Copyright
© 1997 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.
World Politics 49.2 (1997) 212-249
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Russia's
"Ethnic Revival": The Separatist Activism of Regional Leaders in a
Postcommunist Order
Daniel
S. Treisman *
Figures
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I.
Introduction
Since 1990 Russia has experienced an unexpected
"ethnic revival." From Sakha in Eastern Siberia to Adygeia on the
slopes of the Caucasus Mountains, many of the country's more than one hundred
minority nationalities have asserted claims for greater rights, privileges,
and constitutional recognition. Leaders of ethnic regions have demanded
everything from greater economic autonomy to complete independence. While
non-Russian nationalities constitute only about 18 percent of the population,
the recent disintegration of other postcommunist multiethnic federations has
raised anxieties in both Russia and the West about the country's future
stability. The war in Chechnya offers an alarming demonstration of where such
nationality politics can lead. This article seeks to explain the causes of this sudden
invigoration of ethnic politics and to explore the implications of Russia's
recent experience for general theories of ethnic and nationalist activism.
The ethnic revival in Russia and other postcommunist countries follows
several decades of ethnic resurgence in various parts of the postcolonial and
developed world. This has stimulated a rich theoretical debate over the bases
of ethnic identities and nationalist mobilization. 1
Russia's recent [End Page 212] history offers an opportunity to assess
the scope of existing theories, specifically, the extent to which
generalizations from other parts of the world fit the details of ethnic
politics in Russia or the extent to which the evidence suggests a distinctive
explanation for the upsurge of ethnonationalist activism in postcommunist
states. An ethnic revival is a complex social phenomenon that can
be studied from various angles. Indeed, scholars of ethnicity and nationalism
suffer from an embarras de richesse in their choice of a dependent
variable. Some have sought to explain why individuals adopt particular ethnic
definitions of identity in certain periods and geographical or social
settings. 2
Others have applied insights from the study of social movements to the
question of how latent ethnonational groups mobilize and have asked
why political organizations emerge to represent some groups but not others. 3
Still others have tried to explain the political behavior of
ethnonational groups and their leaders--their strategies and tactics in
dealing with the central state. Finally, others have sought explanations for outcomes
of ethnonationalist activism, most notably, secession and ethnic conflict. 4
In this work, I try to explain the strategy of leaders of
ethnically defined regions and republics within an ethnically heterogeneous
state. While the leaders of some ethnic regions are vigorous in pressing
claims for greater autonomy, others are surprisingly docile. I consider which
factors may best account for such variation in strategies: underlying ethnic
identities of the leader or population, the extent of nationalist
organization, the interests or resources of the individual leader, or the
region's bargaining power and vulnerability to central countermeasures. Russia offers a particularly fruitful setting for
comparing the evidence for different hypotheses. Of the country's eighty-nine
constituent units, thirty-two are today ethnically defined republics,
autonomous districts, or autonomous provinces. They vary widely in culture,
history, levels of economic development, geographical location, size, and
balance of ethnic populations, as well as in many other potentially relevant
factors. And under the surface of the general upsurge of minority
nationalisms, [End Page 213] leaders of different ethnic regions
actually show considerable variation in their eagerness to press demands for
greater autonomy. While the limited number of cases and large number of
potential explanatory factors restricts the conclusions that can be
confidently drawn, Russia's experience of ethnic politics offers a useful
opportunity to subject theoretical conjectures to empirical testing. Leaders of ethnic regions and republics, in Russia as
elsewhere, assert a wide range of minor and major claims. In this article, I
view these as defining different points along a spectrum of "separatist
activism." I include on the same spectrum demands that some might
consider qualitatively different. For instance, while two republics--Chechnya
and Tatarstan--have at one point demanded full independence from Moscow, most
of the others ostensibly seek only greater autonomy in the political,
economic, or social spheres. 5
The justification for this research strategy is twofold. First, while it is certainly true that the goals of ethnic
leaders vary in significant ways, unlike their actions these are not directly
observable. Both independence seekers and those merely eager for economic
concessions may strategically misrepresent their objectives: the independence
seekers to forestall repression, the economic concession seekers to add force
to their demands. At the same time, goals often expand and contract in the
course of bargaining, as movements are radicalized or pacified by central
responses. To classify political actions by their professed goals is thus to
aim at an often deceptive and moving target. Second, some might nevertheless
argue that the act of demanding independence--whether or not it is
sincere--is fundamentally different from demanding greater autonomy. It is,
however, an empirical question whether the factors that predispose some
ethnic leaders to demand independence are different from those that
predispose others to seek autonomy. I examine evidence for and against this. In focusing on the behavior of regional leaders, I
implicitly assume a state with some territorial subdivision of power. The
framing of the question thus fits both federal states and ethnically
heterogeneous unitary states with regional governments. (Whether or not
post-Soviet Russia can accurately be described as a federation in the
definition of Riker or others is a matter of some debate, 6
but it need not be resolved for the purposes of this article.) In many
states, federal and unitary, ethnicity [End Page 214] enters politics
via the interaction of local and central leaders. In such situations regional
leaders are poised between two political arenas--the locality and the
center--with roles to play and bargains to strike in each of them. Their
choices can be explained through analysis of the "nested" or
"two-level" games in which they play a part, negotiating with
central counterparts under constraints and payoffs determined by
characteristics of regional populations. 7
The following section discusses major theories of
nationalist and separatist action and the hypotheses they would imply about
the Russian ethnic regions. Section III compares the observed degree of
separatist activism of the different regional leaderships in 1990-94 and
develops a composite index. Section IV considers the theoretically informed
hypotheses of Section II against actual outcomes and weighs the evidence
using simple statistical techniques. Finally, Section V summarizes the
results and draws some conclusions about what Russia's postcommunist
experience implies for the theoretical understanding of ethnonationalist
activism in heterogeneous states. II.
Theories of Separatist Activism
Why do some subnational leaders declare sovereignty for
their regions, demand greater constitutional rights, assert jurisdiction over
local property and natural resources, adopt flags and other symbols, declare
independence, deny the authority of central laws, and engage in a host of
other actions that call into question existing institutions and bargains? Why
do others refrain from such actions? Different theories focus on factors at
four levels. Ethnic
Self-Identifications
Some scholars associate the degree of separatist activism
of regional leaders with the extent and intensity of minority ethnic,
cultural, linguistic, and religious self-identifications among members
of the population. Such ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious
commonalities provide markers around which social or political movements can
crystallize. For some theorists, the path from shared self-conceptions to
political action is short. According to Ernest Gellner: "Modern ethnic
feeling . . . wells up in otherwise anonymous, atomized populations, [End
Page 215] and it is evidently capable of producing its own organizations,
almost effortlessly." 8
But if the key to separatist activism is such
self-identifications, one must then question what determines the strength and
breadth of ethnic identities in a given setting. One view, associated with
Geertz and Shils, is that such markers are historically determined
"givens" of social existence, which are always experienced
with particular intensity. 9
In Geertz's formulation: Congruities of blood, speech, custom, and so on, are seen
to have an ineffable, and at times overpowering, coerciveness in and of
themselves. One is bound to one's kinsman, one's neighbor, one's fellow
believer, ipso facto; as the result not merely of personal affection,
practical necessity, common interest, or incurred obligation, but at least in
great part by virtue of some unaccountable absolute import attibuted to the
very tie itself. 10
Such a view of ethnic identities as historically generated,
self-preserving, and costlessly self-activating seems to inform many
journalistic and scholarly accounts of ethnic politics in Russia and other
postcommunist states. In one common image, ethnic identities, preserved for
decades in the communist "deep freeze," reemerge with a political
thaw. 11
A second image is of the "pressure cooker": not only are ethnic
sentiments preserved under communist repression, but they are liable to
explode with new force once the lid is removed. 12
More poetically, Isaiah Berlin has argued that "a wounded Volksgeist
. . . is like a bent twig, forced down so severely that when released, it
lashes back with fury." 13
For other scholars, ethnic identifications dominate the landscape of
postcommunist politics precisely because of the success of past regimes at
demobilizing less resilient civic identities through social engineering,
propaganda, and repression. 14
However, such primordial views of ethnicity offer little
insight into why ethnic activism varies so greatly across time and space. If
the causes [End Page 216] of such activism are ties of "blood,
speech and custom," why do different ethnic groups emerge from the
pressure cooker with different degrees of force? Why, that is, should the
Tatars be affected so much more obviously than the Chukchi, who after all
also have kinship ties, common language, and shared traditions. In trying to explain why ethnic definitions of identity
are stronger in some times and places than in others, some have argued that
such identities are rendered salient by such sociohistorical processes as
industrialization and modernization. 15
Modernization brings previously isolated groups into contact with each other,
fostering a sense of difference. Rakowska-Harmstone has applied this argument
to the subterranean growth of nationalism in developing Soviet republics. 16
However, since a previous theory of modernization predicted that it would
accomplish precisely the opposite, creating economic and occupational
divisions that would supersede traditional cultural ones, such arguments must
explain why modernization activates specifically ethnic bases of group
identification. 17
Several answers have been suggested. One possibility is that in early modernization, the
existing social capital of kinship networks, rural cultural groupings, and
premodern religious affiliations will be used to foster collective action in
pursuit of the material benefits of modernization simply because it costs
less to use existing organizational capital than to build new, specifically
economic organizations from scratch. 18
Another is that the leaders of such traditional groupings may react with
ethnic campaigns precisely to the threat that modernization will undermine
the bases of their authority. 19
A third possibility is that economic or occupational
cleavages created by modernization will coincide with and reinforce
preexisting ethnic divisions. Uneven industrialization may bypass
geographically concentrated ethnic categories, stimulating in them a
"developmental" nationalism [End Page 217] of the excluded.
