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The 1986 Party Program and the National Minorities in the USSR

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Julian Birch
Julian Birch*
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield (England)
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Extract

Since Gorbachev's accession to power in March 1985, his rule has been marked by a very visible concern for economic reforms and developments in international relations. Nationality and minority affairs within the USSR, which played such a prominent part previously with the mass emigration movements and open dissent of the 1970s, have not been at the forefront of his interests, in either his speeches or his travels. However, the local Party congresses and the 27th Congress of the CPSU as a whole provide an opportunity for a review of current thinking on this enduring and contentious issue. The All-Union Congress in particular witnessed the appearance of the final draft of the Party's new Program for the future, with its relatively recently adopted longer-term perspective on the question of the advent of full communism and the withering away of conflicting and antagonistic national minority allegiances. The limited prospects for this long awaited moving together of nations are likely to have been significant features in the readjustment of the time scale of Communist development and the emergence of a more realistic assessment of the possibility of producing a fully “Soviet” man divested of his narrower ethnic loyalties.

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , Fall 1987 , pp. 147 - 157
Copyright
Copyright © 1982 by the Association for the Study of the Nationalities of the USSR and Eastern Europe, Inc. 

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References

Notes

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