Centre for Peace Studies
University of Tromsø
Arne
Kommisrud:
STATE-BUILDING,
NATIONALITIES, AND CONFLICT DYNAMICS IN THE SOVIET AND HABSBURG EMPIRES. A
Rokkanian Approach.
CPS WORKING PAPERS NO 2. 25. February
2002
Tromsø Papers
Centre for Peace Studies at Tromsø University here present Working
Papers No 2.
This
paper is written by Arne Kommisrud from the Department of Political Science at
Tromsø University. Kommisrud discuss three cases of state building and
describes them in four different stages following the model developed by Stein
Rokkan. Arne Kommisrud have been active in the preparation of Centre for Peace
Studies at University of Tromsø.
CPS working papers will cover topics presented at CPS and/or produced
by people connected to CPS. These Papers will reflect the work carried out at
CPS but not necessarily present the opinions by the Centre. It will be
published irregularly and can be subscribed to by contacting the editors.
Tromsø
February 2002
CPS Working Papers:
No 1 Three
articles by Johan Galtung:
What is Peace Studies?
The Epistemology and Methodology of Peace Studies
Constructing a Daoist Social Science Epistemology
No 2 Arne Kommisrud:
State-building,
Nationalities, and Conflict Dynamics in the Soviet and Habsburg Empires. A
Rokkanian Approach.
Editors:
Vidar Vambheim, vidarv@peace.uit.no
Address:
Peace Studies
University
of Tromsø
9037
Tromsø,
Norway
www.peace.uit.no
www.transcend.org
The Soviet development project after 1922 contained elements of both
state and nation building, as these terms are commonly used in historical and
sociological research.
The starting point of this comparative
analysis can be stated as follows: What light can the experiences of other
multi-national empires shed on the Soviet nationality policy? Why was the
Soviet Union for a long time obviously successful in neutralizing and to a
large extent solving potential conflicts, while other multi-national empires
facing the same problems collapsed?
I will discuss the three following cases: Austria-Hungary up to 1918, the
All-Russian empire before 1917, and the Soviet Union.
Theoretically I will base my discussion on the assumption that Stein Rokkan's
models offer a mode of discussion which may be useful in the comparative
analysis of certain important processes of state and empire building and
disintegration also in those cases.
Rokkan distinguishes between 4 phases of
state building processes in Western Europe: phase I, state building in the
"narrow sense of the word", characterized by military-administrative
and economic penetration ca. 1200-1800 , phase II characterized by cultural
standardization extreme variation, ca. 1500-1800 , phase III characterized by
political mobilization and incorporation of the population through active
participation ca. 1840-1920, and phase IV characterized by economic
redistribution from ca. 1920.
Rokkan developed this 4 stage model
taken from Parsons by crossing each of the four subsystems with a
centre-periphery dimension. The political systems can thus be divided into four
different types of domination and hierarchy, each with their specific potential
for conflict and resistance:
"Phase I covers the initial state-building process: in Western
Europe the period from the High Middle Ages to the French Revolution. This is
typically a period of political, economic and cultural unification at the elite
level: a series of bargains are struck and a variety of cultural bonds are
established across networks of local power-holder and a number of institutions
are built for the extraction of resources for common defense, for the
maintenance of internal order and the adjudication of disputes, for the
protection of established rights and privileges and for the elementary
infrastructure requirements of the economy and polity.
Phase II brings in larger sectors of the
masses into the system: the
conscript armies, the compulsory schools, the emerging mass media create
channels for direct contact between the central elite and parochial populations
of the peripheries and generate widespread feelings of identity with the total
political system, frequently, but not necessarily, in protracted conflict with
already established identities such as those built up through churches or sects
or through peripheral linguistic elites.
Phase III brings these subject masses
into active participation in the
workings of the territorial political system: typically through the
establishments of privileges of opposition, the extension of the electorates
for organs of representation, the formation of organized parties for the
mobilization of support and the articulation and aggregation of demands.
Phase IV finally represents the next
series of steps in the expansion of the administrative apparatus of the
territorial state: the growth of agencies
of redistribution, the building of public welfare services, the development
of nationwide policies for the equalization of economic conditions, negatively
through progressive taxation, positively through transfers from the better-off
strata to the poorer, from the richer to the backward regions".
This model will in the following be
considered as formal, which means that an analysis of social change based on it
ought to be firmly situated in a specific time and in particular circumstances.
It therefore needs to be filled out with complementary propositions and
appropriate data of a historical
kind, that means partial and local ones.
My aim is twofold: First I will attempt
to answer the question raised above. Then I will briefly discuss what my
results can shed light on the use of such a meta-theoretical model, as
developed by Stein Rokkan, outside the region specified by his conceptual maps.
This discussion may be interpreted as a small contribution towards pinpointing
factors which should be taken into account if one wishes to integrate Europe's
Eastern zone into the comparative European studies based on Stein Rokkan.
Wherever periphery interests are
articulated and mobilized political conflicts will arise.
Rokkan did not however say much about
the phenomenon of nationalism. I will during the following study go more
thoroughly into and discuss two perspectives on nationalism, as more or less
implicated by his models:
1: nationalism as a political and
cultural centre-periphery conflict which follows from attempts at cultural
standardization, i. e. phase I and II.
2: nationalism created by the tensions
between relatively advanced and relatively backward regions and countries the
interaction between the industrial and the national revolution , mainly phase
IV, but also phase III.
The Ausgleich
in 1867 altered the state structure of the Habsburg Monarchy and thereafter the
national relations were developing along very different lines in the two
imperial halves. The Ausgleich-agreement
was mirroring an equilibrium between the Habsburg dynasty and the Magyar
nobility. The empire was divided into two parts with equal status and rights,
the essence of the compromise being the German dominance over Austria and the
Magyar over Hungary. A comparison between the two states shows, however, that
the shape and structure of the nationality conflicts and their available
solutions were quite different. Austria, in principle recognized as a
multi-national state by its own political elite, with equal rights for all its nations,
was faced with a Hungary defining itself as a Magyar nation state - with the
concept of a Magyar supreme rule as a common dogma for all parties and with a
subsequent suppression of reality. This Magyar supremacy and the following
fiction of Hungary as a nation state could only be maintained by means of an
arbitrary and discriminating electoral system and by corresponding
administrative practices.
For certain comparative purposes Austria-Hungary must therefore be treated as
two cases.
In order to put the distinctive features
of the Russian state building into a relief, I will also use the Western
European overseas colonial empires as ideal types or examples in the
comparative analysis. I feel that this is justified because both in terms of
methods and institutional solutions state and colony building must be seen as
variations over related themes or practical problems.
In order to focus on the social and
economic dynamics that modern nationalism springs from, I will present the
phases in a somewhat different order from that of Rokkan's model. In the Soviet
case the phases were developing simultaneously. This approach should therefore
hardly present a problem from a historical-empirical point of view.
ECONOMIC REDISTRIBUTION BETWEEN SOCIAL CLASSES AND NATIONS
Nationalism and combined, uneven development
Phase IV in Rokkan's model - economic
redistribution - is associated with the crystallizing of modern class
conflicts, and with various types of cleavages between interest groups linked
to production and markets. Most distinctive during the industrialization
process was the cleavage between the owners of the means of production and the
industrial working class. The political breakthrough of social democratic and
social liberal values took much of the sting out of this conflict and
"domesticated", so to speak, both the capitalist dynamics and the
industrial working class as a potentially revolutionary force. In the case of
the USSR, I will emphasize the economic redistribution between regions and nations,
not between different social classes, although these two aspects are closely
linked in modernizing societies, including the USSR.
Nationalism may be seen as a response to
uneven development. In the core areas nationalism will most certainly occur either
among minority national groups which are trying to defend their own privileged
positions, or among newly educated strata of hitherto non-privileged nations
who are trying to better their own career possibilities parallel with the
social advancement of their own nations as such, as for the first time they are
drawn into the modernization process.
When the national and the colonial
questions are intertwined, each reinforcing the other, lack of stability may as
well be explained by a combined, uneven development. Under such circumstances
the class structure tends to be ethnically segregated. This situation can be
characterized as "internal colonialism", a condition in which the
uneven development of the economic system causes material and cultural oppression
to nations in the making - new-comer ethnic groups tend to constitute
"internal colonies".
This kind of nationalism will hardly be
articulated without an intelligentsia. When studying social elites, one is not
only interested in their objective characteristics, or the factors which
account for their formation. One is also interested in their identity and their
capacity for collective action. Ernest Gellner suggests that political
nationalism will be more marked when the economy is not able to provide a
growth of high status employment on the same scale as the increase of new
applicants.
The scenario of national opposition and
separatism due to economic factors may however be defeated. Federalism may be
seen as an instrument to handle the economic aspects of ethnic conflicts, by
leaving room for the central authorities to redistribute a larger or smaller
part of the society's resources. However, even if the state is seeking to act
in the interest of the community as a whole, it must be prepared to face
serious problems as the involved parties may always interpret its policies as
"injust" as regards its effects. The idea that some nations profit at
the expense of others may form the basis for political mobilization.
Considering the fact of the greater
degree of stability in the USSR, as compared to the conditions in Austria, some
comparative questions need to be further elaborated:
1: Were the geographical discrepancies following from budgetary
allocations, i.e. between the origin and the spending of the national income,
greater in the case of the USSR than in the Habsburg Monarchy?
2: Did the leveling in the standard of living and life chances which
was brought about by the Soviet policy of regional redistribution essentially
contribute to political stabilization?
3: To what extent was the occupational structure and the labour market
segregated along ethnic lines in such a way that the national minority
intellectuals ended up as career loosers?
Modernization and nation building
The industrial development of the
Habsburg Monarchy sparked off only slowly. Historical research on the economic
development in the nineteenth century shows this general trend: In the first
half of the century, the Monarcy became more backward in a European perspective,
because of the absence of economic growth in its eastern parts. This picture,
however, conceals the growth taking place in its German core areas due to the
capitalist development starting already at the beginning of the century. There
was no gap between those areas and the leading Western European countries,
neither in 1800 nor in 1850.
After the mid-century, the gap between
the Monarchy as a whole and the Western countries was stabilized. Toward the
end of the century the Monarchy began to catch up, a fact accounted for by
Hungary's rapid economic growth, especially from the 1880s. Right up to the end
of the Monarchy the economic and social structures in the Eastern parts were
dominated by great landowners, a fact which, however, did not retard neither
the capitalist development nor the country's industrialization.
All things considered, a model of
"development through reaping the benefits of backwardness", à la
Gerschenkron, based on the backward countries' borrowing and learning from more
advanced ones seems to fit the Habsburg case, or at least some of its most
important areas, better than a theory of underdevelopment, which postulates
that the beneficial effects of industrialization can not be spread, great
regions being doomed to remaining dependent suppliers of raw materials and
labour.
This is the case both with regard to the Monarchy's relative position in Europe
and to the relationship between its own two halves.
As concerns the All-Russian Empire, one
of its main features had been the disparities in developmental levels between
different regions, both in terms of economy and culture. A conspicuous feature
was the fact that the Russian nation was not the dominant one in the
All-Russian empire economically speaking, when compared to some of the national
minorities. Great discrepancies were also to be found within the regions and
among their various ethnic groups.
Although the foundations of the later Soviet drive for modernization were laid
during the last decades of Tsarist Russia, the disruptive economic factors
which took such strong effect in the Habsburg case, were therefore far less
noticeable in All-Russia.
In Austria-Hungary the industrialization
transformed the sociological basis of the national opposition and changed the
composition of nationalities in important regions through migration. As more
and more workers of various nationalities were migrating into the principal
cities of the Monarchy to get work, the towns became the main conflict areas.
There is therefore reason to believe in the relevance of an approach stressing
the causal importance of uneven development, and to assume that nationalism is
at its strongest where social cleavages and discrimination follow ethnic lines,
as in the tradition based on Otto Bauer.
National feelings and assertiveness,
according to Bauer, became more strongly developed among minorities, both
ruling and oppressed ones, living in districts overwhelmingly populated by a
different people which belonged to another culture and spoke another language
and where national differences were coupled with social conflicts. The
strongest nationalism would occur among a nationally conscious minority in a
situation where it did not occupy positions of privilege and the right to
exploit, but lived as a servile and exploited social class.
In such cases, nationalism developed among the exploited class out of hate for
the exploiters: "National hate was transformed class conflict".
As urbanization proceeded, the newcomers
to the city proletariat were generally excluded from the benefits of prosperity
by their more privileged German fellow workers. A fierce urban class
competition also reduced to a mockery the supposed unity of the working class.
In the midst of this competition culture and language became particularly
important.
One distinctive feature of the Austrian
nationality conflict was that the national movements for the first time
embraced the working classes of the populations, both among historic and
non-historic nations, and that the working classes were split along national
lines. In Austria people's social and economic situation was determined by the
national group to which they belonged, so that collectively the German workers
were better protected, better educated, and had an easier access to skilled and
supervisory positions than others. They also had stronger trade unions at their
disposal.
A nationality dynamics highly similar to
that in the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy, was to be found in the USSR
during the implementation of the nationality policy introduced by Lenin, the
policy of indigenization, or korenizatsiya.
Processes comparable to those described in Austria-Hungary did not occur in the
All-Russian Empire, and in the case of the USSR, they were, so to speak,
"embedded" in the overall processes characterizing the Soviet road to
modernity: "nation-building processes" natsional'noe stroitel'stvo initiated from above, through massive
literacy campaigns which encouraged the use of minority languages as mediums of
instruction in local schools, and "upgrading" by the Soviet
authorities of a number of preliterate minority languages by giving them
alphabets. In addition to this national infrastructures of mass communication
were built and higher education strengthened. The social structures of the
various nations were transformed through social and geographical mobility, i.e.
through urbanization and formation of working classes and new intellectual
elites among non-Russian nations.
The unintended effects of the Soviet
modernization began to be noticeable to the country's rulers in the period
immediately after Stalin's death. Important nation-building processes had taken
place especially through the formation of new non-Russian educated elites.
Political control with higher education therefore became an everlasting concern
of the Soviet nationality policy. For decades the access to higher education
was controlled through a system of national quotas which gave preferential
treatment to representatives of the titular nations in their home republics.
In contrast to the older social elites from Tsarist times, which were wiped out
by Stalin in the 1930s, the new intelligentsias had the Soviet system itself as
their basis.
