukrainian, in 1959 only 53 percent were in that language. The figure continued to decline: by 1960, it was 49 percent, and by 1965 it was 41 percent. The decrease in Ukrainian-language titles meant a concomitant increase in Russian-language ones. In Belarus, the decrease of publications in the native language was even more dramatic. Book titles in Belarusian fell from 85 percent in 1950 to 31 percent in 1965.
The rising number of Russian-language publications reflected the Russification of the educational system. In Ukraine, between 1951 and 1956 the percentage of students in Ukrainian-language schools fell from 81 to 65 percent. During the same period, the share of those studying in Russian increased from 18 to 31 percent. Especially worrisome was the status of Ukrainian-language education in the big cities. In 1959, only 23 percent of students in Kyiv were being taught in Ukrainian, while 73 percent were being taught in Russian. As Russification of the educational system gained speed, more and more students in Russian-language schools refused to take Ukrainian or Belarusian even as a subject. By the end of the 1960s in Minsk, 90 percent of students were taking no Belarusian classes at all.
What differentiated the Ukrainian situation from the Belarusian one was the role played in cultural policy by the former Polish territories annexed to the two republics on the basis of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 and sanctioned by the Western powers at Yalta in 1945. The Ukrainians in Galicia, Volhynia, and, to a lesser degree, in formerly Romanian Bukovyna and Czechoslovakian Transcarpathia had a highly developed national identity that retarded the pace of Russification there and in other parts of the republic. The integration of the Ukrainian west required major cultural concessions long after the war.
In Belarus, urban dwellers in the western part of the country often manifested even less attachment to the Belarusian language, culture, and history than their counterparts in the east. After all, the east had undergone a brief period of cultural Belarusization in the 1920s, while there had been nothing similar in the Polish-ruled west. In 1959, 23 percent of Belarusians in the cities of western Belarus claimed Russian as their native tongue, as opposed to 4 percent of Ukrainian city dwellers residing in western Ukraine. By 1970, the share of Belarusians claiming Russian as their native tongue in the same localities had increased to 26 percent, while the similar category of Ukrainians had decreased to 3 percent—a consequence of migration to the cities by Ukrainian villagers who refused to give up their language.
A major ideological shift occurred in the Soviet Union with the ouster of Nikita Khrushchev in October 1964 by a group of his former protégés led by Leonid Brezhnev. It was a palace coup carried out by conservative elements in the party and state leadership who believed that Khrushchev’s reforms were threatening the stability of the regime. The new rulers put an end to a number of Khrushchev’s initiatives, including his decentralization of power and his ideological obsession with communism. Brezhnev announced that Soviet society had developed socialism and would have to be satisfied with that for a while. No new dates for the arrival of communism were announced. But while the new leadership removed the promise that the “current generation of Soviet people would live under communism” from the party program, it did not discard the program itself or its commitment to the idea of one Soviet nation.
By the early 1970s, Brezhnev had made the concept of the Soviet nation the centerpiece of his nationality policy. Official propaganda launched a campaign promoting the Soviet way of life, while the new edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia included a new definition of the Soviet people. That definition dropped the reference to communism as a common goal helping to create one political nation but left references to Marxist-Leninist ideology and the Russian language intact. It added the category of common citizenship: “The Soviet people have one set of supreme organs of state power and state administration in the USSR, and the same all-Union citizenship has been established for all Soviet people,” stated the Encyclopedia. “The common language of international communication in the USSR is the Russian language.”
Cultural Russification was now official policy. The marginalization of non-Russian languages and their elimination from the educational system began in 1970, when a decree was issued ordering that all graduate theses be written in Russian and approved in Moscow. In 1979, the authorities organized an all-Union conference in Tashkent on ways to improve Russian-language instruction; beginning in 1983, bonuses were paid to teachers of Russian in schools with non-Russian-language instruction. Cultural Russification was being intensified, as the future of the Soviet nation-building project depended on its success.
LEONID BREZHNEV AND HIS IDEALOGUES INHERITED FROM NIKITA Khrushchev and his aides a conflicting legacy in the realm of Soviet nation-building. Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign, which resulted in a political, ideological, and cultural “Thaw,” brought to the fore a generation of activists who believed in the possibility not of building communism, but of reforming socialism in order to make its politics and culture more pluralistic. That entailed the idea of the flourishing of nations and their cultures as opposed to their merging. It was during the Thaw that readers became a
cquainted with the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the future spiritual leader of Russian opposition to the regime.
