Great Russian Chauvinism

Framing the problem

Great Russian chauvinism names the attitude in which a dominant nation defines itself as superior and suppresses others. As an inheritance from the Russian Empire, the problem was a practical task for a Soviet regime intending to build a multinational state, because the imperial bureaucracy, language policy, and cultural hierarchy remained in place.

Lenin did not treat the problem as one of formal equality. He argued that what is required of socialists of an oppressor nation differs from what is required of socialists of an oppressed one. The formulation was asymmetrical: the former owe vigilance against their own nation's privilege and recognition of the right of secession, the latter an orientation toward union rather than national isolation.

Expression in policy

The autonomization dispute of 1922 was the first test. Lenin defined Stalin's autonomization plan as an expression of Great Russian chauvinism and demanded a federal form in which all republics, Russia included, entered on equal terms. He criticized the handling of the Georgian affair of the same period on the same ground.

The Twelfth Party Congress of 1923 defined Great Russian chauvinism as the main danger and adopted korenizatsiya as the response. Local nationalism was also identified as a danger at that congress, and how the weight between the two dangers was set became the question that determined the direction of policy afterwards.

Reversal and after

That weighting was inverted in the mid-1930s. Local nationalism was redefined as the main danger and national cadres were removed, and the term Great Russian chauvinism disappeared from official discourse. Figures and events from Russian history were reorganized as resources of Soviet patriotism, and during the war the leading role of the Russian nation was written into the official narrative.

The disappearance of the concept is treated as an index of the change in the character of Soviet nationalities policy. Where early policy focused on restraining the privilege of the dominant nation, later policy moved toward using the Russian language and Russian culture as the medium of federal integration. The tension this shift left behind is discussed as one of the backgrounds to the national conflicts of the Soviet collapse.