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Soviet people
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Soviet nation was an ideological demonym and proposed ethnonym for the population of the Soviet Union. It first appeared in official usage in the 1970's.
ugh the history of the Soviet Union, both doctrine and practice regarding ethnic distinctions within the Soviet population varied over time. Minority national cultures were not completely abolished in the Soviet Union. By Soviet definition, national cultures were to be "socialist by content and national by form", to be used to promote the official aims and values of the state.
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Encyclopedia
Soviet nation was an ideological demonym and proposed ethnonym for the population of the Soviet Union. It first appeared in official usage in the 1970's.
History
Through the history of the Soviet Union, both doctrine and practice regarding ethnic distinctions within the Soviet population varied over time. Minority national cultures were not completely abolished in the Soviet Union. By Soviet definition, national cultures were to be "socialist by content and national by form", to be used to promote the official aims and values of the state. While the goal was always to cement the nationalities together in a common state structure, as a pragmatic step in the 1920's and early 1930's under the policy of korenizatsiya (indigenization) the leaders of the Communist Party promoted federalism and the strengthening of non-Russian languages and cultures (see national delimitation in the Soviet Union). By the late 1930's, however, policy shifted to more active promotion of Russian language and later still to more overt Russification efforts, which accelerated in the 1950's especially in areas of public education. Although some assimilation did occur, this effort did not succeed on the whole as evidenced by developments in many national cultures in the territory after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Reinforcing the distinctions in national identities, the Soviet state maintained information about "nationality" on many administrative records, including school, work, and military records, as well as in the periodic censuses of population. The infamous "fifth record" (pyataya grafa) was the section of the obligatory internal passport document which stated the citizen's ethnicity (natsionalnost). In some cases, this official nationality served as a basis for discrimination.
Soviet "nation"
The new term "Soviet nation" (????????? ?????) first appeared in official statements at the 24th Party Congress in 1971, and was later incorporated into the Soviet Constitution of 1977. However, the concept of "Soviet nation" did not use the term that had heretofore been used for a "nation": natsiya. Instead it used the word for a "people": narod. Thus, it may be more appropriate to understand the new concept as "Soviet people" rather than as "Soviet nation."
This single all-Soviet entity – the Soviet people, Sovietskiy narod – was attributed many of the characteristics that official doctrine had formerly ascribed to nations (natsii – ?????) and nationalities (natsionalnosti – ??????????????) composing the multi-national Soviet state. The "Soviet people" was said to be a "new historical, social, and international community of people having a common territory, economy, and socialist content; a culture that reflected the particularities of multiple nationalities; a federal state; and a common ultimate goal: the construction of communism." This description echoed the well known definition of nation of Joseph Stalin, in his essay from 1913 entitled "Marxism and the National Question": "A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture." It also echoed philosophical literature in the 1970's that defined a socialist nation (natsiya — ?????) as "a social-ethnic community of people, characterizing by a single industrial economy, territory, literary language, national character and culture.
Although the word narod had an ethnic connotation, official doctrine had not yet reached the point that all prior Soviet nations and nationalities (Russians, Ukrainians, Estonians, Uzbeks, and so on) were to merge into a single all-Soviet nation (????? – natsiya). Even in the subsequent Soviet censuses of 1979 and 1989, in which all Soviet residents were categorized by "nationality" (natsionalnost), none were classified as belonging to the "Soviet nation" or "Soviet nationality". As a project, the construction of the "Soviet people" ended when the Soviet Union (the Soviet state) was dissolved in 1991.
Footnotes
See also
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