Everything about Korenizatsiya totally explained
Korenizatsiya sometimes also called
korenization, meaning "nativization" or "indigenization", literally "putting down roots", was the early
Soviet nationalities policy promoted mostly in the
1920s but with a continuing legacy in later years. The primary policy consisted of promoting representatives of
titular nations of
Soviet republics and national minorities on lower levels of the administrative subdivision of the state, into local government, management,
bureaucracy and
nomenklatura in the corresponding national entities. The term derives from the Russian term "коренное население" (korennoye naseleniye, "root population") for indigenous nationals.
Among the stated goals the policy was addressing were the relative economic and cultural backwardness of certain regions of the former
Russian Empire, harmonizing the relationship between the Soviet regime and the population by carrying the national and ethnic policies that would appeal to the wide masses of the local people in the ethnically non-Russian areas. Korenization implied the introduction of the local languages into all spheres of public life and usage of the local languages to the widest possible extent, particularly, in education, publishing, culture, and, most importantly, government and the
Communist Party. Not only was the local cadre of the titular nations to be promoted at all levels but the ethnic Russians who served in the local governments were encouraged (or required) to learn the local culture; and local languages were to be used in official affairs.
Implementation
The nationalities policy was formulated by the
Bolshevik party in 1913, 4 years before they came to power in Russia.
Vladimir Lenin sent a young
Joseph Stalin (himself an ethnic minority member) to
Vienna, at the time a very ethnically diverse city. Stalin reported back to
Moscow with the idea for the policy.. Ironically he later would be the major proponent of its eventual dismemberment and the reemergence of Russification.
Beginning under Lenin, a policy of korenizatziya was created to appeal to the many non-
Russian residents of the former
tsarist empire and to internationalize the
communist movement. It involved encouraging citizens to become literate and educated in the language of their own nationality or ethnic group; translating government documents; and promoting ethnic elites to positions of power within the regional
soviets, including for a time the creation of a special group of soviets called "natssoviety" (nationality councils) in their own "natsraiony" (nationality regions) based on concentrations of minorities within what were minority republics. For example, in
Ukraine in the late 1920s there were even natssoviety for Russians and
Estonians.
At the same time korenization was applied to other areas of the society, such as education, medicine, culture.
This policy was meant to partially reverse decades of
Russification, or promotion of Russian identity over indigenous culture, that took place during the imperial period. It arguably helped the government exert its influence on the many ethnic minorities throughout the country. In 1923, Stalin identified two threats to the success of the party's "nationalities policy": Great Power Chauvinism (Russian chauvinism) and local nationalism. However, he described the former as the greater danger:
[The] Great-Russian chauvinist spirit, which is becoming stronger and stronger owing to the N.E.P., . . . [finds] expression in an arrogantly disdainful and heartlessly bureaucratic attitude on the part of Russian Soviet officials towards the needs and requirements of the national republics. The multi-national Soviet state can become really durable, and the co-operation of the peoples within it really fraternal, only if these survivals are vigorously and irrevocably eradicated from the practice of our state institutions. Hence, the first immediate task of our Party is vigorously to combat the survivals of Great-Russian chauvinism.
Furthermore, he said that Russians themselves would have to be the main group that kept Great Power Chauvinism in check, for the sake of the larger goal of building socialism.
The initial period of korenizatsiya went together with the development of national-territorial administrative units and national cultures. The latter was reflected above all in the areas of language construction and education. For several of the small nationalities in Russia that had no literary language, a "Committee of the North" helped to create alphabets so that the national languages could be taught in schools and literacy could be brought to the people in their native languages -- and the minorities would thereby be brought from backwardness to the modern world. And in the very large Ukrainian Republic, the program of
Ukrainianization led to a profound shift of the language of instruction in schools to Ukrainian. Only in 1938 did Russian become a mandatory subject of study in all non-Russian schools. Arguably this had to do with the impending war and the need to familiarize the non-Russian populations with the language of command in the Red Army. Similarly, only in 1939 did the Bolsheviks impose the
Cyrillic script on most of the non-Russian languages, including the languages of
Central Asia that in the late 1920s had been given Latin alphabets to replace Arabic ones.
Thus, whereas by the mid-1930s, with purges in some of the national areas, the policy of korenizatsiya took a new turn, by the end of the 1930s the policy of promoting local languages began to be balanced by greater Russianization, though perhaps not overt Russification or attempts to assimilate the minorities. Moreover, the country's leader seemed set on greatly reducing the number of officially recognized nationalities by contracting the official list of nationalites in the 1939 census, compared with the 1926 census. The development of so-called "national schools" in which the languages of minority nationalities were the main media of instruction continued, spreading literacy and universal education in many national minority languages, while teaching Russian as a required subject of study. The term korenizatsiya went out of use in the latter half of the 1930s, replaced by more bureaucratic expressions, such as "selection and placement of national cadres" (подбор и расстановка национальных кадров).
Notes and citations
General references
- Anderson, Barbara A., and Brian D. Silver. 1984. "Equality, Efficiency, and Politics in Soviet Bilingual Education Policy: 1934-1980," American Political Science Review 78 (December): 1019-1039.
- 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.
- Slezkine, Yuri. 1994. "The USSR as a Communal Apartment, Or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism," Slavic Review 53, No. 2 (Summer): 414-452.
- 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).
- Wixman, Ronald. 1980. Language Aspects of Ethnic Patterns and Processes in the North Caucasus. University of Chicago Geography Research Series, No. 191.
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