As one takes a glimpse of the Soviet collapse, one wants to become a proponent of primordialist theories. Indeed, a conscious effort to forge various peoples of the former Russian Empire into a cohesive political entity started eighty years ago and lasted for seventy years. The level of control and centralization exercised by the authorities was unprecedented. Their power to manipulate public opinion and, in fact, population itself remained virtually unchallenged through much of this period. Schools, the army, television and many other institutes of socialization were well controlled by the party-state. And yet, despite such seemingly ideal conditions for social construction and the long duration of the effort, the Soviet Union fell apart along ethnic lines at the moment of political crisis.

Explanations of this momentous event that focus on the role of ethnic institutions, such as advanced by Rogers Brubaker and Valerie Bunce, have now become quite popular. Indeed, if one does not want to be a primordialist (and most scholars do not), this explanation offers a convenient escape. The gist of the argument is that because the USSR was divided into ethnically defined territories, its constitution nurtured numerous national identities that became salient at the moment of political crisis. Moreover, the Soviet ethnic federalism enabled ethnic elites to mobilize their populations for the nationalist cause. This kind of explanation, however, does not take into account the fact that the territories that seceded from the Soviet Union in 1991 are quite congruent with those that seceded from the Russian Empire after the 1917 revolution. Yet the Russian Empire, as a rule, did not provide for ethnic institutions.¹ In fact, the ethno-territorial units of the USSR emerged in part as a response to the separatist tendencies that had been there in the first place.

The purpose of this paper is not only to elucidate the interaction of traditional and officially imposed identities of the Soviet peoples, but also to draw implications for the current Russian Federation, especially having in mind the Muslim peoples who, in the post-Soviet context, have shown a higher degree of nationalist mobilization than did other peoples of Russia. Traditional religious and ethnic divides as opposed to officially imposed newer identities will be the main focus of this paper. For the purposes of comparison, I will briefly examine the case of the Kurdish people who did not identify with the Turks in the critical transformation of the early twentieth century and the case of Ukrainians of about the same time and of the late twentieth century.

Before the twentieth century Kurds have been rural and tribal people. Their primary identifications were tribal and religious. The Sufi religious societies, which sometimes transcended the tribal boundaries, were quite important for one's personal identification. Most Kurds who live in Turkey belong to the Shafi'i school of Sunni Islam, whereas Turks adopted the official Hanafi school of Sunni jurisprudence. (That is, in fact, what made a Turk in the Ottoman period.) The frontier position of Kurds on the border with the ever-inimical Shiite Persian Empire made them too important to bother about their religious purity. This is also why the Ottoman government has traditionally tolerated a great degree of autonomy of the Kurdish lords. Consequently, the whole area used to be divided into a number of semi-independent fiefdoms, which were put down only by the mid-nineteenth century. Turkish Kurds, however, are diverse, both religiously and linguistically. The area to the north of the city of Diyar Bakir, called traditionally Dersim or (more recently) Tunceli, is populated by Kurds who practice a fringe branch of Shiite Islam, known as the Alevi or Kizilbash faith; it is a mixture of Zoroastrian, Turkic Shaman, and Shiite beliefs.

In the later nineteenth century, Sultan Abdul Hamid II, alarmed by the Russian threat, commissioned a likeness of the Russian Cossack troops in the area bordering the Russian Transcaucasia. The troops, known as Hamidiya, were drafted from the Sunni Kurdish tribes who, in a religiously defined empire, seemed more reliable than heretics. (Russian agents must have thought along the same lines when they agitated the Alevi tribes of Dersim during the Russian-Turkish wars of 1854 and 1877.) Soon enough, it turned out that the Ottoman government was not able to pay the Hamidiya. In lieu of salaries, the government granted them tax privileges on Armenian villages of the area and turned a blind eye on the excesses that followed. But the Hamidiya excesses were not confined to Armenian villages only. They also attacked an Alevi Kurdish tribe of Khurmak and confiscated their lands. Again, the government did not react. Thus, the heretic Alevi Kurds found themselves in the same shoes as the infidel Armenians, both victims of the Sunni Kurdish thuggish paramilitary forces. No wonder that the Armenian Hunchak revolutionaries considered those heretic Kurds their potential allies.