The correspondence of ethnic and other cleavages is often viewed as
heightening ethnic modes of identification and organization, not just in
cases of modernization. Hechter predicts greater ethnic mobilization where
there is a cultural division of labor, with jobs and life chances segregated
according to ethnicity. 20
Melson and Wolpe associate the absence of crosscutting cleavages with the
emergence of movements of communal nationalism. 21
Joseph Rothschild considers the existence of "structured interethnic
inequalities" to be a "fertile circumstance" for the
politicization of ethnicity. 22
However, even when ethnic and economic cleavages do line
up, it is unclear whether economically advantaged or disadvantaged groups are
more prone to ethnic activism. The evidence does not point to any simple
relationship. Horowitz, based on a study of Asian, African, and Caribbean
ethnic movements, observes that among regions that seek to secede, prosperous
regions are far outnumbered by those "poor in resources and
productivity." 23
But studies of national movements in the developed West and communist world
have concluded just the opposite. Tedd Gurr in a survey of politically active
communal groups found that the most assertive separatist groups were those
least disadvantaged: "Spanish Basques, Québecois, Armenians, Ukrainians,
and Slovenes all were separatist in the 1980s despite regional prosperity,
limited autonomy, and significant national political influence." 24
In the Soviet Union it was "the nationalities with the highest levels of
educational, occupational, and often political attainment, rather than the
disadvantaged or marginal ones, that . . . advanced the most ambitious
agendas for change and engaged in the most extensive protest." 25
Horowitz also suggests a more complex categorization,
based on both the relative position of the minority ethnic group within the
region and the relative position of the region within the country. The
greatest propensity for separatism is found among educationally,
occupationally, and economically "backward" groups within
economically less developed regions, that is, among people who fear losing
out to [End Page 218] more "advanced" groups in a united
state. 26
This coincides with the "developmental" nationalism hypothesis. The
lowest propensity, by contrast, should be among "advanced" groups
in "backward" regions, who will have greater mobility opportunities
within the larger state. Meanwhile, both advanced and backward groups in
economically developed regions should exhibit intermediate propensities to
secede. On the basis of this categorization, Horowitz expected a high rate of
ethnic activism among the relatively less developed Central Asian republics
of the Soviet Union. 27
Besides long historical processes such as modernization
and besides the existence of congruent economic cleavages, a certain set of
ethnic markers may at times be politicized by some short-term, polarizing
event. 28
Conflicts over border issues can awaken previously latent ethnic
identifications and overwhelm economic or other divisions. 29
The extreme polarization and reinvigoration of ethnic identities that
occurred in the former Yugoslavia as hostilities erupted in 1990-91 is one
example. Terrorist acts associated with ethnic demands can also create a
sense of insecurity that leads to ethnic "stockading." 30
Some events may traumatize ethnic communities sufficiently to promote ethnic
suspicions and consciousness for decades. In Russia the groups deported
brutally from their homelands by Stalin in the 1940s may have been left with
a heightened sense of shared national identity. These various theories of the nature and intensity of
ethnic identifications suggest a series of hypotheses about the relative
separatist activism of regional leaders in Russia and other heterogeneous
states. First, primordial theories might imply that those groups most distant
culturally from the central nationality would have leaders who are the most
separatist. Such cultural remoteness might be observed in rates of language
usage and religion. 31
It could also imply that leaders' separatist activism will vary with the
concentration of a single, minority nationality [End Page 219] in the
region's population. The larger and more powerful the coalition that can be
mobilized by politicizing ethnic markers, the more likely are political
entrepreneurs to organize around the issue of separatist action. 32
Different versions of the modernization perspective
suggest hypotheses that separatist activism would be greater (1) at early
stages in modernization, (2) in locations of recent rapid
modernization, (3) among relatively advanced groups competing for the
benefits of modernization, (4) among backward groups in backward
regions, threatened by their inability to compete in a modernized state. The
convergent-cleavages view implies that the strongest separatist activism
would occur where there is a close relationship between ethnicity and
occupational or economic characteristics. Finally, the conflictual
mobilization view suggests separatist activism might be greatest where there
has been recent violent conflict between the minority and majority
ethnicities, where in-migration threatens traditional identities, or where
particularly traumatic incidents of repression within living memory have
catalyzed ethnic suspicions. Mobilization
A second set of theories contends that ethnic markers are
always present, and that what explains why some regional leaders make
separatist demands is whether organizations have emerged to mobilize
individuals for collective action around these markers. 33
Even intense self-identification by a large proportion of the population will
not necessarily mitigate the free-rider problem. Whether groups are mobilized
will also depend on the extent to which political entrepreneurs have
resources for providing selective incentives and monitoring contributions [End
Page 220] of members. This implies the hypothesis that separatist
activism will be greatest where ethnic organizations exist and press
political demands on local leaders. Bargaining
Power
A third level of factors that might cause variation in
regional separatist activism concerns the region's dependence and bargaining
power vis-à-vis the center. The central leadership may either accept or
reject the region's demand for greater autonomy. If it chooses the latter, it
can respond with either concessions or sanctions. Since the center is the
same for all regions, variation in its response will reflect variation in the
balance of bargaining power in particular cases. One way in which the bargaining power of different regions
may vary follows from their differing status in the system of institutions
that governs bargaining. At the start of mobilization in the late 1980s
Russia's ethnic regions were either autonomous republics, autonomous oblasts,
or autonomous okrugs. The republics, which were directly subordinate to the
RSFSR, had considerably greater rights and representation at the center than
did the autonomous oblasts and okrugs, which were subordinate to the
territories in which they were located. Policies to create an indigenous
elite, loyal to the party, went further in the republics than elsewhere,
endowing present republican leaderships with experience at higher
administrative levels and greater institutional resources for bargaining with
the center. 34
One might hypothesize, therefore, that the republics would be more likely to
press separatist claims than would regions with institutionally lower status,
because of the greater bargaining power and skill of the republican
leaderships. The second set of bargaining power factors concerns the
payoffs of the game, rather than its structure. There are two possible
reasons why an instrumentally calculating regional leader would engage in
separatist activity in the first place. First, such a leader might do so as
part of a strategy sincerely aimed at acquiring increased independence. For
this to be the case, either the region must have a positive expectation of
net benefit from greater independence, even given the center's reciprocal
sanctions, or the center's threat to sanction must be noncredible. Second, a
regional leader may engage in separatist action even though he does not
desire greater independence, in the hope of extorting other concessions from
the center in return for a retreat. For this to be the case, the center's
threat to sanction must be noncredible, and the center [End Page 221]
must be more vulnerable than is the region to the costs of extended failure
to reach agreement. 35
It must be costlier for the center to call the region's bluff than to pay it
off. The greater the expected benefit from autonomy and the
greater the risk-seeking propensities of the regional leadership, the more likely
will it be to engage in separatist action. Similarly, the lower the center's
ability to cause pain by imposing sanctions on a given ethnic region or the
higher the cost to the center of doing so, the more likely that region will
be to press demands. While the expected benefit from independence may have
many dimensions, the economic ones are perhaps easiest to measure. One might
expect regions that subsidize others heavily or that have valuable resource
