Pushkin House invites you to join Brigid O’Keeffe in conversation with Natalya Chernyshova about O’Keeffe’s new book, The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise. They will discuss ethnic politics in the USSR that aimed to mobilise and suppress the minority groups that made up the Union, and how these policies have shaped contemporary Russia's relationships and conflicts with its 'post-Soviet' neighbours and affected Eurasia and the world ever since.
The vast territory of the Soviet Union was home to hundreds of ethnic minorities. Driven by Lenin’s condemnation of nationalist rivalries and belief that international community of workers could be united in one socialist utopia, the Bolsheviks inscribed ethnic difference into the bedrock of Soviet policy. Initially there was a push for “national in form, socialist in culture” – the idea that minority languages, customs, traditions and ways of life could be a vehicle for socialism – as well as the policy of korenizatsiya that recruited members of local ethnic groups into the Soviet apparatus.
Yet utopian ideals were far from reality. While all nations were equal in theory, some were considered to be civilised and others more backward, and needed the guidance of a benevolent Russian “elder brother” through Russocentric cultural and educational programmes. Ethnic policy shifted from class-based to ethnic-based terror, underlain by a belief that national groups were first and foremost loyal to their own communities rather than Soviet ideology. The pursuit of industrialisation and collectivisation dovetailed with the aim to quell nationalism. This caused the death of millions of people in the catastrophic Holodomor famine in Ukraine, and the deportation of millions of people belonging to minority groups – from the Baltics to the Caucasus, Mongolia and the Far East – to remote regions to colonise lands occupied by other indigenous communities.
The Soviet collapse in 1991 fractured the Union along markedly national lines, leading to a variety of new nation-states – including the Russian Federation – being born. Yet the idea of Russian cultural superiority and entitlement to its previous spheres of influence has pervaded into the present day, with catastrophic consequences for the nations that once made up the USSR. Nowhere is this more evident than in the war in Ukraine.
About the speakers
Brigid O’Keeffe is a Professor of History at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. O’Keeffe is the author, most recently, of The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise – a compact and accessible history that explains the centrality of ethnic politics to the rise and fall of the Soviet empire. She is also the author of Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia (winner of the Ab Imperio Prize) and New Soviet Gypsies: Nationality, Performance, and Selfhood in the Early Soviet Union. O’Keeffe is as at work on her next book, The Family Litvinov: A History of the Twentieth Century.
Dr Natalya Chernyshova is Lecturer in Modern European History at Queen Mary University of London. Her research and publications focus on Belarusian history, Soviet nationalities politics, material culture and everyday life during late socialism. She is currently writing a history of late Soviet Belarus under the leadership of Petr Masherau, the first secretary of the Belarusian Communist Party during 1965-1980. This research was funded by the British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship in 2020-2022. Natalya comments regularly on Belarusian history and current affairs for media in the UK and internationally.