Goff , Krista Nested Nationalism: Making and Unmaking Nations in the Soviet Caucasus (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 587 problematic, some of which have already been mentioned. The most striking is perhaps the claim that Stalin’s ‘clearest individual predecessor’ was Henry VIII, while the Soviet Union’s ‘direct predecessor’ was the Confederacy: both were ‘quasi-socialist’ slave states (pp. 12, 20, 24, 102). One must completely ignore history’s ‘heavy facts’ to argue so. And it is not clear how these claims relate to Curtis’s ideas about the monastic roots of Stalinism. To justify his problematic associations methodologically, Curtis takes up arms against metaphysics and causality in history: he claims he is not interested in cause-effect relations between social phenomena (p. 71) and explores their meaning by establishing parallels between them, which helps to ‘enlarg[e] the universe of human discourse’ (pp. 24–25). Giving the plasticity of his methodology, it comes as no surprise that his bibliography does not include several authors whose work has significantly contributed in recent decades to our understanding of Stalinism as culture (e.g. Boris Groys, Igal Halfin, Jochen Hellbeck and Mikhail Weiskopf). Bringing literature, history and anthropology closer together is a valuable enterprise, and cultural analysis can significantly enrich our understanding of history. Literature can reveal cultural mechanisms that are crucial for understanding power relationships in a given society. Examining Stalinism in the context of the world-wide process of ‘concentration of power’ (p. 20) is a very interesting project. But this does not justify the unusual degree of ‘inner freedom’ that Curtis demonstrates in his interpretation of Stalinism. Emory University Nikolay Koposov Goff, Krista. Nested Nationalism: Making and Unmaking Nations in the Soviet Caucasus. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2020. xii + 319 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $49.95. It might be hard to expect anyone to tell us something new and important about a well-worn topic like Soviet nationality policy, but in this remarkable book Krista Goff has done just that. Nested Nationalism takes up the story of ‘nested minorities’ within a single former Soviet republic, offering us a keen mirroring of the better-known, broader federal debates on national belonging in the USSR. Drawing on extensive archival work as well as more than 120 interviews from across the Caucasus, Russia and Europe, this book is arguably the first to map the structural category of what the USSR called ‘non-titular nationalities’, and how the political dynamics they experienced have informed post-Soviet life today. By most reckonings, Ingilois, Kurds, Lezgins and Talysh all had ample cause to anticipate that the USSR’s doctrine of the friendship of peoples would ensure SEER, 99, 3, JULY 2021 588 them protected standing in Azerbaijan, a non-Russian republic that had its own battles for recognition in a crowded hierarchy of Soviet peoples. Officials in Baku, in theory, had every reason to extend the same minority rights to others that they sought from Moscow. Yet, at almost every turn, relations between Azeris and the republic’s smaller ethnic communities proved fraught, with much evidence from Goff’s intrepid archival and field work pointing to the premise that many Azeri officials simply feared the competition in a setting where their own footing was hardly uncontested. Chapters on the Soviet period offer a richly detailed portrait of the initial confusion surrounding policies of korenizatsiia or ‘nativization,’ at a time when, as historian Adeeb Khalid pointed out, the nation had become a leading currency of political elites. Goff draws on extensive government memoranda to illustrate how difficult it proved to sort and count varied minority populations in one of the world’s most ethnically and linguistically saturated areas at the same time as administrative echelons in Baku were themselves being brutally purged. Chapter two offers valuable insight on post-war efforts to resettle Azerbaijanis from Armenia to Azerbaijan, in part to make way for repatriates to Armenia, while chapter four makes particularly good use of often overlooked minutes of dissertation defences from the Soviet Academy of Sciences to walk the reader through the charged debates over ethnic recognition, foremost for Talysh living along the border of Iran. In 1959, Soviet census takers grudgingly identified only eighty-five of them in all of Azerbaijan, conceding some thirty...