Terry Martin’s The Affirmative Action Empire was published just four years ago, but has already become a recognized study of the early history and nationalities policies of the USSR. Indeed, it is required reading for anyone who maintains a professional interest in Russian and Soviet history. While Martin may not have aspired to offer a new standard for American historical writing on the USSR, the very demand by the readership immediately made the book into a classic. Both graduate students and senior scholars interested in the first two decades of Soviet history were desperately looking for up-to-date, comprehensive research on Bolshevik nationalities policies as a systematic all-Union phenomenon. Moreover, professors wanted to be able to assign to their students a single book that could cover a good deal of post-1917 Russian history and offer an integrated narrative of different regions and events. Martin’s well-researched and skillfully structured book has successfully met these diverse and demanding expectations. It is certainly a mark of prestige to write a book that becomes a standard text in the field, but there is also a price to be paid.
The academic community will always need a canon of standard texts. Scholars writing on related themes like to support their secondary arguments with a single reference to a classic study; students need a clear system of authoritative names and concepts in order to gain a faster grasp of the basics in a discipline; teachers need reliable literature for their syllabi. However, inertia often artificially keeps a standard text from receiving a full-scale engagement and from enduring the process of historiographic critique and revision. As a result, and possibly contrary to the author’s intent, Martin’s book remains under-analyzed and under-discussed. To do justice to Martin’s very good book, let us forget about its quite deserved status and look closer at the historiographic canon it has come to embody. Specifically, we should look into the way Martin approaches early Soviet history as imperial history.
First of all, the very easiness with which Martin gets around the problem of qualifying the USSR as an empire is remarkable, and it allows him to avoid engaging with the legacy of the term’s negative connotations. Martin addresses the issue of Cold War political rhetoric (p. 19), but ignores the more complex problem of the negative connotations of “empire” in modern political and philosophical discourse. His readers seem to be equally eager to embrace a positive or at least neutral perception of empire;^[1] this can be attributed to the author’s success in coining a vivid image with the catchy formula of the “affirmative action empire.” Martin wrote the book during the Clinton era, and its American readers are only too well aware of the controversies, problems, and achievements of affirmative action policies in the US academy and beyond. More likely than not, US readers were inclined to regard even an empire as progressive if it was engaged in a systematic policy of affirmative action, while all the problems and peregiby associated with the implementation of the policy were perceived with some understanding. The modern concept of affirmative action was applied to the Soviet case as a metaphor and structured the historical narrative of the book, not the other way around. Therefore, we should look closer at the logic Martin uses to legitimatize its application.
The idea of the early Soviet Union being an “affirmative action empire” is introduced in the beginning of the book. Martin repeatedly formulates his thesis with some variations but, essentially, he is speaking about a system of preferential treatment for underdeveloped or historically discriminated national causes, at the expense of Russian national agendas. “In the Soviet case, where all non-Russians were to be favored, Russians alone bore the brunt of positive discrimination…” (p. 17). This conclusion is derived not from the main body of preceding arguments and analysis but serves as an a priori model, and it rests on Martin’s subtle historical intuition, extensive research experience, and a particular reading of the Russian sources. It is important for Martin to demonstrate that his model of the affirmative action empire, though anachronistic, does apply to the Soviet situation in the 1920s, to the extent that it was represented in the ideological discourse of the epoch. His quote from an influential article written in 1913 by Lenin seems to support his claim: indeed, Lenin warned against any investment in nationalism along the lines of a policy that can be accurately translated as “affirmative action” (p. 16). Yet Lenin’s work in question in a sense compromises Martin’s analytical model: in his lapidary manner Lenin explains that “the nationality principle is historically inevitable in bourgeois society and, taking this society into account, the Marxist fully acknowledges the historical legitimacy of national movements.”^[2] Lenin concludes the article by quoting and commenting on a resolution written by Russian social-democrats on finding a desirable solution to the empire’s national question – which all but coincides with the future Soviet “affirmative action” policy – yet Martin does not take this part into account.^[3] Given the Party’s attitude toward the New Economic Policy (NEP) as a temporary retreat to pre-socialist, bourgeois socioeconomic practices, there is no reason to agree with Martin that this nationality policy “represented a dramatic shift” from Lenin’s theses of 1913 (p. 16). On the contrary, parallel to the “capitalism without capitalists” of the NEP, the new nationality policy accommodated the interests of “bourgeois nationalisms” without the bourgeoisie, quite in line with old Bolshevik scenarios. While few historians would argue today that the NEP was a real alternative and a vital economic system in its own right, a parallel set of measures in nationality policy devised for a “temporary retreat” does not quite qualify for the grand title of the “affirmative action empire.” As was the case with the historiography of the NEP a few decades ago, the benevolent historian of the early Soviet Union attempts to find evidence of the regime’s dedication to the new policy beyond short-term political conjuncture. And similarly to the old discussions of the NEP’s potential for the future, Stalin is quoted as the most ardent supporter of the new national policy:

“We stand for an affirmative policy [pokrovitel’stvennaia politika] in relation to the development of national cultures… actively supporting [pokrovitel’stvuiushchie] the development of national culture” (p. 17).