In the Habsburg Monarchy the centrifugal
influences stemming from spread of capitalism in the economic sphere was above
all coupled with the "Great Depression" from 1873 to 1896. The
national movements of Austria then had their political breakthrough. In the
wake of economic crisis the political climate changed and the political
hegemony of Austrian German liberalism was broken for the benefit of
conservative, socialist and nationalist movements. The broad masses were now
for the first time drawn into the political struggle, altering both its form
and content.
As the united German political front was
disintegrating, and with it the influence and prestige of the Austrian Germaneness
die deutsche Kulturgemeinschaft ,
the Slavic peoples displayed increased political energy and their positions
were strengthened. The social and regional impact of the crisis thus was to
make national opposition more fierce. This also seems to make plausible the
thesis that the most important social carrier of national hatred was the petite bourgeoisie, in the classical Marxist
sense, in the Austrian part of the Monarchy. While the traditional small
bourgeoisie was hardest hit in Cisleithania i.e. Austria , the group which felt
the impact of the Great Depression in Hungary strongest, was the gentry. The
gentry also was to become the foremost exponent of anti-capitalist and
nationalist feelings.
Some economic factors that influenced
the Habsburg nationality conflicts ought to be mentioned: Even if German
capital was necessary in the beginning for Czech and Hungarian
industrialization, the dependency and lack of proportion between
"national" and "foreign" capital and personnel that
followed offended the Czechs and the Hungarians, whose self-esteem had been
considerably enhanced as a consequence of their unequivocal industrial
progress. Tendencies
toward autarky among the non-Germans were also reinforced due to the pressure
from the competition with the initially more advanced German industry. The
Czechs are the most conspicuous example here. Strengthening of national credit
institutions became a matter of greatest importance, and patriotic slogans -
such as "Do not make your purchases from Germans!" - were followed by
a boycott of German goods.
In Hungary, where a modernizing elite
had at its disposal a state apparatus, a persistent policy was pursued to
further the building of a national industry. The Hungarian opposition towards
Austria was kept alive as a means to reach such a goal. This policy was on the
whole very successful.
Economic transfers - a means to counteract national
opposition?
As regards the Soviet-case, it is well
worth emphasizing the following aspect of the Soviet nationality policy in a
comparative perspective: Even if the existing regional hierarchy of consumption
per capita remained unchanged, one
basic aim of Soviet regional policy was to promote economic development even in
the regions with the highest birth rates, i.e. Central Asia, so that this
region would not lag more behind in the future. To achieve this, income
produced in one republic was transferred and used for consumption and
investments in others. A strong financial redistribution took place during the
whole period of Soviet rule within the framework of the budgetary process and
closely tied to social economic planning.
An important means in the income transfers was the turnover tax, a
differentiated tax on consumption which was introduced in 1930 as a purely all
union tax leaving room for the Moscow central planners to allow different
republics to retain unequal shares for local use.
Also the investment allocations had as one of its aims to redistribute
resources so as to promote a complex and parallel economic growth among the
various republics.
The Soviet modernization resulted in
perceptible improvements from one year to the next for the Soviet citizens, as
long as the economic growth increased steadily. From 1950 to 1980 the real
consumption per capita increased by 3,4 per cent on the average each year and
the standard of living was tripled.
As regards social expenditures payments from social consumption funds a
conspicuous leveling was taking place, in medical care, pensions, through
subsidizing of house-rents, and through support and subsidizing of education
and general enlightenment of the people.
This included, as an aspect of paramount importance, the equalization of
educational opportunities for members of all Soviet nations, a factor which
brought about a dramatic rise in the level of education among the non-Russian
nations.
Also in Austria a transfer of income
through taxation took place. The higher tax revenues received from the Germans,
were above all used in the regions of Cisleithania as an addition to the
capital injection from the Vienna banks, which made possible both Czech and
Hungarian industrialization.
Even if both the pronounced aim of the transfers, and their most important
effect,
was to spread economic growth and level down developmental differences among
the regions, their political impact was the sharpening of national opposition
in the Habsburg Monarchy. The principal explanation for this was the character
of the political system of Vienna and the permanent tug of war between the
nationalities in economic issues which made the national struggles more fierce.
The conflict between Hungary and Austria
over the distribution of the common public spending, was recurrently sharpened
every tenth year when the renewal of the Ausgleich
was to be negotiated. In Cisleithania the conflict over each crownland's
share of the public spending and the distribution of the public transfers kept
the national conflicts warm.
Social and economic factors can to a
large extent explain the high degree of stability in Soviet Central Asia the
former colonies of Tsarist Russia up to the Gorbachev era. The absence of signs
of national opposition must be ascribed to the Soviet developmental policy.
Despite Central-Asia's peripheral position and high birth rate, it was
relatively protected against exploitation, and the region's republics profited
as a consistent recipient of resources transferred from other parts of the
USSR, probably during the whole Soviet era.
Its labour intensive agriculture, its relative degree of self-sufficiency with
regard to farm products, and its industry, deviating from the Soviet pattern
based on heavy industry, mainly geared to the needs of agriculture, and
dominated by small-scale production, raised popular consumption levels. In
addition mass education coupled with social mobility neutralized the local
intelligentsia. These are the factors explaining why the Central-Asians on the
whole remained locked in a pre-nationalist stage.
Central-Asia was in fact the most
conspicuous example of the developmental disproportions on the republic level,
disproportions which made it possible to employ an intellectual elite to manage
a large cultural infrastructure which was out of all reasonable proportion to
the local economy as such. This policy was dependent on a strong central power
relying on an extensive economic growth and gave the state the opportunity to
protect the interests the interests of the groups which were most receptive to
nationalist attitudes according to Western theories on the subject. Its result
was that a uniform institutional pattern of science, art and culture was
imposed on all union republics regardless of their different histories,
cultures and levels of industrial development. The disproportions which
followed from this were accentuated by ongoing demographic and ethnic
processes. At
the same time, the Soviet policy was not effective in weakening the influence of
sub-national identities connected with universal organizations clan, kinship,
family, neighborhood at the grass root level.
The Ukraine found itself in a position
completely opposite to that of Central-Asia. To be sure, here too the republic
leadership was prepared to create new job opportunities and open up careers to
the new intellectual strata. But here more than 10 per cent of the republic's
gross national income or perhaps as much as 14 per cent in the most recent
period was transferred to other republics; that is, national income produced in
the Ukraine exceeded the income used there by that amount, without any
compensation. At
the same time members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia experienced a crisis with
regard to their social mobility in the home republic.
The stability in the national relations
in the Ukrainian republic can not be accounted for by factors relating to the
economic redistribution phase in Rokkan's macro-model. The stabilizing
influence exerted by economic factors in the USSR as a whole probably came to
an end in the second half of the 1970s. In the same way as the European
"Great Depression" sharpened national opposition in the Habsburg
Monarchy, the stagnation of the economic growth in the late 1970s now contributed
to hardening the political atmosphere between the Soviet nations. This conflict
was particularly related to the professional interests and careers of
"native" elites of non-Russian origin.
As a conclusion is it quite reasonable
to maintain that an approach like that of Otto Bauer, focusing on the uneven development of capitalism as
one way of concretizing the economic problems with which state-builders have to
cope, is an apt theoretical starting point to explain the dynamics of national
conflict in Austria-Hungary.
I have maintained that in the case of
the Soviet Union the economic transfers partly explain the political stability
after the Second World War. Similar transfers also took place between regions
in Austria without the same effect. On the contrary, the unconcealed tug of war
concerning economic burdens and benefits rather sharpened the national
opposition here. Seen from a comparative point of view, economic factors are
therefore not a adequate explanation for the Soviet stability. In the Habsburg
Monarchy the same economic factors exerted their influence on the relationship
between the nations, but they did so within one particular political
arrangement which acted as a "superstructure" possessing a
"relative autonomy", and thus contributed to defining a quite unique
ethnic-topographical structure. Granted other political conditions, the
influences of the economic factors might have been quite different also in the
case of the USSR.
This leads us to the next set of
problems, as defined by Stein Rokkan's model.
CULTURAL STANDARDIZATION AND NATIONALISM
Stein Rokkan and the theory of "sociological
minorities"
This phase, or bundle of problems, of
the state building consists in an attempt from the centre to establish a
unified religious and linguistic standard. In the West the church was combined
with the state and its supra-national ties cut off. Latin was gradually
disappearing as the medium of written communication and was giving way to a
standardized vernacular language. As the population as a whole was joined to
the state centre, and losing their local or international cultural-symbolic
loyalty, "nation-building" was taking place.
If the process is successful, the
geographical area of the state's authority will also define the boundaries for
the population's sense of national identity and its culture. A new loyalty
being born, the classes were to a higher degree integrated and the social and
cultural segregation of the agrarian society was beginning to disappear through
a social communication process, transcending and integrating "high
culture" and "low culture" the educational system was of vital
importance here . Periphery based counter culture was thus wiped out.
Nation building represents, if seen from
below, a transfer of loyalty from the smaller primary group oriented social
units family, kinship, locality, household to aggregate units of a political
and administrative nature. This represents a departure from the earlier
patterns of social and political organization, with their old local and particularistic
mentality, which follows from a definite tendency to level down all
intermediate structures between state and individual and tie the influential
elites to the state's buraucratic structure. However, a state-supporting
elitist culture was not the only possible value system by which political
loyalty could be reoriented:
Ethnic minorities which have strong
integration and loyalty, can survive as non-assimilated pockets and constitute
potential threats to the dominating nation state "from below".
When, in the age of increasing reform
from above the "scientific state", in the terminology of Anthony
Smith, seeks to homogenize the population within its boundaries for
administrative purposes, it produces "sociological minorities". These
are groups with a distinctive culture within a large political unit, who become
permanently oppressed. The novelty in their situation is that they are made to
become conscious of the fact. The
crux of the matter was that the "scientific state" demanded a heavy
price for its benefits: it demanded the privatization of religion. This shaking
of trust in divine authority underlies the crisis of faith among the
intelligentsia, who turns to the creating of nations out of the
"sociological minorities".
As a way to approach such questions I
will discuss if, or in which degree the dominant nation’s culture and
nationalism influenced the policy toward the minorities? The answer to these
questions places nationality policy on a continuum which varies from strict
cultural standardization and discrimination against some distinctive subgroups
toward cultural tolerance, even including an active stimulation of cultural
differences.
Austria
and Hungary as representing two distinctive nationality policies
The development of the Habsburg Monarchy
from 1848 to 1918 was, before the disintegration phase of the Soviet Union, the
most important sequence in European history for the study of the political
consequences of the ethnicity principle. The fragmentary dynamics vis-à-vis the
state organization and the tension between state organization and nationalist
mobilization were, in other words, more strongly expressed here than in the
Soviet Union for the larger part of its history.
For certain comparative purposes
Austria-Hungary must, as mentioned above, be treated as two cases. In total
agreement with the differences between the official ideologies dominating
Austria and Hungary respectively, the political democratization, seen from a
nationality perspective, was proceeding along very different tracks in the two
imperial realms. While the Austrian nations were able to further develop their
national culture year after year, the opposite tendency was the case in
Hungary. The strongest Hungarian non-Magyarian national group was weaker in the
political and public arena than the weakest non-German one in Austria. While
there did not exist any "cultural standardization strategy" in
Austria, neither from the political elite nor from the German-Austrian side,
Hungary was the clearest example of such a cultural standardization strategy
outside the All-Russian Empire.
In Austria the new national movements
could develop spontaneously from small intellectual circles into large,
socially all-embracing mass movements. "The nations without a
history" i.e. without their own national upper class and without a
historically developed political institutional framework by the beginning of
the nineteenth century had the German nation's cultural dominance working
against them, a fact which came to expression in the secondary schools and at
the university level, plus in the widespread opinion that such nations were
incapable of creating their own higher culture. On the cultural level, the
construction of national infrastructures for the emerging nations was of prime
importance. It is therefore not a mere coincidence that the foundations of Slavic
philology, archeology, and ethnography were laid by Austrian Slavs during this
period. General compulsory education and the rise in the average standard of
this education contributed to hasten the nation building process, as did the
spreading of newspapers and publishing houses, pedagogic literature, specialist
literature and terminology. In Hungary the transition from embryonic national
movements to embracing mass movements was retarded by the use of political
instruments.
When the Habsburg Monarchy collapsed,
before Entente troops had been stationed on its territory, all national
movements in Cisleithania Austria proved strong enough to take power in their
own ethnical areas. Only in some particularly disputed areas did bloodshed
actually take place. In the Hungarian half of the realm, on the contrary, the
government of Karolyi was attempting to save historical Hungary with the
exception of Croatia and Vojvodina . The tradition of Magyar dominance and
political pressure proved sufficiently strong to secure the initial recognition
of the authority of the new government. Only the military invasion by the
"successor states" and the decisions and treaty of the peace conference
put an end to Magyar power. The elections after the First World War, moreover,
showed a deviation between the "objective" ethnical composition as
reflected in the census of these territories and the national political
orientation as reflected in the results of the elections on the subject of the
new post-war state.
From a comparative perspective, there
are periods in the history of Tsarist Russia characterized by a
"nationality policy" similar to that of Hungary. In these periods
there is an intensification of an elite-based cultural standardization of the
kind referred to in Rokkan's four-phase-model: In the wake of the eighteenth
century westernization, a stimulus toward an aggressive policy of integration,
including a violent missionary activity, was making itself felt. The reason for
this was a desire to unify, systematize and modernize the empire according to
Western standards, including the standard set by Western intolerance towards
non-Westerners. Still no particular national considerations existed with regard
to implementing a cultural Russification of non-Russians in this period;
functionally what was taking place was the same process of standardization
which was occurring during the enlightened autocracy in the West as a
prerequisite for the emergence of culturally homogeneous nation states.
Late nineteenth century Russification and Magyarization
The Russification of the last decades of
the nineteenth century can, as a point of departure, be understood as a
parallel to the Magyarization process in Hungary. Both cases were an
anticipatory strategy from groups, traditionally alien to national ideas but
now threatened by marginalization through social modernization and its
accompanying political mobilization. Neither the Russification nor the
Magyarization were influenced by the patterns given by the French and the
American revolutions. In both Russia and Hungary a superficial and illusionary
image of national unity was created by suppressing the national self-assertion
of the minorities.
