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Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Volume 13, Number

2, Spring 2012 (New Series), pp. 429-440 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/kri.2012.0018

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Articles
Rulers and Victims Reconsidered
Geoffrey Hosking and the Russians of the Soviet
Union
Adrienne Edgar

Post-Soviet Russia has become known as a xenophobic land, a place where nonEuropeans are reluctant to go for fear of encountering hostility and violence.
Public opinion evidence shows that these fears are not entirely misplaced. In
2004, the slogan Russia for the Russians was supported by 59 percent of
Russians polled, while nearly half agreed that national minorities have too
much power in this country. Large numbers of ethnic Russians wish to curtail
immigration, maintain that non-Russians are themselves responsible for the
ethnic violence committed against them, and believe that Russians live worse
than other ethnic groups within the country. Popular hostility is directed
not only toward visiting foreigners from Asia and Africa but also toward the
peoples who have historically been bound up in an imperial relationship with
RussiaMuslims of the Caucasus and Central Asia.1
How can we explain the rise of such virulently nationalist attitudes in
the past few years, so seemingly at odds with the Soviet-era discourse of antiracism and internationalism? Geoffrey Hoskings work on Russians in the
Soviet Union, while not explicitly focused on the post-Soviet period, is a
compelling introduction to the roots of this phenomenon. The contrast he
describes between Russias status as the leading nation of the Soviet Union
and its impoverished and degraded condition in the final Soviet decades is
one important reason for the resentment felt by many Russians during and
after the Soviet collapse.
Professor Hosking has never been shy about tackling the big questions
of Russian history. His works appeal to specialists as well as nonscholars,
recalling a time when historians were not so minutely specialized and reluctant
1

Marlene Laruelle, In the Name of the Nation: Nationalism and Politics in Contemporary
Russia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 3941, 45.
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13, 2 (Spring 2012): 42940.

430

ADRIENNE EDGAR

to make broad arguments. Engagingly written and erudite, Hoskings books

draw on archival research as well as literary sources and memoirs to analyze
key themes in Russian society and culture. Rulers and Victims: The Russians
in the Soviet Union is a sprawling, ambitious, and highly readable book, a
sequel to the equally magisterial Russia: People and Empire, 15521917.2 The
fundamental premise of both works is that imperial state building interfered
with the consolidation of a Russian nation. For Hosking, a cohesive sense
of nationhood is essential for stability in the modern world, so the lack of a
clearly defined sense of national identity is the fundamental problemindeed
the tragedyof Russian history both before and after 1917.
Hosking argues that the overlap between russkii (referring to the ethnic
group) and rossiiskii (referring to the state) helps explain the fluidity and
ambiguity of Russian national identity. Because of the gradual expansion
of the Russian state over centuries, the territorial and ethnic boundaries of
the Russian nation were poorly defined. The identification of Russia with a
larger, messianic idealOrthodox messianism before 1917, global proletarian
revolution thereafteradded to the confusion, making it difficult to
disentangle national from imperial identity or even to conceive of a Russian
nation-state apart from empire. Hosking was the first to analyze the interplay
of empire and nation in Russian history in such a sustained and nuanced
way, with careful attention to politics, society, and culture. For this reason
alone, Rulers and Victims holds an important place in the historiography of
the Soviet Union.
Yet this is not the books only big theme. Hosking goes further, identifying
what he sees as a tragic consequence of the conflict between empire and
nation in the Soviet era. Russians, he writes, were not only the largest
and most powerful ethnic group within the Soviet Union but in many ways
its most disadvantaged. In the early Soviet period, Russian national interests
were neglected and Russians themselves were condemned as inveterate greatpower chauvinists and imperialists. This blanket rejection of Russian national
identity was abandoned in the 1930s. Yet Stalin had no love for ethnic Russia
and its traditions, Hosking writes, and his rehabilitation of Russia had statist
goals. One of the major contributions of Rulers and Victims is to show the
continuing suppression of Russianness in the period of the Russians
supposed ascendancy as the state-bearing people. Even in the postwar
era, when Soviet identity was perceived as largely Russian in content, when
Russians were first among equals and leaders of Soviet internationalism,
2

Geoffrey A. Hosking, Rulers and Victims: The Russians in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap, 2006); Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 15521917 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1997).

