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Империя наций. Этнографическое знание и формирование Советского Союза
Вышедшая в 2005 году по-английски «Империя наций» уже заслужила статус классического исследования по истории советской национальной политики. Франсин Хирш прослеживает взаимодействие власти и экспертного знания в процессе государственного строительства, показывая вклад этнографов, антропологов, географов, лингвистов и других специалистов в формирование советских представлений о нации и расе, а также выработку самих принципов устройства СССР как многонационального государства. Именно от экспертов, имевших дореволюционную подготовку и опиравшихся на западноевропейские идеи, зависели в 1920—1930-е годы конкретные формы государственной политики в отношении тех или иных народов. На основе обширных архивных исследований автор показывает, как посредством планирования и проведения переписей, картографирования, создания музейных экспозиций общие идеи большевиков кристаллизовались в политические решения. Европейская идея культурного эволюционизма, марксистская теория стадиального развития и ленинская идея о способности революционной партии ускорить историческое развитие стали основой государственной политики интеграции разных народов и культур в рамках советского проекта. Франсин Хирш — профессор истории в Висконсинском Университете в Мэдисоне (США).
472 pages, Hardcover
First published September 5, 2000
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About the author
Francine Hirsch
3 books7 followersFrancine Hirsch is an American historian, specializing in modern Europe with a focus on Russia and the Soviet Union. She is a recipient of the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize for her book, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union, as well as honors from the American Society of International Law, the Council of European Studies, and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies for her work.
Hirsch has a B.A. from Cornell University, and completed her M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University. She is currently a professor of history at University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Hirsch has a B.A. from Cornell University, and completed her M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University. She is currently a professor of history at University of Wisconsin–Madison.
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November 10, 2014The epigraph of this book is a description by Hanna Arendt of history as a man-made process, and this is exactly the aspect of Soviet history that Hirsch explores. Her research is guided by the attempt to discern how Soviet rule managed to create nation-states and change the group and individual identities of the Soviet people. She is also interested in the ways in which European ideas about “empire” and “nation” became adapted in the Soviet-Marxist context.
Previous literature on non-Russian nationalities victimized them and failed to integrate them into the Soviet “master narrative,” contributing to the conflation of “Russian” and “Soviet.” Hirsch moves beyond the totalitarian and revisionist models that debate the degree of the Soviet state’s control over its population. Instead, she argues that the regime mobilized the population in such a way that even its resistance to the Soviet power ended up strengthening it.
Hirsch challenges the conventional periodization of Soviet history. She begins her narrative not in 1917, but with the 1905 revolution, which made obvious to both the Bolsheviks and the imperial experts the power of non-Russian nationalism in the Russian Empire. Both Bolsheviks and experts were influenced by concurrent European debates and believed that this phenomenon was due to Russian oppression and needed to be counteracted by using scientific methods. The First World War belatedly brought the ideas of these experts to the attention of the Russian government because non-Russian population needed to be mobilized, used as a productive force, and its separatism countered.
When Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, they were faced with the major task of overcoming “historical diversity” of the former Russian Empire, which despite their anti-imperialism they wanted to preserve in order to maintain access to its resources. In these tasks they were allied with the imperial experts, whose services they engaged.
The understanding of Bolshevik ideology is crucial to explaining their nationality policy. They believed that national development (superstructure) followed economic development (base), and that under socialism all nations would merge into one. In order to act on both the base and the superstructure, Bolsheviks and the imperial experts together formulated the approach that Hirsch calls “state-sponsored evolutionism,” a combination of European anthropological theories and Marxist conceptions, that aimed to speed up peoples’ development. Throughout their rule, Bolsheviks held nationalities to be both primordial and constructed. Thus, historically originated groups that were victims of Soviet modernization could be acted upon by the state in order to reach the Bolshevik’s ultimate goal: amalgamation of nations under communism. This would be done through “double assimilation” of the population into nationality categories and nationality categories into the Soviet society.
