Who Built Nations in Eurasia? How Writers, Artists, and Professors Shaped Beliefs about National Identity

Abstract

For many, national identity is deeply felt and politically powerful. Yet at the same time, these same peoples may hold ambiguous, agnostic, or even antagonistic views towards national sovereignty. Nationality often exists without nationalism. These dogs that do not bark are ubiquitous in multinational states like the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Spain that formally recognized and actively encouraged the cultural expression of many national identities under one sovereign roof. How can we explain this broader diversity in the ways that nationality has been imagined in multinational states? Why do some national groups remain loyal to multinationalism, while others reject it? When is nationality meaningful to begin with? An influential paradigm from historical sociology holds that beliefs about national identity are the legacy of mass native-language literacy pursued by modernizing states in formation. New research from comparative politics has elaborated this paradigm, providing compelling evidence for the durability of national identities in individual cases, especially in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. This structuralist paradigm, however, by focusing on outlier cases where historical beliefs about national identity were exceptionally durable, has been shaped by a survivorship bias that diverted attention from cases where national identity failed to persist across generations. Considering the full range of national beliefs in Eurasia reveals that national identities can be persistent, but can also change quickly - over months, not generations. We require a theory of national identity formation that can accommodate both slow-moving and fast-moving beliefs. This project provides such a theory and applies it to explain variation in national beliefs in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was the first multinational state: it systematically inculcated national identity amongst its citizens by investing in native-language education and building indigenous cultural intelligentsias for over 100 peoples under a single, sovereign, socialist roof. My theory tells us how Soviet nation-building did in fact shape the way that everyday Soviet citizens thought about national identity. I distinguish between two distinct dimensions of nationality: the political implications of nationality for the state, and the meaningfulness of nationality to begin with. To explain the former dimension, I point to the writers, artists, and professors that let nationalist movements during the collapse of communism. Members of these national intelligentsia, like the poet Silva Kaputikyan in Armenia, the writer Zviad Gamsakhurdia in Georgia, and the musicologist Vytautas Landsbergis in Lithuania had long histories of advocating over communal grievances in the offices of writers unions and hallways of national academies. When Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalizing policies lifted the constraints of Soviet censorship, it was these communal grievances that became the seeds of popular movements that would eventually challenge Soviet multinationalism. Structure, however, still mattered. The legacy of mass native-language literacy continued to shape which categories of nationality were already meaningful to everyday Soviet citizens. In this way, mass native-language literacy would empower or constrain the ability of national intelligentsias to popularize their communal grievances. Intelligentsia seeking to popularize communal grievances made appeals based on imagined membership in the nation, and such claims only rang true when these nations were already clearly defined and easily understood – when it was unquestionable that they existed in the first place. In this way, the long-term influence of mass literacy and the proximate effect of intelligentsias - structure and agency - together explain the full diversity of ways that nationality was imagined in Eurasia in this period. To test this theory, I first introduce original archival data on voting in 1946, which I use to mea- sure anti-Soviet sentiment, and primary source data on the professions of candidates elected in 1989, during the first competitive multi-candidate elections in Soviet history, which I use to measure where members of the intelligentsia entered into public politics. Using these data, I show that Soviet provinces where former writers, artists, professors, and other cultural intelligentsia won national office experienced an 18% increase in the percentage of mass demonstrations making nationalist demands. I then perform an automated text analysis on a corpus of Soviet cultural newspapers to show that the grievances raised by intelligentsia in these publications in the decades prior to Gorbachev’s liberalization matched the specific demands expressed publicly by protesters during the mass mobilizations of 1987-91 around such orthodox nationalist themes like monument preservation, language policy, and the remembrance of Stalin-era repression. To trace the effect of intelligentsias in an individual case, I replicate work by Darden & Grzymala-Busse (2006) on the positive relationship between historical mass literacy and anti-Soviet sentiment, and select a deviant case - the case of Armenia - that over-performed what we would expect based on historical mass literacy alone. Using a diverse base of qualitative and quantitative primary sources, including in-person elite interviews with former leaders of and participants in the 1987-91 protest movements, archived interviews, archived correspondences, memoirs, and historical publications, I show how Armenian writers, artists, and academics with a long history of advocating over irredentist territorial claims deployed their credentials and mobilized their constituencies to popularize those claims and tie them to the existential issue of Armenian independence - something that the intelligentsia in neighboring Azerbaijan, who lacked such a history, failed to do. Finally, I provide new evidence for the way that historical mass native-language literacy structures the effect of these national intelligentsias. To do so, I present original archival data on the Bolshevik campaigns to “liquidate illiteracy” amongst the adult Soviet population in the 1920s; this represents some of the only systematic fine-grained quantitative evidence that we have on the actual implementation of mass literacy. I show that literacy achieved as part of Soviet “affirmative action” programs were actually associated with fewer protests over language issues in 1987-91 and a weaker effect of intelligentsias on nationalist mobilization. I use these findings to motivate a new, alternative mechanism by which historical mass literacy structured the effect of intelligentsias based on the supply of nationally based grievances, and probe the plausibility of this new mechanism using the case of Belarus. This project shows that strong beliefs about national identity can, and often do, exist alongside ambiguous, agnostic, or even antagonistic views towards national sovereignty. It challenges the conventional wisdom on the durability of national identities by showing that the half-life of national identities can be shorter than we think, and beliefs about national identity can turn on a dime. It corrects the survivorship bias in the literature by investigating the full range of ways that nationality was imagined and re-imagined in this region. This study introduces a new class of political actor - intelligentsias - that was once ubiquitous in classic social science theories of class, identity, and the state. It also demonstrates that the Soviet Union could and did build nations, and in doing so revises political science theories which assume that autocracies like the Soviet Union viewed national identity merely as a threat to or instrument of rule. Finally, this study establishes a new research agenda for scholars of state-building on the cultural face of state formation.