endowments to anticipate a positive benefit from secession. The greater the
region's dependence on the center for communications, trade, raw materials,
subsidies, and so forth, the more vulnerable it would be as an independent
state. And the more dependent the center is on a region's products, the higher
will be the cost to the center of imposing sanctions. Regions sufficiently
large to lower the risk for imitators if they announced separation would
impose costs immediately on the center, in terms of the enhanced risk of
state disintegration. 36
Leadership
Characteristics
Finally, even if a certain level of separatist activism
was expected to have positive net benefits for the ethnic region as a whole, whether
or not it is actually implemented will depend on the particular institutional
resources, interests, and self-identifications of the leader herself. Those
with political capital invested in good relations with the center (for
example, a member of a national party) may be reluctant to risk losing or
devaluing it. Those personally more integrated into central institutions (for
instance, as an elected deputy to the national parliament) may be less likely
to seek rupture. By contrast, those who have lost their institutional
supports in the center may seek a new basis of legitimacy in a newly
"rediscovered" local ethnic identity. Both in the Soviet Union and
in Russia, analysts detected a brand of "nomenklatura
nationalism" among former local communist leaders eager to hold on to
power. 37
[End Page 222] Some spoke derisively of new Khant and Mansi
nationalists "with Russian or Ukrainian faces." Those with
significant political capital invested mostly in region-level organizations
(for example, a leader of the indigenous nationalist movement) and may view
confrontation with the center as a way to mobilize potential supporters and
increase the value of their stake. And the existence of potential rivals in
his own organization may limit his room for maneuver. In Russia the likelihood that regional governors will
challenge Yeltsin might be influenced by the extent to which they owe their
jobs to the president's support. All ethnic regions inherited Supreme Soviet
chairpersons who had been elected by the local legislature--and thus
represented the choice of central communist party and local elite. In eleven
of the republics elections were held in the period from 1991 to 1993, and
presidents or chief executives were chosen by popular vote. The heads of
administration of the autonomous oblasts and okrugs were appointed by
Yeltsin, sometimes from a short list of candidates supplied by the regional
soviet. One might expect those ethnic regions led by Yeltsin's appointees to
be less assertively separatist than those led by locally elected presidents. III.
Measuring Separatist Activism in Russia
Among Russia's ethnically defined administrative subunits,
some, such as Chechnya and Tatarstan, have become identified with repeated
demands for independence, claims to national distinctness, and rejection of
rule from Moscow. Others, such as Chukotka or the republic of Mordovia, have
almost completely avoided such confrontations. This section seeks a
systematic measure of such differences between ethnic regions in terms of
degree of separatist activism. The task is complicated by the wide variety of different
types of demands, assertions, and declarations made by regional leaders.
Since the early 1990s regional leaders in Russia have shown remarkable
ingenuity in constructing a large repertoire of pressure tactics. Among the
more extreme measures, they have threatened general strikes and terrorist
attacks, local states of emergency and tariffs, and confiscation of federal
property; they have even on occasion taken the central government to court to
try to extract greater concessions. Some scholars have emphasized the ostensibly divergent
objectives that underlie such varied actions. While some appear aimed at
wresting genuine independence from Moscow's rule, others seem calculated
gambles to elicit economic or political concessions from the center. [End
Page 223] Some theorists have advocated drawing a sharp distinction
between the pursuit of secession and pursuit of greater advantage within the
existing state (even though this may sometimes be accomplished by
strategically threatening to secede). 38
History, however, provides many examples of demands that have been presented
in a deliberately misleading way, of groups that moderate their demands for
tactical reasons, 39
and of demands that slide back and forth between autonomy and independence,
depending on the state of negotiations and current prospects. The
nonnegotiable often becomes negotiable and vice versa during the process of
negotiation. 40
Classifying movements by their stated goals is thus complicated by the
tactical nature and elasticity of such goals and by the frequent willingness
of leaders in practice to settle for less. 41
Nor can ostensibly economic movements be separated from ostensibly political
ones on the basis of the tactics they employ. Strikes that start out as
economic often turn political. And as regional leaders recognize, actions
aimed at purely economic objectives can have profound political consequences,
at times weakening the authority of the central state to the point of
revolution or collapse. The approach of this paper, therefore, is to study actions
rather than objectives and to view a range of actions as indicators of an
underlying variable--separatist activism. 42
Various indicators of separatist activism suggest themselves, based on the
previous work of a number of scholars. 43
Table
1 shows how Russia's ethnic regions line up on a number of these selected
for this paper. I include nine indicators of political-legal separatism in
the years 1990-94, as follows: 1.
a
declaration of sovereignty by the ethnic region's political leadership 44
[End Page 224] 2.
a
unilateral claim by the leadership of higher administrative status for the
region (for example, an autonomous oblast asserting republic status, and an
ASSR asserting the status of an SSR) 45
3.
adoption
by the ethnic region of its own constitution 4.
an
assertion either in the constitution or in some other legal document that
regional law or the regional constitution took precedence over federal law or
constitution 5.
holding
of a referendum in the region over regional sovereignty 6.
a
regionally coordinated boycott of the federal election of December 1993,
resulting in a a voter turnout of less than 25 percent 7.
a
declaration not just of sovereignty but of outright independence or an
official announcement that the region was no longer part of the Russian
Federation 8.
a
refusal by the leadership to send conscripts to serve elsewhere in the
federal army 9.
assertion
of the right to conduct an independent foreign or foreign economic policy Next, I included two indicators of economic demands: (1)
assertion by the political leadership of a regional right to control natural
resources; and (2) a declaration of intent to issue a regional currency.
Adding up the number of positive indicators for a given ethnic region yielded
an index of regional separatist activism. Data on these various questions were collected from a wide
variety of sources (see the notes to Table
1). These included reports from Russian and Western newspapers,
television, and radio, and scholarly works by Western and Russian regional
experts. In addition, the Nexis database was searched for additional
information about each of the regions. While there is no way to be certain
that all information is absolutely complete, an effort was made to
investigate all available sources. Available information was too sparse and
ambiguous to make a reliable judgment on two points, however--whether
Chuvashia's authorities asserted the supremacy of Chuvash law over federal
law and whether the Taimir autonomous okrug unilaterally raised its
administrative status; they are therefore recorded in the table with a
question mark. Raising the index for these two regions by one point does not
affect the results signficantly. [End Page 225] [Begin Page 229]
The results of this tabulation hold few surprises for
close observers of Russia's nationality politics. Highest in the measure of
separatist assertiveness are the two republics of Tatarstan and Chechnya,
with scores of 11 and 10, respectively. These pacesetters are closely
followed by two second-rank separatist republics--Bashkortostan and Sakha,
with scores of 8 and 7. Next, with scores of 5 or 6, comes a group of
moderately assertive republics--Buryatia, Karelia, Komi, and Kalmykia. A
second set of republics--Ingushetia, Mari El, Chuvashia, Kabardino-Balkaria,
Dagestan, North Ossetia, Tyva, and Udmurtia--was slightly less activist, with
scores of 3 or 4. Finally, Mordovia falls among the former and present
autonomous oblasts and okrugs, with scores 0 to 2. Interestingly, there do not seem to be large divergences
between the propensity of regions to assert political rights or to demand
economic autonomy. Rankings on the politico-legal index correspond fairly
consistently to those on the much narrower economic band. This constitutes
additional reason to consider a composite index of separatist activism
meaningful. IV.
