E. H. Carr and the Soviet Nationalities

E. H. Carr and the Soviet Nationalities Timothy K. Blauvelt (bio) and Jeremy Smith (bio) Western scholarship on the Soviet Union from the Cold War era is often criticized as Moscow-centered and oblivious to the diverse nationalities and the policies of the state and party toward the Soviet periphery, topics seemingly viewed then as niche fixations for parochial area specialists or nationalistic émigrés1 Given the central role that the nationalities and nationalism seemed to play in the way that the USSR dissolved, this ambivalence would later appear as a particular failing of the field, one that has recently received renewed attention amid calls to "decenter" and "decolonize" Russian and Eurasian studies. While the critique is generally valid, the works of the historian E. H. Carr represent a major exception: although he never published a specific treatise on the "national question" in the USSR, attention to the periphery and to the challenges that the early Soviet regime faced in simultaneously maintaining unity and accommodating diversity permeate Carr's 14-volume History of Soviet Russia and are directly addressed in several of his other works.2 Despite a diminution of Carr's standing as a public intellectual since his death in 1982, Carr arguably continues to enjoy particular (if sometimes [End Page 359] begrudging) respect as a pioneer in the field of Soviet history.3 He was among the first to bring empirical historical methods to the period of the Russian Revolution and the early Soviet Union, despite limited access to archival materials and the polarized atmosphere of the early Cold War. Carr often challenged the prevailing consensuses about the USSR from the "totalitarian" school and is today viewed by some as a progenitor of the "revisionism" that has since evolved largely into the consensus approach.4 In the words of Ronald Grigor Suny: E. H. Carr is that giant of Soviet historiography on whose shoulders we who followed stood to get a grand, synthetic view of the founding years of the USSR. He was a pioneer of a social and economic historical approach to the early Soviet experience, and while his good friend Isaac Deutscher may have been right that Carr was "inclined to view the State as the maker of society rather than society the maker of the State," his particular angle of vision in fact gave us panoramic portraits of revolutions from above and below.5 Carr was also one of the first Western scholars to draw attention to the nation building and positive discrimination aspects of early Soviet nationality policy, the provision of concession and opportunity, and the ways in which the nationalities might use their own agency to take advantage of such possibilities and could at times voluntarily assimilate to the Soviet project. He was also among the first to emphasize the overlap between the domestic approach to the nationalities and Soviet foreign policy toward the colonized and decolonizing "East." Such insights would come to serve as a touchstone for a later generation of scholars of the nationalities of the 1990s and 2000s such as Ronald Suny, Terry Martin, and Francine Hirsch, who in turn set the stage for the tremendously rich flowering of scholarship in recent years in this field that utilizes a vast range of newly available primary source materials from the former Soviet republics and in local languages.6 What is more, Carr's focus on the interrelationship between [End Page 360] economic development and nationality policy suggests avenues for future research that seem often overlooked in the recent scholarship on the Soviet periphery. Nationalities and the Challenges of the Interwar World Order Carr's concern with nationalism and self-determination derived directly from his experience as a British diplomat during the establishment of the post–World War I settlement and the creation of the new states in Eastern and Central Europe.7 Over the succeeding two decades, the principle of self-determination, through the establishment of new states that often contained large minorities within them, seemed to many to have fallen wide of the mark of creating a peaceful order in Europe, instead appearing to engender ethnonationalism and repressions of minority rights.8 From the late 1930s, as he transitioned...