Scando-Slavica

ISSN: 0080-6765 (Print) 1600-082X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ssla20

Ethnic and Religious Minorities in Stalin’s Soviet

Union: New Dimensions of Research

Brendan Humphreys

To cite this article: Brendan Humphreys (2018) Ethnic and Religious Minorities in
Stalin’s Soviet Union: New Dimensions of Research, Scando-Slavica, 64:2, 312-314, DOI:
10.1080/00806765.2018.1525320

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00806765.2018.1525320

Published online: 29 Nov 2018.

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312 BOOK REVIEWS

Ethnic and Religious Minorities in Stalin’s Soviet Union: New

Dimensions of Research, Andrej Kotljarchuk, Olle Sundström (eds),
Northern studies monographs: Umeå University and the Royal Skyttean
Society, 2017, 285 pp, ISBN 978-91-7601-777-7, ISSN 2000-0405.

“A Communal Apartment” (Slezkine), “The Affirmative-Action Empire” (Martin) are

two well-known titles that have dealt with the complexities and contradictions of
the national “question” in the early Soviet Union. This publication seeks to present
new research avenues and perspectives on the topic of national and – to a lesser
extent, at least measured in terms of the number of chapters – religious minorities
in Stalin’s USSR. The book is the outcome of a multidisciplinary international
research network led by Andrej Kotljarchuk (Södertörn University) and Olle Sund-
ström (Umeå University) and consisting of a very international group of scholars,
representing a range of disciplines, primarily political history, but also anthropol-
ogy, cultural studies, and the history of religions from several countries.
Overall, the sections form a very strongly coherent whole, something that
cannot always be taken for granted with anthologies based on workshops (as
here) or conferences. Several chapters deal – from slightly different perspectives
– with the “ethnification of Stalinism,” most precisely in regard to the “national
operations” of 1937, and how these related to the overall thrust of the Great
Terror.
A little background is in order. As of the early 1920s, the Bolsheviks were pro-
moting the rights of minorities, especially their languages, in the hope of bringing
marginalised peoples into the dynamics of the revolution. Furthermore, if
sufficiently calibrated ideologically, these grateful groups, especially the diaspora
nations, could influence their brothers outside the USSR. They could form bridge-
heads; i.e., the Finns and Swedes living in the USSR could become the “Piedmont
of Red Scandinavia.” By the late 1930s things had changed radically – nationalities
were severely repressed. For instance, over 230 Finnish schools were closed down,
Finnish language newspapers were shut, and members of groups that were for-
mally encouraged via indigenization (korenizatsija) were now seen as “the
people’s enemies.” The statistics of the national operations are grim: between
August 1927 and October 1938, 335,513 people were arrested by the NKVD;
247,157 of them were shot. Victims of the national operations accounted for
34% or all the victims of the Great Terror.
Taking a step back, as a policy, korenizatsija had been popular with represen-
tatives of marginal groups. As Eva Toulouze states in her excellent treatment of
the Volga region, small groups of local intelligentsia had aims – chiefly linguistic
and cultural development – that dovetailed neatly with the aims of the Bolsheviks
following the Civil War. In their wish that “nationals” would be better represented
in leading positions, one might even detect a distant relative of democracy (or at
least affirmative action). This, of course, would change utterly in the 1930s. Not
that all marginal groups were interested in what the new dispensation had to
offer; the chapter on “Cultural Bases in the North” by Eva Toulouze, Laur Vallikivi
and Art Leete, demonstrates how the civilizing mission of the communist regime
 SCANDO-SLAVICA 313

