Smith develops a comprehensive overview of Soviet nationality policies, tracing them from their ideological foundations developed before and during the Revolution, through the revival and then destruction of national cultures in the 1920s and 1930s, the effect of Nazi violence and Stalinist deportation and annexation, and uncertain prospects for national specificity in the 1960s and 1970s, to increasing disillusion among non-Russian ethnicities with the internationalist project. The 1940s are discussed in a similarly detailed way the Great Patriotic War and the deportations of specific national groups are analyzed in separate chapters. Smith’s undertaking is ambitious: to give an account of Soviet nationality policies and their effect on the many peoples of the USSR from the union’s founding until its breakup requires a swift hand that captures central directives devised and propagated by the Soviet government, while not losing sight of the vagaries and complexities of these directives’ implementation in the different republics.įollowing the introduction, each of the twelve chapters covers roughly a decade the exceptions are Chapters 2, 3, and 4, which focus on the early Soviet period and the intense debates during the Revolution, civil war, and the 1920s. The book, however, is not, as it provides a useful reading to access the background of current and future events in former Soviet territories. With the recent (and ongoing) conflict in Ukraine, this statement seems outdated. As Jeremy Smith notes in Red Nations, “t the time of writing, the Russian-Georgian war of 2008 was the first and only occasion on which Russian armed forces had engaged in action against one of the other former Soviet states” (P. Until recently, the most dramatic instance of that legacy was associated with the intervention of Russian troops in the struggle over South Ossetia’s separation from Georgia. The legacy of Soviet nationality policies and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 persists to the present.

Red Nations by Jeremy Smith