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the nationalist intelligentsia while in most cases limiting the spread of their

inﬂuence.

The general radicalisation which spread across all three empires as a result

of the First World War greatly enhanced popular support for nationalist lead-

ers. With central authority diminishing by the day, and the Western allies

keen on promoting the development of nation-states across Europe and

the Middle East,

national parties across the Russian Empire shifted their

demands from support for broad autonomy and rights to insistence on outright

independence.

Ukraine led the way,withtheformation of the UkrainianCentral Rada under

the presidency of the popular historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky on 17 March 1917.

The Rada’s First Universal of 23 June declared the right of the Ukrainian people

to order their own lives without breaking away from Russia. In Baku, Tiﬂis

and elsewhere in Transcaucasia, effective power lay with socialist-dominated

soviets, which sought to work with the Provisional Government. A series of

all-Russian Muslim Congresses afﬁrmed the right of Muslims to autonomy

within Russia. The Provisional Government, however, dragged its feet over

both the constitutional structure of the post-tsarist state and the question

of land reform, which was crucial to the interests of the vast majority of

non-Russians, and the demand for independence was raised with growing fre-

quency. The Bolshevik revolution in October 1917 marked, for many national

leaders, the end of any hope of autonomy or federalism within a democratic

Russian state. The Rada declared Ukrainian independence on 25 January 1918,

and a Transcaucasian Sejm made up of Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijani

representatives followed suit on 22 April, only to split into three fully indepen-

dent republics a month later. The fourth Muslim Congress held in Kokand

in November–December declared autonomy for Turkestan, but soon became

a focus for both Russian and non-Russian anti-Bolshevik forces in the region.

By this time, however, most of the non-Russian regions were engulfed by

the civil war. As well as the Reds and Whites, the war was fought between

independent peasant and nationalist armies ﬁghting for local self-rule. No

less than eight separate armies were active on Ukrainian soil at some point

between 1918 and 1920.

The nationalist forces of Simon Petliura and Denikin’s

1 Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History (London and New York,

Longman, 2001).

2 Aviel Roshwald, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the

Middle East, 1914–1923 (London: Routledge, 2001).

3 Arthur E. Adams, Bolsheviks in the Ukraine: The Second Campaign, 1918–1919 (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1963); Jurij Borys, The Sovietization ofUkraine, 1917–1923 (Edmonton:

Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1980).

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White Army were ﬁnally defeated by November 1920, although the Ukrainian

peasant bands under the anarchist Nestor Makhno continued to disrupt Soviet

power until the following summer. In Central Asia resistance lasted longer

in the form of the ‘Basmachestvo’ – a broad and disparate movement made

up of a loose alliance of politically motivated opponents of Bolshevism and

pan-Turkists together with local warlords. Although the movement was never

united or organised enough to pose any serious threat to Soviet power, it

continued to cause disruption until the end of the 1920s.

In Transcaucasia,

following the withdrawal of Turkish forces in the summer of 1918, the three

independent republics survived with little interference until Soviet power was

established in Azerbaijan in April 1920, in Armenia in December and in Georgia

the following February.

Richard Pipes’s account of the formation of the Soviet Union describes the

establishment of Bolshevik rule in these areas essentially as a series of military

campaigns in which the Red Army eventually overwhelmed weak national

armies.

Only in Georgia, however, was the picture almost as straightforward

as this. Elsewhere a number of complex factors undermined the independent

governments. Outside Transcaucasia, workers and administrators in the cities

were predominantly Russian, even where the surrounding countryside was

populated by non-Russian peasants, providing an urban base for Bolshevism

and opposition to separation from Russia. Bolshevik promises of land reform

and the guarantee of national rights appealed to many non-Russians, among

whom the idea of independence had weak roots in any case. In some areas,

the Bolsheviks were able to exploit splits in the national movement and base

Sovietisation on one or other sympathetic group or party, as with the Azerbai-

jani socialist Hummet Party. In Armenia, the Dashnaks reluctantly accepted

Soviet power as the lesser evil when faced with the imminent possibility of

invasion from Turkey. Finally, even where the national governments enjoyed

broad popular support, they were led mostly by intellectuals with little or no

experience of either government administration or military affairs and whose

political programme was not coherent or developed enough to satisfy the

aspirations of even their natural supporters.

