Rulers and Victims Reconsidered: Geoffrey Hosking and the Russians of the Soviet Union

Abstract

Post-Soviet has become known as a xenophobic land, a place where non-Europeans are reluctant to go for fear of encountering hostility and violence. Public opinion evidence shows that these fears are not entirely misplaced. In 2004, the slogan Russia for the was supported by 59 percent of Russians polled, while nearly half agreed that minorities have too much power in this Large numbers of ethnic Russians wish to curtail immigration, maintain that non-Russians are themselves responsible for the ethnic violence committed against them, and believe that Russians live worse than other ethnic groups within the country. Popular hostility is directed not only toward visiting foreigners from Asia and Africa but also toward the peoples who have historically been bound up in an imperial relationship with Russia--Muslims of the Caucasus and Central Asia. (1) How can we explain the rise of such virulently nationalist attitudes in the past few years, so seemingly at odds with the Soviet-era discourse of antiracism and internationalism? Geoffrey Hosking's work on Russians in the Soviet Union, while not explicitly focused on the post-Soviet period, is a compelling introduction to the roots of this phenomenon. The contrast he describes between Russia's status as the leading of the Soviet Union and its impoverished and degraded condition in the final Soviet decades is one important reason for the resentment felt by many Russians during and after the Soviet collapse. Professor Hosking has never been shy about tackling the big questions of Russian history. His works appeal to specialists as well as nonscholars, recalling a time when historians were not so minutely specialized and reluctant to make broad arguments. Engagingly written and erudite, Hosking's books draw on archival research as well as literary sources and memoirs to analyze key themes in Russian society and culture. Rulers and Victims: The Russians in the Soviet Union is a sprawling, ambitious, and highly readable book, a sequel to the equally magisterial Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917. (2) The fundamental premise of both works is that imperial state building interfered with the consolidation of a Russian nation. For Hosking, a cohesive sense of nationhood is essential for stability in the modern world, so the lack of a clearly defined sense of national identity is the fundamental problem--indeed the tragedy--of Russian history both before and after 1917. Hosking argues that the overlap between russkii (referring to the ethnic group) and rossiiskii (referring to the state) helps explain the fluidity and ambiguity of Russian national identity. Because of the gradual expansion of the Russian state over centuries, the territorial and ethnic boundaries of the Russian nation were poorly defined. The identification of with a larger, messianic ideal--Orthodox messianism before 1917, global proletarian revolution thereafter--added to the confusion, making it difficult to disentangle national from imperial identity or even to conceive of a Russian nation-state apart from empire. Hosking was the first to analyze the interplay of empire and nation in Russian history in such a sustained and nuanced way, with careful attention to politics, society, and culture. For this reason alone, Rulers and Victims holds an important place in the historiography of the Soviet Union. Yet this is not the book's only big theme. Hosking goes further, identifying what he sees as a tragic consequence of the conflict between empire and nation in the Soviet era. Russians, he writes, were not only the largest and most powerful ethnic group within the Soviet Union but in many ways its most disadvantaged. In the early Soviet period, Russian national interests were neglected and Russians themselves were condemned as inveterate great-power chauvinists and imperialists. This blanket rejection of Russian national identity was abandoned in the 1930s. …