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China is a vast nation comprised of hundreds of distinct ethnic communities, each with its own language, history, and culture. Today the government of China recognizes just 56 ethnic nationalities, or minzu, as groups entitled to representation. This controversial new book recounts the history of the most sweeping attempt to sort and categorize the nation's enormous population: the 1954 Ethnic Classification project (minzu shibie). Thomas S. Mullaney draws on recently declassified material and extensive oral histories to describe how the communist government, in power less than a decade, launched this process in ethnically diverse Yunnan. Mullaney shows how the government drew on Republican-era scholarship for conceptual and methodological inspiration as it developed a strategy for identifying minzu and how non-Party-member Chinese ethnologists produced a \"scientific\" survey that would become the basis for a policy on nationalities.

Abstract As applied to the Russian case, identity politics means first and foremost a state strategy that regulates the public expressions of ethnicity-based solidarity in a way that prevents them from being motivated by a sense of injustice. With regard to Russia’s Central Asian residents, injustice lies in tacit racist treatment by officials, police officers, employers and landlords. The peculiarity of officially recognised Central Asian organisations operating on the basis of state nationalities policy institutions is that they contribute to maintaining the status quo. They do so through orchestrating cultural activities that reproduce stereotypical images of harmonious ethnic diversity in Russia, as well as by supervising labour migrants. However, there are members in these organisations who do manage to use the resources of Russia’s rather idiosyncratic nationalities policy to fulfil their own aspirations, i.e. to practice identity politics for which the policy is not intended.

In 2006, a “tolerance policy” was launched in St. Petersburg to address the growing xenophobia and the need to integrate labor migrants. Applying a bottom–up perspective, this study finds that this policy was symbolic – aimed at changing public attitudes, not at providing material outcomes. The direct implementers (the street-level bureaucracy), operating under governmental constraints, drew on informal mechanisms: behind-the-scenes negotiations, unwritten rules and hierarchies, personalist power, and ideological cues. Formalized dense reporting, often quantitative, was used to keep low-level implementers in check. The combination of these features rendered the tolerance policy shallow and self-locked. Street-level bureaucracy had to interpret vague policy documents, but lacked the necessary discretionary powers. This gave rise to the kartinka (picture, or image) coping technique. The term describes how all work activities were shaped by the need to demonstrate progress with respect to unwritten rules and ideological dynamics. The article concludes with a discussion of the applicability of the author’s findings to the field of nationalities policy in Russia.

The Stalinist state’s nationalities policy had a major impact on the production of culture. When applied to music, it opened up significant new opportunities for minority composers. However, in its rigid focus on cultivating works “national in form, socialist in content,” it also imposed limits on the range of their creative expression. This article argues that for national minority composers in the late Stalinist era, the official promotion of minority music served in equal measure as an empowering and imprisoning force, opening the door to all-Union fame and fortune while limiting access to those who faithfully performed their national musical identity. To emphasize its difference from its imperialist predecessor, the Soviet state sought to raise the perceived cultural level of its newly defined minority nations by fostering the development of Western-style classical music repertoires tailored to each national group. Such music would incorporate indigenous melodies and harmonies into complex European forms. This work was initially undertaken by ethnic Russians, as representatives of the “most advanced” nation, but Soviet nationalities policy would not truly be fulfilled until minorities themselves took over the task of composition. To this end, the state established conservatories in each republic, from which the first fully Soviet generation graduated in the late Stalinist period. This article traces the experiences of young minority composers who came to Moscow to complete their training and audition their work at the Composers’ Union. As it demonstrates, these composers found that pieces written in a recognizably “national” style received high praise, while those that adopted a more complex, supranational approach were criticized. Ultimately, while Soviet nationalities policy created a host of opportunities for minority composers, it foreclosed on the possibility of their transcending national identity and becoming Soviet composers in a broader sense.

The book sheds light on processes of Belarusian nation-building and identity formation during the interwar period. It provides a complete analysis of the Soviet policy of Belarusization in interwar Belarus (1924-1929). The analysis covers issues pertaining to the formation of national identity, the incorporation of the Belarusian national language into educational and administrative spheres within the policy of Belarusization and its acceptance by the different strata of the multi-ethnic society in the BSSR of that period. The monograph also sheds light on the reasons for the launching and ceasing of that policy as well as on the interrelation between the Communist Party and the Belarusian national intelligentsia.