In one basic aspect the Russian and the
Magyar policies of unification were, however, fundamentally different. In the
All-Russian case orthodox Christianity was the main instrument in the drive
toward a unitary state, not the nationalism of the dominant nation, as was the
case in Hungary. This must be explained by the fact that in Hungary the impulse
towards unification emanated more clearly from the interests of the upper
social groups - or ruling classes in an economic sense - while in Russia its
sources were to be found among the dynastic circles of the imperial or
patrimonial state bureaucracy.
In societies in which the majority of
the population lacks both political experience and education, one of the main
preoccupations when political minority programs are being formulated, will be
the language issue. The national movements within Austria-Hungary achieved very
different results in their struggle to carry out their language programs i.e.
the use of their own mother tongues . In Hungary national movements were
prevented from reaching phase C the phase of mass mobilization in Hroch's
terminology by political means. The strategy of "forced
Magyarization" of the Hungarian education system was in fact aiming at
impeding the non-Hungarian nationalities from developing their own educated
elites. This was openly acknowledged by the Magyar leaders. It is important to
emphasize the political linkage between the language question and the social
class conflicts i.e. social conflicts lying outside the sphere of a nation's
existence . Equally important was the linkage between nationality policy and
class policy. Thus the Magyars were on the defensive in a twofold sense: their
defense of their national dominance was in addition an anticipatory strategy
against a development that in the long run threatened to undermine the old
latifundia system of class dominance i.e. the political and social
ramifications of capitalist industrialization.
With the spreading of education and the
increase of industrialization, the Hungarian middle classes expanded by
absorbing newcomers. The new groups were of artisan and peasant origins and
bourgeois elements assimilated from other nationalities, the majority of which
consisted of Jews and Germans, but there were also Slavs and Roumanians.
Representatives of the suppressed nations considered, on their part, their own
"Magyarons" to be renegades. Magyar nationalism therefore became the
ingredient cementing the heterogeneous Hungarian middle and upper classes.
The crisis of Dualism in 1903-06 tied
the deeply discriminating election system to the preservation of the old
Habsburg army regulations in Hungary. Traditionally, the language of command Kommandosprache in the common army k.u.k. Arme had been German. However,
the Hungarian Parliament now put forward a bill which declared Magyarian to be
the language of command in the Hungarian part of the empire. After a
long-lasting conflict the King-Emperor threatened through the minority
government led by Fejevary, to introduce universal suffrage in Hungary if the
bill was not revoked. As a consequence the opposition surrendered its vehement
nationalism. This made clear that the perpetuation of the Monarchy depended on
the continued dominance of the Magyar agrarian upper class.
On the other side, the hegemonical position, or dominating influence of the
state structure over other societal domains, or spheres of social action, in
All-Russia, as later in the USSR, raises the following question: Were the
cultural norms implemented in the Russian case representing only the
ideological-cultural interests of the state regime as such, without a clear
reference to any particular social class in the population, in contrast to the
situation in Hungary? In my opinion this must be answered in the affirmative -
the driving force behind the development of Russian official nationalism was
the patrimonial bureaucracy itself - and the political positions of these two
presumptively "state-supporting nations" in the state structure were
therefore quite different in the two empires during their last decades.
Paradoxically, during the last decades of the nineteenth century the relative
position of the Russians in the hierarchy of All-Russia's nations was becoming,
according to my concepts, more and more similar to that of the Germans of the
contemporary Austria. A development in the opposite direction of the one the
Russians went through was occurring from a different starting point for the
German part - in such a way that a convergence was taking place.
The Contradictory Nature of Russian and German identities
The relative position of the Russians in
the All-Russian Empire had, up to the middle of the nineteenth century, been
the opposite of that of the Austrian-Germans in the Habsburg Monarchy. The use
of non-Russians in offices of confidence in the patrimonial administration,
obstructed the Russian nobility from constituting itself as an independent
political force against the Emperor-Tsar. While the Russians made up a
considerably larger part of the total population than the Germans, the more
purely patrimonial state in All-Russia rendered possible the limitation of
their social and political influence.
In the All-Russian, as opposed to the
Hungarian case, the efforts to build a unitary state can be described as a "national
leveling", the result of which was the strengthening of a group previously
discriminated against, namely the Russians. This was done in a way that
affirmed the patrimonial system of government and the political principle of
autocracy, and implied that no formal rights were granted to any nationality,
including the Russians. In addition to them, a number of minority groups in the
category inorotsy non-natives in Central-Asia also benefited by their
annexation by the All-Russian empire during the Russification campaign of the
late nineteenth century.
To the Estonian and Latvian "nations without a history", who lacked
an upper class of their own ethnicity, the mounting pressure on the German
Baltic nobility for the first time opened up the possibility to constitute
themselves as separate nations, particularly within education and culture, but
also in the economic domain.
Russian nationalism remained closely
tied to the social and political contradictions of the Russian society
throughout the entire Tsar-period. Towards the end of the eighteenth century
there had been three variants of Russian proto-national feelings. These came to
expression through three different social strata, or classes: the predominantly
politically oriented state patriotism of the upper ecclesiastical and
aristocratic strata which were closely linked to the state; the religious and
xenophobic, potentially anti-state feelings of the broader masses; and a
culturally, linguistically and historically motivated national consciousness of
segments of the secularized, Western-oriented, educated elite.
In the nineteenth century these three
forms of Russian national identity remained separate from one another, and a
fusion into one single political and social nationalism never took place.
Russia remained divided in its national identity. The state could not make use
of slavophile nationalism for its own ends and at the same time did not succeed
in transforming the traditional state patriotism to a source capable of binding
all strata and groups together, nor was the national consciousness of the
Russian elite capable of creating a lasting bond neither to the state nor to
masses of the Russian people. Nationalism in pre-revolutionary Russia, being
more a state of mind than a political force, never succeeded in fulfilling the
socially integrating functions it had in the old "historical nations"
of Western Europe. Its relationship to the state was one of fateful ambivalence
which caused it "for the most part to remain a cultural and psychological
rather than a political phenomenon".
During the nineteenth century the
development of the Austrian state of affairs was, as seen from the
German-Austrian point of view, the other way around. Two factors were of
importance: The disintegration of the German cultural and political hegemony in
the Habsburg Monarchy, and the role of Great German nationalism, first in the
German Confederation, afterwards in das Reich. Before 1815 "the Old
Austrians", were feeling both as a part of the German nation and as good
Austrian patriots. However, a constantly increasing gulf was gradually
developing between the Austrian state patriotism and Great German patriotism in
the course of the nineteenth century. Unlike all other groups in the Habsburg
Monarchy the German-Austrians could not, moreover, on their part, clearly
differentiate between their own nationality, with its particular interests, and
their Habsburg identity. Instead they found themselves permanently torn between
a universal state ideology and their particularly German identity.
As for the USSR, Stalin's attack on
non-Russian nationalism as well as his use of Russian nationalism can be given
a plausible interpretation within the context of Soviet modernization. A
rehabilitation of the position of the Russian population element was taking
place as a part of the post-revolutionary state building project, after a
period in which the "decolonizing aspect" of the bolshevik revolution
had entailed a condemnation of Great Russian nationalism as "the worst form
of deviation from the correct leninist course".
The change was brought about more as a response from the centre to the
anti-Russian feelings among the political leaders and party members in the
non-Russian republics due to the violent measures used by Stalin to enforce his
revolution from above, than it was an abandonment of old objectives on grounds
of principle. Stalin accused the national elites in the non-Russian republics
of "bourgeois nationalism" and liquidated them completely. The purge
extended throughout the party from the highest to the lowest level. It as well
extended to those outside the apparatus particularly members of the
intelligentsia who might serve as alternate sources of leadership. They were
replaced by new elites, socialized in complete agreement with the new
non-egalitarian, centralized and Russian inspired Soviet ideology. With local
leadership decimated, control over the non-Russian nations was secured through
"foreign cadres", that means, mainly Russians
who were placed in positions of responsibility.
With Stalin's death in 1953 it seemed as
though the authority of "the Russian elder brother" was complete and
the question of nationality consequently solved. The national tensions that had
been revealed by the war, were by all appearances eliminated.
Not even at that point of time, however,
was the official policy formalized on the basis of the Russian nation, but on
Soviet patriotism and socialism. This form of state nationalism, consequently,
was building more upon the old state patriotism of the patrimonial, All-Russian
autocracy, than on nationalism in the modern sense. Also in the case of the
USSR, the achieved unity was illusory and short-lived, despite Stalin's use of
methods that none of the rulers of the old authoritarian states, such as
Tsar-Russia, had at their disposal.
Moreover, it soon was to be clear that
Stalin's successors were more sensitive about national differences than what
the apparent national peacefulness immediately after the World War suggested.
Soviet state building and Russian nationalism
As for the Russians, the internal
contradictions and tensions afflicting their national identity was probably
perpetuated into the post-war period, despite the mobilization of Russian
nationalism under "the Great Patriotic war". Lenin himself was a
Russian, the Revolution had been Russian, consequently the Russians were
supposed to be typical representatives of the Soviet citizen, and the Russian
culture was treated accordingly. While the flag waving from the governmental
quarters of every non-Russian Soviet republic was a cross between the titular
nation's original national symbol and the Soviet banner, only the red Soviet
banner itself was waving from Moscow's Kremlin. Russian national pride could,
moreover, be attached to the international strength of the USSR and its
presumed prestige as a superpower. While non-Russians could easily describe
their problems within the Soviet system in terms of national oppression by
attributing their difficulties to a "stupid Russian speaking
bureaucracy", such an escape route was more difficult for the Russians to
embark upon.
My answer to the question concerning the
role of Russian nationalism in the state building projects of All-Russia and
the USSR, is that none of the Russian social groups, nor the state and its
elites, gave voice to a nationalism directed against non-Russian ethnic groups
before 1917. Both before and after 1917 the state was at times pursuing a
policy of standardization, aiming at reducing all subjects to a common
denominator in accordance with a non-ethnic model. Before 1917 orthodox
Christianity was the distinguishing element of this policy and after 1917 the
marxist-leninist ideology. Even if the medium of this supra-national Soviet
culture, as it was developing in the USSR during the last two generations, was
the Russian language, it is still possible to argue that it was not so much a
Russian as a meta-culture above ethnic distinctions. It therefore seems
unreasonable to interpret the Soviet nationality policy during the
post-stalinist period as consistently offensive and assimilating towards the
non-Russian ethnic groups. Rather it expressed a strategy which sought to
balance the non-Russian ethnic groups and the Russian majority.
This answer must also be seen against
the background of the Russians still not having reached a stage of
reconciliation and integration between the different components constituting
their collective identity. This state of dissension was sharpened, evolving
into something like an identity crisis, during the Gorbachev era.
Continuity and break in the Soviet case
The dual structure of the
Austrian-Hungarian political system was of course not present neither in the
All-Russian nor in the Soviet polity. The question then is which of the two
Habsburg "nationality policies" was closer to the Soviet case. The
answer is, as suggested above, that both parallels are to be found as
contradictory, mutually undermining components of the Soviet policy, the first
one being more influential at some points of time, the second one at others.
A periodization of Soviet policy based
on the dynamics between the two components is possible. The ethnic-linguistic
policy was thus marked by three phases: The first phase, the policy of
"indigenization" korenizatsiya
, was characterized by a large degree of linguistic pluralism and up-grading
and alphabetizing of several minority languages.
The Latin alphabet - "the alphabet of the world revolution" - was
chosen.
In this work no resources were spared and the efforts can hardly be described
as anything but an attempt at a highly genuine linguistic pluralism with a
basis in reality, as the recognition of various separate languages - even when
they were closely related, expressed as in the case of Tatar and Bashkir, or
Kazakh and Kirgiz.
In the second phase, the study of Russian language became obligatory for
non-Russians, a change to the Cyrillic alphabet took place, and linguistic
pluralism was succeeded by bilingualism.
The third phase was marked by a pronounced desire to construct a meta-culture
in the country as a whole, with a partial de-ethnicized Russian language as the
medium. The use of Russian language was increased within the higher echelons of
the educational system and in official domains related to the all-union level.
In the first of the periods mentioned
above "the Austrian element" was dominant, in the second one it was
weakened, in the third it is tempting to jump to the conclusion of a parallel
with Hungary, but the mixture is more diffuse and contradictory, as is also the
tension between the components, and various interpretations can therefore be
applied to different geographical regions and functional groups. On the
individual level, the perspective will vary according to each Soviet citizen's
national background, due to the fact that the tension between the
"Austrian" and the "Hungarian" component in a very direct
way was being built into and reflected in the Soviet state structure. A
departure from the Austrian pattern was the way in which the recently formed,
or newly transformed, nations not only were recognized and stimulated, but even
institutionalized as the only officially acknowledged criterion of differential
treatment of Soviet citizens. The internal passport system which listed the
owner's nationality had a negative impact on integration. It made nationality
instrumental when dealing with the educational authorities and essential for
the distribution of labour. By actively consolidating the nations and using
them as the strategic mediating institutions between the citizens and the
state, the Soviet state made nationality into perhaps the best possible basis
for collective political action in a period of social crisis and collapse. To
which degree did these fluctuations and ambiguities reflect a deviation or a
continuity compared to the All-Russian Empire?
Seen in a longue duree nationality perspective, the Soviet Union and Tsarist
Russia in many respects seem to have been moving along paralleled tracks. These
tracks also led to similar terminal points. The Soviet nationality policy thus
had several features which quite obviously match the pre-revolutionary
patterns, such as the vacillation between flexibility and stimulation of
non-Russian groups, on the one hand, and a policy of cultural regimentation and
Russification in order to remove impediments to modernization, on the other:
Not to mention a comprehensive cooperation with loyal non-Russian elites -
which, just as in All-Russia, contributed to the creation of a supra-national
social stratum consisting of groups whose loyalty was to the leadership in St.
Petersburg before 1917.
The 1930s and the Soviet industrialization
involved, however, a radical departure from the pattern set by Tsarist Russia
by a dramatic reconstruction of the "entities" - i.e. the populations
and elites that the nationality policy of the USSR was to handle. One of the
officially pronounced long term aims of the Soviet development policy from now
on was the creation of a uniform social structure throughout the country.
