HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

224 ReviewsTHE NATIONALITIES FACTOR IN SOVIET POLITICS ANDSOCIETY. Edited by Lubomyr Hajda and Mark Beissinger. Boulder,San Francisco, and Oxford: Westview Press, 1990. 331 pp., withtables, figures, notes, index. $19.95 paper.This book provides a solid basis for a better understanding of the sovereign republicsthat have emerged from the former USSR in the wake of the failed coup ofAugust 1991. Let it be said at the outset that this important overview of the Sovietnationalities picture should not be dismissed because the research predates the coup.As S. Frederick Starr remarked during a panel discussion at the annual convention ofthe American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in November1991, much of the work that could have contributed to our knowledge of the republicsprior to their emergence as independent players remains to be done. Reams ofliterature, especially that in the local languages, are yet to be tapped by scholars.Attention to this resource, however belated, can yield important new insights. Thepresent volume helps to fill the gap and to discern the forces which inform therepublics' national existence today.Roman Szporluk's introductory essay on the "imperial legacy" sets the stage forthe coming breakup of the USSR. Szporluk suggests that Lenin's statement aboutthe "tendency of every national movement... toward the formation of nationalstates" was not limited, as Lenin said it was, to capitalist systems. He recalls LadisK. D. Kristof's delineation of the "dichotomy between narod and gosudarstvo"which characterized the Russian Empire even in its final stages, observing that thissame tension between state and society carried over—in the case of Russians and,even more so, the non-Russian nationalities—as part of the heritage with which Gorbachevwas forced to deal during the perestroïka period. What ultimately defeatedGorbachev's efforts to hold the Union together were the acceptance of linguisticautonomy and the espousal of the national-territorial principle, which, early on—Szporluk quotes Richard Pipes on this point—were conceded to the nationalities as a"purely formal feature of the Soviet Constitution": hence, the involuntary enshrinementof nationalism at various levels of the federal structure that has now producedstates within states like the contents of a matryoshka. Szporluk, naming somenames, is critical of those who were unable or unwilling to see this loomingphenomenon, accepting instead official claims that the nationality question had been"solved."There are chapters on various thematic aspects: the role of the national elites, theeconomy, the military, language policy, literary politics, and religion. GertrudeSchroeder, dealing with the economic sphere, points to a key centrifugal factor: "thepersistence of substantial development gaps and disparities in living standardsamong national groups." She makes the prescient observation that the declaredintent to manage the economy from the center while giving the republics moreauthority in managing their own development was "a contradiction in terms" thatcould lead to "bitter wrangles, unavoidably with an ethnic coloration." As for futureeconomic cooperation among the republics, her finding that the "small republics aremuch more trade dependent than the larger ones" suggests that the former will have