Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union by Francine Hirsch (review)

Abstract

reviews 735 it is nonetheless a pioneering effort thatwill be a welcome addition to the literature on gender inEurope during a particularly violent century. HistoryDepartment Claire E. Nolte Manhattan College, New York Hirsch, Francine. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the SovietUnion. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2005. xviii + 367 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. $27.95: ?^5? (paperback). Francine Hirsch, an associate professor of history in the University of Wisconsin, Madison, states her primary purpose as seeking to understand 'how the Bolsheviks went about changing the individual and group identities of the former Soviet Empire'. This, however, leads her into a range of subsidiary theseswhich combine tomake this a richly rewarding book. While her chief sources are the archives of the St Petersburg branch of theRussian Academy of Sciences, she draws on several other Russian and American archives and libraries. That of the Commission for the Study of the Tribal Composition of Russia's Population (Kips), formed in 1917, proved particularly rich. During the Civil War the Bolsheviks had grown sharply aware of the importance of winning the collaboration of native elites in non-Russian areas, and this sensitized them to the need for an accurate picture of Russia's ethnic geography. The learning process, thus begun, was to lastwell into the 1930s, and was to issue in a range of policies and practices which Hirsch examines in illuminating detail. From the first a key role was played by Russia's ethnographers ? hence the subtitle of her book. The early 1920s saw the emergence of a system of national republics and national communes, and the strikingof treatiesbetween theRSFSR, Ukraine, Belorussia and Azerbaijan guaranteeing their sovereignty, leading on to the establishment of a Moscow-centred 'Union of Soviet-Socialist Republics', initially comprising the Russian, Belorussian and Transcaucasian republics. As Hirsch demonstrates, however, this process of regionalization along ethnic rather than economic lines was undertaken only after prolonged dispute through the Civil War period, and for some years thereafter advocates of economy-based regionalization remained active. Of critical importance was the first 'All-Union' census of 1926, inwhich it became clear that a great number of the USSR's non-Russian subjects, espe cially those of Central Asia and the Far East, had no conception of national identity, instead identifying themselves in local or clan terms. In such cases Moscow devised a national identityfor them and instructed the census takers accordingly. The process of amalgamation of clans and tribes into narodnosti into glavnye narodnosti was, however, to continue into the late 1930s. Successive censuses saw a series of adjustments and corrections to the list which citizens could choose from when officially stating their nationality. The ethnographers initiallyarrived at a figureof 172,but by 1936 theCensus Bureau had whittled itdown to 107.A fewmonths later Stalin sowed further 736 SEER, 86, 4, OCTOBER 2008 confusion by stating in a speech to the Congress of Soviets that 'as iswell known, there are about sixty nations, national groups and narodnosti in the Soviet Union', thus provoking the ethnographers to hastily cut down their figures: 1937was not a time to contradict theGeneral Secretary! The rise of Nazism provoked a reaction in the USSR against naked national determinism. During thewar years, however, the distinction between Soviet citizenswho were ofRussian or other native origin and those of foreign origin, such as Poles, Germans and Koreans, assumed critical importance, triggering wholesale deportations from sensitive border regions. Following the war several peoples deemed to have collaborated with the Germans were deprived of their territorial identity. In a brisk epilogue Hirsch outlines official and scholarly positions on the national question from Stalin's post-war years through to the collapse of the Soviet state in 1991. She has much of interest to say on the ideas of Julian Bromlei, Sergei Rudenko and others active during theBrezhnev years. Meanwhile both the listof nationalities and nationality borders continued to invite dispute. Stalin's prediction that themerger of Soviet nations was nigh was now thrown into doubt, as both Brezhnev and Khrushchev warned against the 'forced' merger of nations. Hirsch resists the temptation to credit nationalism or national tensionswith precipitating the collapse of the Soviet Union...