Explaining Separatist Activism
Which of the theories discussed in Section II can explain
the divergent rates of separatist activism of Russia's ethnic regions? Since
different factors are assumed to operate cumulatively, multivariate
statistical techniques are most appropriate. Nevertheless, because the number
of cases is small for the number of hypothesized causal variables, it is
worth first examining correlation coefficients and cross-tabulations for
evidence of strong bivariate relationships. One factor is so apparent as to demand separate analysis:
a region's administrative status lines up almost precisely with its
level of activism (see Table
1). Almost without exception, autonomous okrugs and oblasts (AOs) were
less separatist than republics. Indeed, as Table
2 shows, with only one exception (the Volga republic of Mordovia), those
ethnic regions with the status of republics in 1990 had separatism scores at
or above the median, while those that were AOs had scores below the median.
In general, while the aos restricted themselves to a declaration of
sovereignty and sometimes an assertion of higher administrative status, the
republics went further and demanded or asserted greater prerogatives. This is powerful prima facie evidence that a region's status
within Russia's constitutional structure affected its propensity toward
separatism. 46
[End Page 229] I had hypothesized that this would be the case because
higher administrative status gave a region greater bargaining power within
the institutions of intergovernmental negotiation. Because this strong
relationship might distort other relationships, I use the following procedure
in testing the other hypotheses against the bivariate evidence: I look for
relationships that hold not just among all the ethnic regions but also among
just the sixteen republics that existed in 1990. As will be seen, some
apparent relationships with other economic or cultural factors are in fact
best explained by the difference in administrative status. [End Page 230]
With one exception, primordial ethnicity did not
seem decisive in determining which of Russia's ethnic regions staged active
separatist campaigns. The exception was religious identity, which probably
correlated with broader cultural differences. Republics with traditionally
Muslim titular nationalities were considerably more separatist than those
that were traditionally Christian, Buddhist, or shamanistic. While the mean
separatist activism score for the Muslim regions was 5.5, for the non-Muslim
regions it was 2.5. 47
Even looking only at the 1990 republics, the mean for Muslim republics was
6.7, while for their non-Muslim counterparts it was 4.2. 48
All three of the most assertively separatist regions--Tatarstan, Chechnya,
and Bashkortostan--were Muslim (see Table
3). There was no evidence to suggest that separatism was more
likely to occur in regions where primordial attachments to language were more
intense or where the size of the minority nationalist community was greater.
While there appeared at first to be a relationship between concentration of
the titular nationality in its homeland and separatist activism, [End Page
231] this turned out to be explained entirely by the fact that AOs tended
to have lower titular nationality concentrations than republics. Among the
1990 republics, there was no relationship between concentration of titular nationality
and activism. Nor was there any relationship between activism and the
proportion of non-Russians in the regional population, the rate of change in
the titular nationality population between 1959 and 1989, the change in the
titular nationality's share of the region's population in 1959-89, the
proportion of the titular nationality population using its ethnic language,
or the proportion of school students studying in the native language. (See Table
4.) This leaves religion as the only primordial factor that appears to
have played a decisive role in mobilizing ethnic groups to pressure their
regional leaders to demand more autonomy from the center. Moving on to the next question, were levels of separatist
activism in Russia's regions shaped by the tendency of modernization, ethnic
conflict, or cultural divisions of labor to politicize ethnic identities? The
evidence suggests at most a weak relationship between modernization
and separatist assertiveness. (See Table
5.) There was no observable relationship between separatist activism
scores and urbanization of the region, the rate of secondary or higher
education, the proportion of agricultural workers in the labor force, or the
1990 average wage. While there appeared to be a weak positive relationship
between the urbanization level of the titular nationality population 49
and separatist activism, again this was explainable by the particularly rural
character of national populations of the AOs (no relationship existed among
the 1990 republics). Nor was there any evidence for the
recent-rapid-modernization hypothesis. Regions in which the capital intensity
of industry had increased sharply between 1981 and 1990 were not any more likely
to be separatist. Horowitz argued that less modern groups in less modern
regions would have the greatest propensity to secede. Testing this is
complicated [End Page 232] [Begin Page 234] by the fact that
indicators of modernity do not line up neatly in comparing nationalities and
regions. Soviet nationalities policy has left some relatively rural,
agricultural groups with higher rates of educational attainment than the far
more urban and industrialized Russians. 50
However, those tests that can be run suggest Horowitz's conjecture does not
fit the pattern of separatist activism in Russia. Figure
1 shows ethnicities and regions divided up according to their rates of
urbanization, industrial output, and agricultural employment. Ethnic regions
are classified as "advanced" or "backward," but no
connotation, pejorative or otherwise, is intended by the use of these terms,
which are chosen simply to correspond to Horowitz's original hypotheses. The mean separatist activism score for each category is
given in the table. Horowitz's theory would predict the highest average
propensity to secede in the bottom right quadrant. A hypothesis of ethnic
division of labor might be identified with conditions where the national
population was either much more or much less modern than the regional
average, roughly, the top right and bottom left quadrants. In fact, the
highest average separatism score was in the one category predicted by neither
of these theories--that of advanced national populations in advanced regions.
The mean separatism score for the category of advanced nationality in
advanced region was significantly higher than that for each other category. 51
Perhaps most important, the large range in separatism scores among regions in
the same boxes of Table
1 suggests that in Russia, unlike in Africa, Asia, or the Caribbean, this
characterization has weak explanatory power. Surprisingly, this conclusion is quite robust to
differences in the definition of advanced and backward nationalities. When
they are classified by rates of secondary education or by urbanization alone,
the identity of the ethnic regions in the different cells changes somewhat.
But in each case, the mean separatism score for advanced groups in advanced
regions remains at least one whole point above the next highest category. With one possible exception, bivariate analysis did not
support the conflict hypothesis. Regions that had seen ethnic violence
during the period in question or that were involved in a territorial dispute
with their neighbors did not have significantly higher average separatist
activism scores. 52
While there appeared to be a counterintuitive negative [End Page 234] [Begin
Page 236] correlation between the proportion of the population that were
in-migrants and separatist activism (in-migration appeared to douse
separatist passions rather than to exacerbate them, as might have been
expected, given the competition of newcomers for jobs and local resources),
this relationship again was explained by the fact that AOs had higher
in-migration rates than the republics had. The possible exception concerns
the nationalities that had been deported by Stalin during World War II. The
mean separatist activism score for (1990) republics or autonomous oblasts
containing these five nationalities (Karachai, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush,
Balkars) was 5.0, compared with a mean score of 3.9 for the seventeen
republics and autonomous oblasts that did not contain deported groups.
