Name: The Affirmative Action Empire
ISBN: 9780801486777

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drysineJun 2025

You are mistaken. I don't blame you - it's a common narrative of Russophobic propaganda.

I'd suggest reading "The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939" by Terry Martin [0]

"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."

[0] https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.7591/97815017...

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mamonsterApr 2024

Sorry, did not see you responded, responding late.

>Gorbachev's devolution worked about 15 times better than Mountbatten's.

Oh, I'm not arguing about that. I was making more of an objective case, sorry if it wasn't clear, I think the British decolonialization was handled horribly. But Gorbachev already had the benefit of hindsight and he was kind of the initiator of a whole lot of it, whereas Mounbatten was basically handed a hot potato by Atlee(and here Churchill escapes criticism even though some of his behavior throughout his carrier made the Labor rapid decolonization inevitable).

>US and USSR would have converged on something closer to a western european social democratic model There is a very interesting book kind of related to this, The Affirmative Action Empire by Terry Martin. A lot of parallels between the US and USSR in terms of what actually happened.

>current Tsar might lack for Cossacks without Chechens? The unfortunate reality of the Ukraine War seems to be(according to Russians I keep in contact with) that the Varangian Guard/Swiss Mercenary thesis for Chechens, which was sold and shilled by pro-Putin mouthpieces for the last 20 years as part of the reconciliation, is completely destroyed for the ordinary russian. Akhmat and all other "commandos" are viewed as tiktokers by the majority of russians, it seems. There will be a lot of ethnic tension due to that, I think.

>I'd say that the USSR owed its existence to the German Empire and the British Empire The classic Russian historiographical view(i.e most Russian historians) is that some sort of civil war was basically inevitable in some capacity after the loss in the Russo-Japanese War(and the absolutely horrible way it was conducted), but it could've maybe ended up in a highly depowered monarchic system without WW1, instead of outright communism.

>Did Yeltsin really get handed a bad situation, or did he grab one? Yeltsin did grab it with both his hands, the comment was more about how pathetic Gorbachev's behavior was during that time. As soon as he left office he basically set up shop doing historical revisionism with the Gorbachev foundation about how "actually here is why perestroika was awesome" whilst everything went to shit around him(on the basis largely of his own policies and his dilapidation of the Soviet state).

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rsj_hnNov 2022

Identity politics are antithetical to marxist theory but not necessarily to the marxist movements as they actually existed.

Here, things get more complicated because there were marxist movements all over the world, from Africa to Asia to Russia, and each had different motivations and often different goals.

In Russia, marxism was always about identity first and foremost, primarily the identity of various outcast/conquered groups: poles, jews, germans, lithuanians, etc. that were in the conquered regions in the Western part of the Empire - primarily the regions that used to be held by Poland. The abstruse economic theories served as a type of schelling point for a coalition of minorites against the Russian Orthodox majority, and after the revolution there was a systematic effort to suppress Russian identity and replace it with a new "Soviet" identity -- e.g. if you look at the list of Soviet general secretaries, only one of them was Russian (although there is some debate as several of the secretaties had mysterious, and in some cases, clearly invented pasts). There were explicit anti-Russian policies put in place, for example there were communist parties in all the provinces except the Russian province, which had no communist party, and thus no road for advancement except to join the overall Soviet Communist Party, but that preferenced non-Russians for membership.

Similarly when the Soviets drew the borders of various provinces, they explicitly made the minority provinces much larger, dragging in traditional Russian lands, even as they created local minority communist parties that barred Russians from participation, effectively meaning that 1/3 of Russians were living in an explicitly non-Russian province, even though often times they were the majority population in that province.

A good book that covers this topic in depth is Terry Martin's "Affirmative Action Empire" - https://www.amazon.com/Affirmative-Action-Empire-Nationalism...

At the same time, Marxism in other areas had a decidedly nationalist tone - for example in Africa, Indonesia, Vietnam or other nations fighting colonialism. Here, too, it was identity and nationalism that was the motivating factor and not the economic theories.

Really class-based movements are generally limited to the "West" -- e.g. Western Europe and North America. I'm not saying that class isn't important elsewhere, but when you look at what animates radical movements throughout the world, it's almost always race/religion/language that plays the dominant role, and this is as true for marxist movements as for other types of movements.

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pattuskJul 2020

A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself

I keep thinking a lot of today's identity politics are the direct result of colonialism and its racial hierarchies. A lot of post-Apartheid South Africa's affirmative policies transferred some of the priviledges of the former whites to the groups that Apartheid had marginalized, but the legitimacy of identities developed by a colonial system were never really questioned. (Saying this as a coloured man, who still can't see how such a category could ever be considered meaningful).

You could even say that affirmative action evolved as a kind of colonial science of imperial management. Following brutal colonial repression and subsequent rebellion in the late 19th century European empires adopted a softer type of rule that - on the surface - provided more advantage or more recognition to colonized people. Japan itself learned the technique from Europe and implemented a similar ruling style for its Empire until WWII, giving more visibility to Manchu, Koreans... and representing itself as a multicultural Empire. A historian called the USSR the "Affirmative Action Empire"[0] because this was their preferred way to maintain control over minorities while giving them the sense that they could "make it" in the Soviet Union.

I think affirmative action dates back to the 60's in the US, which follows its rise as a global empire with the Japanese occupation, Korean War, Vietnam War and influence over South America...

[0]https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Affirmative_Action_...

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