SOCIALISM AND RACE: A TEST BASED ON SOVIETOLOGICAL STUDIES
Recognizing this ideological antinomy is one reason, among others, for rejecting the claim that the Ancien Regime monarchies engaged in practices of racial segreÂgation, contrary to what Charles Boxer has argued, for example.[362] Other lines of reasoning have arrived at this same conclusion through different approaches, notaÂbly by emphasizing the contrast between the malleable character of the assignment of status under the Ancien Regime and the rigor of the supposedly scientific racism of the era.[363] In the context of this essay, I wish to restrict my focus to examining this ideological antinomy as defined above, but by shifting my focus entirely.
In fact, this contradiction between universalism (of which Catholicism is the bearer by definition) and the confinement of persons and groups into racialized categories of belonging is not unique in European history. For the purposes of experimentation, I would like to put this argument of an ideological antinomy to the test by examining the state of historical research on processes of categorization, segregation, and exÂtermination that were produced by a region and system that were different in all points from the Ancien Regime Iberian monarchies. The case that seems to merit examination is the creation of repressive policies in the Soviet Union under the reÂgimes of Lenin and Stalin. In fact, a vigorous debate has emerged over the Soviet projects for collective repression and the radical transformation of society, with respect to the question of how racial categories came to be formed. Owing to a lack of access to Russian language sources, it is the reflection of these discussions in the English and French historiography of the USSR, as well as in translated Soviet litÂerature, that will serve as my sources here. In no way, therefore, do I presume to intervene in the debates among specialists on this regime and society. Instead, I wish to borrow evidence from certain ongoing discussions so as to re-open the terms of the debate over race in the Iberian monarchies by distancing myself from its traditional reference points and examples. This is nothing less than an imprudent incursion into a historical and historiographical domain far removed from my own specialty, but whose study I have found quite useful for thinking about the question of this antinomy as defined above.In the 2002 issue the Slavic Review dedicated to this question, Eric D. Weitz, a historian of Germany and of communist movements, sought to analyze the core of Soviet repression in terms of “Racial Politics without the Concept of Race.”[364] His position came under criticism within the same issue of the journal. He is careful to limit his formulations with two qualifications: first, he recognizes just how much the Russian intelligentsia and the world of Soviet thinkers were loath to think about society in biological terms and, second, he rejects the excessive conflation of the Soviet and Nazi regimes. Even with these precautions in place, Weitz’s arguments have no doubt been surprising for some Sovietologists, but they are familiar to those who study the political systems of the Ancien Regime in which processes of racialization occurred.
There are two complementary definitions of racial thinking that we might give. The first is the claim that the social or moral characters of individuals and collecÂtivities are passed down from generation to generation through bodily fluids and tissues. The second is the conviction that the populations identified as bearers of alterity are incapable of change.[365] According to Weitz:
In the Stalin period especially, particular populations were endowed with immutable traits that every member of the group possessed and that were passed down from one generation to the next [...] Certain national groups, targeted as enemies of socialism, became �racialized’ in the sense that their suspect characteristics were seen to inhere in each and every member of the group bar none and were transmitted across generations.[366]
In his examination of the processes of racialization at work in the construction of Soviet society, Weitz begins with a definition of racial thinking that is based not on a primacy of color or phenotype but on the processes by which certain groups were assigned indelible characteristics (2002, 7).
This perspective is very close to one that seems most relevant to an account of how racial categories in Ancien Regime Iberian societies came to be formed, particularly with respect to the segregation of the new Christians, which did not rest on any “color line.” The critiques of Weitz - why is this not a surprise? - employ the same arguments that we see in the debates over the concept of race in the political history of the Ancien Regime empires. My goal is not to resolve the debate in Sovietology in these pages. But it is important to emphasize that the critiques of Weitz in this issue of the journal do not contest the point that is important to us here: politics that are partly racial can be instituted even if the concept of race does not play a central role in the political discourse, nor even in the dominant norms and institutions of the time.Certain historians of the Soviet regime have addressed the question of race and the processes of racialization with regards to at least four major types of phenom- ena: the political use of the idea of bad class origins; the deportations and forced migrations of certain nationalities and ethnicities; the anti-Semitism of the State and the Party especially after the Second World War; and, in counter-point, the mass social engineering that saw forced labor as the midwife of a new humanity. One might add to this the composite and millenarian idea, inspired by Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, according to which scientific socialism had demonstrated that cerÂtain social categories were obsolete, and that therefore these were destined to disapÂpear entirely - which is to say men, women and children, if necessary - in order to obey the law of history that prophesied their disappearance.
