Korenizatsiia:Restructuring Soviet nationality policy in the 1920s

Abstract In April 1923 the Russian Communist Party formalized the policy of korenizatsiia (indigenization or nativization) in order to defuse the hostility it provoked among the large non‐Russian Soviet population during the Civil War. By promoting non‐Russians into leading positions in the party, the government, and the trade unions and by subsidizing the development of distinct national cultures in the USSR, the party sought to legitimate a predominantly Russian and urban‐based revolution in an overwhelmingly agricultural, multiethnic state. Shortly after introducing korenizatsiia, the party initiated a full‐scale industrialization programme. In the long run, the leaders of the Communist Party expected that industrialization would successfully integrate the diverse peoples of the Soviet Union into the socialist order. In practice, however, the social changes jumpstarted by rapid economic development strengthened ethnic assertiveness, even among party members. By the late 1920s the emergence of national communisms in the non‐Russian republics and regions threatened to delegitimate Soviet Russian control of the non‐Russian areas and to thwart the All‐Union industrialization effort. Stalin, not surprisingly, then emphasized order over legitimacy and redefined his claim to legitimacy by giving precedence to the Russians in the USSR.