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Korenizatsiia (, ; ) was an early policy of the Soviet Union for the integration of non-Russian nationalities into the governments of their specific Soviet republics. This term comes from the word korennoi in the phrase korennoi narod, which means "native people" or "indigenous population." In the 1920s, the policy promoted representatives of the titular nation, and their national minorities, into the lower administrative levels of the local government, bureaucracy, and nomenklatura of their Soviet republics. The main idea of the korenizatsiia was to grow communist cadres for every nationality. In Russian language, the term (коренизация) derives from (коренное население, "native population"). The policy practically ended in the mid-1930s with the deportations of various nationalities.
Politically and culturally, the nativization policy aimed to eliminate Russian domination and culture in Soviet republics where ethnic Russians did not constitute a majority. This policy was implemented even in areas with large Russian-speaking populations; for instance, all children in Ukraine were taught in the Ukrainian language in school. The policies of korenizatsiia facilitated the Communist Party's establishment of the local languages in government and education, in publishing, in culture, and in public life. In that manner, the cadre of the local Communist Party were promoted to every level of government, and ethnic Russians working in said governments were required to learn the local language and culture of the given Soviet republic.
Vladimir Lenin believed that nationalism had the potential to attract class allies for the Bolsheviks and that the historical distrust of non-Russian peoples toward Great Russians could be overcome in this way. Korenizatsiia was a preventive policy designed to stop the rise of nationalism among the non-Russian peoples who had been oppressed in the past. The Bolsheviks believed that Great Russian chauvinism was a bigger danger than local national movements. Because of this, korenizatsiia also included criticism of Russian culture and the use of the Russian alphabet, which were linked to the colonial and Russification policies of the former Russian Empire. Korenizatsiia was also designed to support the decolonization process, which the Bolsheviks saw as unavoidable, while at the same time helping to maintain the territorial unity of the former Russian Empire.
The first clear and comprehensive expression of the policy was published by Joseph Stalin in an article in Pravda on October 10, 1920. In this article, Joseph Stalin stated that all Soviet Union institutions operating in the border regions—including courts, administration, economic bodies, local governments, and Party organizations—should be composed of individuals who understood the customs, way of life, and languages of the local populations. This statement marked a turning point in Soviet Union nationalities policy.
Korenizatsiia was later systematically defined, especially during the Party Congresses of March 1921 and April 1923, and was shaped around two main objectives:
As adopted in 1923 korenizatsiia involved teaching and administration in the language of the republic; and promoting non-Russians to positions of power in Republic administrations and the party, including for a time the creation of a special administrative units called (нацсоветы, national ) and (нацрайоны, national districts) based on concentrations of minorities within what were minority republics.For further discussion, see Yuri Slezkine, "The USSR as a Communal Apartment, Or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism," Slavic Review 53, No. 2 (Summer 1994): 414–452. For example, in Ukraine in the late 1920s there were even natssovety for Russians and Estonians.
In 1920s, there still was animosity towards the Russians and towards other nationalities on the part of the Russians, but there were also conflicts and rivalries among other nationalities.Timo Vihavainen: Nationalism and Internationalism. How did the Bolsheviks Cope with National Sentiments? in Chulos & Piirainen 2000, p. 79.
The Great-Russian chauvinist spirit, which is becoming stronger and stronger owing to the N.E.P., . . . finds expression in an arrogantly disdainful and heartlessly bureaucratic attitude on the part of Russian Soviet officials towards the needs and requirements of the national republics. The multi-national Soviet state can become really durable, and the co-operation of the peoples within it really fraternal, only if these survivals are vigorously and irrevocably eradicated from the practice of our state institutions. Hence, the first immediate task of our Party is vigorously to combat the survivals of Great-Russian chauvinism.
The main danger, Great-Russian chauvinism, should be kept in check by the Russians themselves, for the sake of the larger goal of building socialism. Within the (minority) nationality areas new institutions should be organized giving the state a national (minority) character everywhere, built on the use of the nationality languages in government and education, and on the recruitment and promotion of leaders from the ranks of minority groups. On the central level the nationalities should be represented in the Soviet of Nationalities.
The initial period of korenizatsiia went together with the development of national-territorial administrative units and national cultures. The latter was reflected above all in the areas of language constructionFor a highly informative yet compact summary see Slezkine (1994). and education.For a review of the national languages in education, see Barbara A. Anderson and Brian D. Silver, "Equality, Efficiency, and Politics in Soviet Bilingual Education Policy: 1934–1980," American Political Science Review 78 (December 1984): 1019–1039. For several of the small nationalities in Russia that had no literary language, a "Committee of the North"Committee for the Assistance to the Peoples of the Northern Borderlands. helped to create alphabets so that the national languages could be taught in schools and literacy could be brought to the people in their native languages—and the minorities would thereby be brought from backwardness to the modern world. And in the very large Ukrainian Republic, the program of Ukrainianization led to a profound shift of the language of instruction in schools to Ukrainian.
In 1930, Stalin proclaimed at the 16th Party Congress that building socialism was a period of blossoming of national cultures. The final goal would be to merge into one international culture with a common language. Meanwhile, the first five-year plan in 1928–1931 was a period of radicalism, utopianism and violence in an atmosphere of "cultural revolution". Russian cultural heritage was under attack, churches were closed and demolished, old specialists were dismissed, and science and art were proletarianized.Timo Vihavainen: Nationalism and Internationalism. How did the Bolsheviks Cope with National Sentiments? in Chulos & Piirainen 2000, p. 81.
