List of Maps
List of Tables
Preface
Acknowledgments
Pt. 1 Theoretical and Historical Framework
Ch. 1 The Meaning of Homeland in the Study of Nationalism 3
Ch. 2 The Making of Nations in Tsarist Russia 33
Ch. 3 National Consolidation and Territoriality during the Interwar Period 94
Pt. 2 National Territoriality in the Postwar USSR
Ch. 4 Population Redistribution and National Territoriality, 1959-1989 151
Ch. 5 Social Mobilization and National Territoriality 191
Ch. 6 The Ethnocultural Transformation of Soviet Society: Russification versus Indigenization 250
Ch. 7 Political Indigenization and the Disintegration of the USSR 325
Ch. 8 Conclusions and Implications 378
Appendix A: Evolution of the Soviet Federal System 409
Appendix B: Native Language Instruction in the USSR 414
Bibliography 417
Index 447

The Geography of Nationalism in Russia and the USSR is an important addition to the small library of essential works on the collapse of the Soviet empire. The first attempt to construct and test broad theoretical propositions about "place" and "territoriality" in the making of nations, it examines the critical social processes underlying the formation of nations and homelands in Russia and the USSR during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Robert Kaiser finds that for the most part national self-consciousness was only beginning to supplant a localist mentality by the time of World War I. The national problem faced by Lenin was fundamentally different from the more difficult nationalist challenge that confronted Gorbachev. In Kaiser's place-based theory, the homeland, once created in the imaginations of the indigenous masses, powerfully structured national processes and international relations. "Indigenization" from below became an active competitor with nationality policies that promoted Russification, resulting in the restructuring of ethnic stratification to favor indigenes in their own respective home republics and to challenge Russian dominance outside Russia. The revolutionary changes occurring since 1989, Kaiser argues, should therefore be seen as part of a longer process of indigenization.
Originally published in 1994.
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