As part of an effort to prevent the
socio-economic dynamics generated by Soviet modernization from resulting in a
political fragmentation of the totalitarian political structure, there was
exercised increasing pressure on the non-Russian social elites to adapt to a
supranational standard dominated by the Russian language and culture. Even if
the Russification of the language was successful to a considerable degree, it
is much more essential to ask what kind of connection that existed between this
linguistic mobilization and political support of the system.
The cultural sector gradually became a
cause for anxiety, seen from the point of view of the non-Russians. The
emphasis on "bilingualism", was a fact already in the 1930s but was
intensified during Brezhnev's "mature socialism" with its compulsory
use of the Russian language. Attempts were made at establishing Russian as the
medium of inter-ethnic communication within as many sectors and functions as
possible and as the main language of science, technology and culture. Seen from
one perspective, this use of a lingua
franca was of course a sheer necessity in a multinational state. But even
if there was a considerable increase in the use of the Russian language, to
many members of the minority peoples the dominant position of Russian
symbolized their own subordinate status and was perceived as a threat to their
mother tongues. Consequently there were signs of resentment and disdain towards
the Russian language. By 1978 there had already been massive demonstrations in
Tbilisi demanding that the titular language should be designated in the
constitution of the Georgian republic as the state tongue, a demand which
Moscow had to satisfy.
Saying that the chances for a genuine
"Russification" to succeed were small, would thus be a clear
understatement. The use of the Russian language as the "cement" of
the Union impeded, rather than promoted the emergence of a trans-national
political community, in fact it demonstrated the precarious foundation of the
whole Soviet state building process. The
first open manifestation of the shifting of balance between centre and
periphery was to be the passing of local language laws in 1988-89 under
Gorbachev, when six other republics adopted legislation establishing a state
language. Indigenous cultural, educational, and scientific elites were
particularly eager to maintain their own languages as the languages of
discourse in their professions.
Efforts at cultural integration interpreted on the basis
of Rokkan's model
How does this relate to the Rokkan
model? As already mentioned, nationalism according to Rokkan's model may be
interpreted as a political and cultural conflict between centre and periphery.
At first sight, the Soviet experience seems to confirm the relevance of this
model. This assumption, however, needs to be further questioned. According to
Stein Rokkan, it was of decisive importance for the development and historical
fate of a language to emerge as a relatively stable norm for a territory before
the development of technologies for mass reproduction. This was the case with
the Russian language. The prospects of survival for the peripheral languages
were far weaker, unless they had reached to establish an institutionally
anchored set of norms, in education and printing, before the industrial
revolution. Only
very few non-Russian languages had in fact reached such a stage so early.
According to Rokkan's schemata, the new geographical mobility in the wake of
industrialization would expose large parts of the rural vernacular-speaking
populations to the dominating languages of the industrialized areas. But in the
Soviet case, the policy of the centre itself of strengthening these vernaculars
broke the expected pattern, rendering an unusual outcome possible. This
explains the continued existence on a massive scale of ethnic pockets which had
resisted integration within the Soviet system.
The prospects of success for a political
integration process depends, however, according to Stein Rokkan's model, on the
relative duration of time between the different phases of the territorial
consolidation. The efforts of the Soviet authorities to forge a unifying and
integrating "Russian" meta-culture during the 1960s and 1970s "the
Soviet People as a new historical community" came too late. The national
consolidation of the cultural sub-entities as a consequence of "the
interaction between the industrial and national revolutions" i.e. the
intermediary variables when Stein Rokkan constructed his conceptual maps which
traced the political variations within Western Europe was already a fact - a
fact which to a large extent was a result of the favorable the conditions given
by the Soviet nationality policy.
As a conclusion it can be stated that
that stability in the Soviet case can not be explained by referring to phase
II, i.e. the phase of cultural standardization, in the Rokkan model. Moreover
it can be argued that linguistic mobilization may be inversely correlated to political stability - that if, in an
attempt to integrate ethnic minorities, language assimilation is pursued too
assiduously without a parallel political, social and economic equalization, the
development of political loyalty may actually be impeded.
In addition the Soviet stability is also pointing, in my opinion, to another
problem connected to the application of Rokkan's model to societies outside
Western Europe: the cumulation-of-challenges-thesis. This thesis sees the
success of state building as depending on the passing of an adequate amount of
time before one phase in the process is followed by the next. This passage of
time is a necessary condition for the emerging state to be able to cope
separately with each set of challenges referring to different societal domains.
The question is whether one must not also allow for interaction and penetration
from one of those domains to the other, i.e. for the hegemonic and encompassing
influence of one domain, such as politics, law or cultural practices or economy
on social stability and integration? For example the overwhelming dominance of
Islam, Hinduism, Christianity and Judaism in their respective classical eras,
implies not only a thorough immersion of religious teachings into the fields of
law, rulership, family life etc., but also their deep penetration into the
economy. Max Weber also pointed to cases where certain types of rulership
became so deeply entrenched in the social fabric that they also dominated
patterns of action in economic and religious domains, for example the
manorial-feudal rulership in the medieval Occident.
In the Soviet case the superior
influence of the political structure, the primacy of political design over
other domains, and especially over inter-ethnic relations, seems to be a
phenomenon that needs to be investigated more precisely.
MILITARY-ADMINISTRATIVE PENETRATION
Some differences between East and West, and between Russia
and Central-Europe
In the context of the three cases under
consideration here, this phase can be analyzed in greater detail from a Weberian
perspective. State-building in the more restricted sense is then to be
understood as constituting a triangular conflict between the supreme ruler, his
administrative staff and the population. Max Weber emphasizes explicitly that
he is mainly interested in dominance only so far as it is manifested through
administration; i.e in its instrumental aspects.
The main focus in an analysis of
territorial integration, successful or not, is on the use of various strategies
and power resources associated with the means and positions of administration.
The process of political penetration took place in Western Europe through the
formation of non-territorial based elites in the absolute monarchies. With the
words of Otto Hinze: "Absolutism ... can be regarded as concomitant of
that process of political organization in which a conglomerate of separate
territories becomes fused into a unitary political structure ... The efforts of
monarchical authority to fuse these parts into a whole which was
administratively, financially and militarily unified, produced modern
absolutism". A
major part of Max Weber's analysis is dedicated to the way in which armies can
be set up and held together. It describes the administrative problems military
conquerors will have to face when trying to integrate a conquered territory,
and the factors which determine the size of an army, i.e. why the military skeleton of a state tends
to be large or small, centralized or decentralized, collegiate or hierarchical.
With territorial expansion a dynamics
towards progressive fragmentation takes effect. Transferring more authority to
subordinate links makes it increasingly difficult for the prince or the
commanding leader of the state to maintain his personal control of the
administration and his subordinates. At the same time, these subordinates start
to receive material rewards on a larger scale and on a more permanent basis
than before. This increases their social status and consequently also their
independence of the prince as their supreme overlord as well.
When comparing the Central European and
Russian zones, a purely instrumental view of state integration is clearly
inadequate to answer questions relating to long-term historical development. Introducing
Antonio Gramsci's concept "cultural hegemony" as a supplementary
analytic device, makes it however possible to analyze the relation between the
phases of political penetration and cultural integration in Rokkan's model more
thoroughly. Antonio Gramsci's cultural hegemony refers to a structural
differentiation in European state development between the "Eastern"
and the "Western front" first and foremost Russia versus the West -
i.e. between societies basing political power on force, and those basing it on
consensus, in which domination therefore must be understood in a wider context.
The civil society in the West is a highly complex subsystem, which allows its
intellectual life to be controlled by means of purely cultural means, a control
that is one variety of the process of cultural integration as described by
Rokkan.
To Gramsci, this concept of
"cultural hegemony" is underlying the relations between social
classes. Each class seeks to secure a governing posistion, not only in public
institutions, but also with regard to opinions, values and standards which are
acknowledged by the majority. Oppressed classes must, before they can gain
political power for themselves, conquer their own cultural hegemony by
establishing their own values in the public opinion - since a political victory
is impossible without a cultural hegemony. In this process, an oppressed class
is dependent on its own "organic intellectuals", that is to say those
intellectuals who do not simply describe social life "scientifically"
from the outside, but who use the language of culture to "express from
within" experiences and feelings which the masses can not express for
themselves.
Also in the case of the relations
between the different nations of the Habsburg Empire Antonio Gramsci's ideas
are highly pertinent. His theories are also related to Otto Bauer's classical
distinction between two different social structures, i.e. "nations with
history" "socially complete" and the "the nations without
history" "socially incomplete" nations. This distinction
constitutes a historical basis for the development of the nationality question,
tying it explicitly to a social class analysis and a class perspective.
The German-Magyarian hegemony in the
Dual Monarchy had emerged from a long historical development influenced and
determined by the German dynasty, bureaucracy, army and capitalism on the one
side, and Magyar feudalism on the other. Despite the fact that the Habsburg
administration and political system influenced the basis of this hegemony, it
is unreasonable to maintain that is was based on pure political coercion
towards the other nationalities only:
For centuries the Habsburg policy
emphasized flexibility and a "calculated indifference" towards the
subjects of the monarchy. The centralizing and standardizing modernization
policies between 1849 and 1860 was the one and only exception, not the rule.
"Instead of trying to invade and swallow up the society, or more
correctly, the societies, the state tried as much as possible to avoid any kind
of contact with them in the extent to which this was possible."
Outside and beside this administrative
apparatus, Habsburg allowed the many societies and cultures linguistic
communities of the empire to lead their own lives. This opened up to "the
nations without history" a cultural space which made possible a cultural
and political consolidation prior to their attaining of national independence
and states of their own, a space from which new national movements was to
emerge, acting as "independent variables" in the nation-building
processes.
The German-Magyar political hegemony in
the Dual Monarchy was not based on any numerical superiority of these two
nations either. The Austrian half of the Empire was the product of German
colonization, and the culture integrating its economy, administration and army
was German. The situation in the Hungarian half of the empire was similar. The
feudal structure, by which the large landowning interests were able to
determine the content of the country's political and social life, was based on
the Magyar nobility, the non-Magyar nobility that was completely assimilated
into the traditions and ideology of the Magyar upper classes, and on the middle
class. For all intents and purposes, all "nations without history" in
the Habsburg Empire were retarded in their national development up to the
middle of 19th century by the German-Austrian and Magyar cultural hegemony and
economic dominance.
The opposition of the non-dominating
nations was mainly directed against the two leading nations' economic and
cultural monopoly. Twenty years after Ausgleich,
however, the German relative position in Cicleithania was weakened to the
advantage of the other national groups; the German culture no longer had
supra-national pretensions. The German-Austrian position as a national group up
to 1918 was one of the first among equals, not of superiority. In Hungary the
decisive "non-event" was the collapse of the Magyar cultural hegemony
which failed to come. This hegemony lasted until 1918 because it was bolstered
up to 1918 by political means.
Russian state and empire building in a comparative
perspective
In All-Russia, the state carried out a
decisive role in the integration the Empire. As the chief agent of Russian
imperialism, the army embodied the presence of the Russian state in the
different corners of the Empire, thereby giving the administration as a whole a
distinct military cast.
This dominant position of the army in All-Russia must be seen in the context of
the country's relative social and economic backwardness as compared to Western
and Central Europe of the time. Part and parcel of this backwardness was the
weakness of the civilian parts of the Russian state - in Weberian terms: the
absence of a strong bureaucracy, or an institutionally anchored set of
formalized regulations, which were capable of effectively integrating and
pacifying its enormous territory.
Antonio Gramsci's distinction between West and East therefore seems to of
pinpoint the essence of the difference in territorial integration between the
Habsburg monarchy and All-Russia.
One perspective first represented by
Otto Hinze and later further developed among others by neo-marxist authors as
Perry Anderson and Theda Skocpol, may throw additional light on our subject at
this point. This tradition emphasizes that an element of interaction operates,
where the international state system modifies the building of individual
states. This happens when innovations in the art of warfare and in exercise of
authority are transferred from one country to others through warfare. Taxes and
consequently a unified national administration are necessitated by pressures
that the external state system places upon the rulers in the form of military
competition or threats of conquests. The political elites, therefore make their
maneuvers in the intersection between pressures of international conditions and
the domestic class-structured economies, from which they must extract resources
and build their administrations. States in underdeveloped and backward
societies, such as Tsarist-Russia, attempted to keep up with more economically
advanced societies in the field of military technology. The Russians could not
in the long run rely on buying the arms they needed from abroad, accordingly
they had to build these industries themselves, in order to secure a constant
supply. This factor strengthened the position of the military in All-Russia
further as compared to their colleagues in Western Europe.
It is difficult to imagine how Russia -
lying outside the European system as summarized by Rokkan's centre-culture axis
and his West-East centre-economy axis - how Russia can be integrated into a
perspective building on Rokkan's European model without taking into account the
element of international interaction mentioned above. If it is taken into
account, however, Russia's political development as a backward country can be
explained in the context of the broader European development. The military part
of the state apparatus has been "lying ahead of" "operezhenie" the stagnating
society, as a compensation for its weaknesses, and has perhaps itself in turn
decisively contributed to its stagnation by confiscating an unproportional
large part of its resources and economic surplus. In a very interesting
discussion among Soviet historians in the late 1960s and early 1970s it was
recognized that the state cannot be dismissed as a mere element of the
superstructure, and the prevailing general formulas were brought into question.
The debate was inspired among other things by a revival of the category of Asiatic
mode of production which had been suppressed in the 1930s. As generally known
Marx did consider the Asiatic mode of production to be a static order that
could not generate capitalism without a violent shock from the outside. As
early as 1966 Iurii Gashiuriant referred to the temptation of re-examining the
whole Russian history on the basis of the concept of the Asiatic mode of
production. It
was thus maintained from some of the participants that the Russian absolute
state was a reactionary force and did not clear the way for the transition from
feudalism to capitalism, as in France A. L. Shapiro . The state used capitalism
without having any part in it and must be understood as "an intermediary
type between Asian despotism and European absolutism" P. V. Volubuev.
The term mnogoukladnost "multi-structuredness",
i.e. the very complex interaction of socioeconomic formations in Russian
society was coined, referring to the Russian backwardness, the entrenchment of
"feudalism" which for a long time blocked, hindered and distorted the
development of capitalism and the powerful compensatory role of the state.
All-Russia as a colonization project was wearing the stamp of backwardness as well.
Just as the administration of All-Russia
had a more military form than the societies characterized by more elaborate
bureaucracies, the situation inside Russia was that the degree of
militarization was proportional to the distance from the centre.
