Stalin's nations: Soviet nationality policy between planning and primordialism, 1936--1953

The dissertation examines how the Stalinist party-state employed the category of ethnic identity in its educational, cultural, and personnel policies. At the heart of Soviet "nationality policy" was a fundamental contradiction. On the one hand, the regime sought to mold standardized, culturally-interchangeable Soviet people. This process pointed toward a single Soviet "state-nation." On the other hand, the regime institutionalized ethnic identity, claimed to be building culturally distinct "socialist nations," and implemented policies that entrenched non-Russian ethnic identities. Both of these approaches---statist uniformity and ethnic diversity---could be found in Stalin's writings and comments, which were the theoretical basis of nationality policy.; The Stalin regime implemented contradictory policies on ethnic identity because it was committed to rapid modernization and was faced with a problem of "dual backwardness." The challenge of overcoming the backwardness of the Soviet Union relative to the industrialized West pushed it toward a statist form of nationhood. This ultimately meant a reliance on Russian language and culture to bind the varied peoples of the USSR together. Yet the regime was also faced with overcoming the backwardness of the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union relative to that of the Russians. This modernizing goal pushed the regime toward ethnic nation-building policies for many non-Russian peoples.; As practical guidelines for the officials of the party-state who formulated and implemented policy, the two forms of nationhood pointed in contradictory directions. The result was political conflict among central and local officials and Russian and non-Russian intellectuals. The dissertation details the origins, logic, and consequences of such conflict in three areas: (1) ideology, seen through the lens of debates on the histories of the non-Russian peoples; (2) language policy in the non-Russian school; and (3) the training and appointment of non-Russian personnel for administering the party-state.