Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

Schools in all republics were required to teach the Russian language. Russian literature, especially Pushkin and Tolstoy, was extolled as the standard for all Soviet writers to emulate. Ethnic units were abolished in the Red Army, and Russian was made the universal language of command. Many nationalities were required to reformulate their written languages using the Cyrillic alphabet. The Soviet peoples were still in principle equal, but the Russians were definitely ‘more equal’ than the others.

Actually, though, this was imperial and not ethnic Russian-ness. It envisaged the Russians primarily as the bearers of a great state. Stalin had little interest in the ethnic customs of the Russian people, which were being destroyed even as the new Russification took hold. In particular, the Russian village commune and the Orthodox Church were being deliberately undermined as an objective of Communist policy.

Soviet educational and economic policies transformed the consciousness of all nationalities, including the Russians. Mass primary education and likbez produced a generation of young people, literate in their own language, and at the same time becoming urbanized. This was the Soviet Union’s greatest long-term achievement. At the beginning of the Second World War, the average Russian Red Army soldier was far more aware of his national traditions than his counterpart only a quarter of a century earlier. But the same was true of non-Russians: thus, the Ukrainians who sought urban employment during the 1930s–1950s were nationally aware, and transformed what had been Russian, Polish, and Jewish towns into Ukrainian ones, centres of a conscious Ukrainian culture.

As the threat of war grew during the 1930s, Stalin perceived some nationalities as potentially treacherous. Poles and Germans were deported from areas near the western borders. In 1937, when Japan invaded China and seemed to threaten the Soviet Union, all Koreans were deported from the Far East. This was not just removal from a sensitive region: after they reached their destinations, Koreans were forbidden to attend Korean-language schools or to read Korean newspapers. For the first time, the Soviet authorities were endeavouring to extirpate the cultural existence of a whole nationality.

They continued such policies during and after the war. As they occupied eastern Poland and the Baltic republics under the terms of the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939, they deported many local elites – anyone capable of organizing national resistance – to Siberia and Kazakhstan. In the Polish case, this was accompanied by the deliberate mass murder of some 20,000 army officers and professional people. In some cases, entire peoples were deported: notably the Germans, the Chechens, Ingush and Balkars of the North Caucasus, the Kalmyks, and the Crimean Tatars. The legacy of these attempts to destroy whole peoples was their bitter and irrevocable hostility towards the Soviet Union, Communism, and Russians – a legacy which played a decisive role in the ultimate disintegration of the USSR. The first declarations of secession from the USSR came from the Baltic republics, the defection of the Ukrainians in 1991 completed the process, and the Chechens have provoked the most destructive of Russia’s post-Soviet wars.

Chapter 7

The Soviet Union: triumph, decline, and fall

The Second World War and after

The Second World War exemplified in brutal fashion the advantages and disadvantages of Russia’s geostrategic position. When Germany and its allies invaded in June 1941, the Red Army, destabilized by the terror and weakened by poor preparation, suffered terrible early losses, and retreated first of all to the outskirts of Moscow, then as far as the Volga at Stalingrad. The Germans occupied huge areas of the country, killing, enslaving, or deporting the inhabitants. Eventually, though, the strengths of Soviet totalitarian leadership reasserted themselves: the CPSU was able to prioritize the use of resources, shift industry to where it was more secure, and expand the production of armaments. ‘Enemies’ were now all too real, and Soviet citizens were powerfully motivated to fight them. The staunch fighting qualities of the Soviet soldier combined with popular Soviet-Russian patriotism, which even most non-Russians accepted when faced by German brutality. Recovery was gradual, but in the end, the greater size and resources of the Soviet Union, augmented by Allied aid, ensured victory.