Korenizazija

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Soviet-Ukrainian propaganda poster 1921 with Ukrainian inscription: “Son! Enter the school of the Red Commanders and the defense of Soviet Ukraine will be assured. ”The flower tendrils and the Cossack outfit of the father ( Vyshyvanka shirt, shaved bald head with a chub , long mustache, often called“ Cossack / Ukrainian horseshoe ”in the Soviet Union ) were highlighted as specifically Ukrainian at precisely this time.

Korenisazija ( Russian коренизация , transliteration: Korenizacija , literally translated "rooting") describes the politics of the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Union in the 1920s after the October Revolution . Its aim was to integrate non-Russian peoples into the new state by explicitly promoting minorities in order to integrate them into the CPSU cadre and thus into the Soviet Union. Russians were encouraged, and in some cases also obliged, to learn the language in question in areas where they were a minority. In Ukraine in particular , the Korenizazija policy led to a real (re-) Ukrainization . From 1931 at the latest, however, the Soviet government abandoned this policy and instead partially pushed back Russification .

prehistory

The founders of Marxism still saw national movements as a bourgeois diversionary maneuver from the real social issues, but even before the First World War Lenin had ideologically equated oppressed national minorities with workers. During the phase of the revolution and the Russian civil war , the Bolsheviks were confronted with many national autonomy and independence movements that showed a contradiction to the old perspective. In 1917 they also tried to win national movements on their side in the civil war against the whites that broke out in autumn 1917. They only succeeded in doing this with a minority, mostly the socialist wings of the movements. To this end, they published the “Decree on the Rights of the Peoples of Russia” in November 1917, which was followed in December by several appeals to national minorities and peoples in Russia and neighboring countries in the south. After their victory in the very cruel civil war, the Bolsheviks intended to keep their promises. Over the administrative answer to the national question, there was a conflict between Lenin and Stalin (officially People's Commissar for nationality issues until 1923 ) in the last months of Lenin's life , when Lenin participated in a dispute between Stalin and the Georgian Bolsheviks Pilipe Macharadze and Budu Mdiwani , who ruled in Georgia relatively liberally, which eventually led to Lenin's well-known political testament against Stalin . While Lenin strived for a "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of Europe and Asia" with the right to withdraw because he believed that socially developed peoples had no conflicts, Stalin, who distrusted national movements and nationalisms, only wanted a Russian Federal Republic with at most autonomous republics without the right to withdraw. The result of the power struggle was the establishment of the USSR on December 30, 1923 and a complicated mixed system of constitutive Union Republics (SSR) with formal exit rights, autonomous republics (ASSR) subordinate to them without exit rights, Autonomous Oblasts or Autonomous Areas (AO), which form the provinces subordinate to and as the smallest form of autonomy national circles (NO, German also NK).

Basic elements

In addition to the aforementioned formation of SSRs, ASSRs, AOs and NKs, the Korenisazija also included the attempt to establish a proportion of the workforce, among CP members, in the state administration and in the education system through quota regulations , the creation of new national languages ​​in Latin script (whereby in addition to newly created written languages, existing written languages ​​in Arabic, Mongolian and Hebrew script were replaced by Latin script), the definition of national cultures and national histories and finally the introduction of compulsory education and the rapid literacy of the entire population, where possible everyone should be taught in their mother tongue (“Socialism in 100 Languages”). In Baku, linguists established suitable dialects within the various languages ​​of the Soviet Union as the basis of the written languages, established Latin characters for the vowels and consonants, and wrote dictionaries, grammars, school books and sample texts. The authority in Baku, in which mainly linguists worked for this purpose, was called 1927-30 "Central Committee (ZK) for the new Turkish alphabet". When it no longer dealt only with the development of written Turkic languages, but with written languages ​​for all national minorities, it was renamed in 1930 to "All Union Central Committee for the New Alphabet at the Central Executive Committee (ZEK) of the USSR". (The ZEK was the parliament-like institution of the Soviet constitution 1924-38, which had been called the Supreme Soviet of the USSR since the 2nd constitution in 1938. ) In 1930, compulsory schooling was introduced not only for children in primary schools, but also for adults in evening schools. The aim was to literate the entire population by 1940, which officially succeeded by 1958, in fact not until the 1960s, with which these new written languages ​​were now also taught across the board. The subsequent formation of a middle school, vocational school, high school and university system in the various languages ​​was more complicated. These measures were followed by the writing and, in some cases, the construction of national histories and national cultures, which were positively assessed as a further part of “nation building” and thus also taught in schools. Ironically, the Bolsheviks, who themselves placed little value on national affiliation, with this policy not only accommodated national identities in language boundaries (which they typically did not question), they consciously promoted and consolidated them, which is also expressed by the term "Korenisazija". In some regions of Central Asia and Dagestan, in which one previously thought within the boundaries of the tribe, the region of origin or the religious community, identities were actually only invented. The policy was ideologically justified in such a way that the “stage” of national identification was a “necessary transition stage” on the way to a “ classless society ”.