Looking for an actual precedent for his analytical model in the 1920s, Martin takes the risk of misinterpreting the General Secretary, who never forgave such liberties. There can be no mistake: in 1929, Stalin was talking not about “affirmative policy” or “support” – he repeated twice the unambiguous term “patronizing.” Stalin’s words are used as an introduction to important generalizations on the nature of the “affirmative action empire” and the inevitable discrimination of Russians in this system. The whole model seems to loose its coherency if we read Stalin in a more accurate translation: patronizing does not imply discrimination of some groups, nor does it provide for any degree of independence and self-determination of the other. Stalin meant manipulation. The big question, of course, is how even a ruthless dictator could manipulate a complex sphere of nationalities without a detailed knowledge of the situation “on the ground,” i.e., without distinguishing and mapping recognized nationalities and assessing perspectives for their development. This indispensable knowledge was produced by experts (ethnologists, linguists, geographers), local intelligentsia, and party functionaries. To what extent was Stalin’s illusion of manipulating the nations, which Martin seems to have interpreted unequivocally as a policy of affirmative action, in fact a product of collective efforts by these experts and national cadres?
The author’s success or failure to locate the conscious use of affirmative action rhetoric in the past is irrelevant for the validity of his approach, although for Martin it was clearly important to show that the Bolsheviks had indeed anticipated American discourse on affirmative action. It is equally purposeless to debate how convincingly has Martin proven that the Soviet regime was indeed an affirmative action empire: the concept is built into the book, the sources and facts were selected with this idea in mind, and cannot stand on their own. It seems more important to discuss the contribution of Terry Martin’s book to the conceptualization of Russia/USSR as an empire, whether “affirmative action” or not.
The appearance of the book was hailed because it offered a long-awaited answer to the dilemma of writing the history of the multinational USSR beyond both the totalitarian and the national history paradigms. This is why it set up a new standard in historiography: Martin explicitly demonstrated why the concept of “empire” could apply to the Soviet case, and why it could be in principle applied as a useful analytical category. In his study, “empire” appears as a peculiar mechanism for managing the extreme national diversity of the Soviet Union, “not a federation and certainly not a nation-state” (p. 15). He quite convincingly and systematically interprets the period of Soviet history between 1923 and 1938 as the evolution of this empire. The major problem with Martin’s approach emerges when we get beyond the historical narrative and attempt to take the model at face value. Is the “empire” in his book a real political form, an analytical category, or both? The author himself fails to make a clear distinction, while the answer is important not just for reasons of epistemological purity. If an empire really existed, how had it come about? What forces were at work? Which factors contributed to its emergence and then affected its evolution? What was the “machinery” of the empire, i.e., how did this structure evolve without collapsing for many years? If “empire” is an analytical model chosen to describe a complex and dynamic society, what is “the theory”? How does the author situate his vision of “empire” vis-à-vis the rich tradition of imperial and postcolonial studies? Can “affirmative action” be used to label any powerful national mobilization movement? How does this explanatory model operate, and what are the built-in functions and roles that the researcher projects onto the actual historical actors and institutions? What are the premises and “predictions” of the theory and how do they correspond to the empirical evidence?
