SUMMARY:

The Bolsheviks dreamed of homogeneous orders. The cultural diversity of the Russian Empire, though, stood in stark contrast to their dreams of certainty. The Bolsheviks believed the Empire’s multi-ethnicity to be a threat to their revolutionary project – nevertheless, in the 1920s, they transformed the Soviet Union into a state of nations, that is, in which newly created nations were assigned to national territories. Why did the Bolsheviks, who sought to overcome diversity, create national distinctions? Because national orders were not only a means of simplifying and categorizing a world alien to them, but also because Stalin and his followers – members of ethnic minorities who came from the periphery of the Empire and had experienced inter-ethnic conflict – could not imagine people without national ties. Thus, the state-building process turned into an imperial project, remodeling the multiethnic Empire into a nation-state and ascribing everlasting qualities to ethnic groups and cultures. And while the Bolsheviks talked about overcoming distinctions, they were simultaneously and unremittingly reproducing them. It is this contradiction between the rhetoric of certainty and the incessant staging of differences that the Stalinist terror stems from. The ethnic deportations of the 1930s and 1940s and the “National Operations” during the Great Terror 1937/38 were the results of excessive nationalization – for when the subjects did not submit to collectivization and the Cultural Revolution, the Bolsheviks took it as national resistance. Stalin and followers, obsessed with ideas of foreign spies and saboteurs, came to believe that nations could pose a threat to the Soviet order, resulting in terror against ethnic collectives that were deemed unreliable. In the 1930s, one’s nationality became one’s fate, since every man could become a victim of terror if the ethnic collective to which he belonged was declared an enemy nation. Thus, the historical place of Stalinism was the Empire.