By the middle of 1921, then, Soviet power extended across most of the for-

mer territory of the Russian Empire. The Bolsheviks then faced the problem of

4 Marie Broxup, ‘The Basmachis’, Central Asian Survey 2 (1983): 57–82; Mustafa Chokaev,

‘The Basmaji Movement in Turkestan’, Asiatic Review 24 (1928): 273–88.

5 Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923,

Revised edn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

6 Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), pp. 353–4.

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how to administer the non-Russian areas and to build a socialist society there.

On the one hand, they needed to ensure at least the passive support of the local

population, and Lenin in particular was concerned to avoid any impression

that the new Soviet state was a continuation of the old Russian-dominated

one, and to hold up Soviet rule as a shining example to anti-colonial move-

ments elsewhere in the world. On the other hand, the non-Russiannationalities

were overwhelmingly peasant in composition, had even lower levels of liter-

acy than Russians, and were less receptive to the demands of socialism than

were Russian workers, leaving them vulnerable to the propaganda efforts of

nationalists and religious leaders. From early 1918 onwards, the numerous

smaller nationalities of Soviet Russia itself were granted limited self-rule in

the form of autonomous republics and regions, whose purpose was both to

satisfy the national aspirations of the population and sections of their elites,

and to provide an avenue for the introduction of socialism together with cul-

tural and economic development. In the summer of 1922 Joseph Stalin, as

commissar for nationality affairs, drew up a plan which would have extended

this system to Ukraine, Belorussia and Transcaucasia, by incorporating them

directly into the existing Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR).

Lenin opposed this on the basis that the overt subordination of the major

nationalities to a Russian state would alienate their populations and send out

the wrong message internationally. The alternative scheme he proposed was

a formal federation of equals into what eventually became the Union of Soviet

Socialist Republics at the end of 1923.

The constitutional structure was only one part of early Soviet policies

towards the non-Russians. Equally important was the process of korenizatsiia –

roughly translated as ‘indigenisation’ – a set of policies aimed at developing

and promoting national identity: the recruitment and promotion of members

of the local nationality in the Communist Party and Soviet system; positive

discrimination in other areas of employment; the creation or standardisation

of national languages and scripts, together with national cultures based on

earlier writers and folk traditions; the extension of local self-rule for national

minorities outside the republicsthrough a system of national soviets; and build-

ing up a network of national schools with instruction in the mother tongue

for all non-Russians.

Some historians have interpreted these measures as a

7 H

ene Carr

ere d’Encausse, The Great Challenge: Nationalities and the Bolshevik State 1917–

1930 (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1992), pp. 157–94; Terry Martin, The

Afﬁrmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca,

N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 1–56; Jeremy Smith, ‘The Education

of National Minorities: The Early Soviet Experience’, Slavonic and East European Review

75 (1997): 281–307.

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product of the weakness of Bolshevik appeal to the non-Russians, as a series of

temporary concessions to national feeling.

Terry Martin, however, empha-

sises that the policies of korenizatsiia went far beyond what might have been

needed to ensure loyalty from the non-Russians. Rather than representing a

concession, the policies were aimed at undermining anti-Soviet nationalism

through promoting national identity in a Soviet form.

Korenizatsiia had a profound impact in the non-Russian republics. By 1927

local nationality representation in Soviet executive committees in the republics

ranged from 68.3 per cent (Turkmen SSR) to 80.5 per cent (Armenian SSR).

By the end of the 1920s, the Communists were claiming that almost all children

were receiving education in their mother tongue.

Opportunities in higher

education also opened up for non-Russians with the nativisation of universities

inTashkent, Belorussia and Ukraine, and the operation of a quota system across

the country.

This strategy was not without problems. From the beginning, it aroused

opposition among local Russians who felt not only a loss of their previous

privileges, but actual negative discrimination, while Communist leaders in the

republics were frequently seen to be pushing the policies to the extent that

they were denounced as nationalists. The result was a series of local crises and

clashes between different wings of the republican Communist parties, which

reached their most acute in Ukraine.

