How were people of different ethnicity treated in the Soviet Union?
This is a really big question for several reasons but primarily because when talking about something like how peoples of various ethnic backgrounds were perceived and treated in a nation-state like the Soviet Union, one has to take into consideration something called intersectionalism. You’ll see this word floating around in places where these kinds of issues are studied and discussed but it’s started to become one that is more recognizable in the mainstream of some societies– what it means in the context of this question though is that making some kind of broad statement that encapsulates how, for example, Chechens would be perceived and treated within the Soviet Union is nigh impossible because it requires that one unpack literal centuries of history concerning Chechen and Russian relations, but likewise an equivalent amount of history for Chechen and Dagestani relations, Chechen and Armenian relations, Chechen and Georgian relations, and on and on and on. History doesn’t just disappear overnight because you’re ostensibly a communist now. To give a truly holistic and complete answer to your question is the stuff of which PhDs are made.
As you can imagine, that means a question like this which is seeking a straightforward answer concerning the treatment and perception of all minorities within the USSR (which had 69 officially recognized nationalities and more like 200 self-identified nationalities) scales up to be an absolutely enormous question the moment one sets out to answer it. Literal volumes have been written on this subject. Literal volumes have been written about a single ethnic group’s conflicts with the other ethnic groups in its own region. Literal volumes have been written about a single ethnicity as it relates to another single ethnicity within an even smaller region. I would never claim that I’ve read near enough material or done near enough research to truly, completely answer this question to the extent that it could be done. As such, in this context, intersectionalism helps us immensely by allowing the acknowledgment to be made that racism is a supremely complicated issue and provides the recognition of the collisions that occur between multiple forms of oppression or discrimination that inevitably occur when you’re talking about something like race relations in a country of nearly 200 million people and over a millennium of recorded history. We need to be mindful of it and consciously address it before trying to answer (what I’m hypothesizing is) your underlying question which (to nitpick, I’m sorry) can be more explicitly stated thus:
How did the government of the Soviet Union treat non-Russian ethnicities and/or did the average Russian Soviet citizen harbor intense racial biases or prejudices against his or her Soviet compatriots?
This question becomes even further fraught with complication given that ‘Russian’ is also obviously not synonymous with all other quote-unquote white Slavic races in and around Russia– that is, Belorussian, Ukrainian, etc. So again, while to someone who is looking in from the outside, a Ukrainian will present essentially as a Russian, or Belorussian, or otherwise, the fact is that within these groups, there is huge amounts of dissent about how distinct or indistinct they truly are from one another.
So, okay, sorry for the entire windup there but it’s important to give some space to other writers who might have something to contribute concerning, perhaps, how a specific minority ethnic group experienced specific discrimination (or lack thereof) in the Soviet Union instead of my answer which, as I implied above, is going to talk about the concept of non-Russian ethnicity in a generalized way that is absolutely not correct or even applicable and relevant 100% of the time. Next article: 202005151925 Part 2 - Soviet union
uid: 202005151924 tags: #literature