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Terry Martin. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939. The Wilder House Series in Politics, History and Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. xvii, 496 pp.
Terry Martin's Affirmative Action Empire is an exceptional and unique book, indispensable for any student of ethnic politics in the Soviet Union and its successor states, notably the Russian Federation. It is unique both in its comprehensive, in-depth treatment of the evolution of the Soviet nationalities policy from its inception until the end of the 1930s and in its reliance on Soviet archival sources that have become accessible only recently.
Access to hitherto closed primary-source materials sheds new light on the policy's implementation. It reveals previously unknown information about the implementation and results of the policy, especially at the grassroots level, and offers new insights into the scope and nature of internal Party and state concerns, debates, and conflicts on the subject. The "strategy of ethno-territorial proliferation" (the systematic formation across the USSR of a pyramid of territorial national soviets for minority groups, from the village-kolkhoz-town level to the autonomous or Union republic), discussed in chapter two, is a revelation. It explains the unprecedented ethnic mobilization that followed, and strikingly illustrates the strategic efficacy of ethnicity as a channel of upward mobility for minority elites. Some stereotypes are undermined or modified. The richness of the data is at times overwhelming.
The focus of the book is indicated by its singularly apt, if contemporary, title. It centres on the commitment of the Soviet leadership, Lenin and Stalin in particular, to the policy of korenizatsiia, its implementation, and its consequences. The policy, which aimed at endowing each of the non-Russian groups, large and small alike, with a sense of national identity, territory, institutions, and culture, was expected to pre-empt a growth of ethnic nationalism. Significantly, the commitment excluded the majority Russians, who were tainted by their imperial past and "Great Russian chauvinism." Martin tells the story of how and why precisely the opposite happened. Ethnic nationalism, which prevailed in the 1920s, was followed in the 1930s by purges of "nationalist deviationists," the rehabilitation of the Russians' leading role, and a re-emphasis on centralization. But the policy and the state's multinational character survived.
The book is...