4. Affirmative Action in the Soviet East, 1923-1932

Abstract

Today, when Edward Said has turned "orientalism" into a universalIy recognized term and the inspiration for a burgeoning scholarly industry, nothing seems to us more characteristic of colonialism than the division of humankind into the arbitrary, essentialized, and hierarchical categories of east and west. It therefore seems odd that the Soviet Union, whose nationalities policy was explicitly formulated as a decolonizing measure, would not reject those categories and instead affirm the unity of mankind. In one sense, they did. The Bolsheviks' Marxist sociology led them to repudiate east and west as racial categories and to deny any long-term differences in the economic, social, or political capacities of alI nationalities. However, the east/west dichotomy was nevertheless preserved as a cultural distinction (one that could at times contain much of the content of the old racial divide). This was not, in fact, surprising. Indeed, nothing better illustrates the way in which the Affirmative Action Empire preserved imperial categories, while reversing their policy implications, than the maintenance and systematization of colonialism's east/west dichotomy. Since this division did in fact influence policy implementation, my analysis of korenizatsiia has likewise preserved this old dichotomy. In Chapter 3, 1 undertook a case study of linguistic korenizatsiia in Ukraine, which was the most important policy in the Soviet "west." In this chapter, 1 analyze the most important policy in the Soviet "east": Affirmative Action, the practice of granting ·preferences to non-Russians in admissions, hiring, and promotion in education, industry, and government.1