Limitation under Stalin

The phase of Korenizazija, which was carried out in a similar form throughout the Soviet Union, was increasingly accompanied by repression by Stalin against imagined or actual nationalist deviants in the Communist Party, which gradually spread through the forced collectivization of agriculture with subsequent violent deculacization to the Great Terror - Purges increased in the late 1930s. In this phase of Stalin's rule, suspicion of dissenting opinions could be the death sentence. The national minority areas were particularly badly affected by the purges because of the distrust of nationalists. The "starting shot" of the great purge among the Communist Party functionaries in the minority areas was given by the then Georgian and Transcaucasian Communist Party Chairman Lavrenti Beria on July 9, 1936 Armenian Communist Party leader Aghassi Chandschian was probably shot personally in his office in Tbilisi. Parallel to these events, the Korenizazija 1932-38 was gradually ended. An influx of Russian skilled workers and functionaries into the minority areas was encouraged again, the quotas for minorities lifted and the importance of Russian in school education significantly increased. The result was that at the end of the Soviet Union, apart from a few remaining areas (southern Chechnya, eastern Tajikistan), practically the entire population was also fluent in Russian. The replacement of Latin alphabets for minority languages ​​by new Cyrillic alphabets in 1937/38 was particularly striking. In addition, there was propagation of “friendship among peoples” and, since the Second World War, also of the “Soviet people”. Earlier resistance to Russian expansion was no longer rated as an “anti-colonial struggle for freedom”, but as “anachronistic resistance to progress”. Even so, not all elements of the Korenizazija policy have been eliminated. A right to maintain the national languages, national literature and national cultures was retained. Schooling in the minority languages ​​was also retained, although in the case of less important languages ​​it was sometimes reduced to primary school. These remnants without the possibility of political deviation were summarized under the slogan “cultural autonomy”, to characterize the joke in the Soviet Union: “Cultural autonomy is the right to express the will of the Kremlin in one's own language.” But also with this The rest of the USSR had a more developed minority policy than most of the neighboring states.

literature

  • Gerhard Simon : Nationalism and Nationality Policy in the Soviet Union. From dictatorship to post-Stalinist society. Nomos, Baden-Baden 1986, ISBN 3-7890-1249-1 .
  • W. Koschemjakina and others: Slowar sociolingwistitscheskich terminow . Institut jasykosnanija RAN, Moscow 2006, pp. 97-98. (Russian)

Remarks

  1. Ukrainian: козацька / українська підкова , Russian: казацкая / украинская подкова
  2. Gerhard Simon: Nationalism and Nationality Policy in the Soviet Union. From dictatorship to post-Stalinist society. Baden-Baden 1986, pp. 34-82. It should be noted that the antagonism between Lenin and Stalin did not exist in the whole of ideology and politics. The frequently cited dispute over leadership styles resulted from a dispute over national policy, about which both had different ideas. Lenin once characterized Stalin, although he was Georgian, as the "Great Russian Derschimorda" (= "shut up").
  3. Gerhard Simon: Nationalism and Nationality Policy in the Soviet Union. 1986, pp. 41-64.
  4. Gerhard Simon: Nationalism and Nationality Policy in the Soviet Union. 1986, pp. 180-195.
  5. The official announcement of Chandschian's death was suicide, but testimony according to which Chandschian visited Beria in his office that day suggests to most historians, including Simon, that he was shot dead by Beria in his office.
  6. Gerhard Simon: Nationalism and Nationality Policy in the Soviet Union. 1986, pp. 153-194.