From what I’ve read of the review of the ‘Affirmative Action Empire: 1923-1939’ by Terry Martin:

Martin significantly advances our understanding of the early, formative years of Soviet nationality policy, providing a subtle and lucid reconstruction of its unique conceptual underpinnings and its stormy evolution. Contrary to earlier Bolshevik mantras, Lenin and his partner in nationality policy, Stalin, committed the {union} by 1923 to developing non Russian languages, elites, territorial units, and cultural forms-all at the expense of Russian nationhood and culture. Hence the Soviet Union became, in Martin’s odd phrase, the first multiethnic “affirmative-action empire.”

That’s good, but then there’s this next part

Then, in the period of the Great Terror (1933-38), the experiment ended. Russian nationality and culture were revived, and “bourgeois nationalism” replaced “great-Russian chauvinism” in opprobrium

Why did that happen in such a manner?

  • NikkiB@lemmygrad.ml
    0·
    5 days ago

    https://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/terry-martin

    “Terry Martin is the author of The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the USSR, 1923–1939 (Cornell UP, 2001) and co-editor (with Ronald Suny) of A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford UP, 2001). In addition to questions of nationality and empire, he has written on religion, political and administrative history, Soviet neo-traditionalism, and the political police, as well as the Nazi-Soviet comparison. He is currently completing a book on the politics and sociology of state information-gathering in the USSR from the revolution through the death of Stalin.”

    This guy does not strike me as serious. Don’t waste brainspace on his drivel.

    I know it seems unfair to categorically dismiss someone’s thoughts like this, but it saves you so much energy. Any time you spend reading his historical fiction novels is time you could spend studying theory, or at least Soviet history from Soviet scholars. Or reading a better historical fiction novel, for that matter. Private publishing like this is frowned upon in academia for a reason. It allows you to say anything with a veneer of authority. The only reason you’re reading him is because he’s a Harvard professor, and that means less than nothing. It’s a finishing school for rich white kids, always was and always will be.

    • deathtoreddit@lemmygrad.mlOP
      0·
      5 days ago

      The reason why I asked is because cfgaussian cited him

      Due to this the Soviet Union has been labeled by liberal academics who seriously studied the Soviet policy toward nationalities an “Affirmative Action Empire”. This means that they effectively practiced reverse imperialism, they were an anti-empire. Where empires siphon off wealth from the periphery to enrich the core, the SU did the opposite, sometimes to such a degree that it created resentment among the Russian majority. This is a point frequently brought up by modern day anti-communist Russians to criticize the Bolsheviks and their policies.

      • NikkiB@lemmygrad.ml
        0·
        5 days ago

        Sorry, maybe that was a little antagonistic. I think user bennieandthez answered your actual question pretty well, that to the extent these policies existed, they dried up during wartime. When the Nazis invade and have cells throughout eastern europe, narratives of ethnic harmony got flattened into a desperate struggle for the survival of all the Soviet people. I’m not sure what these practices looked like in the postwar period, but even after the victory, Soviet authorities likely focused on reconstruction of vital infrastructure over something seemingly superfluous like cultural centers and what not. There was likely less to go around in general. Stalin would go on to die in 1953, and his death caused paradigm shifts which may have caused these policies to fade from view.