National in Form, Socialist in Content

What the formula was meant to solve

The Soviet state made two promises at once: to revive the languages and cultures of previously oppressed nations, and to build a single classless society. Left alone the two collide. Cultivate national culture and nationalism grows; press for one culture and the result is Russification.

The formula patches the collision with a distinction between form and content. A novel in Uzbek and a novel in Russian differ in form only; in speaking of labour, the plan and the party they have the same content. Expanding the national-language press and unifying its line could therefore proceed as one policy without contradiction.

How it worked in practice

At its height the principle meant large investment. Alphabets were devised for unwritten languages, textbooks and dictionaries were compiled, and every republic acquired a state theatre, an opera company and a folk ensemble. Where korenizatsiya dealt with personnel and institutions, this formula defined the character of the culture those institutions were to produce.

It was also the grammar of censorship. Whatever would not translate into socialist content, national epics or traditional religious culture, was classed as feudal residue, and works that portrayed the national past warmly attracted the charge of bourgeois nationalism. Where permitted form ended and forbidden content began shifted from period to period, so the same work could be honoured and banned within a decade.

What it left behind

After the later 1930s, as the Russocentric narrative strengthened and Soviet patriotism and elder brother doctrine came to the fore, the room allowed to 'national form' narrowed markedly. The formula itself was never discarded and remained the official language of cultural policy to the end.

Assessments differ. One reading treats it as a device that reduced national culture to stage costume; another, following Terry Martin's account of the USSR as an 'affirmative action empire', holds that the national-language school systems and cultural institutions actually built under this principle were what first institutionalised modern national identities. The two are not exclusive: an arrangement meant to preserve only the form also left behind the staff and institutions that filled it.