Nationalizing States, Negotiated Sovereignties and Soviet Modernity: Soviet History Beyond the Empire Paradigm

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Method III: Neoliberal/Cultural Turn in Histories of Socialism

Abstract

Since the 1990s, English-language historiography on nations and the "national question" in the Soviet Union has expanded widely. This thematically diverse body of literature shows how the Soviet Union was a builder of nations and not - as most Cold War histories implicitly or explicitly argued - a homogenizing anti-national polity. Despite this shift, and longstanding debate on the topic, the paradigm of the USSR as imperial, an empire or an empire with unique characteristics persists in the historiography. Why does this framework continue? What features of Soviet nationhood does it obscure? And how did it get reimagined within the turn to studies on the Soviet "national question" in the context of US-led globalization, the collapse of communism and rise of neoliberalism? What would it take to move beyond the "empire paradigm"? And why is this important? By conceptualizing Soviet nations as various types of "nationalizing states" within a developmentalist Soviet modernity, integrated socialist economy and negotiated sovereignty, new ways to approach the study of soviet nationhood, the USSR as a whole and the post-Soviet crisis of national sovereignty emerge.

Author

• Bryan John Gigantino, Georgian American U