RULERS AND VICTIMS RECONSIDERED

431

Russians still felt victimized and neglected. Their forlorn villages, declining
birthrate, and grim urban landscapes all hinted at a deep malaise at the heart
of the nation. The widespread feeling that Russians had sacrificed themselves
for the benefit of the Soviet stateand for other, insufficiently grateful Soviet
nationsleft a strong residue of bitterness and ultimately helped lead to the
Soviet collapse.
The extent to which these two legacies of the Soviet erathe conflict
between nation and empire and the feeling of Russian victimization
continue to shape the post-Soviet era makes Hoskings work an essential
guide to Russia both past and present. Before Rulers and Victims there was
no work explicitly devoted to the Russians in the Soviet Union, although, as
Hosking notes, there were already histories of all the major nationalities of
the Soviet Union, and a good many of the minor ones, too.3 The relative lack
of focus on the Russians was partly a predictable result of the collapse of the
Soviet Union, which drew attention to the non-Russians and allowed scholars
access to certain non-Russian regions and their archives for the first time. It
also reflected the Russian position as default nation in the Soviet Union
and of the Russian experience as the Soviet norm. Most works on Soviet
history in generalwhether about peasants, workers, everyday life, popular
opinion, Soviet modernity, Soviet subjectivity, or any of a number of other
topicsare in fact about the Russians. Just as ethnic in the United States
long referred only to those not belonging to the white, Anglo-Saxon default
group, national in the USSR referred exclusively to non-Russians. Since
the 1990s, whiteness studies has emerged as a new subfield within ethnic
studies in the United States, with whiteness itself being problematized and
scrutinized.4 Professor Hoskings work suggests the possibility of a similar
trend in the Soviet field, with more explicit attention to Russian identity and
experience within Soviet history.
At the same time, Hoskings work on the relationship between empire
and nation makes abundantly clear that one cannot examine Russians in
isolation from other nationalities in the Soviet period. The many shared
experiences of all the Soviet peoples are increasingly obscured by the rhetoric
of nationalism and victimhood in the post-Soviet era, as well as by the need
3

Ibid., 2.
To name just a few works from this vast literature, see Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall
of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London:
Verso, 1990); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American
Working Class (London: Verso, 1991); and Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different
Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1998).
4

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ADRIENNE EDGAR

to produce a distinct historical narrative for each post-Soviet nation. Yet other
Soviet nations, too, suffered from the ambiguous nature of the Soviet empirestate and from the tensions between national and Soviet identities. NonRussians, like Russians, could be both victims and beneficiaries of Soviet rule.
Moreover, the Soviet legacy continues to play itself out in other post-Soviet
republics as it does in Russia (though not necessarily with the same results).
Hoskings work on the imperial aspects of Russian identity points to the
need for a broader history of the Soviet Unionone that would transcend
the binary opposition of Russians and non-Russians and the tendency to
treat each Soviet nationality in isolation. We need to know more about how
Russias position as the leading nation within the Soviet multiethnic state
helped shape Russian identity, culture, and society. This would have the
added benefit of bringing Russian and Soviet history into closer dialogue with
scholarship on other empires. Recent work on empire and its role in shaping
metropolitan identity, much of which has focused on the British empire (the
so-called new imperial history), has not yet found much resonance in the
field of Russian history. Scholars such as Frederick Cooper, Ann Stoler, and
Catherine Hall have called for studying metropole and colony in a single
analytic field and abandoning the notion of a binary distinction between
colonizer and colonized.5 Building on the work of Frantz Fanon and Edward
Said, historians of empire have argued that Europeans became Europeans in
part through colonizing others.6 They have shown how concepts and practices
developed in the colonial periphery have played a key role in shaping life
in the metropole.7 Even if one is agnostic on the question of whether the
Soviet Union should be considered an empire, these ideas have clear relevance
for our field. In Soviet history, center and periphery are still for the most
part written about separately, and by different people. Even among those
who study nationality policy, there are those who focus on the center and
those who focus on the republics. The common use of the opposing terms
Russians and non-Russians underscores this bifurcation.
5

Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a
Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 34, 15. While Cooper and
Stoler focus specifically on the colonialism of 19th-century bourgeois Europe, I find their ideas
about the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion and the hierarchies of production, power,
and knowledge (3) to be more broadly applicable.
6
Catherine Hall, Introduction: Thinking the Postcolonial, Thinking the Empire, in
Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries. A Reader, ed. Hall (New York: Routledge, 2000), 1215.
7
Ibid., 23; see also Antoinette Burton, Who Needs the Nation? Interrogating British
History, in Cultures of Empire, 13753.

RULERS AND VICTIMS RECONSIDERED

433

There are several areas that might particularly benefit from an examination
of center and periphery within a single analytic field. The first that comes
to mind is the issue of gender. Historians have produced excellent work on
Soviet gender policies focused primarily on Russia, as well as path-breaking
work on the emancipation of Muslim women in Central Asia.8 These have
been treated for the most part as separate topics, written about by historians
in different subfields. Yet it seems clear that ideas about gender in Russia and
the Muslim periphery were intimately related. Moreover, the experience of
gender reform in the Muslim periphery must have been important in shaping
Russian identity and gender politics in the early Soviet era.
In the hujum of the late 1920s, Central Asian women were encouraged
to cast off their veils and participate in Soviet life. These events were widely
publicized within the Russian-language Soviet press, as were instances of
Muslim males resisting the emancipation of their women. Muslim women
traveled to Moscow to tell conversion stories of their former oppression
and emancipation by the Soviet regime. All of this must have shaped Russian
perceptions of what it meant to be European rulers of a Muslim land.
Reading these accounts, Russians would have been able to see themselves
as civilizers and liberators and to view gender relations in Russia (which had
been deplored by the early Bolsheviks) as a highly progressive European
model deserving of emulation by more backward peoples.
In the postwar era, too, the discourse of a gender-based civilizing mission
continued. An extensive literature on ethnic intermarriage in the 1960s
through 1980s depicted Russian women who married Muslims as introducing
modernity directly into the heart of Central Asia. Soviet analysts noted
that mixed couples were more likely to abandon traditional ways and adopt
a modern, generically Soviet lifestyle, thereby setting an example for other
Central Asians to follow. Mixed families generally spoke Russian at home,
especially with the children. Because many mixed marriages brought together
a Russian woman and a Muslim man, accounts by Soviet scholars stressed the
positive role of the Russian woman in bringing social and cultural change to

On Russia, see Elizabeth Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in
Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); and Wendy Z. Goldman,
Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 19171936 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993). On Central Asia, see Douglas Northrop, Veiled Empire:
Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); and
Marianne Kamp, The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling under
Communism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006).

