Exit in the Near Abroad: The Russian Minorities in Latvia and Kyrgyzstan (original) (raw)
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The post-Soviet nations: perspectives on the demise of the USSR
International Affairs, 1996
The Post-Soviet Nations is edited by Alexander Motyl, one of the few students of Soviet politics to focus on nationalities issues and to do so in a way that encourages comparative theorizing. According to Motyl, the twelve essays in the volume are united by three objectives: (i) to demonstrate how nationality and ethnicity influenced various social processes, institutions and policy effects during the Soviet period and how the legacy of the Soviet period is now conditioning the transformation of post-Soviet nations ; (ii) to pay more attention to the experiences of the non-Russian ethnic groups and peripheral regions in revising the study of Soviet history and studying post-Soviet politics and society; and (iii) to draw broader theoretical propositions concerning the relationships between the categories of ethnicity and nationalism and such classic concepts as "elites," "coercion," "participation," and "modernization," so that Soviet and post-Soviet studies can become a more viable sub-field of comparative politics. It is these broader considerations, rather than the empirical content, that are supposed to make these essays a valuable collection. However, the majority of the essays in this volume do little more than present concise overviews of how different institutions, policies and social processes shaped and were shaped by nationality and ethnicity. Several of the essays, although covering topics ranging from Marxist-Leninist ideology and the legal foundations of the Soviet state to the political police, citizen participation and economic policy, often end up covering much of the same historical ground: Lenin's "dialectical" strategy of allowing indigenization while encouraging "fusion" in the long run, Stalin's formula ot "national in form, socialist in content," the failed quest for sblizheniia (convergence) and sliianie (assimilation), and finally, the eruption of suppressed nationalist discontent with glasnost' and perestroika. The reader may be able to find some theoretically interesting insights, but the majority of the essays provide few indications of how their empirical observations bear on the broader issues in comparative politics. At best, most of the essays in this volume offer a corrective for past tendencies in Sovietology to ignore nationalities issues and to focus on Kremlin politics and ethnic Russians. The essays by Walker Connor, Mark Beissinger, Zvi Gitelman, and Walter Connor, however, offer more theoretically compelling observations and come closest to achieving the three objectives initially set forth by Motyl. Walker Connor focuses on growing economic disparities and differential access to political power and cultural resources among the different titular nationalities and other minority groups. He observes that the Communists never achieved the "equality of nations" that was so crucial to the "fusion" among different nationalities in the USSR anticipated by Lenin. Connor himself makes no reference to other societies or to any theoretical tradition, but the underlying theoretical implications are more explicit than in most of the other essays. The Soviet experience suggests that the extent of equality in various spheres may be an im
Keywords: post-soviet states, soviet legacy, foreign policy, political and economic development, identity discourse, civil society
State and Nation Building Policies and the New Trends in Migration in the Former Soviet Union
The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, 2003
Democratic transitions are especially complex in federal states and countries with multinational populations and compact, ethnic minority settlements; the increasing ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural heterogeneity of a society complicates the achievement of political compromises. In this sense, the post-Soviet newly independent states (NIS) face an especially complex transition pattern. Roman Szporluk, for example, enumerates three different transformations: the dissolution of the imperial structure and the resulting formation of independent states, the transition from a centralized to a market economic system, and the transition from authoritarianism to (at least ideally) a political democracy, with all three "combined or fused in the chaotic and extremely difficult process of formation and transformation of states and nations. " Thus the transition in the NIS is marked by simultaneous developments in the political, economic, social, religious, ideological, and ...
Journal of Eurasian Studies, 2011
When the Soviet Union began to unravel in the late 1980s, many observers expected that the 25 million ethnic Russians who lived in the non-Russian republics represented an important group of people who could be mobilized by ‘empire-savers’ to stem this process. Russians who would end up as minorities in new nationalizing states, had little if anything to gain from state disintegration. They were also highly resourceful in terms of education and occupational positions. The sinister role which ethnic Serbs played in Slobodan Milosevic’s schemes to salvage the Yugoslav state boded ill, as did the bloody war waged by France in Algeria in protection of the pied-noirs in the 1950s.As it turned out, the Russians in the non-Russian republics for the most part remained remarkably passive, and this contributed in no small degree to the tranquil transition to a new political map in Eurasia. This article is an attempt to explain this counterintuitive outcome. I revisit a typology of identity trajectories for the Russian diaspora which I developed in the mid-1990s and conclude that its basic insights remain valid. At that time I had argued that Russians outside the RSFSR had already for some time been going through a process of dissociation from the Russian core group. They were adopting some cultural traits from the local population without undergoing any kind of assimilation. While there were important regional varieties as well as generational differences within each Russophone community, as a general rule it could be said that they had developed an identity of their own, or more precisely: one local identity for each republic. In this way Russian ethnic solidarity was weakened and the mobilizational potential of the diaspora issue for political purposes was diminished.Empirical research carried out by myself and others over the last 15 years, including large-scale opinion polls, seem to confirm these assumptions. After the break-up of the unitary state the distance between the identity trajectories of the various Russian-speaking post-Soviet communities have gradually grown wider, for a number of reasons. Those Russians who were least willing or able to adapt to the new political circumstances have in many cases returned to Russia, making it even more important for those who remain to learn the local language and find their cultural-political niche in their country of residence as a national minority.
The puzzle over post-Soviet nationalizing nationalisms remains unresolved as questions such as why some states nationalize more than the others remain open and require a detailed historical study and empirical approach. Why do some democratic states nationalize more than authoritarian states given similar ethno-demographic contexts, Soviet legacy experiences, and more or less similar ethno-lingual divides and challenges? This study focuses on elites—political, cultural, and economic. These powerful men—and, more rarely, women—control decisions about the nationalizing discourses and projects in the post-Soviet states. I contend that an analysis of the motivations , interests, and processes used by power elites to construct and influence the nation-building processes will shed light on how and why post-Soviet states undertake nationalization. The interplay of different elites' power over decision-making, the outcomes of elite competition, the historical and political contexts under which such decisions are made, as well as the final outcome of these motivations are termed here as a nationalizing regime. It is both an analytical tool through which we can piece together different processes and contexts of the nation-building development as well as a concept under which the process of power relations in the nationalizing context occurs. By applying this framework to post-Soviet " democracy " and " authoritarian " political scenarios, I aim to demonstrate the complexity of the processes involved in nationalization and to analyze how different political regimes influence nation-building. The question I pose in this chapter is very specific to the chosen cases of post-Soviet Latvia and Kazakhstan—the two post-Soviet countries with the largest Russian-speaking minorities, as a percentage of total population, Laruelle_9781498525473.indb 113 8/17/2016 2:40:31 PM