Looking for Good Books about Korenization/Nativization in USSR

by ComradeInNeed2222

I went on to the bibliography of the Wikipedia on the subject and found 3 books. Since they are all $35+, I would prefer to get the higher quality one of the 3 (although i do like more content). Anyways, I wanted some of advice on which to get.

They are:

  • Hirsch, Francine. 2005. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-4273-7.
  • Martin, Terry D. 2001. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-8677-7.
  • Suny, Ronald Grigor and Martin, Terry, Eds. 2002. A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-514423-6 (softcover), ISBN 0-19-514422-8 (hardcover).52.
mikitacurve

Obviously all three are good books. The question is what you want to focus on.

The Suny/Martin collaboration is actually almost as much about the politics of national identity in the Russian Empire as it is about the USSR. It's really more about the continuities between Soviet and imperial policy. And it's got an article by Peter Holquist in it, and I love Peter Holquist.

Terry Martin's book on his own is your best bet if you want a straightforward history of Soviet policy up until WW2. It's sort of almost like a biography of the policy, if that makes sense.

Hirsch, I will admit, I haven't read much of, but her approach is more conceptual and abstracted. If Suny/Martin is broad chronologically but narrower in terms of sticking to particular case studies, and Martin alone is narrow both chronologically and in its focus on chronicling events, Hirsch has the same tighter chronological focus on the 1920s and 1930s as Martin's solo book but with a lot less focus on telling a single biography-like story.

So again it depends on what you want out of the book. I think Martin's solo work is the best place to start, based on how your phrased the question.

I know you're trying to narrow down your list, not add to it, but if you ever want other book recommendations:

Kate Brown's A Biography of No Place is a very good one if you're interested in a cultural history, looking at the policy from the perspective of the people it affected. She does limit her focus to the western Ukrainian SSR, though. And if you want a book about nationalities in the later USSR, I would recommend Jeff Sahadeo's Voices from the Soviet Edge.

If you have journal access, I think the best single summation of why the nationalitites policy turned violent is Terry Martin's "The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing". And there's also recommend Peter Holquist's "Violent Russia, Deadly Marxism? Russia In the Epoch of Violence, 1905–21", because even though it focuses on the violence of the civil war more than national identities, it's basically the perfect piece to read alongside Martin's article, and although you don't need to read it, I feel that the two go together really well and I can't imagine recommending one without the other even if one of them is sort of irrelevant to the question.