| Review of: | Rulers and Victims: The Russians in the Soviet Union by Geoffry Hosking |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Ronald Grigor Suny |
| Reviewed in: | Nations and Nationalism |
| Date accepted online: | 02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 13, Issue 2, Pages 341-367 |
Book Reviews
From a chance reading of a Russian village novel four decades ago, Professor of Russian History at London University Geoffrey Hosking developed a lifelong interest in the fate of ethnic Russians in the Soviet Union. This 'unmarked nationality' for whom the whole of the Soviet Union was its motherland suffered many of the discriminations and brutalities that non-Russians experienced but at the same time benefited from its position as the ruling people, the imperial state-bearing nation of the Soviet empire. Hosking has covered much of this ground in several other books -
In Hosking's reading, Russia never was a nation-state but an empire with aspirations toward millenarian transformations of itself and the rest of the world. Ethnic Russians suffered equally with non-Russians during the Soviet experiment, but in the first decade and a half after the October Revolution they were particularly neglected. As 'Great Power Chauvinists', Russians could develop neither their own nationalism nor national institutions while Armenians, Georgians, Ukrainians and others enjoyed ethnonational republics that 'indigenized' education, the ruling Communist parties and the state structures. After 1931, Stalin shifted Soviet nationality policy in favour of an emphasis on Russian themes and historical traditions, but only during the Second World War did Soviet and Russian (both in the ethnic sense [
The hegemonic ideology from the end of the Second World War to the collapse of the USSR was a Russian-Soviet patriotism that 'amalgamated the revolution and the Second World War as the "sacred past" of a new form of messianic, Russian-led internationalism' and in which Russia 'played the key role in providing the inspiration and leadership for world socialism' and 'the great struggle with imperialism' (p. 230). This neo-Russian empire with its increasingly uninspiring millennial socialist mission faded during Khrushchev's rule (1953-64), and some Russians, particularly oppositional intellectuals, 'began to wonder whether the Soviet Union was really good for them' (p. 303). Varieties of Russian nationalism, some of them mutually contradictory, emerged in the post-Stalin years, eventually becoming the real residual ideology - a 'petrified messianism' based on claims to world power - of the Brezhnev regime (p. 331). Still, even as ethnic Russians and Russified Slavs dominated the Soviet power elite, the Russian Soviet Federation continued as a hollow structure without real power, its institutions a kind of window dressing for a store without goods. Yet with the disintegration of central power in the Gorbachev years, opportunistic politicians, headed by Boris Yeltsin, were able to use those structures to make their successful bid for power. As a consequence, they brought down the USSR, which most ethnic Russians identified as their real homeland.
Hosking has read deeply in the social and cultural history that Western scholars have produced in the last several decades and combined their findings with his own primary research into available archives. He gives us a rich picture of the life experience and views of myriad Soviet citizens through vignettes taken from diaries, letters and memoirs. Sometimes the stories, indeed the narrative more generally, strays into fascinating pathways not intimately related to his central subject and themes, but they always remain informative. Deliberately eschewing political history for social and cultural, Hosking extremely effectively uses literary sources and his own vast knowledge of the history of the Soviet intelligentsia. He provides very little on the development of non-Russian national coherence and its effect on Russian ethnic nation-making, an evolution that is essential in understanding the tensions that ultimately undermined Gorbachev's plans for gradualist reform. It seems only fair that since, as Hosking argues, the Soviet Union 'had destroyed much of Russia', Russia would return the favour and destroy the Soviet Union. Looking ahead, he concludes that 'for some time to come, Russia will be a residual empire rather than a nation state' (pp. 402-3).