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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Siberia, apparently, is an inhospitable region as far as Communist Party members are concerned. According to T. H. Rigby, both in 1939 and in 1961, a significantly smaller proportion of the CPSU membership was to be found in the Urals and Western and Eastern Siberian regions of the RSFSR than of the general Soviet population. This is surprising, he points out, in view of the area's “relatively small rural population” and its key industries being mining and metallurgy. Beyond the suggestion “that the general comfort and pleasantness of an area is an independent factor in its party membership levels,” one is immediately intrigued by the implications this may have for the political recruitment opportunities of ethnic minorities in these regions. Does it mean that native, non-European minorities have better chances to become party members because Europeans are reluctant to move there? Or, conversely, does it mean that Europeans, because of their higher levels of education, tend therefore to displace the non-Europeans? Is there evidence of any sort of “affirmative action” on behalf of ethnic minorities in Siberia insofar as recruitment into the party, and concurrently access to the better jobs, is concerned?
1. T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the U.S.S.R., 1917-1967 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). pp. 503-5.Google Scholar
2. Ibid., p. 505.Google Scholar
3. Grey Hodnett's impressive Leadership in the Soviet National Republics: A Quantitative Study of Recruitment Policy (Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press, 1978), for instance, deals only with “the fourteen non-Russian union republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” (p.1).Google Scholar
4. The only exception, as far as this writer has been able to ascertain, has been the compilation published about itself by the Lithuanian Communist Party, Lietuvos Komunistu partija skaiciais, 1918-1975: Statistikos duomenu rinkinys (Vilnius: “Mintis,” 1976). It reports the number of Lithuanians among persons admitted to the party, but no other nationalities. For an attempt to ascertain the determinants of nationality recruitment in that particular case, based on the above publication, see Bohdan Harasymiw, “Nationality and Communist Party Recruitment in the USSR: The Case of Lithuania,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Rocky Mountain Association of Slavic Studies, Albuquerque, N.M., 25 April 1980.Google Scholar
5. The figures give the percentage of Russians in the total population, and are taken from Robert A. Lewis, Richard H. Rowland, and Ralph S. Clem, Nationality and Population Change in Russia and the USSR: An Evaluation of Census Data, 1897-1970 (New York: Praeger, 1976), p. 216, Table 6.7.Google Scholar
6. For a brief description of some of these thirty native peoples, see Konstantin Symmons-Symonolewicz, trans. and ed., The Non-Slavic Peoples of the Soviet Union: A Brief Ethnographical Survey (Meadville, Pa.: Maplewood Press, 1972), pp. 120-4.Google Scholar
7. Migration policies and processes in respect to Siberia are discussed in Jeff Chinn, Manipulating Soviet Population Resources (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1977), pp. 26-39.Google Scholar
8. One is limited in one's comparisons here by the lack of coincidence between party data and those of the census. Fewer nationalities are given in the latter than in the former.Google Scholar
9. On the role of Jews as “mobilized diaspora” and of the other two as the Russians' “Younger Brothers,” see John A. Armstrong, Ideology, Politics, and Government in the Soviet Union: An Introduction, 3rd ed. (New York and Washington: Praeger, 1974), pp. 176-84.Google Scholar
10. On the Tatars, see Gustav Burbiel, “The Tatars and the Tatar ASSR,” in Handbook of Major Soviet Nationalities, ed. Zev Katz, Rosemarie Rogers, and Frederic Harned (New York: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan, 1975), pp. 390-414.Google Scholar
11. For the USSR as a whole, such data have, to this writer's knowledge, not been published since the mid-1960s. See Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSR v 1965 godu (Moscow: Statistika, 1966), 582, and earlier editions of the same annual handbook on the Soviet economy.Google Scholar