The ﬁrst signs of a change of direction in policy came in 1928–9 with a

series of high-proﬁle show trials of intellectuals and less public purges of lead-

ing republican ﬁgures in Ukraine, Belorussia, the Tatar Autonomous Soviet

Republic, Crimea and Kazakhstan. A more general assault on the nation-

building approaches of the 1920s was signalled at the turn of the decade over

the question of the interpretation of Russian history. In the 1920s a new school

of history (the ‘Pokrovsky School’), supported by the regime, interpreted the

Russian Empire as an exploitative, brutal colonial regime. But in the 1930s

the Russian people, history and culture were advanced as being superior to

those of non-Russians, and the Russian Empire was now portrayed as having

brought enlightenment and other beneﬁts to the territories it had conquered.

This revival of the Russians was symbolised by a law of 1938 which made

8 E.g. Stephen Blank, The Sorcerer as Apprentice – Stalin as Commissar of Nationalities, 1917–

1924 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994).

9 Martin, An Afﬁrmative Action Empire,pp.2–9.

10 Natsional’naia politika VKP(b) v tsifrakh (Moscow: Kommunisticheskaia Akademiia, 1930),

pp. 209–12.

11 Ibid., pp. 278–9. 12 Martin, The Afﬁrmative Action Empire, pp. 75–124; 211–72.

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Russian, already the effective lingua franca of the Soviet Union, a compulsory

subject of study in all schools.

These changes did not amount to a policy of Russiﬁcation. Religion and

other practises, such as nomadism, did come under attack, threatening the

traditional way of life for minorities,

as well as for Russians, as a conse-

quence of the ideological assault and the drive to industrialise the country. But

throughout the 1930s, a renewed emphasis on non-Russian folk cultures was

exempliﬁed by a series of festivals held in Moscow, and language rights and

the territorial structure were not threatened. The tone, however, had shifted

from one of promoting entirely separate national cultures to emphasising a

‘Brotherhood of Peoples’ in which different cultures could share a common

space within the Soviet framework, and in which the leading place went to

the Russians. By the end of the decade, those national leaders who had risen

to the most senior positions in the republics in the 1920s had been eliminated,

without exception, before or during the Great Terror, opening the way for a

new generation of leaders who perhaps did not share their commitment to

nation-building.

The shifts in policy and tone of the 1930s are open to a variety of interpreta-

tions. For those historians such as Pipes and Blank who viewed the approach

of the 1920s as a purely temporary concession, the turn against national lead-

ers and cultures was merely a recognition of the fact that Soviet power was

securely established and an ‘internationalist’ programme of national assimi-

lation could now be implemented without fear. For some, most notably the

historian Robert Conquest, the turn against non-Russian nationalities went

much further, amounting in some cases to a policy of virtual genocide. In par-

ticular, controversy has raged over the devastating famines of 1932–3, which hit

the Ukrainian (and Kazakh) countryside to a far greater extent than it did in

Russia. Conquest has argued that the famine was deliberately engineered by

Stalin in an effort to break the back of the Ukrainian nation through the pur-

poseful starvation of a large part of its population.

Others have challenged

both his ﬁgures and interpretation, concluding that the famine was a natural

disaster, albeit one which the leadership did little to alleviate, and which also

devastated Russian areas.

13 Alexandre Bennigsen and Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, Islam in the Soviet Union

(London: Pall Mall, 1967), pp. 138–52.

14 Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow (London: Hutchinson, 1986).

15 R. W. Davies, M. B. Tauger and S. G. Wheatcroft, ‘Stalin, Grain Stocks, and the Famine

of 1932–1933’, Slavic Review 54 (1995): 642–57.

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More recently scholars have predominantly accepted the picture of the

1920s as an era of nation-building, and have offered various interpretations of

the new direction in the 1930s. The persistence of the federal form and the

emphasis on national cultures has led Yuri Slezkine to underplay the extent

of changes in the 1930s.

Other interpretations invariably see the change in

national policies against the background of the dramatic political, social, eco-

nomic and international developments of the decade. Geoffrey Hosking has

noted that the destruction of traditional ways of life associated with collec-

tivisation and industrialisation was an inevitable consequence of economic

modernisation which applied to Russians and non-Russians alike.