Soviet Union defined itself as the sum of its parts, unlike tsarist Russia or European colonial powers, which viewed themselves in opposition to their colonies.
Contrary to Pipes, Hirsch shows that in 1924 the formation of the Soviet Union was only beginning, and it was a fascinating “work in progress.” Soviet government engaged imperial ethnographers and local elites in the interactive process of the shaping of the Soviet Union, using the data they supplied in accordance with their own objectives to shape the eventual structure of the Soviet state and develop the peoples’ national identities. The creation of the Soviet territorial-administrative structure was not a whimsical policy, or a policy of “divide and rule,” as argued by scholars like Caroe. On the contrary, the attempt to compromise between economic expediency and national idea shaped the eventual (very complicated) structure of the Soviet Union.
Census, map, and museum are the “cultural technologies of rule” that Hirsch explores in the section of her book dedicated to the 1924-1934 period of “sovietization.” The census, for example, was used not only to count representatives of a certain nationality, but also to inform people about the nationality which they represented. Soviet population understood that identification with a certain nationality could lead to benefits, and thus by the early 1930s nationality became a fundamental marker of identity among Soviet peoples. A fascinating example is the Tajik SSR, which was carved out from the Uzbek SSR on the basis of census data.
By late 1920s, the Soviet state began to establish tight control over experts and local elites (campaign against the Academy of Sciences), but continued to rely on the information they provided. Stalin’s “great break” (1928) called for a faster building of socialism, and to further this, “smaller” and “less developed” nationalities were amalgamated into larger groups. This was not a “retreat” from earlier Soviet nationality policy, but an attempt to accelerate it.
Strengthening of Nazi political and scientific forces that began in 1930 presented both a geopolitical and an ideological threat to the Soviet Union. Nazi scientists’ belief in the danger of inter-ethnic mixing was detrimental to the Soviet hope of the eventual unification of all nations under socialism. This development caused a push to further accelerate state-sponsored evolutionism. In order to prove that it was nurture, and not nature that explained the relatively slow national development of several of the Soviet Unions’ “backward” nations, Soviet ethnographers came up with the idea of “survivals of the past” (perezhitki proshlogo), such as shamans, which were holding these nations back. Soviet scholars of race continued with minor exceptions to define it in “neutral” (socio-historical, and not socio-biological) terms.
In mid-1930s, national oppression within USSR was “abolished,” and Russians were therefore no longer great power chauvinists. The promotion of Russian national culture that followed was not, according to Hirsch and counter to Brandenberger and Martin, a retreat from the Stalin revolution, but the celebration of the Russian proletariat’s “progressive historical role,” and not of the Russian imperial past or the Russians’ innate traits.
By the late 1930s, the threat from Germany became geopolitical. The Nazis justified their expansionism by claims to protect Germans abroad, which made the Soviet state concerned about its diaspora nationalities. Their loyalties were to non-Soviet states, and they could therefore never merge into the Soviet people. NKVD deported these nationalities from border regions. Ethnographers provided NKVD with the scientific basis for the soviet vs. foreign nationality distinction, this continuing to play an active role in the process of subordinating Soviet people to the Soviet power even when they were persecuted.
As a result of the Nazi threat, Soviet nationality policy became increasingly contradictory: while touting national self-definition, it forbade Soviet citizens to choose which nationality they were ascribed to on their passport. This policy did not, however, indicate a shift to Nazi-like biological view of nationality. Non-Soviet diaspora nationals were not considered degenerate, but they would not be able to join the amalgamated Soviet people.
A fascinating example of Stalin’s involvement is the effect of his declaration that around sixty nationalities inhabit the Soviet Union. Stalin left it to the ethnographers to cut their existing list of nationalities down to sixty.
