The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union

by Ronald Grigor Suny

This timely work shows how and why the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union was caused in large part by nationalism. Unified in their hostility to the Kremlin's authority, the fifteen constituent Union Republics, including the Russian Republic, declared their sovereignty and began to build state institutions of their own. The book has a dual purpose. The first is to explore the formation of nations within the Soviet Union, the policies of the Soviet Union toward non-Russian peoples, and the ultimate contradictions between those policies and the development of nations. The second, more general, purpose is to show how nations have grown in the twentieth century. The principle of nationality that buried the Soviet Union and destroyed its empire in Eastern Europe continues to shape and reshape the configuration of states and political movements among the new independent countries of the vast East European-Eurasian region.

Genres: History, Russia, Nonfiction, Soviet Union, Soviet History, Politics, Russian History

200 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1993

About the author

Ronald Grigor Suny is the William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan and professor emeritus of political science and history at the University of Chicago.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ronald Suny’s basic argument in The Revenge of the Past is that, at the same time that it attempted to build a unified nation that superseded individual nationalisms, the Soviet central government actually engendered the creation of nationalistic sentiments and attachments. These forces grew stronger as time progressed and, during the critical period of Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost, were unleashed against the government and ended up overwhelming it, thus causing its downfall. In other words, the author not only cites nationalism as the primary cause for the disintegration of the Soviet Union, but argues that it was fostered by the very system that was based upon an ideology of eliminating it.

Suny’s first chapter is devoted to a rigorous exploration and definition of “nationalism”, which is a refreshing change from many other works that take the concept as a given and do not explicate upon a precise meaning and method of invocation. After justifying his study by arguing that ignoring non-Russian nationalities caused historians obsessed with the totalitarian model to miss challenges that were taking place on the periphery, he argues that nationalities and nationalisms are not intrinsic or natural forces, but processes that exist within particular historical, social, and cultural discourses. He distinguishes his use of “nationality” and “nationalism” by defining the former as “the modern secular form of ethnicity with a degree of coherence and consciousness that enables its members to be mobilized for national political goals” and the latter as “a doctrine that at its core holds that humanity is divided into nations, that loyalty to nations overrides all other loyalties, that the source of all political power lies within the collectivity of the nation, and that nations are fully realized only in sovereign states”, both of which “shared a common myth of descent, some notions of history, usually a language and religion, a sense of solidarity or kinship, and often an association with a specific territory”. His most important point, however, is that the development of socialism was inexorably intertwined with the formation of these concepts in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.

Suny’s analysis begins in his second chapter, which starts from the premise that nationality was not a primary concern in the building of the Russian Empire, which strove for unity but also tolerated difference. After 1881, however, social problems were conceived of in ethnic terms and nationalities were ripe for engagement with socialism as it became the defining factor in Russian social and political life. The author’s objective is to examine the degree to which each nationality negotiated the interplay between nationalism and socialism and to which each idea gained a following outside of the intelligentsia and elite circles. He identifies five basic patterns: peasant-based regions that did not respond strongly to either ideology (Belarus, Lithuania, and Azerbaijan), transitional societies that had some engagement with both (Ukraine and Estonia), areas that emphasized socialism but integrated nationalism (urbanized, literate Latvians whose labor problems led them to socialism and Georgians who were demographically concentrated and had a history of statehood that was only lost under the Russian Empire), groups that attached to themselves more strongly to nationalism (Armenians who recalled the splitting of their ancient kingdom), and Finland, which was an exceptional case of dual engagement because it had strong divisions across lines of both class and nationality and fought a civil war to determine which would become the basis of its identity.

The third chapter explores how the Soviet Union managed and negotiated its various constituent nationalities. Pre-Revolutionary Bolshevik thought envisioned a global form of communism that would meld all nationalisms into one movement and make them obsolete. Pragmatic realities after 1917, however, led to an increasing amount of privileges granted to the nationalities in order to maintain peace and involve them in the Soviet project. Lenin believed that the proletariat was supranational and that nationalism was a bourgeois ideology, but he also knew that tolerance was needed to progress forward. National rights, in his view, had to be supported because nationalities could not be forced into federation. Suny then outlines seven state-supported trends that facilitated nationalism: nativization, economic and social transformation, territorialisation, imperialism, traditionalism, localism, and national mobilization. In his final chapter, the author details how “the general democratization of political practices, the delegitimization of Communist party rule in the center, and the growing reluctance and inability of Moscow to use force to impose its will” led to nationalism and nationalist politicians taking control of important political organs out of the hands of more conservative and Russia-centric party members as soon as Gorbachev’s glasnost policy enabled them to rise to the fore.

Suny’s greatest asset is probably his penchant for brevity and clarity, which allows him to write in a style that is difficult to summarize only because his own words are so direct and constitutive of the ideas that he is attempting to convey. He has no use for excessive verbiage or unnecessary prose, which allows him to cover a broad swath of Soviet culture in only a handful of pages. While this does make the work somewhat dense on occasion, Suny is lucid enough to make his ideas easily intelligible to any academic, regardless of their specialization. Overall, The Revenge of the Past is a classic of the field for good reasons: its messages are as clear as they are important and they present a critical perspective that complicates more simplistic visions of Soviet governance by injecting the agency of nationalities and the periphery into the mix. It is essential reading for anyone interested in Soviet studies and, while it may be firmly academic, it is far from a chore to get through.