The militarization of the administration was a fact not only in Russia proper
but also in the Empire. Lacking the organizational bonds tying the overseas
colonies to their motherlands - i.e. the powerful trading companies and
concessionaries - the Russian "colonial administration" was dominated
by the army and the army by powerful and strong individual leaders as namestniki,
voevody, vice-regents governors or military governors-general.
The army was made up by slavs and the officer corps endorsed the official state
patriotism. This kept in check possible opposition and guaranteed the loyalty
of the local pillars, i.e. the co-opted elites of the non-Russian peripheries.
In the European expansion throughout the
19th century, it was certainly a common trait that the generals led the way
more than ever: Kaufmann in Turkestan was matched by Custer in Dakota and
Kitchener in the Sudan. The often ideologically motivated expansion, i.e.
"the white man's burden" to carry the torches of civilization to all
corners of the world - however at this stage often boiled down to the conquest
of territories which the companies of earlier times had deliberately left
untouched, since no profits were expected there.
In this perspective, however, a main
difference between the Russian and the Western European expansion seems to be
the high degree of uniformity characterizing the administrative arrangements of
both "the colonial centre" and its peripheries in the All-Russian
case. This, rather than the deviations from the Western colonial pattern, was
distinguishing Russia in a comparative perspective. This interpretation is
strengthened by the fact that instituting supreme state ownership of all land
in "the colonial areas" was an important aspect of the
standardization and uniformization of the empire. Such state ownership of land
was, according to the Weberian tradition, a definitory characteristic of
patrimonialism, the most marked feature of the Russian state.
The comparative perspective thus seems to give new meaning to the great
historian Kliuchevskii's word that "Russian history is the history of a
country colonizing itself".
Political integration in Tsarist Russia and the USSR
The uniformity of the organizational
patterns of the state before 1917, continued into the Soviet period, and was
further elaborated so as to fit the new state building processes. Right from
the start it was the policy of the Soviet regime to give the citizens of each
titular nation preferential treatment concerning admittance to higher education
and recruitment to leadership and administrative positions inside its own
territory. In order to pursue a policy of equal opportunities for titular
nations in every single republic, each of them was, as earlier mentioned,
equipped with the same set of institutions. Leadership and administrative
positions in almost all of the republics were in the hands of the titular
nations from the 1950s and their share of leadership positions were greater
than their share of the population as a whole.
Although Soviet federal republics had very little power compared to all-union
institutions, the multi-national nature of the Soviet state had real
significance for social mobility and for the existence of national hierarchies.
One difference between the Soviet states
and the old regime, in a state building perspective, was the following: After
1917, an increasingly planned economy was requiring a much higher degree of
formal bureaucratization than both l'ancien regime and the contemporary market
oriented economic systems of the West. The Soviet Union consequently shared
with giant organizations everywhere an urge to organize all human activity
rationally. It also shared with them a thoroughly authoritarian political
structure, in which the elite is above control from the lower-ranking members
of the organization.
To Max Weber bureaucracy, seen from a
territorial point of view, was an exceptionally efficient organizational device
in the realization of political aims, because of its capacity to integrate and
keep organizations together. The bureaucratic state became predominant because
of its functional superiority in pacifying large territories. Externally it is efficient
in its capacity for supporting large armies with equipment, and internally it
shows great resilience in the face of the threat of disintegration from civil
war or revolution.
Of course, the political struggle for
control of the administrative apparatus in Western Europe did not cease with
the breakthrough of bureaucracy; it has only been transferred to new arenas, on
which bureaucrats, or expert officials, tend to make their political superiors
into mere figureheads. Knowledge of official forms, procedures, appeal
channels, and precedents can easily degenerate into special
"techniques" of bureaucratic abuse. The internal dynamics of
bureaucracy tend to transform its individual departments into interest groups
representing only their own restricted field. Instead of serving the common
good, each begins to fight for its own specialized interests, against the
interests of other departments. This results in a systematic displacement of
goals where partial concerns will win over the interest of the whole. More
generally, the necessity of delegating powers from the centre to the periphery,
from the top to the lower-ranking levels, contains an objective dynamics
towards a progressive fragmentation of authority, that is to say, towards absence
of stability in the relations between the centre and the peripheries of the
state.
As a consequence of the Soviet policy,
each union republic gained "all of the characteristics of former independent
states having lost their independence"
. In spite of this, in the same way as the All-Russian state had succeeded in
preserving the loyalty of both the military governors and the co-opted local
non-Russian elites, in the Soviet case the non-Russian members of the all union
elite accommodated themselves to the multi-national state, and became its most
strategic pillars after the purges of the 1930s.
Which kinds of constraints were brought
about by the Soviet reliance on elite politics, and how can these constraints
explain the remarkable stability of the peripheries? Which were the mechanisms
counteracting the dynamics towards fragmentation? Did the Soviet elite itself
have characteristics which prevented independent political action by its individual
members? How can the remarkable internal loyalty and external concord of the
Soviet elite be accounted for?
Uni-hierarchical and multi-hierarchical societies
In a comparative perspective, the Soviet
uni-hierarchical system of social stratification and social control was a
unique way of organizing an industrial society. All the institutions were parts
of one single hierarchy where the state gave both the criterion for the ranking
of social groups as such and for the transfer of individuals from one group to
another. The common link was the system of the nomenclature, in which the party's personnel department assigned
people to jobs in all sub-hierarchies. The Habsburg Monarchy lacked such tools
for social engineering - it was unable to manipulate the social structures of
its nations and to integrate its elites in a way comparable to that of the
USSR.
As state building projects, there are
some conspicuous historical parallels between the All-Russian Empire and the
later USSR. Both Peter I and Joseph Stalin was highly active as builders and
warriors; in the reign of Peter I the nobility was mobilized to carry out the
emperor's comprehensive military and civilian projects. Joseph Stalin, on his
side, played a major role in creating the Soviet privileged estate, or ruling
class, i.e. the nomenclature. The
Soviet system eliminated almost every income from property, and the state
decided on on the scales of wages and salaries and on the distribution of
privileges in general. The state also reconciled all the more or less
conflicting demands from the numerous interest groups, including the
nationalities, inside one single hierarchy. Stalin's nomenclature can consequently be seen as a parallel to, or an
elaboration of Peter's famous table of ranks. This table of ranks formalized
the gentry's obligation and became an effective device in forging one single
state supporting estate soslovie,
the dvoryanstvo, through the
co-optation of the non-Russian social elites. Thus there was created, in the
Soviet case, a multi-national elite, within which there were national ladders
to climb.
In Tsar-Russia the state was continually
confirming already existing privileges for social groups and local elites,
granting new ones when expanding into new territories. Even if the recruitment
of non-Russians elites was indispensable for the Russian state in order to
retain its newly conquered territories, this strategy must also be understood
as part of the patrimonial techniques of domination. Openings for non-Russians
in the All-Russian elite, was to be found not only in the periphery, but also
in the centre, a fact which created a heterogeneous supra-national elite. No
other European aristocracy had as weak "indigenous roots" as the
Russian one:
Peter the Great and his successors, while
introducing technological changes, continued with the well-established pattern
of bypassing the members of the old administrative staff and the old nobility
in favor of foreign-born and "low born" groups when they renewed
their administrative staff. The most important posts in St. Petersburg were
filled by members of different non-Russian groups, such as Tatars, Germans from
the Baltics and Swedes from Finland. The court language was French in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, not Russian. This gave rise to a Russian culture open
to members of all educated classes, regardless of national background.
In the same way in the Brezhnev era,
non-Russians could be found strategically placed among all the most important
pillars of the empire such as in the army, the police, the state and the party,
and among members of other all-union structures and institutions, that is to
say in the central bureaucracy with its sub-divisions and territorial
ramifications. Seen from this point of view, it is an open question whether the
essential features of the social class structure had been fundamentally changed
at all by 70 years of ideological domination emphasizing a "socialist
development".
The All-Russian-Soviet parallel was also
reflected in thoughts concerning the polity. From Peter I on the state concept
rested on an idea of All-Russia as one vast monarchy, although consisting of a
large number of nationalities and territories. This was expressed through the
differentiation in the official title of the imperial majesty.
In Tsarist Russia the rulers and state
officials preferred to look upon the ethnical
conglomerate of the population as an un-differentiated mass of subjects.
The adjective rossiiskaya had a
special meaning in the formation of the Russian state - and in the
development of the Russian identity. The
All-Russian Empire was known as Rossiiskaya
imperiya, which implied the idea of a unitarian, although multi-national
state under a Russian monarch, and of a particular kind of loyalty to this
state on the part of its subjects, independent of their ethnic and cultural
background. The concept had a territorial, as opposed to ethnic, connotations
and referred to the geographical extent of the state's authority and
possessions. Rossiiskaya was
distinguished from the plain and ordinary adjective russkaya, which indicated the particular Russian component of the
population.
The dominating culture of All-Russia
was, according to the view of Slavophils, not genuinely Russian, but a thin
Western-European varnish, introduced and upheld from the outside, in much the
same way as its main seat, St. Petersburg, was characterized by a slavish
imitation of Western Europe. Consequently this ethnic-cultural Russian
nationalism was hardly a suitable ideological basis for the state; it came
instead to be regarded as a permanent threat against the ruling elite,
persistently suppressed and in general devoid of independent political
significance.
The Russian state was, as formerly
mentioned, expanding continuously beyond the original Russian core areas.
Russia's central position on the Euro-Asiatic continent by turns naturally
invited confrontations and withdrawals in relation to both Europe and Asia.
Finns and Turks were under Russian political authority, already at a very early
stage of the state-building process, and later on the number of non-Russian
groups was permanently increasing. Only in the original Russian core areas, in
the North Western part of the later USSR, was ethnic unification taking place
through natural assimilation processes; elsewhere continual migrations were
only increasing the local ethnic and religious heterogeneity. The geographical
expansion, therefore, was perceived more as a spontaneous and natural process,
than a result of a conscious policy, and in the early stages of empire building
there was very small awareness of the fact that Russia was about to become a
multi-national polity.
State concepts before and after 1917
The dual nature of the political
development of All-Russia, as one single and continuously overarching process,
encompassing both state formation and "colony building" as two
closely interrelated and simultaneous aspects, not as two distinct processes
separate in time and space, as in Western-Europe - this characteristic of the
Russian state did not remain without influence on the concepts and methods of
the Russian administrators. The political elites of St. Petersburg hardly
distinguished between domestic and colonial policies. From an administrative -
or rather a political - perspective, the empire was regarded as a unified
whole. It encompassed an enormous area, especially against the background of
the means of transportation and communication available at the time. This vast
extension was generating a urgent need of regional decentralization, i.e. of
delegating certain functions to local institutions in the peripheries. Again it
is conspicuous that compared to countries such as France and Prussia, and above
all to the Habsburg Monarchy, the administrative build-up of Russian empire was
dominated by a basic uniformity in all its regions.
The Rossiiskaya-concept
was allowing for a considerable non-Russian cultural influence in the
All-Russian system. The political structure depended however on a powerful
ideology for continuous mass support. The only ideology which was sanctified by
the church was not based on orthodox religion as such, but centered around the
person of the Tsar as the father of All-Russia. However, there was also a
powerful folklore mythology worshipping the Tsar's Fatherhood of the nation.
The views were deeply divided concerning the interpretation of the Tsar as a
political symbol of autocracy: as the absolute monarch of divine right, Gosudar Imperator, proudly and
independently ruling over his empire, or as the humble monk in union with the
Holy Russia. This tension on the mythological level was confirmed and
strengthened during the reign of Peter I, as the exercise of state authority
was freed from the limitations set by orthodox religion and thereby no longer
restricted by the specific Russian element of the population. Liberation from
tradition gave rise to an approximately pure patrimonial system. Although it
was inconceivable to contradict tsarism as such within the context of Russian
culture, the division concerning the Tsar as a political symbol was to become
the basis of church schisms, as well as of social opposition to the state in
the name of orthodox religion as the hallmark of the Russian nation.
The struggle for cultural hegemony
between different social strata, or classes, among the Russian population, was
also partly overlapping a conflict between a "native" Russian
agrarian population and a "foreign" ruling class, as was the case in
the Habsburg Empire.
However, All-Russian state patriotism,
as the dominant ideology of social integration, was not to be challenged in any
serious manner before 1917. A main reason for this was the absence of a social
class, or estate, sufficiently independent of the state to act on behalf of the
Russian nation. Here the general conditions under the patrimonial regime must
be born in mind: the state's dominant position vis a vis the society; the
nobility's lack of independence from the state and its permanent inner
intrigues; the embryonic character of the emergent "civil society" i.e.
of the intermediary organizations between the state and the citizens.
From the middle of 1920's a change was
taking place in the new regime's official, ideological self-representation. In
less than a decade the role of the USSR was transformed from champion of world
revolution to guarantor of socialism in one country, a reversal which has been
described as one "from utopia to realism" by E.H.Carr . Stalin
committed Russia to a vast program of industrialization and modernization, a
program which made little sense in the context of classical marxism. At that
point, there was little to distinguish the aspirations of Russian nationalists
from those of Russian Marxists. A fusion of developmental and nationalist
aspirations took place.
Russia was to become a great nation, never again to be defeated in the field,
capable of defending itself against a conspiracy of capitalist powers. As long
as the "capitalist encirclement" remained the, state was to remain as
the focal institution of the Soviet system.
In the summer of 1934 the doctrine of Soviet-patriotism was introduced to fill
the ideological vacuum in the post-revolutionary society.
An ideological current that could serve
as a pattern for the new doctrine was the so called national Bolshevism. After
the revolution this national Bolshevism had contributed to the legitimacy of
new regime among its former opponents by depicting it as the true heir to the
Russian historical tradition.
All later variations of the "national Bolshevist theme" were
pinpointing the fundamental importance of the continued territorial integrity
of the Russian dominated Soviet state. This attitude must be seen as the
fundamental ideology of the ruling all union elites. In my interpretation it
represents a continuation of the pre-revolutionary state patriotism.
The nomenclature and the centre-periphery relations
The parallel between the All-Russian and
the Soviet efforts at state-building does not stop at the creation of new state
supporting service classes which were highly dependent on the sovereign ruler.