However, the difference is not statistically significant. Thus, although
religious differences appear to have played a mobilizing role, other factors
associated with the distribution or costs of activating ethnic markers do not
seem to explain much of the Russian experience of regional separatism. Did the existence and degree of mobilization of
ethnic organizations determine which regional leaders would press separatist
demands? As this question presents particular data problems, the conclusions
here can only be preliminary. Knowing of no reliable source of information
from which to gauge the relative membership of ethnic organizations in the
regions, I therefore constructed a substitute measure, an index of the date
of founding or of the first reference in the Russian national press to an
organization in the region with specifically nationalist aims. Additional
indicators of the degree of mobilization of nationalist movements were
whether the nationalist movement had formed an armed militia and whether it
had created a parallel nationality-based parliamentary body. As expected, those ethnic regions that had established a
nationality-based parliament and where nationalist organizations had emerged
earlier appeared more likely to be actively separatist. (See Table
6.) But in large part this was due to the fact that republics were more
likely to show these signs of greater organization than were AOs. However,
the existence of a nationalist militia in a region was positively related to
separatist activism among all thirty-two ethnic regions and almost as
strongly among the pre-1990 republics. 53
The mean activism score for the six regions with national militias was 6.3,
while for twenty-five ethnic regions without militias it was 2.5. This
suggests that in ethnic regions [End Page 236] where nationalist
movements had reached this militant level of organization, they were more
effective at imposing their demands on the regional political leaders or they
posed a more credible threat of disruption that the leadership could use in
bargaining with the center. Regardless of the interests or demands of regional
constituencies, the stance of regional leaders might be expected to be
influenced by their own particular institutional interests, personal history,
and social networks. Surprisingly, however, the Russian data turned up little
evidence of this. (See Table
7.) First, regional leaders who in the past had worked as apparatchiks in
the party or state bureaucracy were neither more nor less likely to press
separatist claims than were those with other past professions. 54
Leaders who were themselves of the titular nationality appeared slightly more
likely to engage in separatist acts, but this reflected the fact that more
leaders of republics than of AOs were of the titular nationality. Leaders who
had been appointed by Yeltsin appeared much less likely to be separatist,
whereas those who had been popularly elected in their region were much more
likely to be separatist. But these effects can be explained in large part by
the fact that all elections were in republics, while almost all the
appointments from Moscow were among the AOs. 55
Considering the 1990 republics separately, the greater average activism of
leaders who were elected was not significant. In brief, the particular
characteristics and institutional interests of the regional leaders did not
play a role statistically distinguishable from the [End Page 237]
broader institutional differences between ethnic regions with different
administrative status. The one exception was in the one ethnic region where
the republican leader was himself also the leader of a nationalist
organization--Chechnya. There the separatist score was significantly higher
than the mean for the other regions. Finally, how did considerations of the dependence
and relative bargaining power of the region influence the choices of
regional leaders? Some aspects of dependence are simple consequences of
geography. [End Page 238] Regions with access to an international
border or with functioning ports might have greater chances of succeeding as
independent states or of resisting central economic retaliation. Those with
large proportions of the titular nationality population in other parts of
Russia might have more to lose from hostility and closed borders. And those
near Moscow might be more subject to central pressure than those many time
zones away. In fact, however, there was no evidence for any of these
hypotheses. Surprisingly, ethnic regions surrounded by Russian territory were
not significantly less likely to take separatist actions against the center
than were those on an international border or those with a port. 56
Nor did distance from Moscow or the relative number of ethnic hostages in
other regions make any difference. (See Table
8.) A second aspect of bargaining power and dependence
concerns the wealth, resources, and size of regions, factors that affect both
their perceived viability as separate entities and their ability to withstand
central pressure and impose economic costs on Moscow during the negotiations.
(See Table
9.) The evidence here is quite powerful. In contrast to the other factors, which yielded results
that were equivocal at best, there appears to be a strong relationship
between the economic prospects and bargaining power of an ethnic region and
its degree of separatist activism. Those ethnic regions that had large
populations and high industrial output, were major raw materials producers,
or had high industrial exports were much more separatist. Those that relied
heavily on central subventions to fund regional government spending tended to
be more cautious. 57
This suggests a strong element of rational calculation in the incidence of
separatist action among Russia's regions. While correlations and comparisons of means are useful for
discerning strong relationships between factors, they do not isolate the
separate effect of different variables in a multivariate context. For this,
regression techniques are appropriate. Table
10 shows the results of OLS regressions of the separatist activism index
on various subsets of the hypothesized causal factors. Model 1 shows the coefficient estimates when a large
selection of the hypothesized causal variables are included. Not
surprisingly, with so many independent variables for such a small number of
cases, the significance of the estimates is very low. Model 2 shows a
pared-down regression, from which I have excluded all independent variables
that did not significantly improve the fit of the regression as judged by an
F-test [End Page 239] at the .10 level. Since lack of data meant that
including either the export or the raw material production variables in the
regression would drastically reduce the number of available cases, they were
left out of the first two models. Models 3 and 4 show the estimates if they
are, nevertheless, included. The main results of the bivariate analysis are confirmed.
The administrative status of a region remains fundamentally important:
republics on average had separatism scores 4 or 5 points above nonrepublics.
Muslim regions were on average 3 to 4 points more separatist than non-Muslim
ones. (Other primordial or modernization factors remained insignificant.)
Ethnic regions dependent on central subventions seem to have been less
separatist, although this result is no longer significant once the raw
materials production or exports factors are included. 58
[End Page 240] [Begin Page 242] Though the results were not
significant, which is not surprising given the small number of cases, the
positive coefficients suggest that raw materials producers and exporters of
industrial goods were on average more separatist. And the two regions where the
president or chair of parliament was also the leader of a nationalist
organization--Chechnya and Tyva--were significantly more separatist, even
controlling for the other factors that improve the fit of the regression. Two results were more surprising. Given the impact of the
other factors, ethnic violence in a region during the previous four years was
associated with a lower propensity to take separatist action. Perhaps
recent experience with ethnic conflict heightens the regional leaders' sense
of the danger of inflaming ethnic tensions. And, other things being equal,
the earlier a nationalist organization was founded in a region, the less
separatist it was. One possible explanation for this might be that
nationalist movements which organized late were emboldened by the center's
accommodation of previous separatist demands, whereas those in the first
cohort of autonomy seekers were appeased before their goals could radicalize.
Finally, were the deteminants of demands for independence
different from the determinants of demands for greater autonomy? To check
whether the results might have been distorted by combining two qualitatively
different phenomena in the dependent variable, I ran similar regressions
excluding from the data the two republics (Chechnya and Tatarstan) that had
actually declared independence. The results were largely similar to those
reported above. Republic status remained the most significant factor, and
recent political violence remained negatively associated with separatist
activism. Dependence on subventions was still a restraining factor, though
not significant. The regressions produced results for raw material output and
industrial exports similar to those reported in Table
10, though with somewhat lower coefficients. The most notable difference
was that, with Tatarstan and Chechnya excluded, the Muslim nationality
variable was no longer at all significant. But the existence of a nationalist
militia in the ethnic region now significantly increased its predicted
separatist score, as did having a leader who was of the titular nationality.
One might reasonably conclude that while Muslim tradition may make regional
leaders more likely to seek independence, it is less important than the
pressure of organized and militant nationalists and even the regional
leader's nationality [End Page 242] in determining how assertively a
leader will demand lesser degrees of autonomy. V.
Conclusion
Russia's experience with minority nationalisms in the
early 1990s offers a natural testing ground for existing theories of
separatist activism. This article considered why, of Russia's thirty-two
ethnically defined subregions, some such as Chechnya and Tatarstan have come
to epitomize the demand for greater independence, while others such as
Mordovia and Chukotka have been virtually silent. Each separatist group has a
distinct history and set of motives to press for greater independence, but
some clear patterns do emerge from a comparative analysis.