Although Terry Martin does not address these questions fully, he offers some general observations in the introductory part of the book (characteristically reproducing in a condensed form the structure of his narrative). While each of these introductory theses contributes to a more nuanced approach to the problem, together they fail to provide a synthesis or at least a multifaceted entity. Martin distinguishes four premises that informed “the logic of the affirmative action empire” and served as its driving forces: “the Marxist premise” of the party elite; “the modernization premise” (which is in fact another aspect of Marxist dogma); “the colonial premise/greatest-danger principle,” which represents a tactic of domestic policy more than anything else; and “the Piedmont principle,” again a tactical device but on the international arena. From this taxonomy we may suggest that the Soviet empire was constructed and manipulated by a Bolshevik elite that was motivated by Marxist orthodoxy and the tactical considerations of the moment. The thesis about the plenipotentiary Bolshevik party as the major driving force of Soviet history seems somewhat outdated now, but Martin adds factors that split the imagined monolithic will of the party into a number of competing and even conflicting agendas concerning the arrangement of national territories, the management of national languages and elites, and the problems of economic productivity and population control. Martin goes on and introduces a spatial differentiation between “East and West” (which, being introduced a priori, appears to have been inspired more by traditional imagination of these “regions” rather than a thorough analysis of the differences in patterns of national mobilization and nation), and particularly distinguishes the Ukrainian and Russian cases as paradigmatic. He adds a diachronic perspective by offering a periodization of his study into the “New Economic Policy, 1923-1928,” “Cultural Revolution, 1928-1932,” and “The Great Retreat, 1933-1938.” Finally, Martin carefully warns the reader that there were “ hard and soft” lines in party politics, that the “Affirmative Action Empire was never an independent Bolshevik goal” (p. 20), and that social (national) engineering was accompanied and even overshadowed by ruthless repressions.
Altogether, Martin constructs a complex and efficient system of checks and balances that protects his narrative from surrendering to one or another master discourse or to superficial simplification. By the same token, he compromises the very idea of “empire” as a historical reality or as an analytical model that exists outside of an author’s carefully arranged narrative. If the “affirmative action empire” was just an element of the party “soft line” policy, we are dealing with a metaphor and not an actual political system. If this is a metaphor and a model, why then it is treated in the book as an actual regime with its own administrative logic and cadres policy? And even if it is both, how does the introduction of the “imperial” perspective change or complicate traditional views of the nature of the early Soviet regime, besides the revision of its nationality policies? After all, institutionally speaking, empire – whether metaphorical or real – is about the delegation of some sovereignty to local authorities in exchange for their support of the central government, without the developed universal state apparatus (characteristic of the nation-state). The concept of “empire” becomes redundant if it is introduced without changing the traditional historiographic assumptions about the all-controlling Bolshevik regime and the Kremlin monopoly on decision-making.
The deficiency of Martin’s construct becomes visible when it is taken from the protective environment of his text and placed in the larger historiographic context, in order to see how compatible it is with other approaches toward Soviet history. If the Bolsheviks failed to implement War Communism (in itself a result of ad hoc responses to various crises, according to some scholars) and retreated, if only temporarily, to NEP, why should we believe their nationalities settlement to be the result of a coherent plan? If that was indeed the case, it would be interesting to know how they mobilized the immense resources needed for such an ambitious tour de force, and how they got the necessary knowledge of the ethnic composition of Russia. If they were yielding to the demands of the national elites or at least trying to pacify different nationalities groups, it would be important to know how those local visions of reforming the Russian Empire (often dating back to the 19th century) actually affected the “affirmative action empire” regime. There is a significant literature on both the actual efficiency of the Bolshevik political machine, and on the pre-1917 federalist, confederalist, and separatist projects – all of which unfortunately escape Martin’s attention. Remarkably for a student of the “Chicago School,” Martin understands the phenomenon of “cultural revolution” simply as a system of coercive mobilizing measures initiated by the political leadership (and supplemented by extravagant experiments in the cultural sphere).^[4] Therefore, we do not find any suggestions as to how the “affirmative action empire” participated in the Cultural Revolution as a subject and not a passive object of Politburo measures. For instance, to what extent were repressions against the “bourgeois nationalist” and later local Bolshevik elites stimulated by internal conflicts in the regions? A rich literature on the Cultural Revolution in the professions and academia suggests that the purges of the late 1920s were not just an initiative from above, and there is evidence now that in the sphere of nationality policies, internal conflicts within the local intelligentsia played a crucial role as well.^[5]
