UC Santa Barbara

Modern states inhabited by many different national, ethnic, and linguistic communities have long faced the problem of how to manage their internal diversity without fragmenting into separate nation-states, assimilating minorities into a dominant national majority, or relegating them to second-class political status. This dissertation examines how a particular system of multinational governance pioneered in the Soviet Union spread widely across the world and became one of the twentieth century’s most important alternatives to the nation-state model. Rather than treating Soviet nationality policies as merely a domestic Soviet arrangement, this dissertation argues that they constituted a globally consequential model of governance. These policies included dividing multinational states into national territorial-administrative units, recognizing official national categories, promoting and protecting native-language use for minorities in education and government, enacting nationality-based affirmative action in employment, education, and administration, and supporting officially recognized national cultures. The Soviet model was distinctive in global context at the time of its creation, emerged from early Marxist debates over the “national question,” and represented only one of several possible Marxist plans for building and governing a multinational state. After the Bolshevik Revolution, these policies were first implemented in the USSR, where their rollout, including the creation of non-Russian national republics and lower-level autonomous territories under the slogan of “the right of nations to self-determination,” was undertaken with an eye toward international expansion and foreign policy. From the USSR, the model spread widely and took different forms: Yugoslavia adopted it most explicitly; Soviet-dominated satellite states implemented more limited versions; China created the largest centralized adaptation; Vietnam demonstrated its limits in anti-colonial contexts; and Ethiopia shows its post-Cold War afterlife through ethno-national federalism. In total, nearly a third of the world’s population came to live in states strongly influenced by Soviet-style nationality policies. The dissertation also examines the complex relationship between nationality policies and state fragmentation, as well as the continued legacies of this model in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It argues that these policies continue to influence institutions and governance even in states that abandoned or substantially retreated from large parts of the model. The twentieth century was therefore not only an age of nation-states, but also an age of ambitious state-led attempts to make multinationalism governable.