Some time later, the attempts of Young Turks at centralization and imposition of law and order indicated inter alia that the government might force the former Hamidiya to return the illegally confiscated land and even tax their Armenian booties. Such attempts to deprive Kurds of the remnants of their autonomy alienated their chieftains and precipitated a sudden rapprochement of Sunni Kurds with Armenians, united this time in their dislike of the Turkish government. Some prominent Kurdish leaders even called for a Russian protectorate over the area populated by Kurds and Armenians. The Young Turk government in response returned to the practice of Hamidiya, this time under the impersonalized name of "light tribal cavalry," which drove a new wedge between the (Sunni) Kurds and Armenians and restored the status quo ante. Some Kurdish chieftains promptly became members of local committees for union and progress (the Turkish nationalist organization).

In the wake of the World War I, the Christian (Greek and Italian) invasions of Anatolia in May 1919 enabled Mustafa Kemal to capitalize on a pan-Islamic identity among Sunni Kurds and mobilize their chiefs for the Islamic cause.² At the same time, the Alevi tribes in Dersim started a series of rebellions against Kemal that lasted through 1921. A little later, the repression of progressive army officers and proclamation of a secular republic by Kemal left the leadership of the anti-Kemalist resistance to conservative clerics who were keen to restore the religious character of the society. Sufi brotherhoods that were especially prominent in Kurdistan became an important medium of such resistance and the focal point of the 1924 Kurdish rebellion, which in addition to religious demands also called for a Kurdish (traditional/religious) government. Significantly, however, the Alevi tribes did not join the rebellion that time, as calls to restore a Sunni-dominated society did not jive with them. Nevertheless, as the Turkish repression that followed extended to all Kurds, many tribes, including the Alevi ones, participated in another rebellion of 1926.

The continuing restlessness of Kurdistan provoked a brutal response from the Turkish government that resorted to crude social engineering. A law of 1934 called for deportation and dispersal of Kurds for assimilation. Meanwhile, the Turkish military force ruthlessly proceeded to squash all and any resistance in the region. As a result of deportations, many Kurds, mostly from tribal elites, ended up working or studying in a foreign environment, stuck out and despised. Mass urbanization of Kurdistan started a decade later; that is when the anomie of the rural migrants to the cities of Kurdistan matched with the alienation felt by the Kurdish students in Turkish cities. That opened a new chapter in the story. But still, the religious divisions among the Kurds continue to matter even now, despite the secular nature of the Turkish republic. Sunni Kurds have quite often sided with Sunni Turks against Alevi Kurds and continue to do so. Many Sunni Kurds have successfully assimilated and had excellent careers in the Turkish government. (The late President Turgut Ozal is one such example; he revealed his origins, however, only very late in his career.) Whereas the Kurdish nationalism in Turkey is not restricted to Alevi Kurds, many Turks perceive the latter as particularly troublesome people.

This section aims to bring the reader to the conclusion that, during the transition from a religiously defined empire to a modern nation state, the newly imposed official identities are built on an old foundation left over from the old period. The Turkish case is a good illustration because the new secular identity propagated since the early twentieth century was supposed to have nothing to do with old religious identities. In fact, a major thrust of Mustafa Kemal's reforms was anti-clerical in nature. The old Turk was religious, dressed in traditional robes and fez, and educated in a religious school, whereas the new Turk was supposed to be nationalist, dressed in European clothes (the fez was explicitly forbidden), and educated in a secular school. Much of this program has indeed been fulfilled. Nevertheless, the new Turkish identity was built on the old Ottoman identity as the mainstream of the Empire was transformed into the mainstream of the Republic. As the mainstream of the Ottoman Empire was Sunni Islam, religious minorities such as Alevi Kurds, let alone Christian Greeks and Armenians, found it difficult to identify with the mainstream even in the emerging secular/nationalist context. That the government staffed by the mainstream was suspicious of minorities and ready to crack down on them did not help their inclusion. Thus old religious boundaries remained politically meaningful in the new context even as the prominence of religion was waning.