Terry Martin distinguishes just two types of major actors: the Moscow party leadership, with its proverbial factions and uklony, and the national elites, with appropriate differentiation into “bourgeois” nationalists-socialists, old Bolsheviks, and the new generation of Stalin cadres. Otherwise, beyond their political cleavages, the Ukrainians are always homogenous “Ukrainians,” the Tatars are “Tatars,” and the Russians are “Russians.” While in the former two cases the author’s insensitivity to the problem of internal divisions within nations brings his analysis to the edge of superficiality, the latter equation is fatal. By overlooking the dilemma of russkii-rossiiskii, Martin deprives his empire of any autochthonous dynamics, translating even the most ambiguous phenomena into the uniform language of nationalism (admittedly, still omnipresent in our analyses of multiethnic spaces). Yet a mere combination of nations alone does not an empire make, even an affirmative action one. In Martin’s model, empire is lacking substance, whether institutional (as was mentioned above), symbolic (Martin notes the deliberate “anti-imperialism” of Soviet propaganda), or subjective. There is no social group that associates itself with some pan-national entity; Stalin and his clique act as the major driving force behind the transformations of a union of mechanically connected nations. When the mobilization surge of the first Five-Year Plan threatened to tear up the system by being channeled along different nationality venues, the policy of “affirmative action empire” gave a way to the “friendship of peoples” regime with its stake on the Russian people:

“Under the Affirmative Action Empire, Russians were identified with the state and asked to sacrifice their national interests and submerge their national identity, all to serve the goal of preserving the multiethnic state. By 1937, Russian national identity was no longer submerged – it was being crudely celebrated at every turn – but it was still identified closely with the state.” (pp. 456-457.)

So one nation (“the first among equals”) is being promoted to the status of the guardian of the regime. Is this an empire? Martin does not seem to have noticed the problem of defining “Russian national identity” – to him, Russians are Russians, as Uzbeks are Uzbeks. Well, Uzbeks are not simply “Uzbeks,”^[6] the Tatars and Bashkirs are still engaged in a bitter dispute over the identification of the “borderland” communities, and certainly there has always been a huge problem with “Russianness.”^[7] In the 1930s, with the virtual annihilation of the major traditional marker of that elusive entity, the Orthodox Church, what were the “Russian national holidays, anniversaries, and celebrations” that allegedly “became a part of the friendship symbolic” (p. 456)? It is unclear exactly how some preexisting “Russians” were “asked to sacrifice” something they had been in possession of or expected to acquire, or what it meant to be “Russian” in the 1930s (besides classic Russian literature, Russian imperial history, and the Russian language), all of which are no more “national” than their English or Spanish counterparts. One may only guess from Martin’s book that in the course of the 1930s the regime finally abandoned the extensive practice from the NEP-period of channeling the spontaneous mobilization drive of local national subsystems into a centralized pool, and instead embarked on the search for a more intensive way to mobilize the population under the umbrella of a single political nation.
Terry Martin can be commended for his daring attempt to rework the entire complex period of Soviet history within the paradigm defined by the metaphor of “affirmative action.” His book is a dramatic departure from the standards once set by Richard Pipes and Hélène Carrère d'Encosse, who argued that the Soviet Union was unequivocally repressive toward its nationalities. In this sense, “affirmative action empire” is a daring challenge to the orthodoxy of the “prison of nations” model. However, even if we recognize the complexity of the material, Martin still needs to convince the reader that the affirmative action was successful. It seems that the major problem of Martin’s approach resides in the language he uses. While the two meanings of “Russianness” are difficult to express in English, a much greater difficulty consists in trying to analyze empire in strictly national terms. It seems that historians have much less trouble learning to speak “Bolshevik” than mastering the elusive yet real language of imperial society. Empire might not be a system (“constitution” in Martin’s terms), which The Affirmative Action Empire attempts to reconstruct; it might not be a systematic policy, as Martin’s substantial research tries to demonstrate with varying degrees of success. Empire could be approached as a field of negotiations and multilayered alliances, silent conventions and compromises. But in order to see “the invisible threads of empire” (Charles Steinwedel), one has to be prepared to look beyond the “self-evident” national bodies and “homogeneous” national elites. It would be wonderful if Martin’s oft-cited, extremely rich and complex – but rarely closely read – book will encourage his followers to explore this alternative approach to Russian imperial history.