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Towards a New Soviet Party Program on the Nationalities?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Julian Birch
Julian Birch*
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield (England)
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Extract

It has often been declared that the CPSU cannot cope with the problems of its national minorities because it cannot understand, or rather is not willing to understand, the very nature of the beast. There is much to be said for this proposition, mirrored as it is in the agricultural sphere where Professor Peter Wiles has long insisted that to put a Marxist in a field is to pave the way for famine in no time. The Party in power, from Lenin onwards, has constantly sought to analyze the complex ethnic structure of Russia and the USSR with a view to “solving” it as a problem once and for all. Quite apart from the question of whether there is in fact “a” solution (or even solutions) to such a complex melange of problems, much of what has resulted has been more concerned with the idealistic world as it could be, or should be, rather than with an acceptance of the world as it is.

The solutions adopted have variously involved planned economic development and redistribution to achieve a greater measure of equality and levels of development; temporary federation during the process of adjustment; uniform education and socialization programs; population mixing across boundaries; de facto Russification; and a measure of stick to go with the carrots, as and where necessary.

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 17 , Issue 2: With a Special Focus on the Baltics , Fall 1989 , pp. 98 - 115
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by the Association for the Study of the Nationalities of the USSR and Eastern Europe, Inc. 

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References

Notes

1. Pravda, 5 July 1988.Google Scholar

2. Tass, (Moscow), 13 March 1989.Google Scholar

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7. Financial Times and International Herald Tribune, 29 August 1989.Google Scholar

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10. At a meeting of the first secretaries from all the republics, regions and territories—Pravda, 19 July 1989. See also A. Sheehy: Gorbachev announces postponement of Plenum on nationalities, Radio Liberty Research Report RL 335/89, 20 July 1989, in Report on the USSR, vol. 1, no. 30, 28 July 1989, p. 19-20; and Financial Times, 20 July 1989.Google Scholar

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13. Pravda, 17 August 1989.Google Scholar

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