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This Is the Published Version of a Chapter http://www.diva-portal.org This is the published version of a chapter published in Ethnic and Religious Minorties in Stalin's Soviet Union: New Dimensions of Research. Citation for the original published chapter: Kotljarchuk, A., Sundström, O. (2017) Introduction: the problem of ethnic and religious minorities in Stalin's Soviet Union. In: Andrej Kotljarchuk & Olle Sundström (ed.), Ethnic and Religious Minorties in Stalin's Soviet Union: New Dimensions of Research (pp. 15-30). Huddinge: Södertörns högskola Södertörn Academic Studies N.B. When citing this work, cite the original published chapter. Permanent link to this version: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-143112 INTRODUCTION Introduction Andrej Kotljarchuk & Olle Sundström The Problem of Ethnic and Religious Minorities in Stalin’s Soviet Union Robert Conquest, who popularized the term the Great Terror in his classic account of Stalin’s purges in 1937–1938, depicts these events as massive repres- sions first of all of Soviet political, cultural, and military elites (Conquest 1971). But Conquest did not particularly address the role in the turmoil of the 1930s of ethnicity and religious belonging—two categories of central importance in so much of Soviet politics. The Russian “archival revolution”—the newly ac- quired access to previously unavailable sources from former Soviet archives after 1991—has brought to light new facts on the history of the Great Terror, among other things data on the so-called national operations of the security service (NKVD) against ethnic minorities and details on the repression of religious groups (Samuelson & Sorokin 2007). Even though much information on the repression is still difficult to uncover—as several of the authors in this volume show—the archival revolution has undoubtedly brought new pos- sibilities for research. The inter-war Soviet Union was unlike many other states in Europe. The differences concern not only the abolition of private property and the establishment of the one-party system, but also a nationality policy based on internationalism (in the sense of ‘inter-ethnicity’) or the solidarity and unity among different ethnic groups. The Soviet Union was in practice the first major state power in the world that systematically promoted the national consciousness of indigenous peoples and established institutional forms characteristic of a modern nation for them. While small-numbered ethnic groups faced discrimination, the Soviet Union proclaimed in 1923 a policy of self-determination and cultural and linguistic rights for all minorities, which they tried to implement during the 1920s (Martin 2001). However, in the beginning of the 1930s this policy changed radically, and in 1937 the NKVD initiated top-secret “national operations.” The situation in the ethnic and religious communities was rather specific. The Bolsheviks believed that ethnic and religious minorities of rural areas remained behind the progressive development of the population of industrial cities. The cul- tural and linguistic factors and the isolation of minority communities from 15 ETHNIC AND RELIGIOUS MINORITIES IN STALIN’S SOVIET UNION the rest of the population thus required additional surveillance of ethnic as well as religious groups by the secret service. At a meeting of the Politburo on 20 July 1937, Stalin initiated the German operation by writing a proposal that “all Germans working in our military and chemical factories, electrical stations and at construction sites in all regions, must be arrested” (Okhotin & Roginskiy 1999: 35). In total, in 1937–1938, 56,787 ethnic Germans were arrested, of whom 41,898 were shot. Only 820 of them were citizens of the German Reich (Okhotin & Roginskiy 1999: 73–74). The next operation was the “Polish” one, in which 139,815 Soviet Poles were arrested and 111,071 of them executed (Petrov & Roginskiy 1997: 37–38). A number of other secret national operations were organized by the central government in accordance with the models of the German and the Polish operations. Among them were the Korean, Chinese, Afghan, Iranian, Greek, and Bulgarian-Macedonian operations as well as the Finnish and Estonian operations. The local NKVD of Smolensk initiated a national Latvian operation. During this operation, which started on 3 December 1937, 17,851 Soviet citizens, mainly of Latvian origin, were arrested and 13,444 were executed (Kott 2007). A number of smaller operations along so-called “national lines” and in accordance with the national operation model were designed and performed by local police against Japanese, Lithuanians, Norwegians, Sami, and Swedes (Kotljarchuk 2014a; Kotljarchuk 2014b; Kotljarchuk 2015). Altogether within the period of fourteen months, August 1937 to October 1938, 335,513 people were arrested in the national operations of the NKVD and 247,157 of them were shot (Werth 2003: 232). The victims of national operations made up 34 per cent of all the murdered victims of the Great Terror. Historians have put forward many explanations for the mass repression of various ethnic groups committed by Stalin’s regime, and two approaches are particularly relevant. Most scholars focus on the security dilemma in the border areas, suggesting the need to secure the ethnic integrity of Soviet space vis-à-vis neighbouring capitalistic enemy states. They stress the role of international relations and believe that representatives of “Western” minorities were killed not because of their ethnicity, but rather because of their possible connections to countries hostile to the USSR and fear of disloyalty in case of an invasion (Werth 2003; Mann 2005; Kuromiya 2007). Other scholars argue that the Soviet terror against minorities was actually genocide based on ethnic criteria (Kostiainen 2000; Naimark 2010; Snyder 2010: 92–108). In contrast to the repression of certain ethnic groups, the repression of religious associations, organisations, and individuals was motivated by basic tenets in the Marxist-Leninist doctrine. As Lenin himself put it, dialectical 16 INTRODUCTION Marxism was “unconditionally materialist and resolutely hostile to any reli- gion” (Lenin [1909] 1954: 8; cf. Lenin 1973: 402). While he proclaimed reli- gion to be a private matter of no concern for the state—and indeed freedom of religion and conscience were inscribed in the Soviet constitution—Lenin at the same time made it clear that for the Party it was imperative to fight against “ignorance and obscurantism in the shape of religious beliefs.” In fact, he claimed that this was the very reason why the Party was founded (Lenin [1905] 1954: 5–6; cf. Lenin 1965: 85–86). This line of thought was phrased in the official slogan for the second congress of the League of the Militant Atheists (Ru. Soyuz voynstvuyushchikh bezbozhnikov)—a Party-run volun- tary organization with the mission to propagate atheism in publications, lec- tures, study groups, and rallies—in June 1929: “The struggle against religion is the struggle for socialism” (see Pospielovsky 1987: 49). If one, as James Ryan (2012: 2) writes, “accepts that Stalin and his col- leagues’ professed Leninism was genuinely important for their political practice, then Stalinism should be studied in the light of Leninism.” And Stalin was indeed the one who canonized Lenin’s writings and proclaimed Marxism-Leninism to be the world-view of the Party, and thus of the Soviet state once the Party took totalitarian control. Lenin’s analysis of religion, in an oft-cited passage in his 1905 article “Sotsialism i religiya” [‘Socialism and religion’], explains why fighting against religion became integral to the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary re-creation of society into a new socialist one among the big city elites, factory workers, peasants, and “savage” hunter- gatherers in the periphery of the Soviet Union: Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression which everywhere weighs down heavily upon the masses of the people, crushed by their perpetual work for others, by want and solitude. The impotence of the exploited classes in their struggle against the exploiters just as inevitably gives rise to the belief in a better life after death as the impotence of the savage in his struggle with nature gives rise to belief in gods, devils, miracles, and the like. To those who all their lives toil and live in want religion teaches humbleness and patience while here on earth, and to take comfort in the hope of a heavenly reward. But to those who live by the labour of others religion teaches the practicing of charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire exploiting existence and selling them, at a fair price, tickets to well- being in heaven. Religion is the opium of the people. Religion is a sort of spiri- tual hooch [Ru. sivukha], in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a reasonably worthy human life. (Lenin [1905] 1954: 3–4; cf. Lenin 1965: 83) 17 ETHNIC AND RELIGIOUS MINORITIES IN STALIN’S SOVIET UNION For Lenin, as for Marx, religion was both an effect of unjust socio-economic relations, as well as of impotence before the forces of nature, and an impedi- ment for overcoming these unjust relations and for increasing humans’ command over nature. The opium and alcohol metaphors are therefore quite pertinent for their analysis. Besides being at the heart of the Marxist-Leninist world-view, the Soviet struggle against religion was also motivated by the Bolshevik intolerance of ideological and organizational competitors of all sorts (and some of them were, of course, outright counter-revolutionary). For both of these reasons, the Russian Orthodox Church became the main target of anti-religious measures in the immediate post-Revolutionary years. As the state church of the tsarist Russian Empire, gathering some 70 per cent of the population, for the revolutionaries this church was synonymous with the monarchy that had just been overthrown (Corley 1996: 13). Thus, emptying the cathedrals of clerics and turning the buildings into museums of atheism and the history of religion was an act in the same vein as throwing out the royal family and transforming the Winter Palace into a state museum (Sundström 2007: 84).
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