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8 - The Russian and Soviet Empire

from Part I - Imperial and Postcolonial Settings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2023

By
Ronald Grigor Suny  and
Valerie A. Kivelson
Edited by
Cathie Carmichael ,
Matthew D'Auria  and
Aviel Roshwald
Cathie Carmichael
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Matthew D'Auria
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Aviel Roshwald
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington DC
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Summary

Empires and nations pull in different directions. Empires are founded on principles of institutionalized differences and distinctions, both laterally between peoples or geographies and vertically between those on top whose superiority grants them the right to rule over others and those below whose inferiority condemns them to be ruled by others. Nations, in contrast, are imagined and affective communities that promote, at least rhetorically if not always in practice, the commonality, horizontal equivalency, and homogeneity of the population that constitutes the nation. A nation at its inception is a political claim that a shared culture, ethnic, political, or religious, gives a people the right to self-rule, and possibly to sovereignty and statehood. At one end of the political spectrum, empires operate through hierarchy and difference between subjects and rulers, while at the other end, nations function on the basis of equality and shared nature, whether ethnic, religious, or political, of their citizens.

Keywords

empirenationnationalismTsarismRussiaSoviet Unionnationality policyrevolutionStalinismReciprocity
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism , pp. 158 - 178
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

Further Reading

Brandenberger, David, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).Google Scholar
Brudny, Yitzhak M., Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953–1991 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Hirsch, Francine, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).Google Scholar
Kivelson, Valerie A., and Suny, Ronald Grigor, Russia’s Empires (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).Google Scholar
Maiorova, Olga, From the Shadow of Empire: Defining the Russian Nation through Cultural Mythology, 1855–1870 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010).Google Scholar
Martin, Terry, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).Google Scholar
Smith, Jeremy, Red Nations: The Nationalities Experience in and after the USSR (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Suny, Ronald Grigor, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Suny, Ronald Grigor, and Martin, Terry (eds.), A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).Google Scholar
Yekelchyk, Serhy, Stalin’s Empire of Memory: Russian–Ukrainian Relations in the Soviet Historical Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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