Wrapping my head around the “need” to nationalize

A major tension seemed to dominate Hirsch’s piece, between the ethnographers who attempted (at first) to accurately and respectfully study and understand identities throughout the Soviet Union and the state goal of consolidating identities into nationalities that could be understood in a similar manner of European nation-states. This tension is most apparent to me in considering the change from 172 nationalities to 57 over time (255-256), and in the phenomena of ethnography experts being increasingly required to justify their studies and delineations with Stalin’s definition of a nation. Over time the state goal of standardizing a conception of national identity into a “modern” Western European understanding that is associated with territorial integrity won out, with the fact that “all of the USSR’s official natsional’nosti had become nations, were on their way to becoming nations, or were part of established nations in other countries” (277). “Nationalities were no longer amorphous collections of peoples with one or two distinctive traits in common. They were peoples located within clearly demarcated national-territorial boundaries” (277). Sorry for sticking two quotes right next to each other, but I wanted to demonstrate the tone of achievement that I think is present. I’d like to acknowledge this tone, and try to figure out what in this process of nation or state–building could be considered an achievement, and whether the state goal and methods of establishing and national consciousness were justified, either by their intentions or by their outcomes.

Maybe to rephrase this question is to ask:

1. What motivated the need to consolidate nationalities? (I think that some form of an answer appears in Stalin’s address, as well as in the Martin reading.) Can/do/should we assign some value to these motivations (as good motivations, selfish motivations, ideological motivations, political)?
2. How were the methods of consolidating nationalities through censuses coercive and how were they voluntary? In many instances Hirsch describes local experts and self-identifying peoples being able to provide input and control over their identity, in many instances they have no control over this. This is particularly interesting considering the importance of “self-determining identity” in the ideological discourse.
3. What happened in the 1937 census, why did it get the response that it did? Was this the point that the tension I described above reached an unsustainable level? Are there other background/institutional changes that can explain this event better?
4. Lastly, can we imagine and analyze an ideologue of Soviet socialism that doesn’t require consolidation of nationalities? The USSR seemed to come to the conclusion that nationalities were important in eventually reaching post-nationalist socialism, but in creating and consolidating these nationalities—in some instances “in regions where it did not previously exist” (277)—the ideologue seems to me to undermine and be inconsistent with itself. Socialism in this instance seems to be largely defined and structured off of Western European capitalism, almost arbitrarily. This feels especially true to me considering the discourse using the phrases “modern” and “backwards” in Hirsch’s paper, and “center” and “‘border-regions'” in Stalin’s speech, all of which seem inherently capitalist and imperialist, which the USSR is supposed to be explicitly against.