434

ADRIENNE EDGAR

native communities.9 Yet we know little about the impact of this discourse
and of intermarriage itselfon Russians and Russia.
Along with gender, the study of nationality and ethnicity in the Soviet
Union would benefit from a pan-Soviet approach with greater attention
to the Russians. A number of works on nationality policy since 1991 have
examined the evolution of Moscows policies toward non-Russians and the
institutionalization of ethnicity in the Soviet periphery, while the story of
Russian nationalism has usually been told separately.10 Yet a central point of
the new imperial history, in the words of Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler,
is that the otherness of colonized persons was neither inherent nor stable;
his or her difference had to be defined and maintained.11 The cultivation
of identities in an empire (or a multiethnic state) involves the creation and
maintenance of boundaries within a regime of difference. In the Soviet
Union, where state-defined nationality categories were internalized and
institutionalized to a remarkable extent in the non-Russian periphery, it may
also be worth examining how the system of ethnic categorization affected
Russians themselves.
The resurgence of Russian nationalism in the Brezhnev era, which
Hosking describes so ably in Rulers and Victims, was an integral part of the
broader ethnicization of the Soviet Union in this period. Between the 1960s
and the 1980s, identity came to be increasingly seen in primordial terms
in every Soviet republic, including Russia. This, in turn, created the basis
for the racialized discourses of nationality prevalent today in many parts of
the former Soviet Union.12 As Sergei Oushakine has written, the ideological
basis of post-Soviet ethno-narratives was created in the late Soviet period.
Without an understanding of the logic of the Soviet theory of etnos [sic],

9
On ethnic intermarriage, see Adrienne Edgar, Marriage, Modernity, and the Friendship of
Nations: Interethnic Intimacy in Post-War Soviet Central Asia in Comparative Perspective,
Central Asian Survey 26, 4 (2007): 581600.
10
Yuri Slezkine has brought Russians into the discussion of nationality policy. See The USSR
as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism, Slavic
Review 53, 2 (1994): 41452.
11
Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire, 7.
12
Terry Martin, Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism: Ascribed Nationality and Stalinist
Primordialism,in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (New York: Routledge,
2000); Marlene Laruelle, The Concept of Ethnogenesis in Central Asia: Political Context
and Institutional Mediators (194050), Kritika 9, 1 (2008): 16988. On primordial
understandings of ethnicity in post-Soviet states, see Ronald Grigor Suny, Constructing
Primordialism: Old Histories for New Nations, Journal of Modern History 73, 4 (2001):
86296.

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435

current Russian debates over nationalism and ethnicity may appear only as an
extravagant mixture of peculiar ideas and strange frameworks.13
The theory of ethnos developed and elaborated in the 1960s by the
leading Soviet ethnographer Iulian Bromlei envisioned the ethnos in cultural/
historical terms, in accordance with the Soviet rejection of racialized views of
ethnicity.14 Yet the nature of the ethnos was contested by other scholarsin
Russia as well as other republicswho saw ethnicity largely in biological terms
and wrote extensively about their own nations ethnogenesis and gene pool
(genofond).15 Lev Gumilev, the controversial theorist of the ethnosphere
and originator of a highly primordial view of ethnicity, became at least as
popular in Central Asia as in Russia.16 An examination of the ways in which
ideas about ethnicity circulated throughout the Soviet Union might reveal
influence that went not just from center to periphery but in the opposite
direction as well. As Valerii Tishkov has noted, Russian/Soviet ethnographers
traveled continuously back and forth to do field research in Central Asia, the
Caucasus, and Siberia. Their research sites were located within their own state,
not in overseas colonies as was often the case for Western anthropologists.
Moreover, the tradition of insider ethnography took root much earlier in
the Soviet Union than in the West, with Moscow-based ethnographers often
working with assistants and graduate students from the field region.17 Thus,
we should be wary of treating the evolution of ideas of ethnos and nation in
various parts of the Soviet Union as separate discourses.
Closely related to ideas about ethnicity and Russianness is the question of
Soviet identity. Hosking sees the overlap between Soviet and Russian identity
as a continuation of the historical interplay of nation and empire in Russian
history.18 Here there is a need for research that extends Hoskings work to
13