Why were most ethnic minority organizations in interwar Poland permitted and sometimes encouraged by the state, when the ruling titular ethnic group pursued discriminatory policies against the same minority groups, faced hostility from these groups, and had the capacity to repress their organizations? Current literature focuses on repression as the main strategy deployed by states to manage these relationships. This article, on the other hand, asks why states allow minority organizations to operate. Using the logic of divide and rule, this article demonstrates that, in the case of multi-ethnic states, a state may prefer a plurality of organizations representing a certain minority ethnic group, particularly if the group is restive, in order to ensure that a united opposition cannot legitimately threaten the state's political survival.

Nested Nationalism is a study of the politics and practices of managing national minority identifications, rights, and communities in the Soviet Union and the personal and political consequences of such efforts. Titular nationalities that had republics named after them in the USSR were comparatively privileged within the boundaries of \"their\" republics, but they still often chafed both at Moscow's influence over republican affairs and at broader Russian hegemony across the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, members of nontitular communities frequently complained that nationalist republican leaders sought to build titular nations on the back of minority assimilation and erasure. Drawing on extensive archival and oral history research conducted in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Georgia, and Moscow, Krista A. Goff argues that Soviet nationality policies produced recursive, nested relationships between majority and minority nationalisms and national identifications in the USSR. Goff pays particular attention to how these asymmetries of power played out in minority communities, following them from Azerbaijan to Georgia, Dagestan, and Iran in pursuit of the national ideas, identifications, and histories that were layered across internal and international borders. What mechanisms supported cultural development and minority identifications in communities subjected to assimilationist politics? How did separatist movements coalesce among nontitular minority activists? And how does this historicization help us to understand the tenuous space occupied by minorities in nationalizing states across contemporary Eurasia? Ranging from the early days of Soviet power to post-Soviet ethnic conflicts, Nested Nationalism explains how Soviet-era experiences and policies continue to shape interethnic relationships and expectations today.

Abstract In the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1990, the political inequality of the nationalities' representation in institutions of governance was overcome, non-Russians' participation in the power structures increased, and Russians' role in administration correspondingly decreased. The increased non-Russian percentage in governance was mainly due to the introduction of the democratic principle in government formation, according to which ethnicities should participate in proportion to their number. By 1990 in the USSR overall, Russians had a slight majority in all power structures, corresponding roughly to their higher share in the country's population. In the union republics, however, the situation was different. Only in the RSFSR did all peoples, Russian and non-Russian, participate in government administration in proportion to their numbers, following the democratic norm. Elsewhere, Russians were underrepresented and therefore discriminated against in all organs of power, including the legislative branch. Representatives of non-Russian titular nationalities, who on average filled two-thirds of all administrative positions, predominated in disproportion to their numbers. Given these representatives' skill majority in legislative bodies, republican constitutions permitted them to adopt any laws and resolutions they desired, including laws on secession from the USSR; and the executive and judicial authorities, together with law enforcement, would undoubtedly support them. Thus, the structural prerequisites for disintegration were established. Thereafter, the fate of the Soviet Union depended on republican elites and the geopolitical environment, because of the Center's purposeful national policy, aimed toward increasing non-Russian representation among administrative cadres and the accelerated modernization and developmental equalization of the republics.

The present contribution analyzes systematically diplomatic reports written by German, Italian, British, and Polish representatives in the Soviet Union at the time of the Great Famine. Based on both published documents and unpublished archival sources, the article examines comparatively the perception of the Great Famine in these four countries. After providing a short overview of the diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and the four countries at the time of the famine, this article examines how German, Italian, British, and Polish diplomats explained three key issues for understanding the Great Famine: (1) the role of the conflicts between state and peasantry in unleashing the famine; (2) the issue of whether the Soviet government intentionally caused the famine; and (3) the role of intentions in the development of the famine and the relationship between the nationalities policy of the Soviet government and the famine.

The Austrian statesman Metternich is widely recognized as a leading actor in European affairs in the first half of the nineteenth century. What has been surprisingly neglected is the long-lasting impact of his nationality policy, which he devised and partly implemented within the context of restoring order after the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The devastation and dislocations caused by two decades of warfare gave rise to a critical historical juncture in which Metternich took the lead to form a counterrevolutionary regime and to pursue what can be termed his empire project. A state modernizer, he devised an intellectually elaborate conservative response to the French Revolution that rested on his distinction between supposedly natural nationalities and artificial nationalism. The resulting idiosyncratic governance of empire fostered a vertical integration of societies-in-the-making through the expansion of state infrastructures, while at the same time determining horizontal fragmentation along provincial and linguistic lines. Metternich’s nationality policy helped to create the ideational and institutional foundations of modern nation-building across Central and Southeastern Europe. Its legacy outlasted the monarchy and is reflected in the distinctive culturalist tradition of nationhood in post-Habsburg Central Europe.