Soon after the death of Peter the Great the members of the nobility were able
to free themselves from compulsory state service - it was abolished in all its
forms by Peter III in 1762 - and to become a privileged estate. However the
change was without any real consequence for their lifestyle. The Russian gentry
always lacked the de facto
independence and authority of the West European feudal lords, and the members
of the dvoryanstvo still had to
serve the crown to maintain their social prestige, also after they were freed
from state service.
Also Stalin, on his side, made the lives
of individuals extremely insecure, depending on his arbitrary and personal
whims. After Stalin's death, the system created by him, as the one by Peter,
proved itself durable, and became more firmly established. However, in the
post-Stalinist era a number of guarantees were built in to secure the nomenklatura, the backbone of the
state, from being torn up by terror and to guarantee the lives of individuals.
Efforts were also made to protect to a somewhat higher degree the functions of
the bureaucratic machinery from interference and disruption by a despotic ruler.
But these guarantees were far from
absolute.
Under Brezhnev the General Secretary of
the all union Communist Party still had the authority to replace regional party
secretaries. However from now on cadre stability and non-interference in local
personnel questions was to become the rule. This opened up for a positive preferential
treatment of the titular nationalities in their republics, making the local
elites dependent on the local party leadership for their positions.
Ethnicity was institutionalized both on
the individual and on the group level, ruled over by indigenous political
elites and organized through a single, but complex administrative hierarchy.
The importance attached to having strong, but loyal individuals for maintaining
the political stability in the non-Russian areas was again in accordance with
the pre-revolutionary pattern.
Even though Stalin arrested the
development toward a genuine federalization in the form of an "absolute
equalization" between the nations during the korenizatsiya-period, a framework for cooperation with loyal
non-Russians was still available through the Soviet federal state structure.
Instead of the korenizatsiya-policy,
which emphasized the goal of giving the titular nations next to full control
over the institutions on their territories, the era of
"high-stalinism" brought with it the pursuit of a long term strategy
in order to grant all the nations a proportional representation in the most
important sectors of social life in their home republics. After Stalin's death,
the tempo toward proportionality was accelerated, and the Russian
overrepresentation was slowly declining. In the USSR, the center’s strong
support of local political elites, was, however, combined with a system of
political appointments of republic leaders from Moscow. Their dependence on the
centre for their power plus a tight control system, maximalized the costs of
backing up national aspirations for these local leaders.
Another important control mechanism
against regional tendencies was the mobility of high ranking administrative
personnel between the all union centre and the republics. The Moscow
authorities placed a small number of political cadres from the all union centre
in key positions in the republics, and circumscribed the experiences of the
rest of the nomenclature officials to one local republic.
Altogether this system made it possible to join the federal structure to a
strong central state power. The Soviet system could thus be described as a
hybrid between a consociated system and an empire. The reason why the
centrifugal, disintegrating dynamics of the soviet state organization did not
become more manifest, lies in the how and why the inner solidarity of this
hierarchy, as well as the loyalty of its individual parts to the centre was not
broken. The absence of a "space" for alternative forces was based on
a variety of techniques, which joined control to self interest, autonomy to
centralism, cooperation to the threat of expulsion.
Austria as a contrast example
The difficulties of the Habsburg
Monarchy to reach a kind of "proportional equalization" including the
non-German and non-Magyarian nations, in the Habsburg Monarchy, must in a
comparative perspective be seen in the light of the more complex
multi-hierarchical, as opposed to the All-Russian uni-hierarchical, social
substratum on which the Austrian state system was based. By this is meant both
the separation of the economic, political and religous ideological hierarchies
and their elites and the more complex social formation in which a multiplicity
of communities not only existed simultaneously, but also overlapped in space,
forming a multilayered network.
In their efforts to centralize and unify
the empire the Habsburg dynastic state too had placed great emphasis on
building an absolutely reliable and loyal bureaucracy. Under the German
administrative personnel, the unity of the empire had been gradually
strengthened. This administration aimed at leveling national particularism and
eliminating of all serious signs of local autonomy. The state administration
had an evident caste character; originally the Habsburgs readily had preferred
foreigners and adventurers without any social and territorial connections
within the boundaries of the Monarchy, in the same way as the Russian tsars.
The ideal Austrian official of the Crown had a perfect knowledge of the German
language and was for the rest completely devoid of any national consciousness,
even if he himself was originally a German.
In Austria the German supremacy was
gradually modified. This meant allowing people with a multi-lingual competence
a career in the Crownlands Kronländer
and in the capital, and it meant the admittance of more non-German students to
qualify for positions in the state. Despite the poor salaries, a position in
the imperial administration was a sign of social prestige, and the awakening
Austrian nations were determined to secure their own sons their rightful shares
of governmental positions. The struggle to replace the mono-lingual Germans was
the basis of countless intrigues in the national assembly and the cabinet.
These efforts were at least partly successful. A survey from 1914 based on most
of the Zentralstellen in Vienna
revealed that 24 per cent of the civil servants were non-Germans.
The policies of encouraging the ethnic minorities to express their identities
through bureaucratic channels were similar in both Austria and the USSR.
The relation between state and society
in Austria was, however, different from the Soviet case, in spite of the
parallels between the Soviet project and the dynastic monarchies of the
European ancien regimes. Instead of
embodying a uni-hierarchical social structure like that of the USSR, the
Austrian state was administering a motley social patchwork of old and new,
agrarian and industrial, feudal and capitalistic. This complexity was also
reflected within the sphere of each national group, i.e. in the conflict
between historic tradition and ethnic claims. Often these claims were wider,
though sometimes even narrower, than the historic state concepts of specific
Habsburg domains, of which Bohemia, Hungary and Crotia serve as outstanding
examples. One
must also distinguish between the federalism of the Habsburg Crownlands Kronländer and the traditions of the
"historicopolitical entities" out of which the Habsburg Power was
developed. "The true significance of this concept of the
historicopolitical entities within the Austrian national problem is based on
the specific nature of the conservative social forces behind it."
The emergent party system was therefore extraordinarily heterogeneous.
The Habsburg dynastic idea had, as
formerly mentioned, rested on the assumption of the precedence of the German
culture. The weakening of the German cultural hegemony in Austria, in the era
of the nationality principle, had left the state without any supreme principle
of legitimacy. The failure of all plans to federalize the state along ethnical
lines also meant that the possibility to create a "supranational" or
an "international" state concept had failed. During the last decades
before the First World War the Habsburg administration therefore was
debilitated both morally and intellectually at the same time as nationalist
ideals were gaining in strength. This process let loose the inner bureaucratic
dynamics towards fragmentation and resulted in the formation of local
"principalities". There was an increasing need for bureaucrats who
spoke the local languages, without any corresponding wish in Vienna to relax
the administrative centralization. Nationalist bureaucrats were therefore
looking forward to the dismantling of the Habsburg monarchy and the building of
independent local administrations for their own compatriots. This again was
contributing to the administrative deadlock.
Also certain features of the Habsburg
ethnic-topographic structure restricted the range of possible political
solutions to the nationality problem:
1: The distribution of ethnic groups between the two imperial states,
which must be seen in light of the very different ideologies dominating the
publics and the social lives of Austria and Hungary and their dissimilar
political systems. The distribution of ethnic groups between the two parts of
the Monarchy implied that five out of eleven groups were living on the
territories of both the two constitutent states. These groups, accounting for
about 45 percent of the total population, were the Germans, the Croats, the
Serbs, the Roumanians and the Ukrainians. The main obstacle to the
federalization plans was the impossibility of unifying these nationalities
without the constitutional reorganization of the Dual Monarchy as a whole. A
step by step solution, reorganizing the state along ethnic-federal lines, would
be blocked also in Austria, as long as the Magyarians were unwilling to
recognize that also Hungary was a multi-national unit, and not a nation state.
The USSR, as opposed to Austria-Hungary,
was, of course, in the first place one single state system, not two states.
Secondly, through the use of Soviet-patriotism and through the formulation of
the concept of "the Soviet-people as a new historical community" the
state leadership was attempting to procure a common ideology, balancing the
elements of a state which was both unitary and multi-national at the same time.
This balancing was gradually becoming more and more precarious i.e. during the
Brezhnev era.
2: Seen in the light of phase
III in Stein Rokkan's model - the political mobilization and incorporation
of the population - in the light of this phase another feature of the
etnic-topographic structure of the Habsburg monarchy must be emphasized: it did
not primarily consist of complete nations, but of fragments of nations. The
majority of the population in six of its eleven nationalities were to be found
living outside its borders: the Germans, the Italians, the Romanians, the
Ukrainians, the Serbs and the Poles. This was a period of considerable
irredentist mobilization. At the same time nationalism was evolving into a mass
phenomenon, and democratic currents were undermining the political supremacy of
the old social elites. All these factors put together meant that the unity of
the monarchy was irretrievably lost. Absolute demands, no longer relative ones,
characterized the type of nationalism now flourishing in Cisleithania. These
demands were too particular to be weightened against the claims raised by other
nations.
In the case of the USSR, the potential
irredentist problem was not connected with modern nations, but with pan-Turkish
and pan-Muslim currents. The formation of modern nations, as a process
engineered from the centre, could therefore paradoxically be used to neutralize
this danger, through the use of two fundamental strategies available to Moscow:
In the first place through the policy of splitting up the larger groups and
through gerrymandering. This meant drawing the borders so as to circumvent
their ostensible raison d'etre by incorporating alien persons or purposefully
leaving segments of the titular groups outside. Secondly there was the
possibility of population redistributions so as to perpetuate the ethnic
heterogeneity in the non-Russian units. The boundaries between the units of the
Soviet federation were in fact often based precisely on a "divide and rule
principle", without considerations for historical traditions or
contemporary ethnic realities. This limited the scope for potential alliances
between the periphery nations against the centre, particularly in Central-Asia.
The official registration of ethnicity
on the individual level, contributed to segregating the Soviet nations from one
another and established a rigid ethnic affiliation for every citizen. Although
this was not intended, it frustrated the process of assimilation and the
creation of a new supra-national community. The challenges of independent
political mass participation, that is, non-manipulated participation through
organizations constituting a "civil society", mediating between state
and individual, was, however, postponed in the Soviet case up to the Gorbachev
period. The system was thus capable of maintaining internal stability, despite
the fact that the Soviet nations had acquired the preconditions for independent
existence through the nationality policy.
3: Another feature of the ethnic-topographical structure is thrown
into relief by the comparative perspective: The existence of a mixture of
ethnic groups in a population can be interpreted, after Stein Rokkan, as an
additional cost complicating the state building process, since the integration
of these heterogeneous groups and periphery societies within the territory controlling
system also implies a potential for periphery protests and politization.
Forestalling the release of this potential makes the tasks of centre
penetration taxes, army, administration and cultural standardization more
difficult to handle.
As we have just seen, the costs for the
Habsburg empire of its ethnical heterogeneity were high. As modernization was
disturbing the old balance between its nations, it was almost logical that the
ethno-topographical structure became a negative constraint on the possibilities
to compromise. This was making the search for a new balance between the nations
extremely complicated, once the original equilibrium from 1867 the Ausgleich had given way.
Such problems did not exist neither in
the All Russian Empire, nor in the Soviet Union: The Habsburg Monarchy was the
only European power if we do not take into consideration the mainly Asiatic
Ottoman empire which consisted of a number of national groups none of which
constituted a majority of the population. The strongest group, the Germans,
accounted for a fourth of the total population. The next strongest group, the
Magyarians accounted for about one fifth of the total population. In the empire
as a whole, no ethnic-national group could assume the role of uncontested leader
in relation to the others; no nation could act as the cement keeping the whole
conglomerate of nations together.
By comparison, the ethnic-topographic basis of the All-Russian Empire and of the
Soviet Union was more favorable. The relative size of the Russian nation
simplified the task of neutralizing the potential of national conflict in the
rest of the population. The Russian relative proportion was varying from 70,7
per cent in 1719 to 44,6 per cent in 1897, and the Russians were thereafter the
only ethnic group with a continually increasing share of the population up to
1959, when it settled at around 50 per cent.
Under otherwise equal conditions this
composition of the population made the Russian population element and the
Russian language into a better catalyst in the political integration process
than any of the nations of the Dual Monarchy. The Russians in fact became the
cement holding the multi-national state together. It should of course also be
noted that parts of the Soviet Union, especially Estonia and Latvia, have
experienced rapid and fundamental changes in their ethnic structure. The
political and cultural implications of these changes still remain unknown and
may still prove to be dramatic.
POLITICAL PARTICIPATION AND THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE
USSR.
Lastly, I will briefly, discuss the
dissolution of the USSR. I will start with the changes in the variables which
explain the long-term political stabilization after the Second World War.
The basic contradiction of the Soviet
society on the eve of Gorbachev's assumption of power was contradiction between
the so called "command administrative system" and the new social
dynamics. Underlying this dynamics were societal modernization, the
scientific-technological revolution and particularly the spectacular growth of
the newly educated social elites.
The problems relating to the stagnation of the political structures were
reinforced by a sustained economic crisis starting in the late 1970s. The
recession meant that the stabilizing influence of a long-lasting period of
economic growth came to an end.
Gorbachev's policy can be interpreted as
an attempt to trigger off a societal learning process, whereby the state
structures were to be adjusted to a civil society in the making. However, in
this process a goal conflict arises between the demands of economic and
political reforms. In Rokkanian terms the unintended effect of Gorbachev's
political liberalization was to precipitate an accumulation of crises on
several fronts which occurred simultaneously.
As the existing political power was
dismantled, without a corresponding recentralizing into new democratic
institutions, the dynamics towards progressive political fragmentation immanent
in the Soviet state is let loose. Power did rapidly diffuse, but very little of
it went to the elected Congress of Peoples' Deputies, the Supreme Soviet, or
the political parties represented there. Power was drifting inexorably to the
republics while political decay in the party, the military, and the economic
organs was rapidly advancing.
At the union republic level, the process of disintegration of the USSR can be
described as follows, by using Miroslav Hroch's well-known model:
The patriotic movements of both the
Habsburg Monarchy's and the USSR's non-ruling nations, propagated their
national programs to mass audiences. The important difference between the
Soviet and the Austrian cases, however, was the remarkable speed characterizing
the transition of the non-Russian national movements to phase 3, the stage of
mass participation. At this stage the intellectual leaders of the national
movements are succeeding in penetrating the population majorities with their
patriotic messages. Another conspicuous feature in the Soviet case is how
swiftly the demands listed in the national programs were to be fulfilled.
