Bourgeois Nationalism

Two charges, only one of which survived

The Twelfth Party Congress of 1923 named two deviations to guard against: Great Russian chauvinism on the side of the ruling nation and local nationalism on the side of the minorities. The first was designated the main danger, and that ruling was the ground on which korenizatsiya rested.

From the mid-1930s the balance broke. Great Russian chauvinism all but vanished from official language while bourgeois nationalism remained and kept expanding. The asymmetry between the two charges is the plainest single indicator of which way nationality policy was leaning.

What fell under the charge

The boundary was never fixed. In 1930s Ukraine, having promoted Ukrainization became the accusation itself, and Skrypnyk, the commissar of education, was attacked for the policy he had administered and killed himself in July 1933. Editing a national epic sympathetically, narrating a nation's past as progress, or describing its union with Russia as conquest could all fall under it depending on the year.

After 1948 it worked in tandem with rootless cosmopolitanism, which stood for an outward, Western orientation. The two charges pointed in opposite directions yet could be laid on the same person: to put your own nation first was nationalism, to look abroad was cosmopolitanism.

Did it outlive Stalin

It did. In May 1972 Petro Shelest was removed as first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, and criticism followed that his book Our Soviet Ukraine (1970) had idealised the national past; a wide round-up of Ukrainian intellectuals came with it. The era of mass execution was over, but the charge went on serving as grounds for dismissal, for banning a book, for barring someone from work.

The category lasted because it was never defined. With no fixed boundary it could be redrawn whenever it was needed, and cadres in every republic were left permanently unsure how far they could defend their own culture.