The turn of the soviet national policy in the middle — second half of the 1930s

Abstract

The article deals with study of the dynamics of Soviet national policy in the middle — second half of the 1930s. During this period a gradual curtailment of the policy of the so-called indigenization, held in the 1920s, was on. This was partly due to the temporary and opportunistic nature of this policy, since it did not meet the general strategy of the national policy of the Soviet government. During the 1930s transition towards centralization, integrating course of domestic policy was happening. It manifested itself, besides abandonment of indigenization policy, in the construction of a new national identity and the actual recognition of the role of the Russian ethnos and the Russian language as the main factors of internal cohesion. At the same time, it is hardly proper to agree with the statements about revival of the Russian nationalism in the USSR in the middle — second half of the 1930s.

Distribution of the peoples, which dwelt in the Soviet Union, into privileged ones, which had their own territorial and administrative units in the form of union or autonomous republics, and the actual pariahs, deprived not only of territorial autonomy, but also of any opportunities for conducting cultural and linguistic activities, has become one of the prerequisites for a crisis national relations in the last years of existence of the Soviet Union.