By Yaroslav Bilinsky

_n a report published under the auspices of UNESCO five years ago, I. P. Tsamerian and S. L. Ronin described the "general nationality policy of the Soviet state" as designed "to insure the more rapid development of formerly backward nations in all fields,” adding that "only such a policy is capable of bringing about genuine equality between all the republics which make up the great land of socialism, the Soviet Union, and between all the peoples and nationalities inhabiting it." Similar enthusiasm for this policy was voiced just last year by T. Usabaliev, the native First Secretary of the Communist Party of Kirghizia. "One of the remarkable results of the development of Soviet Kirghizia," he wrote, "has been the creation of her own national cadres. In our epoch, this constitutes one of the most significant indices of a nation's maturity and the most important condition of its geuine prog

1 I. P. Tsamerian and S. L. Ronin, Equality of Rights Betweeen Races and Nationalities in the USSR, Paris, UNESCO, 1962, p. 100.

2 T. Usubaliev, "Internatsionalizm-istochnik nashevo razvitiia," Kommunist, No. 15 (October) 1966, p. 15. This article was dedicated to the 40th anniversary of the Kirghiz SSR.

Mr. Bilinsky is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Delaware, and author of The Second Soviet Republic: The Ukraine after World War II (Rutgers University Press, 1964).

If these quotations are taken at face value, the central objective of Soviet nationality policy would appear to be to raise the cultural, political, social and economic level of the various minority peoples of the USSR so as to ensure their attainment of "genuine equality" as Soviet citizens. The present article proposes to examine in detail one of the most important criteria of the attainment of this proclaimed objective: namely, the extent of political participation by the diverse nationalities as measured by their representation in the major organs of political rule in the USSR.

The problem of nationality representation has been an extraordinarily complex one for the Soviet Union. The Soviet census of 1959 listed as many as 109 different ethnic groups, 22 of which numbered more than 900,000 members each. Russians constitute a majority in the country as a whole and in the Russian Federative Republic, but they are a minority in the other union republics. The nonRussian peoples, on the other hand, are minorities in the total Soviet population, but virtually all of them (except the Kazakhs and the Kirghiz) constitute majorities in their own native regions, which were conquered by the Russian Tsars at different times, some as late as the second half of the 19th century. To add to the complexity, some of these regions were as much, if not more, advanced economically and socially than the Russian metropolis, while others (e.g., in Central Asia) were inhabited

shift in nationalities policy was Khrushchev's decision, spurred by the ideological challenge from Communist China, to accelerate the Soviet advance toward communism. "Building communism" became the slogan of the extraordinary 21st Party Congress in January 1959 and the premise of the new Party Program of 1961. (Though this theme has since been deemphasized somewhat, and the timetable for the attainment of communism extended, the Program still remains binding.)

In the field of nationality relations, this policy has entailed a more pronounced subordination of the interests and aspirations of the individual nationalities to the interests of the Soviet Union and its predominant ethnic group, the Russians. The teaching of Russian in the schools of the nonRussian republics has been pushed despite protests from several of these republics." So has the largescale immigration of workers and other personnel

6 For documentation of this, see author's "The Soviet Education Laws of 1958-59 and Soviet Nationality Policy," Soviet Studies (London), October 1962, pp. 138-57.

from the more advanced Soviet republics even though it resulted in lowering the indigenous peoples' share in the population of their own republics. This was justified on the ground that the less advanced non-Russian republics could not develop their own resources without outside help," and also that the exchange of people and cadres would contribute towards a harmonious fusing together of nationalities and thus hasten the advent of communism. That a breakdown of national barriers could result in ethnic inequality and discrimination was admitted only for capitalist countries.8

Since Khrushchev's fall, the emphasis on interrepublican exchange of personnel has continued and in the long run may threaten the progress of the less advanced peoples towards autonomy and full political equality. Usubaliev's earlier-quoted article

7 P. Rogachev and M. Sverdlin, "Sovetskii narod-novaia istoricheskaia obshchnost liudei," Kommunist, No. 9 (June) 1963, p. 15. See also E. V. Tadevesyan, "Dalneisheie sblizheniie sotsialisticheskikh natsii v SSSR," Voprosy filosofii, No. 6 (June) 1963, p. 5.