Sergei Alex. Oushakine, The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 85.
14
On the theory of ethnos, see Iu. V. Bromlei, Etnos i etnografiia (Moscow: Nauka, 1973.
See also Oushakine, Patriotism of Despair, 8189; Sergei N. Abashin, Natsionalizmy v Srednei
Azii: V poiskakh identichnosti (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2007); and V. A. Tishkov, Rekviem po
etnosu: Issledovaniia po sotsialno-kulturnoi antropologii (Moscow: Nauka, 2003). Oushakine
writes that the term ethnos was first used in Russia in the 1920s by the ethnographer Sergei
Shikogorov (Patriotism of Despair, 81).
15
Abashin, Natsionalizmy v Srednei Azii, 6; Oushakine, Patriotism of Despair, 9194; Laruelle,
The Concept of Ethnogenesis.
16
On Gumilev, see Marlene Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire, trans.
Mischa Gabowitsch (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008), chap. 2; Viktor
Shnirelman and Sergei Panarin, Lev Gumilev: His Pretensions as Founder of Ethnology and
His Eurasian Theories, Inner Asia 3, 1 (2001): 118.
17
Tishkov, Rekviem po Etnosu, 3940.
18
Hosking, Rulers and Victims, 226.

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ADRIENNE EDGAR

examine the relationship between national and Soviet in other republics.

If the Soviet Union had a Russian coloring, how could an individual be
Uzbek, Georgian, or Moldovan while also claiming a Soviet identity? Did
the primordialization of Russianness in the postwar era make it more difficult
to solidify a Soviet identity outside Russia, since the two were so closely bound
up with each other? The study of Soviet identity has received new impetus
lately as historians have turned to the postwar period, so perhaps we will soon
have new answers to these questions. Hosking finds that the prospects for
a Soviet identity began to diminish in Russia in the 1970s, along with the
belief in messianic socialism. Yet this may not be true of all republics. Did
the reluctance of Central Asian republics to separate from the Soviet Union
indicate that Soviet identity and ideals still had relevance there in the 1980s,
at least among the elite?
Like the new imperial history, the literature on borderlands, which
has been an important part of recent U.S. historiography, has potential
relevance to historians of the Soviet Union. A few historians of the tsarist
era have examined the role of borderlands in shaping Russian identities,
suggesting that the tensions between imperial and national may not
have been uniformly strong in all regions. These works tend to argue that
the eastern and southern borderlands of the Russian Empire were sites of
contested and hybrid identities, where Russian identity was more fluid and
able to incorporate Eastern elements than generally imagined.19 While
it is hard to speak of borderlands per se in the Soviet period, there were
nevertheless regions with highly mixed populations and large numbers of
diaspora Russians, where identities may have been more ambiguous than
in the heartland of each national republic. (Kazakhstan during the virgin
lands campaign comes to mind, but there were many others.)20 Were there
particular ways of being Russianor Kazakh, Armenian, or Tatarin these
multiethnic Soviet borderlands? Were citizens more likely to identify with
being Soviet in such areas, and if so, what did Soviet identity mean to them?
19

See, for example, Thomas M. Barrett, At the Edge of Empire: The Terek Cossacks and the North
Caucasus Frontier, 17001860 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999); Nicholas Breyfogle, Abby
Schrader, and Willard Sunderland, eds., Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization
in Eurasian History (London: Routledge, 2007); Yuriy Malikov, Formation of a Borderland
Culture: Myths and Realities of CossackKazakh Relations in Northern Kazakhstan in the
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara,
2006).
20
On the virgin lands region in Kazakhstan, see Michaela Pohl, The Planet of One Hundred
Languages: Ethnic Relations and Soviet Identity in the Virgin Lands, in Peopling the Russian
Periphery, 23861.