An explanation must allow for a pivotal
conjunctural component, i.e. crisis accumulation in Rokkanian terms, in the
disintegration of the USSR. This component can be defined and evaluated as a
causal element only by reference to the critical level at which it occurs: the
contextual level. This means that the same causal factor varies in its effect
depending upon its context. Indeed, at times kaleidoscopic alterations take
place that lead to a dynamic fusing of heretofore separately unfolding patterns
of action-orientations. Often fully unforeseen developments are called forth,
by the conjunctural dynamics set into motion.
In the USSR at least three sets of
causal factors were interacting with the economic stagnation in the
conjunctural dynamics, as favorable conditions to the growth of national
movements.
1: The social and political dynamics generated by the weakening of the
ruling all union nomenclature class.
2: The possibility, offered by the federal state structure, of
combining different types of demands in more comprehensive national programs.
The same federal structure also made it possible for the national movements to
move beyond their purely linguistical-political phase in a short period of time.
3: As glasnost liberalized the Soviet media policy by removing the
heavy hand of censorship, the modern mass media technology made possible the
fast spreading of new models for political mobilization outside the centrally
controlled institutions and organizations.
During the Gorbachev era the nationality
question passed from a stage, with a strong "Hungarian" element to a
stage reminding more of Cisleithanian Austria after 1867. Also the conflict
dynamics of the two empires seems to have been moving along paralleled tracks:
Gorbachev's tactics of granting limited concessions to the non-Russian nations
did not contribute to rendering the nationality conflicts less fierce. During
Brezhnev an observer who based his views on appearances, might have believed
that the Soviet Union, like Hungary after 1867, was a country without a
nationality problem, whereas it was clear for all to see that Austria, like the
Soviet Union during Gorbachev, was passing from one crisis to another because
of nationalist unrest.
Paradoxically, the more the demands of
the nations were satisfied, the more oppressed the non-ruling nations were
feeling. The Czechs, just like the Balts, were more vociferous, the more their
old demands were met, and the more the Germans, respectively the Russians, were
on the defensive. The Austrian nationality conflicts, gradually got their own
dynamic momentum dynamisches Entwicklungsmoment in the Weberian sense, and
finally paralyzed the normal functions of the political system, thereby forcing
the government to rule by decrees. In the case of the USSR, the paralysis of
the political system was manifested in a somewhat different manner: members of
the all union elite were polarized between two different positions. One group
wanted to maintain the "inner empire" and to resist further
democratic reform, whereas another advocated a persistent pursuit of democratic
reform and were ready, if necessary, to let the empire go. In the face of this
polarization Gorbachev's policy was doomed.
Originally no such coupling existed between attitudes favoring the dissolution
the empire and democratization, on the one side, and continued authoritarian
rule and maintaining the empire on the other.
As opposed to the situation in the
Habsburg Monarchy, and also in the Western overseas colonies, the conflict
between centre and periphery in the USSR was not just a question of the
"form" of the state - unitary versus federalized, or federation
versus separatism - but, equally important, it was a question of its
"content" - a single party system versus a multi-party system based
on political pluralism. The two conflicts were reinforcing each other, thereby
accelerating the political development.
Nor was the latter conflict one of opposition between the Russians as a group
versus the non-Russians. It was rather a struggle between the supporters of the
old centralized power structure, with the Communist party as its only
legitimate political force and those wanting a society based on political
pluralism, the rule of law, constitutional government and the dismantling of
the old command-administrative system. Rather than strengthening the thesis of
an necessary causal link between socio-economic modernization and nationality
conflicts, the dissolution of the USSR is explained by specific the political
dynamics during Gorbachev. Here "empire savers"
came out strongly against political democratization, creating a situation where
democratization necessarily would lead to a separation between centre and
periphery.
The struggles for political independence
were escalated because it was possible to detach by a few simple movements the
already existing state units, i,e. union and autonomous republics.
The Baltic strategy was to issue their own local laws on one societal domain
after another. This meant the overruling of Soviet laws and thereby causing a
"legal chaos" in which they were perceived as sovereign states by the
international community. The basis of this policy was the Declarations of
Independence by some of the national assemblies democratically elected in May
1990.
In societies where the citizens had
being deprived of political participation for several decades, the language
question soon became a mobilizing factor of paramount importance, and, as the
old bonds were weakened, linguistic identity was taking on socially integrating
functions. An important part of the new national self-assertion was the passing
of laws making the local tongues the official languages of the republics. An
important means in Moscow's control of the republics, the deployment of Russian
speaking cadres from the all union centre to local power positions, was thereby
blocked. The use of local ethnic Russian residents as guarantists for the
republics' falling into line, was likewise made more difficult. With regard to
the importance of the linguistic demands of the non-Russians, there are obvious
parallels between the USSR and other multi-ethnic empires in their periods of
decline. Seen from one point of view, also the Habsburg Monarchy was thus also,
from one torn apart by the protracted language conflict between the Czechs and
the Germans.
The weakening of the central and
supra-national power structures, and of the groups relying on it, opened up a
new political space to ethnic and national movements "from below".
The founding of the "Popular Fronts", was partly a spontaneous
process, partly a process initiated from above, trying to channel the various
grass root initiatives in an acceptable direction, i.e. in the direction of
perestroyka. Political mass participation first appeared in the Baltic
republics. In Gorbachev's opinion such mass participation was necessary for the
success of the perestroyka. The first popular fronts had hardly been founded,
however, before they perceived of the nation as the basic and privileged unit
for the development of democracy and social progress. After it had become
possible to champion democratic rights openly, all issues - language, culture,
ecology, democracy, social rehabilitation of the victims of Stalinism - were
connected and combined in one single, all-embracing national program. In this
way it was soon possible to create genuine mass movements which enjoyed the
active support of hundreds of thousands of people.
The Soviet nationality policy had created
a double set of loyalties - toward one's own nation and region, and toward the
Soviet state - at least among the members of the all union nomenclature. As the
political centre and therefore the supra-national political elites were
stripped of their main functions relating to the administration of the economy
and supervision of the mass media the political system was doomed to collapse.
This in turn triggered national conflicts as the old elites now had find a
power base in their local populations. National conflicts in the post-Soviet
political space, then, from one point of view, should rather be considered as
the result of the process of disintegration rather than its cause. The elites
were forced to play the nationalist card to survive, as the all union political
context of the USSR was in a constant flux on which these elites were
completely unable to influence.
The continual and rapid change of the
elites' preferences as a consequence of the experiences which were made can,
from one point of view, be seen as a parallel to the dissolution of the
Habsburg monarchy due to the First World War. Before the First World War the
national leaders of Central Europe were thus only seeking autonomy within the
old dynastic, multi-national states. The First World War was, however, fought
as a war between several states and the principle of national sovereignty was
interpreted as synonymous with state sovereignty by the Peace Settlement of
1919-1920. Self-appointed leaders spoke on behalf of the peoples of the region
and their future states. Only in retrospective did they seek democratic
legitimacy at home. Finally there was the question of the new state borders to
be solved.
Although independence came to the Soviet
republics as a result of the collapse of central authority, not as a result of
direct struggle, the collapse non the less was preceded by three years of mass
mobilization, inter-ethnic conflict and centre-republic tensions, which
conditioned the circumstances under which that collapse took place. At the same
time the Soviet and post Soviet ethnic and national tensions can not be
properly understood without making allowance for the economic crisis and
disruptions, prior to and accompanying the process of imperial disintegration.
A reasonable contra factual question is therefore whether the consequences
would have been the same had these policies been introduced under Khrushchev?
Even if this question can not be
answered in the strictest sense, a closer analysis of the effects of the
Brezhnev period in a regional perspective may throw some light upon it:
1: The stabilization of the nationality relations during Brezhnev, was
based on the functioning of the political system. It assigned to the nations
the role as the main mediating units between the authorities and the Soviet
citizens. Although it existed already before the Brezhnev period, this system
was strengthened by the policies pursued during his reign.
2: This system made all Soviet citizens conscious of their
nationality, as the only officially recognized distinction between the
citizens, registered in each person's internal passport, and taken into account
at every important event in the individuals' lives. The classification created
practically impenetrable barriers between the different nations, and the
nations became the most potent units for political mobilization, and
nationalism the medium through which discontent could be expressed, during a
period of crisis. Here too already existing traits were strengthened.
3: Could stability in multi-national states be maintained under other
conditions than those of the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev period? My answer
is that other forms of federalization, not territorially based, the phrase
national cultural autonomy has been used, are at least conceivable.
For my part, I will therefore refuse a determinist comprehension of the disintegration
of the USSR: given the reform policy "lightening the pressure",
things had to turn out as they did "the whole boiler exploding". This
of course, is not a repudiation of Toquevilles' thesis of the liberalization of
despotic regimes, but an emphasizing of the "primacy of politics"
also in the context of the decline and fall of the USSR.
Footnotes:
.
The following paper is based on the author's doctoral thesis State-Building
and Socio-Economic Change in Multi-National Societies. A Comparative Study of
the Habsburg Monarchy, the All-Russian Empire and the Soviet Union in
Norwegian , Institute of Political Science, the University of Oslo, Oslo 1993.
.
The use of the Habsburg Monarchy for comparative purposes has been considerably
facilitated by the publication of the multi-volume Die Habsburgermonarchie
1848-1918 by the Austrian Academy of Sciences starting from 1973 onwards,
edited by Adam Wandruszka and Peter Urbanitsch. I have in this
paper made extensive use of volume I: Die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung,
Vienna 1973, volume II Verwaltung und Rechtwesen 1975 , and volume III/1
and III/2 Die Völker des Reiches, Vienna 1980. For an
interesting collection of papers relating to some of the questions treated in
this paper, see also Richard L. Rudolph and David Good eds. , Nationalism
and Empire. The Habsburg Empire and the Soviet Union, New York 1992.
.
Rokkan, Stein, "Dimensions of State Formation and Nation Building: A
Possible Paradigm for Research on Variations within Europe", in Charles
Tilly ed. , The Formation of National States in Western Europe,
Princeton, New Jersey 1975, pp. 570-72.
.
On the distinction between formal and scientific theories of social
development, see Boudon, Raymond, Theories of Social Change, Oxford
1986, pp. 202-207.
.
Jaszi, Oscar, The Disolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, Chicago 1929;
Kann, Robert, The Multi-National Empire, Vol. 1 and 2, New York 1950.
.
See Bendix, Reinhard, "Why Nationalism? Relative Backwardness and
Intellectual Mobilization", Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Vol. 8, no.
1; l98l, Ernest Gellner, Nations and States, Oxford 1973, and Øyvind
Østerud, "Utvikling gjennom tilbakeliggenhet", in Øyvind Østerud, Det
moderne statssystem, Oslo 1987.
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österreichisch-ungarischer
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. For
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.
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.
McAuley, Alastair, "Economic Development and Political Nationalism in
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.
Iskanderov,I., Tekstilnaia promyshlennost Uzbekistana, Tashkent 1974,
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.
See Goldman, Philip, Gail Lapidus, and Victor Zaslavsky, "Introduction:
Soviet Federalism - Its Origins, Evolution, and Demise", and Victor
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Goldman eds. , From Union to Commonwealth. Nationalism and Separatism in the
Soviet Republics, Cambridge 1992.
.
For a discussion of the extent of resource transfers frrom the Ukraine, se
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Interpretation," Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 5, No. 4, 1981, pp.
467-96.
.
The native Ukrainian share of the salaried employees in the Ukrainian SSR was
reduced between 1939 and 1970 according to Soviet statistics, compare
Arutiunian, Iu, Izmenie sotsialnoi struktury sovetskikh natsii, Istoria SSSR,
no. 1972 p. 6 and Iu. Bromlei, Sovremennye etnicheskie protsessy v SSSR,
Moscow 1977, p. 131.
.
Smith, Anthony, Theories of Nationalism, London 1971, chapter 10.
.
Accounts of the Hungarian political development are found in R. Kann op.cit.
1950 I, Laszlo Katus, "Über die wirtschaftlichen Grundlagen der
Nationaliätenfrage in Ungarn vor dem ersten Weltkrieg", pp. 149-217 in Peter
Hanak ed. , Die Nationalitätenfrage in der Österreichisch-ungarischen
Monarchie 1900-1918, Budapest 1966, and Laszlo Katus, "Die
Madiaren", in Adam Wandruszka and Peter Urbanitsch eds. , op.cit.
Vol III/1 1980 .
.
An account of the structure of the Austrian part of the monarchy is found in
Stourzh, Gerald, "Die Gleichberechtigung der Volksstämme als
Vervassungsprinzip 1848-1918", in Adam Wandruszka und Peter Urbanitsch
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Prague 1990.
. Zwitter,
Fran, "Nationale Probleme und gesellschaftliche Struktur in der
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Jaszi, Oscar, op. cit., p 338, 286, Benedict Anderson, Imagined
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.
Barany, George, "Hungary: the Uncompromising Compromise", Austria
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. Hanak,
Peter, "Verbürgerlichung und Assimilation", and "Ungarns
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Vienna/Budapest 1984.
. About
the Hungarian election system, see Katus, Laszlo in Adam Wandruszka und Peter
Urbanitsch eds. op.cit. Vol. III, pp. 469-476, about the
crisis of Dualism, see Norman Stone, "Constitutional Crisis in Hungary
1903-1906", Slavonic Review, Vol. 45 1967 .
.
Dolgorukov, P. V., Rossiiskaia rodoslovnaia kniga, St. Petersburg 1855,
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Civilization, New Brunswick 1962 ff; Erik Amburger, Geschichte der
Behördenorganisation von Peter Grossen bis 1917, Leiden 1966, 517.
.
Pearson, Raymond, "Privileges, Rights and Russification", in Olga
Crisp and Linda Edmondson eds. , Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, Oxford
1983, pp. 83-102, compare F. A. Brokgaus and I. A. Efron, Entsiklopeditskii
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.
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Geschichte Litauens und des litauischen Volkes, Darmstadt 1966; R.
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Ostseelände Livland, Estland, Kurland 1180-1918, Munich
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.
About the development of the Russian national identity, see Cherniavsky,
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XI-XVII vv, Moscow-Leningrad 1945, and Dmitrii S. Likhachov, Velikoe
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.