could gain no traction among some groups like the Khanty and Forest Nenets who
resisted and openly rebelled when their local practices and traditions were
blithely ignored.
The editors seem almost apologetic about the micro-history methods
employed. They need not be, the chapters contribute fine individual studies
that compliment and extend larger broad brushes, such as Snyder’s Bloodlands,
which is referred to several times. The chapter “Nation Building by Terror 1937–
1938” by Marc Junge and Daniel Müller is a precise examination of the complex-
ities of actions in multi-ethnic Georgia, especially in regard to local realities and
the degree that these took precedence over centralized instructions from
Moscow. The authors make an important point: “Therefore it seems somewhat
difficult to draw a line of continuity between the persecutions in the Great
Terror and the collective – total or partial – deportations of nationalities, although
undeniably the total deportation of the Germans from Georgia to Kazakhstan in
1941 objectively constituted the culmination of their group’s persecution. The
same is true for the deportation of the Turks and Kurds from Adzharistan and Mes-
khetia in 1944. The very procedure of the deportations differed fundamentally
form the repression used in the mass operations.” (148).
There are several example of the horrific logic of Stalinism. One might summar-
ise this by inverting Marshall Tito’s wartime formulation, “The worse, the better”
(i.e., the more people killed by fascists, the more Partisan recruits). Rather it was
“The better, the worse.” To offer two examples, “Nationalities of lower status
(like Ossetians) were persecuted to a much lesser degree that those with a
higher one (like the Abkhazians).” Similarly, shamanism as not treated with any-
thing like the hostility that Orthodoxy was, because it was not considered a
formal religion or even a cult. However, in the latter 1920s, when it was more
or less “promoted” to the status of a religion, its persecution began.
One recurring theme shared by several authors in this volume is the lack of
access to certain Russian archives, despite the “archival revolution” that followed
the Soviet collapse of 1991. Ukrainian and Georgian archives have become avail-
able (and utilised in this book) but much is still inaccessible. Or worse still, as
Hiroaki Kuromiya asserts, is the practice of some Russian historians who do
enjoy archive access, of cherry picking certain documents that self-defensively
distort the actual policies of Stalin’s USSR.
There are materials is some contexts, but some authors still lament “the abun-
dance of programmatic literature” vis-a-vis reliable material. The final two chapters
are dedicated to the repression of shamanism in Russia, and in their contribution,
authors Tatiana Bulgakova and Olle Sundström readily admit that, “there is still a
lack of substantial evidence to estimate the scale of the repression of shamans.”
Admittedly, Bulgakova carried out extensive field research, but this still left
issues wide open, especially the degree of persecution of shamanism. There is,
on the one hand, some documentary evidence that authorities in the 1930 com-
plained that not enough was being done to combat shamanism, yet the oral
history testimony gives a grim picture of mass arrests and execution of
shamans. Confusing to put it mildly, and obviously frustrating for the researchers.
Furthermore, a request for access to NKVD archives has been denied.
314 BOOK REVIEWS

Nonetheless, even with this sustained problem with sources, some of the con-
tributors have managed to do a lot with little, and some others have very rich data
sets; especially Marc Junge and Daniel Müller, as well as co-editor Kotljarchuk, in
his excellent chapter on media and propaganda during the Great Terror.
(One minor grumble: to see serious scholars use the phrase “what we call today
fake news” (113) gives a certain academic dignity to a phrase that is little more
than a lazy, casual insult, and something far short of a concept. News has no
doubt been sometimes inaccurate, or downright false, since news began – as
well as being sometimes genuine and truthful. I would not feel very comfortable
in that particular “we”).
Given the above-stated problem with sources, it must be said that the ambi-
tions of this volume, to offer new avenues of research into the treatment of
nationalities and religions during the Great Terror has succeeded admirably.
This is a tribute to the methods employed by the writers; field research in the
absence of documentary materials, and micro-historical scaling, both of area
and group, but also precise periodisation, and finally, by quite simply asking the
right questions.

Brendan Humphreys
Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
brendan.humphreys@helsinki.fi http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4271-6149
© 2018 Brendan Humphreys
https://doi.org/10.1080/00806765.2018.1525320

Byzantium and the Viking World, by Fedir Androshchuk, Jonathan

Shepard and Monica White. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2016,
463 pp., ills, bibliography, index, ISBN: 9155494625.

Recent years have witnessed a healthy surge of interest in Byzantium and the
Viking World. The writings of Sigfús Blöndal, Adolf Stender-Petersen, Benedikt
S. Benedikz, Omeljan Pritsak and others did much to create the background for
this field; however, this new study, written by specialists in history and archeology
who come from different academic traditions, is very necessary. The volume,
edited by Fedir Androshchuk, Jonathan Shepard and Monica White, presents nine-
teen essays based on round-table papers from the International Congress of
Byzantine Studies (Sofia, 2011) and the Prepublication Conference of the Nordic
Byzantine Network (Uppsala, 2013). In one important respect, this collection is
without precedent. The collective work attempts to complement, but not to
compete with, the Early Christianity on the Way from the Varangians to the
Greeks, edited by Ildar Garipzanov and Oleksiy Tolochko in 2011, and Rom und
Byzanz im Norden: Mission und Glaubenswechsel im Ostseeraum während des 8.–
14. Jahrhundert, published in 1998. The book is divided into four parts.