In the epilogue, Hirsch rushes through the remaining decades of Soviet history. Marr’s theory of national development as following economic development remains prominent after the war, but the projected merging of nationalities into the Soviet people, although bound to happen, is constantly postponed. Post-war ethnographers tout the benefits of Russian language use as a means to improve of international communication, and define the eventual Soviet people as a combination of all Soviet nations’ national traits. However, local elites are much more interested in the benefits that their national status grants them today, than in a unification and possible linguistic russification tomorrow. Soviet Union remained a work in progress: after the thaw, and especially during perestroika, nations would be returned to the census list of nationalities. Nationality, the main a source of recognition under the Soviet Union, eventually became the most important official category for Soviet citizens. Unlike Suny, Hirsch believes that economic difficulties, loss of faith, and overextension contributed more to the Soviet collapse than nationalism, but the latter does explain the way in which this collapse happened, since all official soviet nationalities already had institutions, cultures, languages, elites, and a developed sense of national consciousness. Soviet Union’s high level of economic integration, ethnically diverse population of the post-Soviet states, and the problem of creating a usable past for these new entities ensure that de-sovietization will be a work in progress for years to come.
As Hirsch repeatedly points out in her footnotes, she argues against several of assertions that Martin makes in his work. First, she does not agree with his use of the term “affirmative action,” which Martin disconnects from its very specific historical context, but also fails to accurately describe Soviet nationality policy. The goal of the latter was not to promote national minorities at the expense of the Russian majority (after all, Russian were not forced to give up their language and remained the dominant nationality in non-national Soviet territories), but to speed both groups through the stages of national development.
Hirsch also seems to disagree with Slezkine and Barber, who emphasize the discontinuity between imperial elites and the new generation of Soviet historians. Instead, Hirsch claims that under pressure from above ethnographers sovietized their discipline themselves.
Comments/Critique: At the outset, Hirsch asks the question: “Why did the USSR fall apart along national lines and how has it endured for so long,” which is closely related to her argument, but it not quite answered by it. The claim that factors other than nationalism were decisive in the collapse of the Soviet Union, which she makes in the epilogue, really needs much more support, and does not directly flow from her findings. If the Soviet power was, indeed, interactive, and thus strengthened even through resistance, why did it collapse in 1991?
Hirsch describes the effect that Stalin’s declaration of the existence in Soviet Union of sixty nationalities had on ethnography. I wish she would have also speculated why exactly Stalin made this declaration. I understand that the decreasing number of nationalities meant the success of the revolution, but why sixty, and why at that specific time?
Previous literature on non-Russian nationalities victimized them and failed to integrate them into the Soviet “master narrative,” contributing to the conflation of “Russian” and “Soviet.” Hirsch moves beyond the totalitarian and revisionist models that debate the degree of the Soviet state’s control over its population. Instead, she argues that the regime mobilized the population in such a way that even its resistance to the Soviet power ended up strengthening it.
Hirsch challenges the conventional periodization of Soviet history. She begins her narrative not in 1917, but with the 1905 revolution, which made obvious to both the Bolsheviks and the imperial experts the power of non-Russian nationalism in the Russian Empire. Both Bolsheviks and experts were influenced by concurrent European debates and believed that this phenomenon was due to Russian oppression and needed to be counteracted by using scientific methods. The First World War belatedly brought the ideas of these experts to the attention of the Russian government because non-Russian population needed to be mobilized, used as a productive force, and its separatism countered.
When Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, they were faced with the major task of overcoming “historical diversity” of the former Russian Empire, which despite their anti-imperialism they wanted to preserve in order to maintain access to its resources. In these tasks they were allied with the imperial experts, whose services they engaged.
The understanding of Bolshevik ideology is crucial to explaining their nationality policy. They believed that national development (superstructure) followed economic development (base), and that under socialism all nations would merge into one. In order to act on both the base and the superstructure, Bolsheviks and the imperial experts together formulated the approach that Hirsch calls “state-sponsored evolutionism,” a combination of European anthropological theories and Marxist conceptions, that aimed to speed up peoples’ development. Throughout their rule, Bolsheviks held nationalities to be both primordial and constructed. Thus, historically originated groups that were victims of Soviet modernization could be acted upon by the state in order to reach the Bolshevik’s ultimate goal: amalgamation of nations under communism. This would be done through “double assimilation” of the population into nationality categories and nationality categories into the Soviet society.
