Paper long abstract:

Soviet nationalities policy under Lenin and Stalin has received widespread attention from scholars working at both the center and periphery of the Soviet Union, including across Soviet Central Asia. Considerably less attention has been turned to the fate of so-called "affirmative action" policies in the decades after Stalin's death, when the promotion of the Soviet Union's ethnic minorities broadly continued, even as many initiatives were scaled back in favor of increasing preference for the Russian language and ethnic Russians. Even less attention has been to paid to the experience of ordinary citizens during this time. Working with recently declassified citizens' letters written by residents of Central Asia to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev personally, this paper considers public discourse about the status of interethnic relations and, in particular, on matters related to the promotion of ethnic minorities. These letters suggest widespread disapproval of central policy initiatives and local conditions, both from ethnic Russians and other Europeans, who complained of growing popular nationalism and the state's undue preference for ethnic minorities, whom they saw as underqualified and undeserving of special treatment, and from non-Russians, who claimed that Soviet policies did not go far enough to promote ethnic minorities in the spheres of politics, culture, and language policy and advocated a more radical position. These letters highlight the party-state's overarching failure to justify and popularize its approach to interethnic relations. Together, these views suggest both the great instabilities that were increasingly present at the Soviet periphery and the increasingly constrained limits in which the party and state were operating. The letters, written between 1986 and 1991, suggest growing instability as articulated by citizens on the ground, offering fresh perspective on rising crisis as the country teetered on the edge of collapse.