Constructing Soviet Nations: Industrialization and Ethnicity in Kazakhstan and Belarus, 1940—1990

Abstract

Constructing Soviet Nations examines ethnicity in the Soviet Union through the lens of industry. It argues that industrialization was key for both uniting and differentiating the various ethnic groups inhabiting Soviet Eurasia across geographical, cultural, and linguistic boundaries within a single body politic. The dissertation follows the history of two industrial enterprises, the Minsk Tractor Works in Belarus and the Karaganda Iron and Steel Works in Temirtau, Kazakhstan. Both factories ranked among the most important of their respective republics in output, workforce size, and political and cultural significance. Located on opposite ends of Soviet Eurasia, together they reflect both larger patterns and local variations of Soviet industrialization. The dissertation moves beyond the focus on Russia in histories of the Soviet economy and working class, and on explicit nationality policies in Soviet nationality studies. By covering long-term social change and identity formation from the late 1930s through the 1980s, it expands the existing concentration on the interwar period and crosses established boundaries such as World War II and Stalin’s death in 1953. The dissertation makes five main claims. First, the task of industrial lobbying turned authorities in Union republics from puppet regimes masking continued Russian rule after 1917 into stakeholders of ethnonational interests. Second, factory work and labor migration integrated non-Russian communities and territories but also perpetuated national hierarchies. On the shop floor, the inclusion of non-Russians was desired but preconditioned on their acculturation to Russian workplace culture, which explains their simultaneous promotion and denigration. Third, different levels of anxiety about Belarusian and Kazakh workers reveal the significance of racialization in late Soviet society. Far from deviating from official doctrine, racialized thought was perpetuated by state-sanctioned discourses and practices. Fourth, public discourse on industry propagated narratives about national achievements and industrial cooperation between national republics, teaching Soviet citizens to distinguish between “us” and “them” based on nationality within the Soviet Union. Fifth, the industrial sector produced new, technocratic national elites whose ideas of economic autonomy, shaped by decades of experience in Soviet industry, fueled centrifugal aspirations during the country’s Perestroika crisis.