Not only does this conclusion emerge from statistical
analysis, but it is also intriguingly evident in the contrasting histories of
some of Russia's ethnic republics. Had primordial ethnic sentiments been the
key, one might have expected to find the most adamant separatists in the
Buddhist republic of Tyva. Incorporated into the USSR only in 1944, the
republic has a population that in 1989 was 64 percent Tyvan. Of these, [End
Page 243] [Begin Page 245] 99 percent spoke Tyvan as their mother
tongue, and 60 percent of public school students studied in the Tyvan
language. By 1991 the three main political leaders--the president, prime
minister, and legislature chair--were of Tyvan nationality. Moreover, ethnic
identifications were catalyzed by violent clashes between Tyvans and Russians
in 1990, in which seven Russians were killed. 60
In fact, Tyva was one of the least separatist of
the 1990 ethnic republics, surpassed in its docility only by Mordovia. Among
the many ethnic regions whose leaders took more separatist actions than Tyva
were some with comparatively weak primordial ethnicity. In Komi, a
Christianized republic, less than a quarter of the inhabitants are Komis and
nearly one-third no longer speak Komi as their mother tongue. All schooling
in 1993 was in the Russian language. In Karelia, where the titular
nationality "is being rapidly assimilated by Russians," only 5
percent of the republic's population reported Karelian to be their mother
tongue by 1989. 61
Yet both Komi and Karelia were among the first to declare sovereignty in the
1990 outburst of minority nationalisms, as Tyva remained cautiously on the
sidelines. Factors that accentuated ethnic identifications in other
places--modernization, in-migration, conflict--did not have the expected
effect on regional separatist activism in Russia. The pattern did not suggest
a developmental or reactive nationalism of groups disadvantaged or threatened
by the process of modernization. Unlike in the Asian, African, and Caribbean
cases studied by Horowitz, the highest rate of separatism was not among
economically less developed groups in less developed regions. In fact, just
the opposite was true: insofar as there was any relationship between
modernization and separatism, it was economically and educationally advanced
groups in more developed regions that were at the forefront. Russian
separatists had more in common with Catalonians and Basques than with
Filipino Muslims or Iraqi Kurds. Nor was greater separatism associated with
particularly sharp divergences between the modernization levels of the
titular nationality and of the rest of the population, as might be predicted
by an "ethnic division of labor" hypothesis. And ethnic conflicts,
rather than polarizing communities and catalyzing concentrated minorities'
demands for self-government, seem to have served as a cautionary reminder to
leaders of the dangers of inflaming ethnic passions. [End Page 245] It is hard to be sure what difference the degree of
organization of nationalist movements made, given the very limited data
available. However, controlling for other factors, it appears that earlier
emergence of a nationalist organization was associated with lower
rates of separatist activism. Possibly, late organizing nationalist groups
tended to be more radical than those that appeared before substantial
liberalization had reduced the risks. Separatist activism does seem to have
increased when the region's president, head of administration, or chair of
parliament was also a leader of the nationalist movement, as was the case in
Chechnya and Tyva. Some of the strongest results concern the starting
positions and relative bargaining power of regions in the game of nerves with
the center. Those ethnic regions with the institutional resources and access
of republics played their hand much more provocatively than those with only
the status of autonomous oblasts or okrugs. Those ethnic regions heavily
dependent on central subventions quite sensibly adopted a meeker posture.
Those with export potential and valuable natural resources seem to have been
more assertive. This may explain Tyva's relative quiescence. From the
early 1990s, its nationalist movement was quite developed and integrated with
the republic's government. A nationalist leader, Kaadir-Ool Bicheldei, served
as chairman of parliament. Demands of the more radical Tyvan nationalists
"clearly exceeded even those of some of the Baltic states' Fronts,"
according to one Estonian observer, and included transfer of the republic's
capital to a city with a more concentrated Tyvan population. 62
For all this, Tyvan leaders have explicitly rejected a confrontational
approach to Moscow, citing the fact that the republic relies on central
subsidies for more than 90 percent of its budget. Tyvan officials have
actively discouraged out-migration by Russians from the urban areas
because of the negative economic consequences of a loss of skilled labor. 63
Rather than fighting off attempts at separatism, Yeltsin
found himself during a 1994 visit actually encouraging the Tyvans to be more
self-reliant and to expand ties with neighboring China and Mongolia. In a
particularly incongruous incident, it was Bicheldei who showed Yeltsin round
a sheepskin coat factory under construction in the capital, Kyzyl, and
reminded the Russian president of the need for federal subsidies. Yeltsin,
immediately promising federal aid to build the factory, wrote in [End Page
246] its guest book: "Good job. We'll give you money!" 64
The careful ambivalence of official Tyva's flirtation with nationalism, like
the statistical results presented in this article, suggests an essentially
rational calculus of potential costs and benefits. But costs and benefits of what? The reference point of
comparison for most ethnic regions seems not to have been a state of actual
secession, for in that case, those regions surrounded by Russian territory
would surely be much more vulnerable and cautious than those on international
borders or with functioning ports. Rather, the reference point appears to
have been a greater degree of autonomy--lower central taxes, rights over
natural resources, freedom to export with fewer restrictions. Those ethnic
regions that could benefit from increased independence at the margin
were the most likely to press a wider variety of claims. It is unlikely that
many of the most adamantly separatist regional leaders desired actual
secession. In fact, the demands and actions of Russia's ethnic
regions seem in many ways similar to the bargaining ploys and pressure
tactics employed by some of the country's non-ethnic regions to
extract benefits from the center. 65
Ordinary oblasts and krais have in recent years demanded higher status and
greater economic rights, and some have unilaterally declared themselves
republics. Conscious of the instrumental benefits of separatist activism,
some leaders of nonethnic regions have even expressed envy of the bargaining
power that a non-Russian population brings. The deputy governor of Tambov
Oblast recently joked that when he saw the advantages ethnic republics were
receiving, "I started to think, should I import Tatars into the oblast
to make up 50 percent of the population." 66
Russia's experience offers new perspectives on the
comparative politics of separatism. A tradition of scholarship on African and
other developing countries has emphasized the role of rational calculation in
the rise and behavior of ethnic movements. 67
Seemingly spontaneous ethnic outbursts are often elements of a rational
competition over distributional outcomes. Particularly in federal states,
regional protests serve [End Page 247] to pressure the central
government for greater resource allocations, and credible threats of
secession are a powerful form of protest. 68
The pattern of separatist activism noted in this article suggests a similar
logic in post-Soviet Russia. Furthermore, empirical evidence suggests that in
Russia separatist actions by regional leaders were indeed effective at
extracting greater fiscal benefits from the center. 69
Though cultural identities clearly play a role in
separatist activism in Russia, they appear to be more of a resource for
regional leaders than a motivating force. Whatever the explanation for the
incidence of ethnic identifications and organization, the way such factors
are translated into regional political strategies seems highly structured by
the rational evaluation of regional interests by local leaders. Such leaders
are not the political embodiment of nonrational primordial impulses so much
as brokers between region and center in a complicated nested game, in which
they consider the potential economic gains of greater autonomy, the risks of
central fiscal retaliation and of provoking local ethnic strife, and their
own need to sustain local organizational supports. If ethnicity in Russia is
explosive, the outbursts are very much the controlled explosions of an
internal combustion engine, which, harnessed within a system of constraints,
produce movement in a direction chosen by the driver. 70
The association of advanced economic development,
industrial wealth, export capacity, and natural resources with separatism in
Russia mirrors similar patterns noted in the Soviet Union and in parts of
Eastern Europe. 71
Among postcommunist multiethnic states there appear to have been more
Slovenias than Slovakias. Future research is necessary to explain why this
should be the case. One hypothesis is that for ethnic regions in
postcommunist states separatism implies not isolation but more rapid
integration into the world market, as well as a decrease in the interregional
redistributive transfers endemic to centrally planned economies. As such,
secession from a falteringly reforming [End Page 248] state may have
more appeal for potentially profitable regions than for their more depressed,
underdeveloped, or resource-poor neighbors. The ethnic revival in the reforming communist states of
Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union caught many observers by surprise,
and suggested various explanations. The sudden invigoration of ethnic claims
might reflect a retreat to premodern forms of solidarity, caused ultimately
by the communist order's very success in eradicating traces of civil society
around which newer definitions of identity could have crystallized. Or it
might be explained by an essentially instrumental logic, in which ethnic
forms of mobilization hold particular advantages for actors within the
distinctive set of institutions evolving out of reforming communist orders.
The evidence presented in this article suggests the latter view. The
explicitly ethnic administrative architecture of communist federal states
left subunits with institutional resources proportional to their previously
recognized ethnic status. At the same time, social identifications that
support anticenter protest endow ethnic regions with particular advantages in
the bargaining for centrally bestowed benefits. In sum, the evidence suggests
an instrumental institutionalist view of ethnic politics in Russia. What
drives the rise of ethnonational demands is not just the strength of ethnic
identifications and movements, but the rational calculation of what they can
achieve. Daniel
S. Treisman is
Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California at
Los Angeles. He writes about Russian politics and is completing a book on the
politics of regional crises in post-So viet Russia. Notes
*
I would like to thank Henry Hale for his useful comments. This work was
supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from Harvard University's Russian
Research Center. 1.