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437

The second big argument in Rulers and Victims, that the Russians
suffered from depredations of the Soviet decades as much as, if not more
than, other peoples,21 has predictably been the more controversial. As one
reviewer noted at the time of the books publication, not everyone is likely
to buy into this first victim scenario, certainly not Ukrainians, Estonians,
Chechens, or the many other ethnic groups that have, in some respects, built
national identities on the basis of resisting Russia and the Russians.22 The
reluctance to see Russians as victims may be explained in part by the reflexive
antagonismperhaps a legacy of the Cold Warthat some in the West clearly
feel toward the reassertion of Russian national interests. The skepticism about
Russian victimhood may also be related to the constellation of political views
that go along with this notion in contemporary Russia. The belief that the
Soviet-era friendship of the peoples was harmful to the Russians is a staple
of conservative nationalist discourse in Russia today.23
Whoever is making the argument, the question of victimhood is a
complicated one. The unmarked or default position of Russians does not in
itself mean that they were disadvantaged. The literature on race in the United
States argues that there are wages of whitenesspsychic benefits gained by
belonging to an unmarked yet favored group. White workers in the United
States were able to enhance their own self-esteem by feeling superior to AfricanAmerican workers, and the status and privileges conferred by race could be
used to make up for alienating and exploitative class relationships.24 Similarly,
there were intangible benefits to being Russian in Soviet society. Despite the
official policy of national equality, feelings of superiority were widespread
among the Russian population in the non-Russian periphery, particularly the
Muslim south. Ethnic Russians, however humble their background, believed
that they were heirs to a great civilization and bearers of a world-class language.
They were representatives of the great proletarian revolution, speaking the
language of Pushkin and Lenin and helping the natives to overcome their
backwardness. Studies of the 1920s and 1930s show that Russians regarded
korenizatsiia as affirmative action for the uneducated and unqualified and an

21

Hosking, Rulers and Victims, ix.

Serge Schmemann, Soviet Disunion [review of Geoffrey Hosking, Rulers and Victims],
New York Times Book Review, 2 July 2006. See also John Keeps review of Rulers and Victims in
the English Historical Review 122, no. 498 (2007): 105859.
23
Laruelle, In the Name of the Nation, 48.
24
Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 13, cited in Paul Spickard, Whats Critical about White
Studies, in Racial Thinking in the United States: Uncompleted Independence, ed. Spickard and
G. Reginald Daniel (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 164.
22

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ADRIENNE EDGAR

affront to their natural feelings of superiority.25 Such sentiments, of course,

were by no means unique to the Russians but are typical of imperial nations
and dominant ethnic groups.
Yet, as Hosking also shows, the position of Russians in the Soviet
Union was not that of a typical imperial nationality. Unlike white people
in the United States or the British in the empire, Russians did not enjoy a
legal advantage over other nationalities in the USSR. Within non-Russian
republics, they were often disadvantaged relative to the titular nationality
in areas such as university admissions and Communist Party membership.
Moreover, Hosking argues, the Russian people as a whole did not reap
material advantages from their position as central pillar of the Soviet Union.26
It may well be the contrast between their theoretically exalted position as
first among equals and their lack of legal and material advantages that made
Russians feel victimized. They were not necessarily worse off as a group than
other Soviet peoples, but they failed to enjoy the position to which they felt
entitled.
In their right to express their national identity, Russians may have
enjoyed a slight advantage over other Soviet nations. Other Soviet republics,
too, faced the simultaneous promotion and destruction of their national
identities. The Soviet regime was pro-Uzbek and anti-Uzbek, pro-Armenian
and anti-Armenian, just as it was pro- and anti-Russian. In all the Soviet
republics, some forms of nationalism were acceptable and others were
not, and the boundaries between the permissible and the forbidden were
continually shifting. The policies toward Russian nationhood were to some
extent reflective of broader Soviet attitudes toward nationality. Yet even in the
1930s, campaigns against bourgeois nationalism in non-Russian republics
generally had more serious consequences for the accused than the campaigns
against Great Russian chauvinism. National sentiments in the periphery were
seen as potentially anti-Soviet in a way that Russian national sentiment was
not. Moreover, central state support for the revival of Russian nationhood in
the Brezhnev era had no equivalent in other republics.
As for national suffering and victimhood, a productive way to build on
Hoskings arguments about the Russians might be to analyze discourses of
victimhood in different contexts across the former Soviet Union. Kazakhstan
25

Bhavna Dave, Kazakhstan: Ethnicity, Language, Power (London: Routledge, 2007), 5970.
On conflicts over korenizatsiia, see Matthew J. Payne, Stalins Railroad: Turksib and the Building
of Socialism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), 13839; and Adrienne Edgar,
Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2004), chap. 3.
26
Hosking, Rulers and Victims, 306.