The preservation of historical monuments, including religious ones, and ecological concerns found their way into the works of Russian authors, who often focused on the plight of the Russian village devastated by collectivization. They became known as representatives of a new genre of writing called “village prose.” Similar concerns were raised by writers in other republics, including Ukraine and Belarus. All of them were driven by loyalty not to the Soviet land or nation but to their republic’s nation and identity. While the party was building one Soviet nation on the basis of the Russian language and culture, the writers organized themselves on the basis of national languages and defined their concerns in ethnocultural terms.
In Russia, the cultural revival triggered by the Khrushchev Thaw produced two political and cultural camps among writers and artists. The first group, closely associated with the literary journal Molodaia gvardiia (The Young Guard), was characterized by a conservative and antiliberal brand of Russian nationalism. Its members decried the fate of the Russian village and culture but also praised the idea of a powerful state and promoted thinly veiled anti-Semitism. Russian liberals, for their part, rallied around their own journals, the most prominent of which was Novyi mir (The New World): while publishing “village prose,” it maintained an antinationalist stance. The clash of different visions for the development of the Russian culture and nation came to the fore in the late 1960s, with Russian conservatives using their journals to accuse their opponents of promoting the Americanization of Russian culture. Liberals responded with attacks on their opponents for their manifestations of Russian nationalism, their desire to preserve the conservative traditions of imperial Russia, and their attempts to isolate Russian culture from the rest of the world.
A series of articles published in Novyi mir in 1969 attacking the Russian nationalism of Molodaia gvardiia forced the party leadership to intervene in the conflict. In the course of 1970, the party bosses dismissed the editors in chief of both journals from their positions. While the removal of the editor of Molodaia gvardiia signaled a victory for Aleksandr Yakovlev, the interim head of the party propaganda apparatus, his triumph was short-lived. After he published an article in 1972 attacking manifestations of Russian nationalism in literary and cultural life, Yakovlev was dismissed from his high position in the party’s Central Committee and sent to Canada as Soviet ambassador. A decade later, he would be discovered there by a rising star of Soviet politics, Mikhail Gorbachev, who brought him back to Moscow in the mid-1980s. Yakovlev would become one of the architects of Gorbachev’s reforms.
In the mid-1970s, however, the party leadership preferred to sacrifice Yakovlev in order to make peace with the rising nationalist trend in the Russian intelligentsia, and, more important, to co-opt the rebels and keep that trend under party control. Those who would not be cowed into submission, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the unofficial leader of the Russian nationalist intelligentsia, were sent out of the country (Solzhenitsyn was expelled in 1974). Others—such as the new editor of Molodaia gvardiia, Anatolii Ivanov, one of the leading authors of “village prose”—had to accommodate their cultural program to the guidelines imposed on them by the party leadership.
The party would continue its support for the Russification of Soviet political and cultural life, sponsoring multimillion-copy press runs of works by Ivanov and other Russian nationalist writers and supporting their cultural initiatives. One such initiative was the celebration of the six-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of the Kulikovo Field in 1980. Although that battle had ended in defeat for the Mongols, aggressors from the East, it was turned on its head in the Soviet media to inspire anti-Western sentiment in Russian society. The Russification of the borderlands and anti-Westernism were two ideological elements that kept Soviet apparatchiks and Russian nationalist writers together throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
While making peace with moderate Russian nationalism, Moscow strongly attacked non-Russian nationalism in the republics, particularly in Ukraine, where the 1960s had witnessed a revival of national-communist ideas, according to which Russification under the guise of internationalism was a betrayal of Leninist policy, and Ukraine could be both culturally Ukrainian and Soviet without contradiction. Leading figures of the 1920s, including Mykola Skrypnyk, who had committed suicide in 1933 after being accused of nationalist deviations, were rehabilitated in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Major literary and cultural figures of the earlier era, including the poet Pavlo Tychyna and the filmmaker Oleksandr Dovzhenko, became active again, providing inspiration, support, and political cover for a new generation of writers and artists, the shestydesiatnyky (generation of the sixties). These included the poets Ivan Drach, Lina Kostenko, and Vasyl Stus, who was later arrested and sent to the Gulag, where he died. This generation of cultural activists emphasized the flourishing, not the merging, of the Soviet nations. Scholars began submitting their analyses of historiographic trends and the current cultural situation to party officials. Their memoranda, which can be characterized to some degree as policy papers, challenged the Russocentric approach to history as represented by the 1954 Theses on the Reunification of Ukraine and Russia and protested the Russification of Ukrainian education, culture, and politics as a violation of Leninist nationality policy.
