SUMMARY:

This paper has focused on a large land mass, home to a multiplicity of ethnic groups, whose members have commonly been living in a supra-national polity. Here the nation-state, in the sense that Friedrich List would have understood it, has been the exception rather than the rule. Yet nationality mattered. It impinged on those tsarist officials and merchants who espoused a vision of a Russified national economy and who advanced the cause of Russification. It mattered, differently, to Soviet leaders who denounced Russian chauvinism and tolerated the creation of an ethno-territorial state within which “national” loyalties contended with Soviet supremacy. When the legitimacy of the supra-national state was questioned (in 1905, 1917 and after 1985), political opposition was expressed at least in part in national terms. But military catastrophe and socio-economic crisis, not “nationalism” per se, were the decisive motors of change.
In response to Gellner, the authors’ argument is that economic changes formed part of a broader process of transformation, which allowed national claims to be asserted alongside other claims. Under tsarism, economic change contributed to the creation of national sentiment and allegiance. In the Soviet case, the state sought to mobilize the population towards the goal of socialism, but ultimately many citizens became convinced that nationalism, rather than the pursuit of Soviet-style socialism, offered them better prospects of economic improvement. After 1985, many citizens appropriated the rhetoric of nationalism as a powerful device with which to undermine the old regime. The Soviet leadership contributed to its own downfall by promoting national consolidation by territorial-administrative means. When the cupboard was shown to be bare, nationalists promised an escape into sovereignty and freedom from want. But the precise mechanisms for improved growth and welfare, as well as their ideological foundations, remain unresolved.
What is taking place at the end of the twentieth century is the reiteration of national conflict and of the conflicts between different minorities in the borderlands of empire. As in 1917, these are peripheral manifestations of broader calamities, which include a strong element of socio-economic collapse. The demise of the Soviet Union has encouraged ethnic minorities – and ethnic majorities – to rethink their history. In this sense, economic history provides vital clues to the past, present and future of these troubled lands.