Soviet Union defined itself as the sum of its parts, unlike tsarist Russia or European colonial powers, which viewed themselves in opposition to their colonies.
Contrary to Pipes, Hirsch shows that in 1924 the formation of the Soviet Union was only beginning, and it was a fascinating “work in progress.” Soviet government engaged imperial ethnographers and local elites in the interactive process of the shaping of the Soviet Union, using the data they supplied in accordance with their own objectives to shape the eventual structure of the Soviet state and develop the peoples’ national identities. The creation of the Soviet territorial-administrative structure was not a whimsical policy, or a policy of “divide and rule,” as argued by scholars like Caroe. On the contrary, the attempt to compromise between economic expediency and national idea shaped the eventual (very complicated) structure of the Soviet Union.
Census, map, and museum are the “cultural technologies of rule” that Hirsch explores in the section of her book dedicated to the 1924-1934 period of “sovietization.” The census, for example, was used not only to count representatives of a certain nationality, but also to inform people about the nationality which they represented. Soviet population understood that identification with a certain nationality could lead to benefits, and thus by the early 1930s nationality became a fundamental marker of identity among Soviet peoples. A fascinating example is the Tajik SSR, which was carved out from the Uzbek SSR on the basis of census data.
By late 1920s, the Soviet state began to establish tight control over experts and local elites (campaign against the Academy of Sciences), but continued to rely on the information they provided. Stalin’s “great break” (1928) called for a faster building of socialism, and to further this, “smaller” and “less developed” nationalities were amalgamated into larger groups. This was not a “retreat” from earlier Soviet nationality policy, but an attempt to accelerate it.
Strengthening of Nazi political and scientific forces that began in 1930 presented both a geopolitical and an ideological threat to the Soviet Union. Nazi scientists’ belief in the danger of inter-ethnic mixing was detrimental to the Soviet hope of the eventual unification of all nations under socialism. This development caused a push to further accelerate state-sponsored evolutionism. In order to prove that it was nurture, and not nature that explained the relatively slow national development of several of the Soviet Unions’ “backward” nations, Soviet ethnographers came up with the idea of “survivals of the past” (perezhitki proshlogo), such as shamans, which were holding these nations back. Soviet scholars of race continued with minor exceptions to define it in “neutral” (socio-historical, and not socio-biological) terms.
In mid-1930s, national oppression within USSR was “abolished,” and Russians were therefore no longer great power chauvinists. The promotion of Russian national culture that followed was not, according to Hirsch and counter to Brandenberger and Martin, a retreat from the Stalin revolution, but the celebration of the Russian proletariat’s “progressive historical role,” and not of the Russian imperial past or the Russians’ innate traits.
By the late 1930s, the threat from Germany became geopolitical. The Nazis justified their expansionism by claims to protect Germans abroad, which made the Soviet state concerned about its diaspora nationalities. Their loyalties were to non-Soviet states, and they could therefore never merge into the Soviet people. NKVD deported these nationalities from border regions. Ethnographers provided NKVD with the scientific basis for the soviet vs. foreign nationality distinction, this continuing to play an active role in the process of subordinating Soviet people to the Soviet power even when they were persecuted.
As a result of the Nazi threat, Soviet nationality policy became increasingly contradictory: while touting national self-definition, it forbade Soviet citizens to choose which nationality they were ascribed to on their passport. This policy did not, however, indicate a shift to Nazi-like biological view of nationality. Non-Soviet diaspora nationals were not considered degenerate, but they would not be able to join the amalgamated Soviet people.
A fascinating example of Stalin’s involvement is the effect of his declaration that around sixty nationalities inhabit the Soviet Union. Stalin left it to the ethnographers to cut their existing list of nationalities down to sixty.
