affirmative action empire nations and nationalism in the soviet union 1923

Very good. No dust jacket issued xvii, [3], 496, [12] pages. Footnote Abbreviations. A Note on Style. Footnotes. Maps. Tables. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. This is a volume in The Wilder House Series in Politics, History, and Culture. Terry Martin was an Associate Professor of History at Harvard University. "The real virtue of Martin's book-and all of the best new Soviet scholarship-is not in the theoretical model it propounds, but in the power of its details, gleaned from previously unknown documents....Martin is able, for the first time, to explain what it was that the Soviet Union's leaders actually intended their nationality policy to achieve....Reading Martin's work,...one is struck, above all, by how much stranger the Soviet Union is beginning to seem, in retrospect, than we thought it was at the time, and how much more perverse....Reading this history also gives us in the West an insight, however narrow, into the turmoil experienced in the non-Russian lands of the former Soviet Union during the last decade. Ukraine, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Georgia: these are now 'free' and independent states. Yet how real is this freedom? Might it not be another illusion, foisted upon them by a still powerful, and still much wealthier, Russian republic."-The New York Review of Books, February 12, 2004. 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. This was a massive and fascinating historical experiment in governing a multiethnic state. Terry Martin provides a comprehensive survey

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