Ukrainians are historically divided into a larger group of Orthodox Christians and a smaller group of Uniates who follow the Eastern Orthodox rite but recognize the authority of the Roman Pope. The Uniates reside in Western Ukraine; their main center is the city of Lviv (also known as Russian Lvov, Polish Lwów, and Austrian Lemberg) in the historical region of Eastern Galicia. The Uniate denomination is so called because of the re-union (Unia) of the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches of the mid-fifteenth century. In most places the Unia did not last long as the Orthodox soon renounced it but in Ukraine the Catholic rulers of Poland and Lithuania who were keen to keep their subjects away from the jurisdiction of the Muscovite church propped it up. The remaining Orthodox parishes of Ukraine were transferred from the jurisdiction of the Muscovite Church to that of Constantinople.

At about the same time, with the merger of Poland and Lithuania, the status of non-Catholic gentry got downgraded compared to its former status within the Grand Duchy of Lithuania before the merger. At the very end of the sixteenth century the Orthodox religion in the lands controlled by the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania went underground for a few years, as the Unia became the only legitimate alternative to the mainstream Catholicism. Such policies resulted in defection of a number of Orthodox nobles to Moscow (oftentimes with their lands seceding, too) throughout the sixteenth century and contributed to the Ukrainian uprising of the 1640s. The primary targets of the uprising were Catholicized nobility and Jews (the latter often served as mediators between landlords and their vassals). When the rebels sustained a severe defeat from Poles at Berestechko, the rebel leader Bohdan Khmelnitsky sought to become a vassal of either the Khan of Crimea or the Czar of Moscow. That the eventual decision was made in favor of Moscow, even though the rebels hated its centralized absolutist nature, is probably indicative of the importance attached to the religious commonality in those days. Since then Eastern Ukraine became a part of the Russian Empire. The Ukrainian gentry was absorbed into the Russian nobility and quickly assimilated. Ukrainian nationalism that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century was confined to a narrow stratum of intellectuals; there were about as many Russian nationalists as Ukrainian nationalists born in Ukraine. Ukrainian peasants moving to Ukrainian citizens adopted Russian language. Eastern Ukrainian nationalists only dreamed of autonomy within Russia, which Ukrainian representatives declared in March 1917. It was only the Bolshevik revolution in November that year that scared the Ukrainian parliament into declaration of independence. Its independence, however, crumbled under the pressure of local anarchists, local and foreign Bolsheviks, and (last but not least) local and foreign Russian nationalists. During the Soviet period, Eastern Ukraine got thoroughly russified.

The situation in Galicia was quite different. It never was a part of Lithuania where a dialect of Old Russian used to be a state language and where Orthodox nobility felt at home. Soon after the Mongol invasions of 1237-1242, Galicia became a part of the Polish Crown (in the early fourteenth century) where it remained until the division of Poland between Russia, Prussia, and Austria in the late eighteenth century. When it ended up in Austria, its internal social structure did not change much; the main classes remained Polish-speaking Catholic gentry and Ukrainian-speaking Uniate peasantry. After the Hungarian revolution of 1848 (squashed by a Russian intervention) the status of Austrian Ukrainians was somewhat upgraded as they proved to be more loyal to the Emperor than the Polish lords who saw a chance for independence in the crisis. Since the second half of the nineteenth century Galician Ukrainians have been able to elect their representatives to the Reichstag. The beginnings of political organization made the question of local Ukrainians' identity more salient. Their identity was negatively defined against the Polish lords and rather positively with the Austrian State.³ The main issue that Galicians debated in the 1860-1880s was their relation to Russians. For fear of Russian irredentism, the Austrian government favored the Ukrainian, rather than the Russian, school of Galician thought, which contributed to its victory by the 1890s. By the World War I most Galicians had come to identify themselves as Ukrainians while very few identified as Russians.

