The Soviet People

Why a new category was needed

After Stalin the Soviet state had to say two things at once: that the national question was already solved, and that the national composition of fifteen republics remained a fact. The family metaphor of elder and younger brothers (elder brother doctrine) was awkward to use unchanged after the critique of the cult of personality, and as the deported peoples were rehabilitated a language built on hierarchy carried less conviction.

The 1961 programme's answer was the Soviet people: nations had not disappeared, but under socialism they had been bound into a community of a new kind. The formula allowed integration to be asserted without either denying nations or spelling out a hierarchy.

Rapprochement and merger

Two stages were posited in theory: nations first draw closer in economy and culture (sblizhenie) and in the distant future merge into one (sliianie). When and how merger was to be achieved was a long-running argument in Soviet scholarship, and the official line under Brezhnev was not to hurry it. The preamble of the 1977 constitution inscribed "the Soviet people, a new historical community" while leaving federalism and the republics' right of secession in place.

The practical instrument was language. Russian was defined as the language of inter-ethnic communication and its weight grew in schooling, higher education, the army and administration. Republican languages kept their legal status, but the practical value of Russian for promotion and admission kept rising.

Where it broke

The statistics of the 1970s and 1980s show that merger was not proceeding as expected. The share of the titular nation in its republic often rose, and national languages and national history went on being reproduced inside the universities and academies that korenizatsiya had left behind.

After 1988 that structure erupted politically. Demands for language laws, declarations of republican sovereignty and then demands to leave the union followed one another, and the grounds invoked were the status of national languages and the right of secession guaranteed by the Soviet constitution itself. The designation 'new historical community' neither explained the process nor stopped it.

Some read the category as an attempt to build a state identity, others as a euphemism for Russification. Both readings concede one fact: the USSR chose to manage nations by institutionalising them rather than to abolish them, and those institutions became the units along which the union finally came apart.