But in itself

this is not enough to explain the more positive attitude to Russians vis-

a-vis

other nationalities in the 1930s. A direct consequence of the combined impact

of collectivisation and industrialisation was a massive mobility of population

across the Soviet Union as peasants ﬂocked to the cities, and workers and

administrators moved from the more industrialised regions to those embark-

ing on the rapid building of industry. In particular, this meant a movement

of Russians into the non-Russian republics. The proportion of Russians in the

overall population increased between 1926 and 1939 from 21.2 per cent to 40.3

per cent in Kazakhstan and from 52.7 per cent to 72 per cent in the Buriat

ASR, for example.

Given that a high proportion of these new migrants were

engineers and skilled workers, maintaining the earlier anti-Russian stance in

the republics was no longer tenable.

A furtherfactor was the growingprospectoftheSoviet Union being involved

in a major war, the fear of which increased in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

The possibility of protracted conﬂict raised the importance of the loyalty of

the disgruntled members of the largest nationality, the Russians.

The overt

appeal to Russian national feeling contained in the new history books and,

increasingly, in the public statements of Stalin and other leaders, underlined

the shift from the development of separate national identities towards a Broth-

erhood of Nations united under the Soviet system and in which Russians had

pride of place.

16 Yuri Slezkine, ‘The Soviet Union as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State

Promoted Ethnic Particularism’, Slavic Review 53, 2 (Summer 1994): 414–52; 436–44.

17 Geoffrey Hosking, A History of the Soviet Union (London: Fontana, 1985), p. 249.

18 Robert J.Kaiser, The Geography of Nationalismin Russiaand theUSSR (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1994), p. 118.

19 Martin, An Afﬁrmative Action Empire, pp. 62–7.

20 Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 287–8.

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Connected with this newemphasis was a change in the theoreticalunderpin-

ning of attitudes towards nationalities in the second half of the 1930s, whichnow

tended to treat national characteristics as something primordial and unchang-

ing.

This was no mere theoretical nicety. In the 1930s this thinking was man-

ifested in campaigns of terror against speciﬁc groups, the so-called ‘national

operations’ against Cossacks (now regarded as an ethnic group) and, from

1935, Poles, Germans and Finns. The policy reached new levels in the autumn

of 1937 with the decision to deport every single ethnic Korean from a large area

in the Far East. This set a precedent for even more large-scale deportations

during the course of the Second World War. Between September 1941 and

November 1944 the following nationalities were deported: 382,000 Germans

of the Volga region; 73,737 Karachai; 131,271 Kalmyks; 407,690 Chechens; 92,074

Ingush; 42,666 Balkars; 202,000 Crimean Tatars; 200,000 Meskhetian Turks.

The operations were carried out by NKVD squads descending on towns and

villages with no notice given to the population – in the Crimea, Tatars were

given ﬁfteen minutes to leave their homes

– and typically were completed

over the course of a few days. Every man, woman and child was loaded into

cattle trucks and transported by train across the country to Kazakhstan or

Siberia in a journey lasting weeks. Lacking food, water and sanitation, up to

half died on the journey. On arrival at their new destinations, the popula-

tions were often abandoned on arid land without housing and were left at the

mercy of local ofﬁcials and dependent on charity. Apart from the Meskhetians,

each of the deported nationalities had inhabited an autonomous republic,

which was subsequently renamed or simply disappeared from the map. The

Balkars, Chechens, Ingush, Karachai and Kalmyks had their rights restored

by Khrushchev in 1956. The Germans and Meskhetians were never ofﬁcially

allowed to return to their homelands, while many of the Crimean Tatars, after

years of protest, eventually returned to the Crimea without ofﬁcial sanction.

Such a large expenditure of NKVD manpower, railway engines and rolling

stock at a time when a war was still to be won deﬁes rational explanation. Pre-

ventative measures against ethnic Germans can perhaps be explained, and

can reasonably be compared to the simultaneous internment of Japanese

21 Terry Martin, ‘Modernization or Neo-traditionalism? Ascribed Nationality and Soviet

Primordialism’, in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism: New Directions (London: Routledge,

2000), pp. 348–67.

