Window on Eurasia: Soviet Efforts to Create Homogeneous Russian Nation Failed

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, November 8 – Most Russians today are accustomed to think that their country is enormous and has various regions but that the people who live in it are all the same, but that is a recent development, one that to a large extent reflects the efforts of Stalin and Khrushchev to fix the identity of Russians much as they fixed the identities of other Soviet nationalities.

 

            “Prior to the revolution,” Andrey Merjanin writes on Rufabula.com today, “everyone in Russia has is distinctive regional, religious and ethnic identity.” There were groups like the Sitskars, the Polekhs, the Tudovlyans, the Pomors, the Molokans, and the Old Believers, and those identities were primary (rufabula.com/author/andrey-merjanin/164).

 

            The writer says that while it is commonly assumed that all these groups have been absorbed into a single Russian nation, a close examination of the people, languages, cultures, and history in particular places shows that these identities have not passed away, even if aspects of that identity such as a completely distinct language have.

 

            He gives as an example the Sitskars, a group which lives only 220 kilometers from Moscow in Tver oblast.  They are, he says, a sub-ethnic group of Russians of Mixed origin, with some of their ancestors being autochthonian Finnic groups and others being Slavs who moved in and conquered the area.

 

            They speak a distinctive dialect still, although their separate language has died out. Their culture and architecture is very different from their neighbors. And those who live there, especially now that the standardized collective farms have collapsed and they have returned to work in the forests, feel themselves different as well.

 

            Some of them even remember that in 1917, they created their own republic, the Breytov Volost Republic which was named for the central settlement and which lasted less than a year.  “But the land [on which it was formed] remained” as have its people. And those who visit it can see that even now it and they are distinctive.

 

            Before this is dismissed as simply an ethnographic curiosity, one should remember that Russian or better Muscovite writers never tire of talking about how divided other nations in Eurasia remain and how Stalin or some other Soviet leader “created them,” be they Ukrainians or Belarusians to cite but two of the most common supposed products of Soviet policies.

 

            But few of these writers acknowledge that the same thing is true of the Russian nation, that it is just as much or even more the product of Soviet policies and even more that as a nation it remains more divided than many others, in part because the impact of Russianization was very different on those Moscow viewed as non-Russian than on those they counted as Russian.