The Elder Brother Doctrine

How to assert hierarchy while professing equality

The Soviet constitution proclaimed the equality of nations and korenizatsiya actually favoured minorities. Yet a multinational state needed a centre of integration, and Russians and the Russian language already occupied that place in fact. The family metaphor was the device that put the fact into official language without making it sound like inequality.

Brothers stand in an order of seniority, but the hierarchy is described as care rather than rule: the elder brother does not oppress the others, he learns first and leads. The narrative could therefore acknowledge Russian primacy while evading the charge of imperialism.

How the histories were rewritten

The practical effect showed in the rewriting of every nation's past. Until the mid-1930s the imperial conquest of the borderlands was described as colonialism; thereafter it moved by stages from absolute evil to lesser evil, and then to voluntary union and progressive annexation. In Ukraine's case the Pereiaslav agreement of 1654 was redefined as the reunification of two fraternal peoples, and its tercentenary in 1954 was celebrated on a grand scale alongside the transfer of Crimea to the Ukrainian republic.

Figures who had resisted Russian expansion were revalued in the opposite direction. Shamil of the Caucasus was treated for a time as a leader of national liberation and by about 1950 recast as an agent of Britain and the Ottomans. Which national narrative was permitted tracked the standing of that nation in the present.

Continuation and retreat

For the peoples deported during the war the narrative was especially harsh. A nation moved wholesale on a charge of collaboration was erased from the family story altogether, and its autonomous republic vanished from the map. deportation of nationalities and this discourse are two sides of the same moment.

After 1956, with the partial rehabilitation of the deported peoples, and after the 1961 party programme introduced the new category of the Soviet people, the elder-brother phrase appeared less often. Since Russian continued to be defined as the language of inter-ethnic communication, however, the hierarchy did not disappear so much as become more euphemistic. That questions of language status stood near the front of republican demands in the late 1980s is not unrelated to this continuity.