22 Figures from Isabelle Kreindler, ‘The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities: A Summary

and Update’, Soviet Studies 38 (1986): 387–405; 387.

23 Ayshe Seytmuratova, ‘The Elders of the New National Movement: Recollections’, in

Edward A. Allworth (ed.), The Tatars of Crimea: Return to the Homeland (Durham, N.C.,

and London: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 155–179; 155.

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Non-Russians in the Soviet Union and after

Americans in the USA. Similar thinking probably underlay the deportation

of the Meskhetian Turks, who inhabited an area of Georgia too close to the

Turkish border for comfort. But in the Crimea, which was under German

occupation for some time, it seems that anecdotal evidence of collaboration

with the occupying forces on the part of a small number of Tatars was enough

to convince Stalin and the head of the NKVD, Lavrentii Beria, that the entire

national group was worthy of punishment.

With the Chechens and Ingush,

accusations of collaboration with the Germans were barely credible, and it

is more likely that this was a matter of settling scores with peoples who

had proved particularly resistant to Soviet rule before and during the war,

while the Balkars appear to have been deported on the whim of Beria as an

afterthought to the Chechen and Ingush operations.

Whatever the exact

reasoning, underpinning it was the assumption that all members of a given

nationality should be tarred with the same brush.

Although most of the deported nations were eventually allowed to return

to their homelands, the long-term consequences were serious. The territories

from which they had been removed had been repopulated by others, causing

grievances which stoked the ethnic conﬂicts that erupted in the North Cau-

casus in the 1980s and 1990s. For the Chechens in particular, the experience of

exile produced a hardening of attitudes and an even deeper antipathy to Soviet

or Russian rule.

The deported peoples were not the only nationalities to suffer in the course

of the Second World War. Ukraine and Belorussia witnessed some of the

most destructive battles of the war and were occupied for much of it by a

Nazi regime which treated all Slavs as inferior Untermenschen, and planned

to rid the territories of much of their population in order to make space

for Aryan settlers. Greatest suffering was reserved for the substantial Jewish

population of the Soviet Union, up to a million of whom were exterminated

in the Holocaust. Over 33,000 Jews were shot in the infamous Babii Yar ravine

outside of Kiev, where they were joined by similar numbers of Ukrainians

and Russians who had dared to put up resistance, while entire villages were

wiped out in reprisal for partisan attacks – this in spite of the fact that many

24 Aleksander Nekrich, The Punished Peoples: The Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at

the End of the Second World War (New York: Norton, 1978), pp. 13–35.

25 Abdurahman Avtorkhanov, ‘The Chechens and the Ingush during the Soviet Period

and its Antecedents’, in Marie Bennigsen Broxup (ed.), The North Caucasus Barrier: The

Russian Advance towards the Muslim World (London: Hurst, 1992), pp. 146–94, 181–4.

26 Tak eto bylo: natsional’nye repressii v SSSR 1919–1952 gody, 3 vols. (Moscow: Insan, 1993),

p. 265.

27 For the whole of this section, Pavel Polian, Ne po svoei vole . . . Istoriia i geograﬁia prinudi-

tel’nykh migratsii v SSSR (Moscow: O.G.I–Memorial, 2001).

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Ukrainians had initially welcomed the Germans in 1941 as liberators from

the suffering they had endured in the previous decade. The scale of atrocities

against the local population inspired many to take up arms behind enemy

lines. By mid-1942 up to 100,000 partisans were operational, concentrated in

Ukraine. Whatever their initial motivation, many of these partisan groups

came to embrace a fully nationalist agenda, leading them to continue to wage

their guerrilla war against the Soviets after the German forces were driven

out. The Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists continued to operate in the

forests of Ukraine well into the 1950s.

For the rest of the Soviet population, the war meant a number of conces-

sions from a regime desperate to mobilise resistance and enthusiasm for the

war effort. While suspect nationalities were subjected to deportation, attempts

were made to secure the loyalty of others through organisational and propa-

ganda efforts. National units in the Red Army, abolished as recently as 1938,

were restored. Particular attention was paid to publicising the part played by

some national units in resisting invasion, such as the Kazakh division’s role

in the defence of Moscow.