If the debates between specialists of Soviet history remain open, it is because the different phenomena presented above are all marked by a certain degree of amÂbiguity. If the debates are lively, it is because each author looks at this question - and it is easy to understand why - from the perspective of a comparison between Nazism and Bolshevism.[367] How did the ambiguities of the revolutionary crucible manifest themselves with regards to the political question of race? Two examples might be invoked here.
The first is the analysis of the relationship between the policy on nationalities that promoted the officialization of languages that had not been recognized by the Tsarist empire and the subsequent large-scale campaigns of ethnic cleansing.[368] The second example concerns the regime’s position on eugenÂics programs and contemporary research on biological heredity. According to cerÂtain accounts, beginning in 1933, the Soviet regime, animated by an explicit desire to differentiate itself from Hitlerism, put an end to this field of research as well as to programs that were eugenicist in nature, which had been developing in the USSR as in many other countries at the time.[369] This rather expedited version can be reÂfuted by a closer study of the history of genetics in the Soviet Union, which reveals a back and forth on this issue, involving condemnations and rehabilitations directed towards the scientific communities involved between the 1920s and the 1960s.[370] Thus, during the Soviet era, eugenicist theories did not find the institutional backing that they did in Germany, Sweden or the United States. The two principal repreÂsentatives of the biological sciences who had eugenicist ambitions were Nikolai Kol’tsov and Nikolai Vavilov. They did not manage to win over the government. The latter was even sent to the Gulags in 1940, from where he would not return. It is true that on the opposite side from him there had been the influential geneticist Trofim Lyssenko.Several processes identified and analyzed in other societies and political conÂfigurations were also characteristic of the Soviet regime. Such is the case with an obsession with internal pollution, which sparked a project of ethnic purification and the aspiration to create a society that was at once both pure and unanimous. In YevgÂeny Ivanovich Zamyatin’s prophetic novel We, the character who strays from the collective norm refers to himself as a germ.[371] This obsession, this project and this aspiration are equally discernable in the political, spiritual and social systems of the Ancien Regime Iberian monarchies.
Soviet society was no more composed of a sinÂgle bloc than were the Early Modern ones. From the October Revolution to the mid- 1930s, the dominant theme was the struggle to eliminate the classes that were supÂposedly condemned to disappear, according to the prognosis of scientific socialism. This undertaking culminated in the liquidation of the kulaks, seen as a population, not a collection of guilty individuals. This had been preceded by the ethnic cleansing of the Don Cossacks in 1919, the Soviet government’s first experience with mass repression aimed at collectivities defined on a social and ethnic basis.[372] Over the course of this same period, the “militarization” of industrial labor and massive infraÂstructure projects created a regime of forced labor that, to borrow the words Gorky used to describe the building of the White Sea canal, was to allow prisoners and forced laborers to emerge from their “zoological” backwardness. Stalinist policies would continue this movement and inflect it in two directions. On the one hand, there were the deportations of entire populations, which in 1937-39 began to focus more on collectivities defined on an ethnic basis (Koreans, Tatars, Poles, Finns, Germans, etc.). On the other hand, the practices of the mass purges rested on the assumption that the worst enemies of the regime had infiltrated the ranks of the Party itself and that their criminal intentions towards the proletarian class were concealed. Finally, the anti-Semitism that took root at the very heart of the system, expressed in the diÂrect aftermath of the Second World War, adopted forms and formulas that it borÂrowed from both the Tsarist tradition and Nazi propaganda.The disagreements among historians of the Soviet era stem from differences in how they assess the effective character of bad class origins, which is to say the heÂreditary nature of position in society, as well as the distinction between ethnic cleansing designed to eliminate an alien danger on the frontiers of the empire and extermination of the kind that the Nazis practiced. The direct juxtaposition of LenÂinism-Stalinism and Hitlerism has exerted far too great of an influence on the histoÂriographic debate, and on remembrance. It is easy to understand why the compariÂson with Nazism has determined the very framework of any approach to the racial question in the USSR. After all, does not Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate invite this very comparison? If the benchmark for racism is the destruction of the EuroÂpean Jews, then no other policy will ever be perfectly comparable. Measured against the Nazis, any other racial policy can doubtless be held up as imperfect, malleable, negotiated.
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