The study of ethnic mobilization has received a rather unbalanced interest in the growing literature on nationalism and ethnic politics. On the one hand, the term “mobilization” appears quite often in the various studies of nationalism. However, in most cases this concept is not thoroughly examined and it is employed in a vague way. Moreover, the books and articles dealing with the issue of nationalist mobilization try, as a rule, to relate mobilization to the causes of the emergence of nationalism. Dmitry Gorenburg’s book is an eloquent attempt to overcome both these shortcomings as it locates at the center of his analysis the mobilization process of nationalist movements and changes the orientation of the core research question from why ethnic mobilization occurs to how this develops and what specific form it acquires. His research can be viewed as part of a recent historiographical tendency to tackle the issue of ethnic mobilization explicitly and directly, especially with regard to post-communist Eastern Europe.^[1]
Gorenburg integrates into his theoretical framework the political-process model, which has been widely used in the study of social movements, and the historical institutionalist model. The study focuses on the period between 1988 and 1993 and covers the intense last period of the Soviet Union as well as the early days of the independent Russian Federation. The objective of the book is to explore how and to what extent the ethnic institutions of the Soviet Union affected: i) the emergence and, primarily, the development of minority nationalist movements; and ii) the popular support that these movements received. In order to address his research questions, Gorenburg selects four ethnic republics in Russia – Tatarstan, Chuvashia, Bashkortostan and Khakassia – and examines comparatively the (non-violent) nationalist movements of their titular ethnic groups.
The core argument of the book is that the ethnic institutions of the Soviet Union, which were established rather arbitrarily in the 1920s and 1930s, constitute the dominant explaining force of both the form of minority mobilization and the popular support for the nationalist movements. Similarly, these ethnic institutions determined extensively which specific social categories were more favourably disposed to support nationalist ideology and support the movements. One of the author’s core findings is that the strength and number of the ethnic institutions in each region depended mostly on the position that the region held in the federal hierarchy of the Soviet state. Hence, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, and Chuvashia, as autonomous republics, had increased prospects for more developed ethnic institutions – and therefore stronger nationalist movements – compared with Khakassia, which possessed a lower administrative status. However, he points out certain differences in the strength of ethnic institutions even among regions of equal status. An additional finding that appears in many parts of the book is that one ethnic institution in particular determined which groups would support nationalist movements, namely, the extent of native language education.
One might indicate three broader theoretical implications of Gorenburg’s analysis: first is his ascertainment of institutional continuity. Even if institutions as such change or cease, their logic continues to frame the goals and beliefs of political actors for a considerable period of time. That means that the “old” logic informs to a large extent, according to Gorenburg, the content and the direction of change.
Gorenburg’s second theoretical innovation is that he consciously focuses on the role of popular mobilization and support, rather than on elite strategies. James Fearon and David Laitin point out that one of the most difficult but meaningful and essential questions that scholars of ethnic collective action confront is why and how publics follow elites.^[2] Gorenburg firmly challenges the instrumentalist view of elite manipulation and insists that in the case of the Soviet Union publics initiated the contentious movements and elites followed. His reply to Fearon and Laitin’s question is that institutions perform the pivotal role of connecting masses and elites in the mobilization process.
The third theoretical achievement of the book is its balanced treatment of ethnic identity. The author does not treat ethnic groups as self-subsistent, homogeneous, and uncontroversial entities that act in one voice. That is manifested by the fact that he tries to evaluate intra-group variation of nationalist support. However, he does not drift to perceive ethnic identities as fake and effortlessly manipulated. In other words, he asserts that ethnicity is not a mere epiphenomenon, but can perform an autonomous function. One could argue that Gorenburg agrees with Craig Calhoun’s claim that collective identities, though not solid and homogeneous, are real and that it is unfruitful “to think that the reality of nations depends on the accuracy of their collective representations.”^[3]
Apart from the above theoretical issues, Gorenburg’s book constitutes a mainly empirical study of nationalist mobilization. Only in the introductory and last chapters does he present his theoretical model and discuss some broader implications relevant to his analysis. Each of the main chapters of the book tackles one aspect of the mobilization process, and the four case studies are analyzed comparatively.
In the first chapter, after presenting his theoretical framework, Gorenburg refers to four key ethnic institutions of the Soviet state: territorialized ethnicity, republic boundaries, ethnic hierarchy, and passport identity. The ethno-federal structure of the state, he continues in chapter 2, created a four-tier hierarchical arrangement, in which “each constituent region was supposed to represent a particular ethnic group” (P. 30). Ethnicity in the Soviet state was conceived, standardized and institutionalized: i) in terms of personal identification, through the issue of internal passports, in which each citizen should declare, once and for all, his nationality, thereby rendering identity shift rather difficult; and ii) in territorial terms, by assigning to most ethnic groups an administrative region, the status of which was relevant to its perceived “importance”. Gorenburg asserts that the higher the administrative status of a region, the more developed and autonomous were the ethnic institutions, like native language education, the number of ethnic newspapers, titular higher education and research, and affirmative-action policies. However, even among regions of equal status some had a higher “functional status”, like in the case of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, in contrast with Chuvashia (P. 38).
