The Affirmative Action Empire

This text provides a survey of the Soviet management of the nationalities question. It traces the conflicts and tensions created by the geographic definition of national territories, the establishment of several official national languages and the world's first mass "affirmative action" programmes.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they set themselves the task of building socialism in the vast landscape of the former Russian Empire, a territory populated by hundreds of different peoples belonging to a multitude of linguistic, religious, and ethnic groups. Before 1917, the Bolsheviks had called for the national self-determination of all peoples and had condemned all forms of colonization as exploitative. After attaining power, however, they began to express concern that it would not be possible for Soviet Russia to survive without the cotton of Turkestan and the oil of the Caucasus. In an effort to reconcile their anti-imperialist position with their desire to hold on to as much territory as possible, the Bolsheviks integrated the national idea into the administrative-territorial structure of the new Soviet state. In Empire of Nations, Francine Hirsch examines the ways in which former imperial ethnographers and local elites provided the Bolsheviks with ethnographic knowledge that shaped the very formation of the new Soviet Union. The ethnographers—who drew inspiration from the Western European colonial context—produced all-union censuses, assisted government commissions charged with delimiting the USSR's internal borders, led expeditions to study "the human being as a productive force," and created ethnographic exhibits about the "Peoples of the USSR." In the 1930s, they would lead the Soviet campaign against Nazi race theories . Hirsch illuminates the pervasive tension between the colonial-economic and ethnographic definitions of Soviet territory; this tension informed Soviet social, economic, and administrative structures. A major contribution to the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, Empire of Nations also offers new insights into the connection between ethnography and empire.

This collected volume, edited by Ron Suny and Terry Martin, shows how the Soviet state managed to create a multiethnic empire in its early years, from the end of the Russian Revolution to the end of World War II. Bringing together the newest research on a wide geographic range, from Russia to Central Asia, this volume is essential reading for students and scholars of Soviet history and politics.

In a climate where whites who criticize affirmative action risk being termed racist and blacks who do the same risk charges of treason and self hatred, a frank and open discussion of racial preference is difficult to achieve. But, in the first book on racial preference written from personal experience, Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, Stephen L. Carter, Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale University and self-described beneficiary (and, at times, victim) of affirmative action, does it.Using his own story of success and frustration as “an affirmative action baby” as a point of departure, Carter, who has risen to the top of his profession, provides an incisive analysis of one of the most incendiary topics of our day—as well as an honest critique of the pressures on black professionals and intellectuals to conform to the “politically correct” way of being black.Affirmative action as it is practiced today not only does little to promote racial equality, Carter argues, but also allows the nation to escape rather cheaply from its moral obligation to undo the legacy of slavery. Affirmative action, particularly in hiring often reinforces racist stereotypes by promoting the idea that the black professional cannot aspire to anything more than being “the best black.”Has the time come to abandon these programs? No--but affirmative action must return to its simpler roots, Carter argues: to provide educational opportunities for those who might not otherwise have them. Then the beneficiaries should demand to be held to the same standards as anyone else.

A groundbreaking work that exposes the twisted origins of affirmative action. In this "penetrating new analysis" (New York Times Book Review) Ira Katznelson fundamentally recasts our understanding of twentieth-century American history and demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner. Through mechanisms designed by Southern Democrats that specifically excluded maids and farm workers, the gap between blacks and whites actually widened despite postwar prosperity. In the words of noted historian Eric Foner, "Katznelson's incisive book should change the terms of debate about affirmative action, and about the last seventy years of American history."

The Soviet Union is often characterised as nominally a federation, but really an empire, liable to break up when individual federal units, which were allegedly really subordinate colonial units, sought independence. This book questions this interpretation, revisiting the theory of federation, and discussing actual examples of federations such as the United States, arguing that many federal unions, including the United States, are really centralised polities. It also discusses the nature of empires, nations and how they relate to nation states and empires, and the right of secession, highlighting the importance of the fact that this was written in to the Soviet constitution. It examines the attitude of successive Soviet leaders towards nationalities, and the changing attitudes of nationalists towards the Soviet Union. Overall, it demonstrates that the Soviet attitude to nationalities and federal units was complicated, wrestling, in a similar way to many other states, with difficult questions of how ethno-cultural justice can best be delivered in a political unit which is bigger than the national state.

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject History - Asia, grade: B+ (2), The American Central University (Department of History), course: The Historian's Craft, language: English, abstract: The Soviet Union, by the time of its creation, was the first modern state that had to confront the rising issue of nationalism. With a progressive nationality policy, it systematically promoted the national consciousness of its ethnic minorities and established for them institutional forms comparable of a modern state. In the 1920s, the Bolsheviks, seeking to defuse national sentiment, created hundreds of national territories. They trained new national leaders, established national languages, and financed national cultural products. This was a massive historical experiment in governing a multiethnic state. Later under Stalin, these policies had to be revised to comply with emerging domestic and international problems, which resulted from those once progressive policies. This paper will present the issue of Russian nationalism and nationality policy in the Soviet Union. The analysis will be based on six different monographs dealing with the issue at different periods of Soviet history. Each has a different approach and at times a different thesis on Russian nationalism or an interpretation of the political events accompanying the Soviet nationality policy. First, on the following pages, I will give a brief summary of the six books discussed in this paper. Then, I will tell the main thesis of each book and underlie it by the author's arguments. In the conclusion, I will compare the book's arguments in a historiographical manner and see where similarities between the arguments exist, where the books complement each other and at which points they disagree with each other. At the end, I will try to give a comprehensive overview of the issue discussed, due to the frame and limited space of this paper.