The literature is far too voluminous to cite, but a selection of influential
sources would include Rupert Emerson, From Empire to Nation (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1960); Clifford Geertz, "The Integrative
Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States,"
in Geertz, ed., Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in
Asia and Africa (New York: Free Press, 1963); Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism
and Social Communication (Cambridge: mit Press, 1966); Anthony D. Smith, The
Ethnic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Michael
Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National
Development, 1536-1966 (London: Routledge, 1975); Robert H. Bates,
"Modernization, Ethnic Competition, and the Rationality of Politics in
Contemporary Africa," in Donald Rothchild and Victor Olorunsola, eds., State
versus Ethnic Claims (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1983); Donald Horowitz, Ethnic
Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); and
Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1994). 2.
For instance, Geertz (fn. 1); Michael Banton, "Modelling Ethnic and
National Relations," Ethnic and Racial Studies 17 (January 1994).
3.
Margaret Levi and Michael Hechter, "A Rational Choice Approach to the
Rise and Decline of Ethnoregional Political Parties," in Edward A.
Tiryakian and Ronald Rogowski, eds., New Nationalisms of the Developed
West (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1985), esp. 134-36. Much work on this
subject draws on Tilly's theory of resource mobilization; see Charles Tilly, From
Mobilization to Revolution (Englewood Hills, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1978). 4.
For example, V. P. Gagnon Jr., "Ethnic Nationalism and International
Conflict: The Case of Serbia," International Security 19 (Winter
1994-95); Ted Robert Gurr, Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical
Conflicts (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1993). 5.
I use the term "separatist" in this article to refer to leaders who
make demands along this spectrum--not necessarily to those who overtly desire
complete independence for their ethnic region. 6.
See, for instance, Steven L. Solnick, "Federal Bargaining in
Russia," East European Constitutional Review 4 (Fall 1995). 7.
George Tsebelis, Nested Games: Rational Choice in Comparative Politics
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Robert Putnam,
"Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games," International
Organization 42 (Summer 1988). 8.
Gellner, "Nationalism in a Vacuum," in Alexander J. Motyl, ed., Thinking
Theoretically about Soviet Nationalities (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1992). 9.
Geertz (fn. 1); Edward Shils, Center and Periphery: Essays in
Macrosociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). 10.
Geertz (fn. 1), 109-10. 11.
See Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern (New York: Random House,
1990), 142; Jacques Rupnik, "Europe's New Frontiers: Remapping
Europe," Daedalus 123 (Summer 1994), 95. 12.
On "pressure cooker" theories, see Branko Milanovic, "Why Have
Communist Federations Collapsed?" Challenge 37 (March-April
1994). 13.
Nathan Gardels, "Two Concepts of Nationalism: An Interview with Isaiah
Berlin," New York Review of Books, November 21, 1991. 14.
George Schöpflin, "Postcommunism: The Problems of Democratic
Construction," Daedalus 123 (Summer 1994), 137. 15.
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1983); Walker Connor, "The Politics of
Ethnonationalism," Journal of International Affairs 27 (January
1973). 16.
Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone, "The Dialectics of Nationalism in the
USSR," Problems of Communism 23 (May-June 1974). 17.
For an example of the first type of argument, see Deutsch (fn. 1). 18.
Douglass North has argued that increasing returns to scale and sunk capital
lead to a retention of organizations even after their original purposes are
superseded; North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic
Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). This seems to
lie behind many discussions of "competitive" ethnonationalism in
developing African states; see, e.g., Bates (fn. 1), who notes that, "in
contemporary Africa, the levels of ethnic competition and modernization
covary" (p. 152). See also Joseph Rothschild, Ethnopolitics: A
Conceptual Framework (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). 19.
Charles C. Ragin, "Ethnic Political Mobilization: The Welsh Case," American
Sociological Review 44 (August 1979). Rogowski terms this
"reactive" nationalism; see the helpful discussion in Ronald
Rogowski, "Conclusion," in Tiryakian and Rogowski (fn. 3). 20.
Hechter (fn. 1). 21.
Robert Melson and Howard Wolpe, "Modernization and the Politics of
Communalism: A Theoretical Perspective," American Political Science
Review 64 (December 1970), 1116. 22.
Rothschild (fn. 18), 2. 23.
Horowitz (fn. 1), 233. 24.
Gurr (fn. 4), 82. 25.
Philip G. Roeder, "Soviet Federalism and Ethnic Mobilization," World
Politics 43 (January 1991), 197; see also Kisangani N. Emizet and Vicki
L. Hesli, "The Disposition to Secede: An Analysis of the Soviet
Case," Comparative Political Studies 27, no. 4 (1995). 26.
Horowitz (fn. 1). The use of the adjectives "advanced" and
"backward" here is not intended to imply any favorable or
pejorative evaluation; they are chosen simply to address a literature that
uses these specific terms. 27.
Donald L. Horowitz, "How to Begin Thinking Comparatively about Soviet
Ethnic Problems," in Motyl (fn. 8), 9-22, esp. 16-17. 28.
Banton (fn. 2), 14. 29.
Barry R. Posen, "The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict," Survival
35 (Spring 1993). 30.
Richard Jay, "Nationalism, Federalism and Ireland," in Murray
Forsyth, ed., Federalism and Nationalism (Leicester: Leicester
University Press, 1989). 31.
In Russia, for instance, the Muslim and Buddhist nationalities and those with
higher rates of retention of the native language might be expected to
mobilize more quickly for autonomy than Orthodox Christian and more
linguistically assimilated nationalities. 32.
Cf. Horowitz (fn. 1), 267: "The strength of a secessionist movement and
the heterogeneity of its region are inversely related." Emizet and Hesli
find that this was true of Soviet republics in the late 1980s: the
concentration of a nationality in its own republic was "a powerful
indicator of the disposition to secede"; Emizet and Hesli (fn. 26), 530.
33.
I do not mean to imply too sharp a division between consciousness of cultural
identities and organization for collective action. Often the cultural markers
around which organizations form are themselves created by those who seek to
mobilize groups for collective action; see Paul Brass, Religion and
Politics in North India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974),
27; and E. J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of
Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). However, various
scholars have drawn a similar distinction between markers and mobilization.
Subrata Mitra, for instance, distinguishes between the "social
anchors" necessary to define a cultural nationalist movement and the
mobilization of such a movement around them; see Mitra, "The Rational
Politics of Cultural Nationalism: Subnational Movements of South Asia in
Comparative Perspective," British Journal of Political Science 25
(January 1995), 64. And Rothschild argues that political entrepreneurs
mobilize ethnicity from "a psychological or cultural or social
datum" into "political leverage for the purpose of altering or reinforcing
. . . systems of structured inequality between and among ethnic
categories"; see Rothschild (fn. 18), 2. 34.
Roeder (fn. 25), 228. 35.
The center's "inside option" must be less attractive than that of
the region; see Jon Elster, The Cement of Society: A Study of Social Order
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 76. 36.
There is a temporal assymetry that enables regions which in fact do not wish
to secede and who cannot therefore credibly threaten actually to implement
such an action to force concessions from the center by merely making the
announcement--since it is the announcement that, if unrepealed or unpunished,
will lower the perceived risk for imitators. 37.
Richard Sakwa, Russian Politics and Society (London: Routledge, 1993).
38.
See Hudson Meadwell, "Transitions to Independence and Ethnic Nationalist
Mobilization," in William J. Booth, Patrick James, and Hudson Meadwell,
eds., Politics and Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993), 191-92; Michael Hechter, "The Dynamics of Secession," Acta
Sociologica 35 (Winter 1992), 267. 39.
Horowitz suggests the example of the Iraqi Kurds, who pressed for autonomy
rather than full independence in part so as not to antagonize the Iranian
regime, from which they had received support in the 1970s; see Horowitz (fn.
1), 231-32. 40.