The Ukrainian national revival came to an end in May 1972 with the dismissal of the strong-willed first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Petro Shelest, who had run the republic for almost a decade. He had not only tolerated but also supported the development of Ukrainian culture and a distinct Ukrainian identity. A national communist by conviction, Shelest had secured a large degree of autonomy, if not independence, from Moscow by supporting Leonid Brezhnev in his struggle against numerous opponents in the Moscow Politburo. Brezhnev paid him back by giving him a free hand in economic and cultural matters. But once Brezhnev marginalized his main rival in the Politburo, the former head of the KGB, Aleksandr Shelepin, Shelest’s days were numbered.
Like the Ukrainian party leaders of the 1920s whom Stalin had no longer needed after eliminating his opponents, Shelest became expendable. In both cases, what followed the removal of Ukrainian party leaders was an attack on the revival of Ukrainian culture that had taken place on their watch. After being transferred to Moscow and appointed to the politically insignificant position of deputy head of the Soviet government, Shelest was accused of idealizing Ukrainian Cossackdom and other nationalist deviations. Meanwhile, the KGB was arresting nationally minded intellectuals and purging Ukrainian institutions. Under the party leadership of the Brezhnev loyalist Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, Ukraine was turned into an exemplary Soviet republic. With dissidents confined to the Gulag, there was nothing to stop the triumphal march of Soviet nation-building, which in Ukraine meant the reincarnation in socialist guise of the imperial model of the big Russian nation.
The party official who seemingly needed no instruction in conducting a nationality policy appropriate to Brezhnev’s USSR was the leader of Belarus, Petr Masheraŭ (Masherov). Masheraŭ ran the republic for fifteen long years, from 1965 until his death in a car accident in 1980. The rapid economic development of Soviet Belarus, a former backwater of Poland and imperial Russia, on Masheraŭ’s watch in the 1960s and 1970s made loyalty to the Soviet regime a basic component of the new Belarusian identity. Masheraŭ was reportedly supported by the Soviet premier, Aleksei Kosygin, and on bad terms with Leonid Brezhnev and his group. But unlike Shelest, Masheraŭ survived in office until his unexpected death. While defending the republic’s economic interests, he never embraced the revival of the Belarusian language and culture as a cause. Unlike Shelest, Masheraŭ never spoke in public in the titular language of the republic; nor did he show an interest in the premodern history of his country. A partisan fighter during World War II—he received the highest Soviet award, Hero of the Soviet Union, in 1944, at the age of twenty-six—Masheraŭ was in
terested in only one kind of history, that of the Great Patriotic War.
Masheraŭ built monuments to heroes and victims of the war, turning the history of partisan resistance to the Nazis into a founding myth of the Soviet Belarusian nation. Unlike the Ukrainians, who looked with pride to the times of Kyivan Rus’ and the Cossack Hetmanate, the Belarusians lacked a founding myth of their own and readily accepted the all-Soviet mythology of the Great Patriotic War. Masheraŭ had few problems with the local intelligentsia. One of its most talented representatives, the writer Vasil Bykaŭ, dedicated most of his writing to the experience of World War II—Masheraŭ’s own principal interest and a theme that was used to create a close bond between Belarusian and Soviet identity. While Russia and Ukraine produced nationalist dissidents en masse, Belarus remained loyal and grateful to the regime.
BY THE EARLY 1980S, THE TIME WHEN KHRUSHCHEV HAD PROMISED the dawning of communism, it was nowhere in sight. But one of its elements, the formation of a single political nation called the Soviet people, had been making real progress. Nowhere was that clearer than in the expansion of the lingua franca of that nation, the Russian language, formally designated as the language of interethnic communication in the USSR. In 1970, 76 percent of the Soviet population claimed proficiency in Russian. Between 1970 and 1989, the number of non-Russians claiming a good working knowledge of Russian increased from 42 million to 69 million. It was a major success, largely achieved in the East Slavic republics of the Union.
The increase in the number of Russian-speakers was unevenly distributed throughout the USSR. Close to 75 million of the 290 million Soviet citizens did not claim proficiency in Russian, and almost all of them lived outside the East Slavic core of the Union. The central authorities were particularly concerned about Central Asia and the Caucasus, where insufficient working knowledge of Russian hindered the effective integration of recruits into the Soviet army, which was then fighting in Afghanistan. Non-Russians in those regions continued to live within their own ethnic groups, with exogamous marriage the exception rather than the rule. Only the Eastern Slavs and highly urbanized Jews freely intermarried. Most of the non-Russians who claimed fluency in Russian to census takers were Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Jews. Out of 65 million Soviet citizens who claimed proficiency in Russian in 1989, 55 million were Ukrainians and Belarusians.
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