Presentation of a new report “Soviet Nationalism in the Historical and Comparative Perspective»
The Laboratory for Comparative Social Research at the HSE Saint Petersburg opened the 2013 Fall seminar series today. Andrey Shcherbak, senior research fellow at LCSR presented a report on 'Soviet Nationalism in the Historical and Comparative Perspective'. He gave a short description of the major findings of his report to the HSE news service.
The late 1980s and early 1990s were characterized by a sudden rise of nationalist movements in almost all Soviet ethnic regions. It is argued that the rise of political nationalism since the late 1980s can be explained by the development of cultural nationalism in the previous decades, as an unintended outcome of the communist nationalities policy.
This is a study of Soviet political and cultural nationalism in a historical and comparative perspective. All ethnic regions are examined throughout the entire history of the Soviet Union (49 regions, 1917-91), using a structural equation modeling approach. With this paper, we aim to make at least three contributions in the field. Firstly, it is a methodological contribution for studying nationalism: a ‘quantification of history’ approach. Quantitative values are assigned to historical trends and events. Having constructed variables from historical data, I use conventional statistical methods like SEM.
Secondly, our research contributes to the theoretical debate about the role of cultural autonomy in multi-ethnic states. The results make us rethink the notion of ‘cultural autonomy’ as a solution to inter-ethnic conflict. Cultural nationalism matters, it indirectly reinforces political nationalism. In both cases making concessions in the cultural domain did not stop the growth of political nationalism in the late 1980-s. Finally, our work statistically proves that the break between early Soviet and Stalinist nationalities policy explains the entire Soviet nationalities policy. In fact, the late Soviet nationalities policy was inherited from Stalin’s time. This finding revealed in other studies now gets statistical evidence.