Language and the Politics of Identity in the USSR

Abstract

The question of identity has become acute in the Soviet Union. The rapid and in some senses catastrophic decline of the Soviet Communist Party’s power, the incipient disintegration of the Union and the re-emergence of national and nationalist solidarities, some of them in all their nineteenth-century glory, have raised urgent questions about the future development of this society and the likely forms of its relations with other countries. Understandably, much of recent attention has focused on the practical economic and organisational problems of the transition away from Stalinism. The drastic collapse in standards of living and living conditions, and the need to manage the explosion of divergent interests, have become urgent and pressing problems with which the whole continent must deal, whether directly or indirectly. As a result, the broader questions of individual and collective identity, or, put another way, the broader question of ideology, have been rather neglected in the discussions of recent events.KeywordsCommunist PartyCollective IdentityClass StruggleObjective LogicCollective PurposeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.