In the epilogue, Hirsch rushes through the remaining decades of Soviet history. Marr’s theory of national development as following economic development remains prominent after the war, but the projected merging of nationalities into the Soviet people, although bound to happen, is constantly postponed. Post-war ethnographers tout the benefits of Russian language use as a means to improve of international communication, and define the eventual Soviet people as a combination of all Soviet nations’ national traits. However, local elites are much more interested in the benefits that their national status grants them today, than in a unification and possible linguistic russification tomorrow. Soviet Union remained a work in progress: after the thaw, and especially during perestroika, nations would be returned to the census list of nationalities. Nationality, the main a source of recognition under the Soviet Union, eventually became the most important official category for Soviet citizens. Unlike Suny, Hirsch believes that economic difficulties, loss of faith, and overextension contributed more to the Soviet collapse than nationalism, but the latter does explain the way in which this collapse happened, since all official soviet nationalities already had institutions, cultures, languages, elites, and a developed sense of national consciousness. Soviet Union’s high level of economic integration, ethnically diverse population of the post-Soviet states, and the problem of creating a usable past for these new entities ensure that de-sovietization will be a work in progress for years to come.
As Hirsch repeatedly points out in her footnotes, she argues against several of assertions that Martin makes in his work. First, she does not agree with his use of the term “affirmative action,” which Martin disconnects from its very specific historical context, but also fails to accurately describe Soviet nationality policy. The goal of the latter was not to promote national minorities at the expense of the Russian majority (after all, Russian were not forced to give up their language and remained the dominant nationality in non-national Soviet territories), but to speed both groups through the stages of national development.
Hirsch also seems to disagree with Slezkine and Barber, who emphasize the discontinuity between imperial elites and the new generation of Soviet historians. Instead, Hirsch claims that under pressure from above ethnographers sovietized their discipline themselves.
Comments/Critique: At the outset, Hirsch asks the question: “Why did the USSR fall apart along national lines and how has it endured for so long,” which is closely related to her argument, but it not quite answered by it. The claim that factors other than nationalism were decisive in the collapse of the Soviet Union, which she makes in the epilogue, really needs much more support, and does not directly flow from her findings. If the Soviet power was, indeed, interactive, and thus strengthened even through resistance, why did it collapse in 1991?
Hirsch describes the effect that Stalin’s declaration of the existence in Soviet Union of sixty nationalities had on ethnography. I wish she would have also speculated why exactly Stalin made this declaration. I understand that the decreasing number of nationalities meant the success of the revolution, but why sixty, and why at that specific time?
April 17, 2022
This is a dense academic book, which I enjoyed for the first half. Then due to a personal tragedy in my life I had a hard time getting through the second half. Whatever its merits, this book will be forever tainted by my memories of grief.
I guess this rating and review is useful to exactly no one. But maybe it will help me remember why I have such mixed memories of this one.
I guess this rating and review is useful to exactly no one. But maybe it will help me remember why I have such mixed memories of this one.
January 12, 2023
The book is a remarkable attempt at deconstruction of the nowadays very popular narrative, especially in Eastern Europe, about "Soviet colonialism" being, by origin, the very same tsarist Great Russian colonialism, but in a Communist edition. Convincingly proving the completely different nature of the Soviet policy of nationalities at the early stage of the formation of the USSR until the end of the 1930s, unfortunately, the author only briefly outlines its further evolution i.e. degradation. Of course, the whole path of Soviet policy of nationalities was out of scope of the book, as Hirsch directly points out, but still there is no escape from the feeling of understatement. All in all, an excellent guide to intellectual de-decolonialism.
March 10, 2018
An outstanding work on Soviet-era ethnography that illuminates the significant role that academics played in the physical formation of the USSR. This comprehensive account illuminates how imperial Russian ethnographers allied with Bolsheviks to harness so-called cultural technologies of rule -- census, border making, and museums. The goal was to encourage a dual cultural assimilation -- to national republics and to the Soviet Union -- and to stimulate the development of national identities which were seen as vital to building socialism. Hirsch's description of the border delineation process was particularly interesting, as she pushes back against the common assumption that Stalin arbitrarily decided where the borders between republics would run. She outlines the careful deliberation among ethnographers, economists and other social scientists in assigning territories to the republics.