[Elizabeth · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars

I think there was a lot of good material about the formation of national identities and how they interacted with class in the Russian Empire and the beginnings of the Soviet system. However, the book is hampered by when it was written and its shorter length. What starts as an in-depth exploration of national and class identity of different groups skips over a lot of interesting dynamics up to Gorbachev.

The central claim of the book is a bit circular, or at least isn't well enough developed for me. Suny seems to claim that the Soviet creation of national federal republics led to a stronger periphery than the core, which led to its collapse. At the same time, he notes instances where the periphery breaks off not because of its own nationalist zeal, but a sense of disillusionment with the center. Which came first? Nationalism or disillusionment? The answer is often different depending on which ethnic republic you look at, and is based on the differing histories (which he set up quite well).

Overall, a strong start, but an unfortunately weak finish.

[Eitental · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first chapter provides a clear and succinct summary of the ideas of various theorists who have worked on the origins and causes of national identities and nationalism (Benedict Anderson, Miroslav Hroch, Karl Deutsch, Anthony Smith, Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Renan). Suny emphasizes a consensus that nations do not just come into being naturally, but are actively fostered by intellectuals, political parties and/or the media. This chapter also includes some critique of the fact that very few sovietologists’ have examined the rise of nationalism in the USSR in light of these theories.

The second chapter illustrates how class and ethnic loyalties can intersect, clash and coincide, using examples from the South Caucasus. It also includes an excellent overview of Imperial nationalities policy, rich with examples from all corners of the Empire, highlighting how policy varied greatly between different regions and different periods. There are also a series of case studies of individual ethnic groups (Belarusians, Lithuanians, Azeris, Ukrainians, Estonians, Georgians, Latvians, Finns and Armenians) and the formations of their national identities in the lead-up to and during the Revolution and Civil War, with a focus on the way that class solidarity and socialism competed and combined with ethno-national identity and nationalism. The central thesis here is that “the social and the ethnic are so closely intertwined that separation of the two can be artificial and misleading”. Suny equally criticizes both the Soviet view of events in the ethnically non-Russian parts of the Empire as integral parts of a broad proletarian revolution as well as the nationalist (and Western) interpretation of the events in the non-Russian regions as nationalistic and wholly separate from the socialist revolution in Russia proper. This class angle makes the case studies interesting to those who are already familiar with the histories of the nations in question, but they are also written in such a way as to provide a good summary for those who have not studied a given nationality before.

The third chapter is perhaps the book’s weakest. It attempts to provide an overview of Soviet nationalities policies and how these contributed to the strengthening of nationalism. While the central thesis – that both the discrimination against non-Russians (russification, deportation, etc.) and the concessions to ethnic interests (the formation of ethnically-based territorial units, affirmative action, language standardization and codification, etc.) contributed to the consolidation of national identity and nationalism – seems to me an astute one, the chapter’s thematic rather than chronological organization makes it somewhat confusing and results in the same points being made repeatedly. An interesting point is made towards the end of the chapter, but not explored in great detail: the rise to power of “local ethnic mafias” during the early 1980s, when central power was weak.

The fourth chapter gives a detailed account of Gorbachev’s attempts to reassert central control over the union republics by both countering and making concessions to nationalism and offers an explanation for why this led to the eventual collapse of the Union. Although this chapter contains a significant amount of repetition of points made in previous chapters, it does provide some interesting insight into events in the USSR’s final years, and is definitely worth reading if you are not very familiar with the chronology of these events. Suny concludes that Gorbachev’s key mistakes, which led to the collapse of the Union, were his decision to implement political and economic reform simultaneously and his hesitance in using force to control opposition. Suny suggests that these mistakes may have been due to Gorbachev having assumed that sovietized non-Russian elites were representative of the non-Russian masses, who had still been little affected by Soviet ideology.

The bulk of the examples used in this work are drawn from the South Caucasus, reflecting the author’s primary area of expertise. A reasonable number of examples are also drawn from the Baltic States, Central Asia, Ukraine and Belarus. However, there is almost no mention of the smaller ethnicities located within Russia (Tatars, North Caucasians, indigenous Siberians…), nor of Moldova or, perhaps most bizarrely, of ethnic Russian nationalism.

In conclusion, despite certain shortcomings, this is certainly worth reading if you are interested in ethnic relations in the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet space, especially for its rigorous examination of the relevant theory in the first chapter and its excellent summary of the Russian Empire’s nationalities policy in the second. The writing is clear and concise, and though perhaps a little dense at times, should be considered readable by anyone from undergraduate level upwards.

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really appreciated this book. Suny is a great writer and an inspiration to me as an historian-in-training to become a better writer. It's over 20 years old now but it is undeniably important for making the nationalities argument for the collapse of the Soviet Union. There is a big debate in Soviet history about whether or not it was an empire, and Suny takes the position that it was, albeit one that fostered the development of many different nationalisms within it.