In the wake of the World War I, when both Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires could not sustain the strain and crumbled, Galicia became the center of the self-proclaimed Western Ukrainian Republic that sought to unite with the Ukrainian State proclaimed on the territory of the former Russian Empire. The Western Ukrainian nationalist troops were far more efficient and had higher morale than their Eastern counterparts who were able to show only frail resistance to Bolsheviks, anarchists, and Russian nationalists. Nevertheless, Galicia ended up in the resurrected Polish State whose nationalizing policies met resistance of the local Ukrainian nationalists. In the World War II Galicians fought against both Poles and Soviets (and for that reason sided with Germans). Their armed resistance to the Soviets did not stop with the establishment of the Soviet regime in 1944 and, though absolutely hopeless, continued well into the fifties.

The Soviet leadership in this context viewed the region of Western Ukraine with great suspicion; lacking the great socialist experience of the thirties, it seemed a nest of bourgeois nationalists and an economically backward region. Consequently, whereas (russified) Ukrainians of Eastern Ukraine had as good career chances as anybody in the Soviet Union, the elite of Western Ukraine seldom made a career beyond the region. Exclusion of Western Ukrainians only reinforced the boundaries that had already existed between Eastern and Western Ukraine. Nationalist mobilization in the years before the Soviet collapse was based in the western regions of Ukraine, whose elite hoped to reverse its status by posing themselves as the custodians of authentic Ukrainian culture. In that they were bitterly disappointed as Ukraine is still governed by various old-boy cliques of Eastern Ukrainian origin whereas Western Ukrainians remain as marginal as ever.

The boundaries that emerged in the High Middle Ages continue to divide Ukraine whose different parts celebrate different holidays, venerate different saints, vote for different politicians on national elections, and to a considerable extent speak different languages. Most Ukrainians do not practice any religion these days, yet the old confessional boundaries just keep on "coinciding" with the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion.

According to recent polls, about seventy percent of the Russian population identifies with Orthodox Christianity, although less than five percent actually practices it.⁴ With ethnic Russians at just over eighty percent of the population and much of the rest being traditionally non-Orthodox, it means that a great majority of ethnic Russians finds some symbolic value in their traditional religion. An analysis of Soviet census data has revealed that the Soviet peoples of Orthodox background got russified at a higher rate than non-Orthodox, other things being equal. A multivariate analysis of the nationalist movements in post-Soviet Russia has shown that Muslim peoples in particular demonstrate higher levels of nationalist mobilization than Orthodox peoples under comparable circumstances. In a sense, this reminds of Turkey a hundred years ago. How is that possible given the great decline in church attendance of the twentieth century?

My answer is that during the revolutionary transformations of the modern time the ruling elite, normally originating from the mainstream group, often finds itself in a precarious situation. The ruling elite is eager to stabilize the situation and secure a tighter grip on its power. For that reason the elite seeks what it thinks will be reliable agents. In many cases the mainstream will seem more reliable; after all, they are "like us," whereas oftentimes the minorities that used to be considered unreliable, stupid, or inimical under the old regime will continue to look suspicious even under a new regime. As a result, the policy of exclusion is continued. Continuation of exclusion will preserve the old boundaries that will remain meaningful in a new context.

1. The Grand Duchy of Finland would be the only obvious imperial analog of the Soviet ethnic republics. In fact, its autonomy was even greater as it maintained its customs at the border with Russia proper and had its own currency. The semi-autonomous Central Asian khanates of Bokhara and Khiva had no distinct ethnic character; moreover, the Muslim resistance to their re-incorporation by the Soviets was not restricted to the territories of those khanates. At any rate, the post-1917 secessions of the Baltic nations, Georgia, Armenia or Ukraine cannot be possibly attributed to any ethno-territorial units of the imperial period. [Back to text.]

2. The invasions also provided pretext to the Turkish government to close down Kurdish nationalist clubs in order "to protect local Christians." Thus the Turkish government efficiently manipulated primordial differences to its advantage with the aim, in the words of a contemporary Kurdish exile, "to destroy Armenians and later to deprive the Kurds of any chance of real autonomy." [Back to text.]

3. One can still sometimes see a picture of Francis Joseph in Galician homes. [Back to text.]