The Bolsheviks' tactics in their struggle to neutralise nationalist aspirations led to political results by the beginning of the 1930s. The old structure of the Russian Empire had been destroyed and a hierarchical federal state structure, based on the national principle, was created. The structure was nationality-based states in which nationality cultures were blossoming, and nationality languages were spoken and used at schools and in local administration.It's important to be aware of a terminological distinction. In the context of Soviet nationalities policy the term "national," which for clarity here has been rendered as "nationality," referred to ethnic minorities and minority territories, as opposed to central or all-Soviet institutions. In this sense, for example, when educational policy focused on expanding "national schools" (nacional'nje školu – национальные школу), it focused on schools in the traditional languages of the national minorities (Ukrainian, Tatar, Armenian, Karelian, and so forth), not on schools for the Soviet Union as a whole. The transition was real, not merely a centralized Russian empire camouflaged.Timo Vihavainen: Nationalism and Internationalism. How did the Bolsheviks Cope with National Sentiments? in Chulos & Piirainen 2000, pp. 81–82.
The 17th Party congress in 1934, proclaimed that the building of the material basis for a socialist society had succeeded. The Soviet Union first became an officially socialist society in 1936 when the new constitution was adopted. The new constitution stated that the many socialist nations had transformed on a voluntary basis into a harmonious union. According to the new constitution there were 11 socialist republics, 22 autonomous republics, nine autonomous regions and nine national territories. At the same time, administration was now greatly centralised. All the Republics were now harnessed to serve one common socialist state.Timo Vihavainen: Nationalism and Internationalism. How did the Bolsheviks Cope with National Sentiments? in Chulos & Piirainen 2000, p. 83.
Moreover, Stalin seemed set on greatly reducing the number of officially recognized nationalities by contracting the official list of nationalities in the 1939 census, compared with the 1926 census.This, however, would be mainly a change on paper, not in actual ethnic or national identities. The sharply contracted list in 1939 was later expanded again for the 1959 census, though not to the number of peoples listed in 1926; the director of the 1959 census criticized the earlier effort at contraction as artificial. The development of so-called "national schools" (национальные школы) in which the languages of minority nationalities were the main media of instruction continued, spreading literacy and universal education in many national minority languages, while teaching Russian as a required subject of study. The term korenizatsiia went out of use in the latter half of the 1930s, replaced by more bureaucratic expressions, such as "selection and placement of national cadres" (подбор и расстановка национальных кадров).
From 1937, the central press started to praise Russian language and Russian culture. Mass campaigns were organized to denounce the "enemies of the people". "Bourgeois nationalists" were new enemies of the Russian people which had suppressed the Russian language. The policy of indigenization was abandoned. In the following years, the Russian language became a compulsory subject in all Soviet schools.Timo Vihavainen: Nationalism and Internationalism. How did the Bolsheviks Cope with National Sentiments? in Chulos & Piirainen 2000, p. 85.
Pre-revolution Russian nationalism was also rehabilitated. Many of the heroes of Russian history were re-appropriated for glorification. The Russian people became the "elder brother" of the Soviet republics. A new kind of patriotism, Soviet patriotism, emerged, with national survival taking priority over ideological conflicts between communists and fascists.
In 1938, Russian became a mandatory subject of study in all non-Russian schools. In general, the cultural and linguistic russification reflected the overall centralization imposed by Stalin. The Cyrillic script was instituted for a number of Soviet languages, including the languages of Central Asia that in the late 1920s had been given Latin alphabets to replace Arabic ones.Armenian and Georgian kept their original and unique scripts. Many so-called "scriptless" languages, mainly of smaller nationalities in Russia, were first given scripts in Latin alphabet and later changed to Cyrillic. Other languages, in particular in Central Asia, Azerbaijan, and the North Caucasus, first adopted Latin scripts to replace Arabic scripts, and later adopted Cyrillic scripts to replace Latin scripts. Thus, the move to the Cyrillic alphabet was delayed for most non-Russian nationalities until at least the late 1930s, and full implementation of this change took time.
Moldova became part of the USSR as a consequence of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Soon after, the language of the country was renamed to "Moldavian" and it ceased being written in the Latin alphabet, changing to Cyrillic. This policy would only be reversed in 1989, after large demonstrations imbued with patriotic feeling. Romanian is an official language in the Moldovan constitution since its independence, and it is Moldova's sole official language today. Russian is still in use but not as important as it was in the Soviet era, since it has no special status in the country and its usage as mother tongue has been declining for some time.
During the Soviet era, a significant number of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians migrated to other Soviet republics, and many of them settled there. According to the last census in 1989, the Russian 'diaspora' in the Soviet republics had reached 25 million.Pål Kolstø, "Political construction sites: Nation-building in Russia and the post-Soviet States". Boulder, Colorado: Westview press 2000, pp. 81–104 uncorrected version, Chapter 2, par. "Nations and Nation-Building in Eastern Europe" and Chapter 5
Some historians evaluating the Soviet Union as a colonial empire ("Soviet Empire"), applied the "prison of nations" idea to the USSR. Thomas Winderl wrote "The USSR became in a certain sense more a prison-house of nations than the old Empire had ever been."
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