The national heroes of the various non-Russian

peoples, who had been lauded in the 1920s and viliﬁed in the 1930s, were again

restored to favour. National religions, as well as the Russian Orthodox Church,

were granted new freedoms to function. The unity and common struggle of

the peoples of the Soviet Union were stressed in propaganda, and were sym-

bolised in victory when the Red Army ﬂag was raised over the Reichstag in

Berlin in 1945 by an ordinary Russian soldier, M. A. Egorov, together with a

Georgian soldier, M. V. Kantaria.

However, following the German occupation of Ukraine it had been Russia

which supplied most of the manpower and industry behind the war effort, and

it was the Russian people whose role was gloriﬁed above all others in ofﬁcial

propaganda, especially in the ever more strident gloriﬁcation of the heroes of

Russia’s past. The mood of the war led political leaders and academics so far

as to declare open support for Russian nationalism. The emphasis was most

famously illustrated in Stalin’s well-known toast at the end of the war to ‘the

health of our Soviet people, and in the ﬁrst place the Russianpeople . . . the most

outstanding nation of all the nations forming the Soviet Union’.

In the later

years of the war, this apparent contradiction between appeals to non-Russian

national sentiment and afﬁrmation of the leading role of the Russians was the

cause of serious disputes between leading historians in the USSR, a conﬂict

28 Shirin Akiner, The Formation of Kazakh Identity from Tribe to Nation-State (London: Royal

Institute of International Affairs, 1995), p. 49.

29 J. V. Stalin, Wo r k s , 18 vols. (London: Red Star Press, 1986), vol. xvi,p.54.

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Non-Russians in the Soviet Union and after

which was ultimately resolved in favour of the pro-Russian line, setting the

tone for propaganda and particular interpretations of Russian history for the

remainderof the Sovietperiod.

In the post-war period, this line wasreinforced

by ofﬁcial condemnation of what had previously been considered important

parts of national culture – the visual arts and epic poetry especially.

Nevertheless, the net effect of wartime propaganda, the brutality of the

Nazi occupation and the eventual victory of the Red Army were to provide

the concept of the Brotherhood of Nations under the leadership of the Russians

with an effective series of myths that served to promote a deeper sense of Soviet

patriotism and affection for the USSR and its leadership than had been possible

before the war.

One group of nationalities unable to subscribe to these myths were those

that were newly incorporated into the USSR as a direct result of the war.

Under the terms of the secret protocols of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact of

August 1939, Nazi Germany recognised the Soviet Union’s right to determine

the fate of eastern Poland, Bessarabia (eastern Romania), Latvia and Esto-

nia, a sphere of inﬂuence that was later extended to include Lithuania. In

September–October 1939, the three Baltic republics, which had gained inde-

pendence in 1918, were forced to accept the stationing of Soviet troops under

the pretext of the strategic demands of defence, making it easy for the Soviets

to engineer Communist takeovers in the summer of 1940 and formal incor-

poration into the USSR. In the year before the German invasion, rapid steps

were taken towards Sovietisation – nationalisation of industry, conﬁscation of

all bank accounts above a minimal amount, expropriation of large estates, new

curricula in the schools and universities. The process was completed following

the reoccupation of the republics in 1945, culminating in full collectivisation

of agriculture by the end of the decade.

Both the occupations of 1940 and the reoccupations of 1945 were followed

by deportations on a massive scale. Unlike the other national deportations,

these were targeted against speciﬁc groups – members of most political parties,

army ofﬁcers, high-ranking civil servants, clergymen, estate owners, anyone

with a dubious past as a White or even an expelled Communist, anyone

suspected of collaboration with the Nazis and so on. The numbers of those

deported or killed was staggering: in 1940, 61,000 Estonians, 35,000 Latvians and

30 David Brandenberger, ‘ “...Itisimperative to advance Russian nationalism as the ﬁrst

priority”: Debates within the Stalinist Ideological Establishment, 1941–1945’, in Ronald

Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (eds.), A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the

Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 275–99.

31 Ben Fowkes, The Disintegration of the Soviet Union: A Study in the Rise and Triumph of

Nationalism (London: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 74–5.

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