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"Habsburgmonarkiets tysk-østerrikere", Den Jyske Historiker,
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Kossior, S. and P. S. Postyschew, Der bolschewistisiche Sieg in der Ukraine.
Reden auf dem Vereinigtem Plenum der Zk und ZKK der
Kommunistischen Partei Ukraine Bolschewiki im November 1933,
Moscow/Leningrad 1934, p. 165, Joseph Stalin, "Extract from the Report on
the Work of the Central Committee of the CPSU Delivered at the Seventeenth
Party Congress", January 26, 1934, in Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the
National and Colonial Questions, New York 1935, pp. 267-68.
.
The single most authoritative study of the purges is still that of Robert
Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, London 1968. See
particularly the section entitled "The Nationalities", pp. 77-82. See
also Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge,. New York 1973, Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev
Remembers. Boston 1970, 106, 108 and Rigby, Th. Communist Party
Membership in the USSR 1917-1967, Princeton, N.J. 1968. pp. 204, 370.
.
Isaev, M.I.. Iazykovoe stroitelstvo v SSSR, Moscow 1979.
.
Sak, L.M. and M. I. Isaev, "Problemy pismennosti narodov SSSR v kulturnoi
revoliutsii", Voprosy istorii, no, 2, 1966, 11; I. Khansuvarov,
Latinizatsiia - orudie Leninskoi natsionalnoi politiki, Moscow 1932.
.
Guboglo, M.N., "Razvitie mnogonatsionalnoi sovetskoi pechati v 1917-1940
gg.", Istoriia SSSR no. 6, 1972, p. 124 , S. M. Diamanshtein,
Itogo razresheniia natsionalnogo voprosa v SSSR, Moscow 1936, 182 ff., A.
Bennigsen, and Ch. Lemercier-Quelquejay, Islam in the Soviet Union, New
York/Washington 1967, p. 127.
.
Baranova, T.J.. "Iz istorii prepodavaniia russkovo iazyka v nerusskikh
shkolakh SSSR". Sovetskaia pedagogiga, no
12, 1977, pp. 115-123 116 ff , Klaus Mehnert, "Die Sowjetpolitik in
Turkestan", In Russlandstudien. Gedenkenschrift für Otto Hoetsch, Stuttgart
1957, pp. 63-78.
.
Isaev, M.I., "Natsiia i iazyk", Voprosii istorii, no. 2, 1968,
99 ff, Yaroslav Bilinsky, "Expanding the Use of Russian or Russification?
Some Critical Thoughts on Russian as a Lingua Franca and the "Language of
Friendship and Cooperation of the Peoples of the USSR", Russian Review,
Vol. 40, 1981, no. 3. pp. 317-32, Iu. D, Desheriev, "Bytovaia kultura i ee
otrashenie v iazyke", in Iu. D. Desheriev, Natsionalnyi iazyk i kultura.
Moscow 1978.
.
Suny, Ronald Grogor, "Georgia and Soviet nationality Policy", in
Stephen F. Cohen, Alexander Rabinowitz, and Robert Sharlets eds. , The
Soviet Union since Stalin. Bloomington University Press 1980, pp. 213-219.
See also Izvestia, February 25 1989; Charles E. Ziegler,
"Nationalism, Religion and Equality among Ethnic Minorities: Some
Observations on the Soviet Case", Journal of Ethnic Studies, 13,
Summer 1985, pp. 9-32 p. 27 .
.
Rokkan, Stein, "Territories, Centres and Peripheries: Toward a
Geoethnic-Geoeconomic-Geopolitical Model of Differentiation within Western
Europe", in Jean Gottmann ed. , Centre and Periphery. Spatial Variation
in Politics, Beverly Hills 1980, and Stein Rokkan "The Survival of
Distinctiveness", in Stein Rokkan et. al. eds. , Economy, Territory,
Identity: The Politics of European Peripheries, Beverly Hills 1983.
.
For an interesting comparative discussion of the implications of language
choices for political community, see Safran, William, "Language, Ideology,
and State- Building: A Comparison of Policies in France, Israel, and the Soviet
Union", International Political Science Review, Vol. 13, No. 4
1992, pp. 397-414.
.
Weber, Max. Economy and Society, eds. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich ,
New York 1968, p. 577, p.1181.
.
Hinze, Otto, Historical Essays ed. by Felix Gilbert , New York 1975,
pp.173-74.
.
Gramsci, Antonio. "State and Civil Society", in his Selections
from the Prison Notebooks, London 1971, pp. 206-76. See also Perry
Anderson, "The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci", New Left Review
100, 1977, Buci Glucksmann, Gramsci and the State, London 1980, and
Leszek Kolakowski, "Antonio Gramsci: Communist Revisionism" in his Main
Currents of Marxism, Vol. 3, Oxford 1978, pp. 220-52.
.
Magris, Claudio, Donau, Oslo 1991, p. 270 translated from Norwegian by
this author .
.
For an interesting discussion of these questions between Miroslav Hroch, Ernest
Gellner and Roman Szporluk, see East European Politics and Society, Vol.
4. No. 1, Winter 1990, pp.101-150.
.
See Starr, S. Frederick, "Tsarist Government: The Imperial
Dimension", in Jeremy R. Azrael, Soviet Nationality Policies and
Practices, New York 1978, pp. 3-38.
.
Raeff, Marc. "The Russian Autocracy and its Officials", Harvard
Slavic Studies 4 1957, p. 59.
.
Anderson, Perry, Lineages of the Absolutist State, London l974,
Otto Hinze op. cit., Theda Skocpol, States
and Social Revolutions, Cambridge l978.
.
Gashiuriants, Iurii, "Ob asiatskom proizvodstva", Voprosii Istorii,
no. 2 1966, 99. See also L.V. Danilova, "Disskusia po
vaznoi probleme", Voprosii Filosofii, no. 12, 1965.
.
Shapiro, A.L., "Ob absoliutizme v Rossii", Istoria SSSR, May
1968, pp. 69-81, P. V. Volubuev is here cited after S. D. Skazkin ed. , Dokumenty
sovetsko-italiansko konferentssii istorikov 8-10 aprelja 1968 goda, Moscow
1970, p. 196. The long discussion was introduced by A.I. Avrekh with
an attack on the conventional Soviet interpretation of Russian absolutism in
his "Russii absoliutizm i evo rol v utverzhdenie kapitalizma v
Rossi", in Istoria SSSR, February 1968, pp. 82-103.
.
Shunkov, V. I. et al. eds. , Perekhod ot feodalizma k kapitalizmu v Rossii
, Moscow 1969, 5, 41. See also the contribution of K.N. Tarnovskii in V.V.
Adamov et al. eds. , Voprosy istorii kapitalisticheskoi Rossii: problema
mnogoukladnosti, Sverdlovsk 1972.
.
Romanovich-Slavatinskii, A., Dvorianstvo v Rossii ot nachala 18 v. do otmeny
krepostnogo prava, St. Petersburg 1870 issued as Slavistic Printings and
Reprintings no 100, The Hague and Paris 1968 , pp. 487-88.
.
For a comprehensive view of these offices, see Adreevskii, Ivan, O
namestnikakh, voevodakh i gubernatorakh, St Petersburg 1864.
.
Bezkrovnyi, L.G., Russkaja armija i flot v XIX veke, Moscow 1973, 19,
23, 26, 34, 48, 52, 55, 65, 88, 90, 93.
.
Galuzo, P.G., "Kolonialnaia sistema imperialistitcheskoi Rossii", i
Akademia Nauk SSSR, Institut istorii, Istoria SSSR c drevneishikh vremen do
nashikh dnei, Vol VI, Rossiia v period imperializma 1900-1917 gg, Moscow,
1968, pp. 309-312. By the same author "Das Kolonialsystem des
russischen Imperialismus am Vorabend der Oktoberrevolution," Zeitschrift
fur Geschichtswissenschaft Berlin/DDR Vol. 15, no. 6 1967.
.
Kliuchevskii, Vasilii, Sochineniia v 9-i tomakh, I, Moscow 1987, p. 50.
.
Hodnett, Grey, Leadership in the Soviet National Republics. An Quantitative
Study of Recruitment Policy, Oakville, Ontario 1978, p. 104 ff.
.
See Meyer, Alfred G., "USSR Incorporated", Slavic Review, Vol.
20, 1961, pp. 366-376 and Alfred G. Meyer, The Soviet Political System: An
Interpreatation, New York 1965.
.
Strugatskii, Boris, "Zhit
interesnee chem pisat", Literaturnaya Gazeta, April 10, 1991, p. 9.
.
Voslenskii, Mikhail, Nomenklatura. Gospodstvuiushchii klass Sovetskogo
Soiuza, London 1984. See also the discussion in Jerry Hough, The Soviet
Prefects, Cambridge, Mass., 1969, pp. 114-116, pp. 150-170, og B.
Harasymiw, "Die sowjetische Nomenklatur 1 ", Osteuropa 7,
1977, pp. 583-598, and B. Harasymiw: "Die sowjetische Nomenklatur 2",
Osteuropa 8, 1977, pp. 665-81. On the origin of the system, see T.H.
Rigby,"Staffing USSR Incorporated: The Origins of the Nomenklatura
System", Soviet Studies, Vol XL, no.4, October 1988, pp. 523-537.
For a discussion of the nomeklatura and Soviet social stratification, see also
Alec Nove, "History, Hierarchy and Nationalities" and "Is there
a Ruling Class in the USSR", in his Political Economy and Soviet
Socialism, London 1979, pp. 2-26 and pp. 195-219.
.
For the details on the etymological history of these concepts, see Kristof,
Ladis, "The State Idea, the National Idea and the Image of the
Fatherland", Orbis 11, Spring 1967.
.
See Nolde, Boris, Iurii Samarin i ego vremia, Paris 1926, 45, 47-48.
.
See for example Raeff, Marc, "Patterns of Russian Imperial Policy Toward
the Nationalities", in Edward Allworth ed. , Soviet Nationality
Problems, New York 1971, pp. 22-42.
.
See the discussions in Daniels, Robert, Trotsky, Stalin and Socialism,
Boulder 1991.
.
For the interesting parallels between bolshevism and Italian fascism in these
matters, see Gregor, A. James, Italian Fascism and Developmental
Dictatorship, Princeton New Jersey 1979, p. 162 ff, p. 206 ff, and
pp. 300-334.
.
For the history of this concept see Oberlander, Erwin, Sowjetpatriotismus
und Geschichte, Cologne 1964.
.
See Agursky, Michail, The Third Rome. National Bolshevism in the USSR,
Boulder and London 1987.
.
Miller, John, "Nomenklatura: Check on Localism", in T.H. Rigby and H.
Harasymiw eds. , Leadership Selection and Patron-Client Relations in the
USSR and Yugoslavia, London 1983, pp. 62-97.
.
For the details of the Habsburg administration, see Adam Wandruszka and Peter
Urbanitsch eds. op. cit. Vol II 1975 , Verwaltung und Rechtwesen, and
Oscar Jaszi op. cit.
. Hugelmann,
Karl Gottfried ed. , Das Nationalitätenrecht des alten Osterreich,
Wien-Leipzig 1934 p. 280, and W. A. Jenks, "Economics, Constitutionalism,
Administration and Class Structure", Austria History Yearbook III/I
1967 p. 53 ff.
. Robert
Kann, op. cit. 1950, Vol. I. pp. 30-31.
.
Ibid. p. 33 ff, quotation p. 36.
. See
Robert Kann, op. cit. 1950 and also his "Zur Problematik der
Nationalitätenfrage in der Habsburgermonarchie 1848-1918" in Adam
Wandruszka and Peter Urbanitsch eds. , op. cit. Vol.
III/2, pp. 1321-1330.
.
See Connor, Walker, The National Questions in Marxist-Leninist Theory aned
Strategy, Princeton New Jersey 1984, pp. 300-322.
.
See Lewis, Robert A, Richard H. Rowland, and Ralph S. Clem, Nationality and
Population Change in Russia and the USSR, New York 1976 and Paul Kolstoe,
"The State of Statelessness", and Paul Kolstoe and Andrei Edemsky,
" Russia's Policy Towards the Diaspora", in Paul Kolstoe, Russians
in the Former Soviet republics, London 1995, chapters 5 and 10.
.
Lewin, Moshe, The Gorbachev Phenomenon, Berkeley 1988, p. .
.
See the various contributions to Problems of Communism, Vol. XL,
November-December 1991, "Moscow, August 1991 - The Coup de Grace: A
Symposium", pp. 1-63.
.
Hroch, Miroslav, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe. A
Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the
Smaller European Nations, Part I, Cambridge 1986.
.
For a discussion of the concept of cumulative causality in historical
sociology, see Kalberg, Stephen, "Conjunctural interaction and the context
of patterned action" in his Max Weber's Comparative Historical
Sociology, Cambridge 1994, pp. 168-77.
. See
Schmidt-Häuer, Christian, "Das Imperium schlägt zurück", Die Zeit,
December 7. 1990.
.
On the former non-existence of such a connection, see Szporluk, Roman,
"Dilemmas of Russian Nationalism", in Rachel Denber ed. , The
Soviet Nationality Reader. The Disintegration in Context, Boulder 1992, pp.
513-517.
.
Duncan, Peter J. S.,"The Rebirth of Politics in Russia", The Road
to Post-Communism. Independent Political Movements in the Soviet Union
1985-1991, London 1992, pp. 67-123.
.
A term coined by Roman Szporluk, see his "Dilemmas of Russian
Nationalism" op. cit..
.
Roeder, Philip G., "Soviet Federalism and Ethnic Mobilization" in
Rachel Denber ed. op. cit. pp. 147-178.
.
Hroch, Miroslav, "Old Nationalism or New National Movements", The
Oslo Congress: Minority Protection and Human Rights in the New Europe,
Leangkollen January-February 1991.
.
Aves, Jonathan, "The Evolution of Independent Political Movements After
1988", in Geoffrey A. Hoskins, Jonathan Aves and Peter J.S., op. cit.
pp. 29-66.
.
For a discussion of the concept, see McRae, K., "The Principle of
Territoriality and the Principle of Personality in Multilingual States", Linguistics
158, 1975, pp. 33-54. See also R. Davison, "Nationalism as an Ottoman
Problem and the Ottoman Response" in Nationalism in a Non-National
States: The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, Columbus Ohio 1977, pp.
25-56 for a discussion of the millet system.