The common findings for all four regions include the provision for native language education and the overrepresentation of titular ethnic groups in the administration. However, after 1959 and especially in urban centres the percentage of children who received education in the titular language steadily decreased, whereas the Russian population of the four regions was overrepresented with regards to managerial employment in industry. Although Gorenburg points out these antithetical processes (i.e., ethnicization and assimilation/“Russification”) in the last chapter, he fails to incorporate their interplay in the main part of his analysis. Moreover, the weaker development of ethnic institutions in Khakassia might have not depended solely on its inferior administrative status, but also on the small number of ethnic Khakass, who comprised only 11% of the region’s population.
In the third chapter, the author comparatively describes the emergence and formation of the nationalist movement organizations and offers a lucid, and more theory-informed, analysis. He broadly employs concepts from the political-process approach, like that of political opportunities structure. He effectively points out that, although the liberalization policies of perestroika enabled the collective articulation of demands by large segments of the population, these opportunities were not equally distributed. These differences in regional opportunity structures resulted in diverse organizational developments of the respective nationalist movements. However, Gorenburg could have conceived of the opportunities structures in a less static way and put an emphasis on public conceptions of the unfolding political change. In this way, the adoption of the similar concept of collective attribution of threat and opportunity^[4] could have been helpful. Gorenburg employs the concept of pre-existing social networks in order to explain the emergence and expansion of the movements. His detailed qualitative analysis finds that the nationalist movements flourished in academic and cultural institutions, and intellectuals constituted the movement elite. Gorenburg shows how the density of workplace-based networks of trust reinforced a common identity among the participants and how networks and interpersonal ties were instrumental in the flow of information and in employing selective benefits in order to attract active support.
After outlining the organizational resources of the nationalist movements, in chapter 4 Gorenburg examines their framing. His theoretical starting point is that the leaders of social movements tend to adapt their claims and demands to the preexisting mentalities of the addressed public. These collective mentalities and perceptions are shaped by the long-term function of the ethnic institutions. Cultural elites, and later on political ones, used a normative framing that was compatible with the political culture of the Soviet public and did not fundamentally challenge the legitimacy of the institutions. Although Gorenburg offers a detailed study of the nationalist framing in each region, one gets the impression that he overstates the ability of ethnic institutions to condition the dominant political ideas and values. Mentalities include intersubjective meanings, common experiences, and discursive and cultural formations that cannot be solely reduced to state institutions. Even if institutional norms were widely accepted, this was not done in a mechanistic way, since norms in certain cases served the specific interests of the movements, as the case of Bashkortostan indicates (P. 102).
The following chapters focus on measuring popular support for the nationalist movements. In chapter 5, through the assessment of protest participation, election results, and opinion polls, Gorenburg finds that nationalist support peaked between 1989 and 1991. This support was stronger and more active in the two more institutionally developed republics, Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. Gorenburg productively distinguishes between support for a cultural/moderate nationalist agenda, and a separatist/radical one, which was less popular. In chapter 6, primarily through quantitative analysis, the author assesses which social groups were more likely to support nationalism. The multivariate regressions he composes are subject to various conclusions, although one should not overestimate their explanatory power, as Gorenburg himself admits. However, it is indicated that those groups that were more exposed to native language education, that is intellectuals, rural inhabitants, and migrants from rural areas, as well as older respondents, were more likely to support nationalism (P. 196). An indication of particular importance is that political elites remained relatively indifferent to cultural nationalism, but were more supportive of separatist demands, obviously anticipating increases of their political power. In chapter 8, Gorenburg repeats his regressions on a much larger sample (18 ethnic regions of the Russian Federation) in order to test if his analysis has a broader relevance. Indeed, his core findings seem to be more or less valid.
Finally, in chapter 7, Gorenburg assesses the achievements of the four nationalist movements. Their strength was responsible for several important successes, such as the reaffirmation of regional sovereignty through declarations, the expansion of the titular language education, and increased job opportunities for titular ethnics (Pp. 226-227). However, demographic factors, i.e., the important presence of ethnic Russians in each region, maintained the territorial, rather than ethnic, character of the regional constitutions and averted the dominance of more separatist or radical agendas. Gorenburg’s expectation is that in the long term, primarily due to the “ethnic revival” policies in the ethnic regions, a new wave of nationalist mobilization is likely to emerge (P. 233).
The shortcomings of Gorenburg’s analysis are of secondary importance, perhaps except for the lack of a more dialectical relationship between theoretical and empirical analysis at certain parts of the book and a limited ontological inquiry into the constitution of ethnicity and institutions. However, this book undoubtedly is a paradigmatic, and, to a large extent, innovative study of the micro-processes of nationalist mobilization. Its empirical examination and its epistemological implications delimit the general orientation of the study of comparative nationalist mobilization.