Donald Rothchild, "Collective Demands for Improved Distributions,"
in Rothchild and Olorunsola (fn. 1), 174. 41.
Horowitz (fn. 1), 232. 42.
Another study that classifies peripheral movements on a continuum of declared
aims is Stein Rokkan and Derek Urwin, Economy, Territory, Identity
(London: Sage Publications, 1983), 140-41. 43.
Emizet and Hesli (fn. 25), 505-8; Mark Whitehouse, "Ethnic Competition
and the Development of Autonomy: A Comparative Study of Three Russian
Republics" (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American
Political Science Association, Chicago, 1995). 44.
Either the region's supreme soviet, supreme soviet chairman, or president. 45.
Included here are only those ethnic regions for which a report existed of a unilateral
assertion of higher status by the ethnic region's authorities. In July 1991
the Russian supreme soviet ratified the increase in status of Adygeia,
Gorno-Altai, Karachaevo-Cherkessia, and Khakassia from autonomous oblasts to
republics. But each of these had already demanded such a change unilaterally.
In June 1992 the supreme soviet also declared Ingushetia to be a republic;
since I could find no record of a prior assertion of republic status by
authorities in Ingushetia, it was coded zero. 46.
This conclusion might be weakened if an ethnic region's administrative status
were itself determined by primordial ethnic factors. Available secondary
sources reveal few specifics about how such administrative status
distinctions emerged. But it is known that most of the distinctions that
existed in 1990, at the onset of the "ethnic revival," were
essentially fixed in the early postrevolutionary years of the 1920s and the
early 1930s. As of 1936 fifteen ethnic regions were ASSRs, five were
autonomous oblasts, and others were autonomous okrugs; see Viktor Kozlov, The
Peoples of the Soviet Union (London: Hutchinson, 1988), 33. In 1990 the
same fifteen were republics and the same five autonomus oblasts. The only
change among these categories was that Tyva, which had been an independent
state under Moscow's tutelage until 1944, had been incorporated into Russia
as an ASSR (after a period as an autonomous oblast). Thus, whether it was
primordial or other factors that accounted for administrative status, it was
primordial factors as of the 1920s or 1930s. Many primordial factors had, however, changed in the
intervening years. For instance, while the number of Ossetians in the RSFSR
more than doubled between 1937 and 1989, the number of Karelians dropped by
46 percent; see Chauncy D. Harris, "A Geographic Analysis of Non-Russian
Minorities in Russia and Its Ethnic Homelands," Post-Soviet Geography
34, no. 9 (1993). In-migration has drastically changed the concentration of
various nationalities in their homelands. While some ethnic populations have
in large part retained their national language (98 or 99 percent of Tyvans,
Karachai, Kabards, Chechens, Ingush, and many of the nationalities of
Dagestan reported the ethnic language to be their mother tongue in 1989),
others have assimilated linguistically to Russian (only 49 percent of Karels
in 1989 considered Karelian their mother tongue, less than the percentage
among many nationalities of the autonomous okrugs). Decisions on administrative status in the early
postrevolution years were highly centralized. Thus, "Autonomy was
granted in each case by a unilateral decision of the central authority";
see E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, vol. 1 (New York:
Macmillan, 1951), 329. Some of the new ASSRs appeared to have strong
primordial claims to such status; but others did not. About Siberia, Carr
writes of "primitive native tribes . . . scattered over vast, thinly populated
areas" with "no effective nationalist or separatist movements"
(p. 350). Still, Buryat-Mongolia became an autonomous republic in 1923, and
the vast Yakut territory was recognized as an autonomous republic in 1922. Second, statistical attempts to isolate the influence of
administrative status from the possible influence of other factors correlated
with such status suggest that it is administrative status per se that best
explains the variation in activism. Republics might in theory be more prone to
separatism because they have larger or more dense populations, higher
concentrations of the titular--or more broadly of non-Russian--nationalities,
more extensive schooling in native languages, more industrialized economies,
or more organized separatist movements. One way to test whether the
administrative status variable is picking up such spurious correlations is to
run regressions of the separatist activism index on administrative status,
adding these other potential explanatory factors and observing whether the
estimated coefficient on the administrative status variable changes. When I
did this, the administrative status variable remained significant in all
cases, and the estimated coefficient (3.9 when no control variables are
included) changed little in most cases, and in the most extreme case
(controlling for regional population) fell only to 2.4. Viewing the evidence
in light of these considerations, the most plausible conclusion is that
administrative status itself, independent of primordial or other factors,
played a significant role in determining the separatist activism of an ethnic
region's leadership. 47.
The difference was significant at the .01 level. 48.
This difference was, however, only significant at the .06 level. 49.
Because of data limitations, figures used here were for the 1989 urbanization
rate of the particular nationality within the USSR, not just Russia. 50.
For instance, despite a population more than twice as rural as the Russians,
Buryats had a 50 percent higher rate of completion of higher education,
according to the 1989 census. 51.
The mean score for "advanced" populations in "backward"
regions was also significantly higher than that for "backward"
nationalities in "advanced" regions. 52.
This was the case whether all ethnic regions or just 1990 republics were
included. Note, however, the multivariate results presented in Table
10. 53.
The mean separatism score for ethnic regions with a nationalist militia was
significantly higher than for others in both cases. 54.
A region's leader is taken to be the president or head of executive in
republics and the head of administration in the AOs. This, of course,
simplifies the more complicated balance of power in most regions. 55.
The one exception is Ingushetia's General Aushev, who was first appointed by
Yeltsin and then elected president. 56.
This was true whether one considered all thirty-two ethnic regions or only
the sixteen 1990 republics. 57.
This was not significant, though, when the 1990 republics were considered
separately. 58.
This may, of course, be due to the sharp drop in available cases when these
factors are added. 59.
One interesting explanation suggested by an anonymous referee was that
regional leaders might have felt more secure playing chicken with the center
if they had a sizable Russian population that could be held hostage. 60.
Toomas Alatalu, "Tuva--a State Reawakens," Soviet Studies
44, no. 5 (1992), 890. 61.
Harris (fn. 46), 584. 62.
Alatalu (fn. 60), 892. 63.
Stefan Sullivan, "Interethnic Relations in Post-Soviet Tuva," Ethnic
and Racial Studies 18, no. 1 (1995). 64.
Segondnya, June 17, 1994, p. 2, trans. in Current Digest of the
Post-Soviet Press 46, no. 24 (1994), 18. 65.
For a more detailed analysis of Russian center-region relations, in which
strategies of both ethnic and nonethnic regions are considered in parallel,
see Daniel Treisman, "After the Deluge: The Politics of Regional Crisis
in Post-Soviet Russia" (Manuscript, Russian Research Center, Harvard University,
1996). 66.
Author's interview with Yuri N. Blokhin, first deputy head of administration,
Tambov Oblast Tambov, June 16, 1996. 67.
See, in particular, Bates (fn. 1); also Rothschild (fn. 18). 68.
On the role of such protests in India, see Subrata K. Mitra, Power,
Protest and Participation: Local Elites and the Politics of Development in
India (London: Routledge, 1992). 69.
Treisman found that, in 1992, Russian regions which had declared sovereignty
early on were on average rewarded with nearly 19,000 rubles per inhabitant in
central fiscal transfers and tax breaks. See Daniel Treisman, "The
Politics of Intergovernmental Transfers in Post-Soviet Russia," British
Journal of Political Science (July 1996). Treisman has also modeled why
it might often be rational for a central government to appease such
separatist regional leaders; see Treisman, "Crises and Stability in
Federal States: A Game Theoretic Analysis" (Manuscript, Russian Research
Center, Harvard University, 1995). 70.
The contrasting cases of "highway crashes" in ethnic relations,
such as Chechnya, merely highlight the general trend of negotiated compromise
between center and ethnic regions. 71.
Emizet and Hesli (fn. 25); Roeder (fn. 25).
http://0-muse.jhu.edu.uncclc.coast.uncwil.edu:80/journals/world_politics/v049/49.2treisman.html.
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