October 6, 2019
Hirsch's book is one of the main texts of modern research into Soviet nationality policy. A counterpart to Terry Martin's "Affirmative Action Empire", Hirsch looks at the topic from a very different angle: how the Soviet authorities classified the peoples of the union, and what they did with that information once completed (though as she notes, this never was completed). It places great focus on the ethnographers, anthropologists, and demographers of the era, who were forced to work within the confines of socialist science, and later forced to modify their work even further to counter the racial science coming out of Nazi Germany. It thus serves as a very important work in considering how Soviet nationality policy was developed, and how various ethnic groups were identified or, in some cases, consolidated or outright removed. A very important book on the subject, and required readying for anyone interested in the history of the region.
April 11, 2011
This is a book about demography is the former USSR and along with it how the Soviets actually created many of their "nationalities" in order to better manage them. There are some nice discussions of how nationalities have trouble fitting into Marxism in theory. It also brings up the ways in which these nationalities were manipulated by the center. The interesting point that comes out of this is that many of the ethnic problems that plague the former Soviet Union come from minorities that the Soviets themselves created - a sort of grand instance of "no good deed goes unpunished".
January 2, 2023
Francine Hirsch looks at the nationalities policies of the early USSR through the prism of "cultural technologies": census, museum, and map (border making). It all starts with how the Bolsheviks' understanding of the "national question" formed, alongside the expert ethnographers', still before the revolution. Then the new regime "formed an unexpected alliance" with those experts to better understand the ethnographic composition of the vast territories it got under its power as a result of the civil war. (I was waiting for spoilers on when every one of those experts would be executed in the 1930s, but no, some managed to die of natural causes.) The Soviet doctrine was that while there's no primordial ("racial") difference between groups that would explain someone's "developedness" and someone's "backwardness," they are so because of the socio-historic circumstances. They are on different stages of historic development "on the Marxist timeline." But one shouldn't just wait for stages to pass, revolutionary actors can propel a "backward" nationality forward much faster. (In the 1930s, they added that "survivals of the past" such as exploiting classes, could also keep the group from developing - so every group now had to produce and cleanse class enemies. Something I also see in the literature between the 1920s and 1930s.) Hence the doctrine of "double assimilation": while wary of national consciousness in more developed nations (like Ukrainians or Georgians), the state promoted the development of national consciousness and the formation of socialist nations in those considered "backward," as a necessary historic step before the eventual merger into a post-national Soviet people.
Chapter three was the most enjoyable - it discussed the 1926 census and the process of deciding what to include on the list of nationalities and what to do if the respondents do not know what a nationality even is. Chapter five about the ethnographic museum (in which it was too cold to enjoy it by wearing overcoats inside was not allowed) was also quite fun.
Chapter three was the most enjoyable - it discussed the 1926 census and the process of deciding what to include on the list of nationalities and what to do if the respondents do not know what a nationality even is. Chapter five about the ethnographic museum (in which it was too cold to enjoy it by wearing overcoats inside was not allowed) was also quite fun.
November 17, 2025
A very interesting exploration of conflation of ethnographic research and the cultural technologies of rule in Russia in the first half of the 20th century. Very clear text - the author points out where she argues against hitherto existing research.
December 17, 2022
Sscb ve ulus meselesi hakkında bilmediğim pek çok konu hakkında detaylı bir bilgi edindiğim kitap oldu. İdeolojik önyargıların ağır bastığı bir alanda nitelikli akademik eserleri okumak memnuniyet verici.
March 17, 2008
Welcome to overuse of the phrase "cultural technologies of rule."
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July 27, 2011A fascinating examination of the many nations that composed the Soviet Union- the overlooked nationalities that are forgotten under a Russian monolith.
December 2, 2012
Read for Anthropology of Post-Soviet Russia class in graduate school
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews