Mfirmative Action in the Soviet East, 1923-1932

4- Mfirmative Action in the Soviet East, 1923-1932 Today, when Edward Said has turned "orientalism" into a universalIy recognized term and the inspiration for a burgeoning scholarly industry, nothing seems to us more characteristic of colonialism than the division of humankind into the arbitrary, essentialized, and hierarchical categories of east and west. It therefore seems odd that the Soviet Union, whose nationalities policy was explicitly formulated as a decolonizing measure, would not reject those categories and instead affirm the unity of mankind. In one sense, they did. The Bolsheviks' Marxist sociology led them to repudiate east and west as racial categories and to deny any long-term differences in the economic, social, or political capacities of alI nationalities. However, the east/west dichotomy was nevertheless preserved as a cultural distinction (one that could at times contain much of the content of the old racial divide). This was not, in fact, surprising. Indeed, nothing better illustrates the way in which the Affirmative Action Empire preserved imperial categories, while reversing their policy implications, than the maintenance and systematization ofcolonialism's east/west dichotomy. Since this division did in fact influence policy implementation, my analysis of korenizatsiia has likewise preserved this old dichotomy. In Chapter 3, 1 under- took a case study of linguistic korenizatsiia in Ukraine, which was the most important policy in the Soviet "west." In this chapter, 1 analyze the most important policy in the Soviet "east": Affirmative Action, the practice of granting ·preferences to non-Russians in admissions, hiring, and promotion in education, industry, and government.1 lThe best case study on korenizatsiia in the Soviet east is Adrienne Edgar, "The Creation of Soviet Turkmenistan, 1924-1938" (Ph.D diss., University of California-Berkeley, 1999): 24!Hlo. 125 126 Implementing the Affirmative Action Empire East and West Before that analysis is undertaken, however, a closer look at the basis of the Soviet east/west dichotomy is warranted. The Soviet Affirmative Action Empire provided two important rhetorical resources that non-Russians could (and did) mobilize in pursuit of their national interests. The first and most fundamental was, to use an unlovely English word, the rhetoric of indigenousness. This rhetoric was available to all Soviet nationalities except the Russians (that is, unril the Russification of the RSFSR in the mid -1930s). As we have seen in Chapter 1, korenízatsíía (indigenization) was a prophylactic policy designed to defuse and prevent the development of nationalism among the formerly oppressed non -Russian colonial peoples through the provision of national territories, lan- guages, elites, and cultures. Part of the decolonizing rhetoric of indigenousness was a rhetoric of abuse that could be (and was) hurled at any Russian (or rus- sified native) who was felt to be behaving in a colonial manner: namely, the potent Leninist charges of great-power chauvinism and mindless Russian chauvinism (rusotíapstvo). All non-Russians, then, could make individual or collective claims on the center by referring to their special status as indigenous peoples. The second rhetoric of cultural backwardness (kuPturno-otstalosr) was not available to all non-Russians. The category of cultural backwardness was, like indigenousness, related to the Bolshevik decolonization project, since Tsarist colonial oppres- sion was said to have greatIy exacerbated cultural backwardness.2 However, unlike indigenousness, cultural backwardness was even more closely linked to the Bolshevik ideology of developmentalism. Like the modernization theorists of the 1950S, the Bolsheviks believed there was one path to progress and that various nations were located at different points along that path. The Bolsheviks aimed to dramatically accelerate the modernization of the former Russian empire, which for them meant industrialization, urbanization, secularization, education, universal literacy, and territorial nationhood. It was clear to the Bolsheviks that, using any of these indicators, many of their nationalities (espe- cially the "eastern" ones) were "backward" (the cultural being added to avoid any implication of a racist interpretation of backwardness). By this logic, the modernization of the Soviet U nion required special measures, which were promised in the 1923 nationalities resolutions, to overcome "the real economic and cultural inequality" between the advanced and backward Soviet nationalities.3 Who was culturally backward? This was initially unclear, and, as we shall see, it was hotIy contested, since the rhetoric of cultural backwardness promised to be useful in making financial claims on the center. Culturally backward with respect to whom? This was obvious: the Russians. Not that the Russians were considered the most culturally advanced nationality in the Soviet Union. 