Counter-Currents
Terry Martin
The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in The Soviet Union, 1923-1939
Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001
Empires are based on a core ethnic group with a well-organized military, a robust economy, and a functional government whose history of fairmindedness and even judgement is such that those outside the core ethnic group can put their trust in it.
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7 comments
Its a total lie that policy the USSR favoured Ukrainian language in the Ukrainian SSR. The USSR was brutally anti Ukrainian and heavily suppressed Ukrainian culture and language. Look up the holdomor sometime. Next are we are going to be seeing articles claiming that the native cultures and languages in the Baltics weren’t suppressed and driven underground in the USSR? For shame.
The same could be said about Caucasians, Qazaqs, and Central Asians. Of their intelligentsia, who initially supported Bolsheviks, seeing in them somebody like progressive modernizers like Atatürk, nobody survived 1937-1938, and of common people thousands and millions died during the collectivization.
I would better suggest to read Kevin MacDonald’s article STALIN’S WILLING EXECUTIONERS. JEWS AS A HOSTILE ELITE IN THE USSR. There is even a Russian translation of this article in the WorldWeb.
The non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union were more anti-Soviet and anti-Communist than the Russians, because they did not have traditions of OBSHINNOST, the word which is not translable in any language, the word communality did not explain it fully. Among the Russians the Cossacks and Sibirians had not such tradition too, and their collectivisation was also very brutal. Stalin wanted to have at least some support of non-Russian communists and that’s why this Korenizatsia. But in the end, millions of Qazaqs, Ukrainians, Uzbeks, North Caucasians were killed during the collectivization, and most of national pro-communist intelligentsia like Tuerkic Jadids, or Ukrainian and Belorussian national-bolshevik writers were all killed in Big Purges.
Kok Bori Is this what OBSHINNOST refers to? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obshchina
Yes, more or less so, the system was based on it and this was the gate to collectivization. The most important is that in this community there was no room for private initiative and no motivation for people to work better. That’s why this system has never existed among Cossacks, or in Siberia, and also in Ukraine. Of course all peasants of all peoples have had some common projects and common works, but Obshchinnost was typical mostly for the Non-Chernozem lands in Russia, together with the serfdom, I would add.
“The Soviet Union’s leadership consisted of a hostile elite whose members were mostly not ethnically Great Russian. As a result, the Soviet leaders created organizations and policies which specifically favored non-Russians.”
David Duke’s book The Secret Behind Communism can be a great help if you have trouble understanding how the so-called Russian Revolution was not about Russians.
Many Russian and Ukrainian authors also have written interesting accounts about what happened in the SU in 1920-1940’s. You surely remember Solzhenitsyn, but he was neither first, nor alone. All those defectors of every national and social backgrounds from the workers-and-peasants paradise have told very revelating things. Bazhenov, Besedovski, Kravchenko, Klimov, Guzenko, Soloniewicz, Barmin and many others.
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