How does national identity form and change?
Sargis Muradyan. Komitas, Last Night (1956)
This painting by the head of the Soviet Armenian Union of Artists depicts the arrest of a famous Armenian composer by Turkish officials during the Armenian genocide.
Dissertation Project
Who Built Nations in the Soviet Union?
Existing literature tells us that national identities in Eurasia are a persistent legacy of the achievement of mass native language literacy at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. However, cases where beliefs about nationality persisted across generations were exceptional - they were important, but also unrepresentative of the broader diversity of ways that nationality was imagined in this region
My dissertation shows how writers, artists, and professors can change beliefs about nationality more rapidly and more dramatically than existing theories anticipate. I focus on the Soviet Union – a model for multinational statehood – where these intelligentsias reshaped how Soviet citizens thought about the nationalities to which they belonged, sometimes almost overnight.
Using historical data on the occupations of winning candidates in the first competitive elections in Soviet history, I show electing intelligentsia drove an increase in secessionist mobilization just prior to the Soviet collapse. Using an automated text analysis of Soviet cultural publications, I show that the communal grievances raised by intelligentsias from the 1960s to the 1980s became the popular demands voiced in these mass demonstrations. Using original elite interviews, archived interviews, document collections, and historical publications written by key actors, I show how members of the intelligentsia with professional credentials, public celebrity, and visible constituencies popularized communal grievances and framed them in national terms in republics like Armenia and Lithuania that became more secessionist than mass literacy alone would predict. Using archival data on Soviet campaigns to “liquidate illiteracy” in the 1920s, I revisit the conventional wisdom on mass native language literacy to show where and why categories of nationality persisted or eroded over time.
You can find a longer description of my dissertation project at this link.
THE LONG-RUN EFFECTS OF STALIN-ERA FORCED RESETTLEMENT ON STATE FORMATION IN THE SOVIET UNION
[ under review ]
Between 1937 and 1949, the Soviet Union under Stalin forcibly resettled approximately 3 million Soviet citizens across more than 11 different nationalities. Regions in the Soviet interior that received these “special settlers” experienced a distinct political and economic environment, where day-to-day governance was handled entirely by the Soviet security apparatus. This paper situates this case theoretically as an expansion of state infrastructural power in the Soviet periphery. Using data on the forced relocation of ethnic Germans to south-central Russia, I show that the Soviet state here endured even after those Germans left - districts that received forced migrants of German ethnicity have a higher presence of Russian police even today.
Portrait of Maxim Gorky, author and founding father of the Soviet Union of Writers
The Right to Write Badly: The Failure of Soviet State Administration in Literature in the 1930s
[ under review ]
The Soviet state endowed its writers, artists, and musicians with material privileges and institutional autonomy; in exchange, these cultural professionals were expected to manufacture a coherent, productive, and heroic “postbourgeoisie culture system.” This study draws on a range of primary sources to explain how the Writers Union became the institutional model for administrating of cultural life in the Soviet Union, even while its predecessor organizations failed. Using a body of primary sources, including diaries, public speeches, memoranda, secret police reports, and archived historical interviews, I show that significant discretion over the allocation of state resources and an erratic regulatory structure incentivized the creation of “informal cultural economy,” where writers, artists, and other creatives kept their best work unpublished, instead choosing to trade it amongst themselves in the privacy of their apartments. This informal cultural economy frustrated Soviet officials and secret police officers, but preserved the Writers Union as an institution that remained “good enough” for Soviet culture-building. This paper explains how national intelligentsias were able to emerge in a centralized authoritarian system to begin with, and is currently under review.