8 Tadevosian, loc. cit.

on the 40th anniversary of the Kirghiz SSR is quite revealing on this score. Noting that the past policy of the Communist Party had been to encourage indigenous cadres in the various republics to assume responsibility for their affairs, he said that at the present stage the situation is different because "now we have well-trained personnel in all fields of activity." (Curiously enough, he had just remarked on the preceding page of his article that of the 300,000 workers in industry, construction and transport, and in the sovkhozes of the Kirghiz republic, "more than 66 thousand”—actually, only 22 percent-were Kirghiz.") He went on to explain:

The significance of training personnel (kadrov) from among the indigenous nationality remains. But this problem now assumes a new character. Now we must concentrate our attenton not merely on the nationality of the cadres, but especially on their real abilities, their talents, qualifications, and know how. We must pick the best.10

Representation in the Party

Having briefly surveyed the general trend of Soviet nationality policy, let us proceed to look at some of the key measures of political participation by members of the indigenous nationalities in the non-Russian republics. Since membership in the Communist Party is a basic prerequisite for political participation and advancement, a highly important measure is to be found in statistics showing what proportion of party members in a particular republic are citizens of the indigenous or "titular" nationality (i.e., Armenians in the Armenian Republic, Kirghiz in the Kirghiz Republic, etc.). Soviet writers on nationality questions do not speak of a quota system as such in this connection, but it has been claimed that admissions to party membership generally follow the ethnic composition of the population in the individual republics. Thus, e.g., an article published in July 1966 stated:

In 1964 the relative share of persons of the indigenous nationality among those admitted to candidate status in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union constituted: in the CP of Armenia, 91.8 percent; Belorussia, 78.6 percent; Georgia, 78.2 percent; Lithuania, 76.1 percent;

Azerbaijan, 74.4 percent; Ukraine, 71.7 percent; Tadjikistan, 68.5 percent; Estonia, 61 percent; Uzbekistan, 60.3 percent, etc. This data reflects to a definite degree (v opredelennoi mere) the relative share of the indigenous nationality among the population of this or that union republic. At the same time it also shows that the Communist Party of each republic constitutes a genuinely international organization including representatives of many nations and peoples.11

The article further claimed that all public organizations in the USSR follow the party's model in distributing their membership among the various nationalities.

12

Certainly, however, the correlation between the proportion of newly-admitted candidate members of the titular nationality and that nationality's share in the total population of the particular republic is not very precise. For instance, according to the 1959 census, Armenians constituted only 88.0 percent of the population of the Armenian Republic,' as compared with the 91.8 percent cited above as the Armenians' share of new party admissions in 1964. In the case of Estonia, the discrepancy is much greater and in the opposite direction: Estonians in 1959 constituted 74.6 percent of the population of the Estonian SSR, whereas their share of new party admissions in 1964 was only 61 percent. For some of the non-Russian republics, such as the Kazakh SSR, similar data on party admissions have not been published.13

Data showing the nationality composition of the

republican parties as a whole have been relatively little publicized, but there is reason to believe that the discrepancies here may be even more pronounced than in the case of new party admissions in a single year. For example, Ukrainians constituted only 60.3 percent of the membership of the Ukrainian CP in 1958,1 as contrasted with their 76.8 percent share of the population and 71.7 percent of 1964 new party admissions. Similarly, Lithuanians made up only 61.5 percent of the Lithuanian CP membership in 1965,15 as compared

11 Barsukov et al., loc. cit., p. 13.

12 Census figures cited here and subsequently are taken from Itogi perepisi, op. cit., pp. 202-10 (Table 54).

13 The percentage figures quoted above on party admissions in non-Russian republics were apparently taken from an earlier article ("KPSS v tsifrakh, 1961-1964 gody") in Partiinaia zhizn, No. 10 (May) 1965, p. 12. This article, too, omits figures for several republics.

14 "KPU v tsifrakh," Partiinaia zhizn, No. 12 (June) 1958, p. 59; or Y. Bilinsky, The Second Soviet Republic: The Ukraine after World War II, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1964, p. 231.

15 S. Atamukas, "Kommunisticheskaia partiia Litvy V tsifrakh," Kommunist (Vilnius), No. 9 (September) 1965, p. 33. (Reference by courtesy of Professors Panas Fedenko and V. Stanley Vardys.)