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439

is an interesting point of comparison. Like Russia, Kazakhstan has seen

the rise of a discourse of victimhood and suffering in the post-Soviet era.
Kazakhs underwent a terrible famine at the time of collectivization, which
resulted in the loss of nearly 40 percent of their total population and a
dramatic transformation of the ethnic composition of their republic. They
also experienced the complete destruction of their nomadic way of life
and irreversible damage to their linguistic and cultural traditions due to
Russification. Kazakh culture, meanwhile, was denigrated as tribal and
feudal by Russian settlers, who continually complained about uneducated,
illiterate Kazakhs getting jobs and promotions solely due to affirmative
action.27 Some Kazakhs, especially in the first decade after the collapse of
the Soviet Union, saw themselves as victims of the Soviet Union and the
Stalinist depredations as part of a long history of victimization at the hands
of Russians.28 Yet many Kazakhs participated enthusiastically in Soviet
construction as party and state officials, enjoyed Soviet opportunities for
education and social mobility, and willingly abandoned their language and
traditions in an effort to become modern. Some of those who persecuted
Kazakh nomads during collectivization were themselves ethnic Kazakhs.
Today, Kazakhs have a complex relationship to the Soviet era. Some still
blame the USSR for genocide against the Kazakhs and for fomenting ethnic
conflict, yet there seems to be a reluctance to reject the Soviet legacy entirely,
and one finds little animosity toward Russians. On the contrary, Kazakhstan
has gone out of its way to promote ethnic harmony and stress that it is an
oasis of stability in the region, despite its ethnically diverse population.29
Should Kazakhs be seen as victims of the Soviet Union, or of Russia? If so,
why is the discourse of victimhood in Kazakhstan less politically potent than
in Russia? The difficulty with making an argument about victimhood is that
ultimately it is a moral judgment, inherently subjective and based on ones
degree of sympathy for the group involved. For this reason, it is perhaps less
important to determine whether or not Russians were victims of the Soviet
Union than to understand why they perceived themselves in this wayand
what the implications of this have been. The Russian sense of victimhood,
like other legacies of the Soviet era, should not be seen in isolation but as part
of a broader post-Soviet context.

27
Dave, Kazakhstan, 8081; Sarah Cameron, The Hungry Steppe: Soviet Kazakhstan and
the Kazakh Famine, 19211934, (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2010).
28
Cameron, The Hungry Steppe, 28692.
29
Ibid., 28791; Dave, Kazakhstan, 9294.

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ADRIENNE EDGAR

Post-Soviet Russia, Hosking wrote in an evocative phrase, is a bleeding

hulk of empire.30 The fundamental question for the future, he concludes
in Rulers and Victims, is which view of Russian identitythe national or the
imperialwill prevail. Citing public opinion surveys from the early 1990s
showing that Russians still identified with supranational ideals more than
ethnicity, Hosking suggested that a modified form of imperial identity was
most likely to emerge.31 Over the past decade, however, the climate of opinion
in Russia has changed, with many Russians coming to adhere to an ethnic
and even racialized view of nationhood. Individuals from the North Caucasus
are now viewed less as fellow citizens of a civic nation than as unwelcome
foreigners.32 Could these shifting views represent the painful process of moving
toward a post-imperial Russian national identity? As Frantz Fanon observed,
decolonization means that the imperial nation, too, must decolonize itself.33
The Russian national imagination, for so long entangled with empire, must
transform itself to cope with the realities of post-Soviet nationhood.
Dept. of History
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93117 USA
edgar@history.ucsb.edu

30

Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 485.

Hosking, Rulers and Victims, 400.
32
Laruelle, In the Name of the Nation, 38, 4041.
33
Cited in Cultures of Empire, 13.
31