2 DvenR-dtsR-tyi S»ezd VKP/b/. StenogrR-ji&heskii otchet (Moscow, 1963): 693-69+. 3 DvenR-dtsR-tyi S»ezd, 69+. TR-iny nR-tsionR-l'noi politiki (Moscow, 1991.): 1.85. Affirmative Action in the Soviet East, 1923-1932 127 Table I3. Literacy Rates by Nationality, 1926 Western NationaIities Eastern Nationalities (Percent) (Percent) Latvians 78.1 Tatars 33.6 Ingush 9.1 Estonians 72.4 Chuvash 32.2 Azerbaijani 8.1 Jews 72.3 Mari 26.6 Ajars 7.8 Lithuanians 70.5 Udmurts 25.6 Kazakhs 7.1 Germans 61.2 Bashkirs 24.3 Kabardinians 6.8 Poles 53.8 Buriats 23.2 Balkars 5.3 Russians 45.0 Mordvinians 22.9 Kirgiz 4.6 Ukrainians 41.3 Ossetians 21.2 Uzbeks 3.8 Georgians 39.5 Cherkess 16.9 Chechen 2.9 Belorussians 37.3 Abkhazy 11.3 Turkmen 2.3 Armenians 34.0 Kalmyk 10.9 Tajik 2.2 Karachai 9.2 Kara-Kalpaks 1.3 Nlusional'naia politikll l' tsifrakh (Moscow, 1930): 271-272. The category Tatars includes Volga and Crimean Tatars. That status, as we have seen, was reserved for the "western national minorities" (Germans, Poles, Finns). Russians were generally grouped in the next category with the developmentally similar Belorussians, Ukrainians, Jews, Georgians, and Armenians (although the last two were sometimes considered "eastern" and "backward" when the topic was "feudal" customs). The remainder were generally categorized as culturally backward, a dividing line that perfectly matched the official 1926 literacy rates as reported in Table 13.4 Within the culturally backward category, the nomadic peoples formed a still less developed category, and the least developed of all were the small peoples of the North. The important division, however, was between advanced and culturally backward. An official boundary between the two categories was not provided until 1932 when, due to controversy over who was eligible to fill all-union university admissions quotas for culturally backward nationalities, the cornmissariat of education finally produced an official list of ninety-seven culturally backward Soviet nationalities (Table 21).5 The division between eastern and western nationalities, then, was a shorthand (and a strikingly tradi- tionalist one) for the Bolshevik categories of advanced and culturally backward nationalities. There were twO important consequences of the east/west divide for korenizatsiia. The first was a practical outgrowth of the real developmental differences between eastern and western republics as reflected in the literacy rates of Table 13. This difference was already noted by Enukidze at a 1927 Orgburo discussion of korenizatsiia: "We have one system in the European national republics and another in the Asiatic ones." The reason for this was, 4The category Tatars includes Volga and Crimean Tatars. s "Ob udarnom kul'tobsluzhivanii otstalykh natsional'nostei," Biulleten' narodnogo komissari- ata po pros"peshcheniiu RSFSR, no. S (1932): 13-14. 128 Implementing the Affirmative Action Empire he argued, that whereas in Ukraine (or Belorussia) it was easy to train and promote Ukrainian (or Belorussian) cadres, low literacy rates in the east made this exceptionally difficult: "The task consists of beginning from below. Over a course of years, through the establishment of special courses, we will create a satisfactory [national] cadre."6 Enukidze was correcto Although the eastern republics initially attempted to follow Ukraine's example, they ultimately had to focus almost exclusively on Affirmative Action, while Ukraine and Belorus- sia focused overwhelmingly on linguistic korenizatsiia. To this end, as we have just seen, Ukraine mobilized the rhetoric of indigenousness in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to limit the interference of all-union institutions who were sabotaging Ukrainization. In the Soviet east, the exact opposite situation prevailed. Since the training of native cadres and the general education of the population were expensive, and since the eastern national territories had few independent resources, they actively solicited all-union interference in the form of desperately needed financial assistance. To this end, they naturally relied on the rhetoric of "cultural backwardness" and the center's promise to help them catch up to the advanced Soviet nationalities. This meant that it was in the Soviet east where two crucial unresolved questions about the Soviet nationalities policy were settled during NEP. The first question was whether the eastern republics could reverse the effects of Tsarist colonialism by expelling Slavic settlers and granting categorical preferences to natives in land distribution. After a fierce fight i~ Kazakhstan, as we saw

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