Martin, Terry - The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939
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The Soviet Union was the first of Europe's multiethnic states to confront the rising tide of nationalism by systematically promoting the national consciousness of its ethnic minorities and establishing for them many of the institutional forms characteristic of the modern nation-state. In the 1920s, the Bolshevik government, seeking to defuse nationalist sentiment, created tens of thousands of national territories. It trained new national leaders, established national languages, and financed the production of national-language cultural products. Read more...
| Terry Martin George F. Baker III Professor of Russian Studies Terry Martin is the author of The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the USSR, 1923–1939 (Cornell UP, 2001) and co-editor (with Ronald Suny) of A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford UP, 2001). In addition to questions of nationality and empire, he has written on religion, political and adminstrative history, Soviet neo-traditionalism, and the political police, as well as the Nazi-Soviet comparison. He is currently completing a book on the politics and sociology of state information-gathering in the USSR from the revolution through the death of Stalin. |