Hirsch, Francine. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet
Union. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London: 2005.
Cara Wood
3/25/13
Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union by
Francine Hirsch is an in depth study of the Soviet Union’s ethnic diversity and how the USSR
handled that diversity by making it part of their story. Hirsch begins her book by pointing out
that when the Soviet Union collapsed, there emerged from it many nation-states that had not
been even thought of before the Revolution. These nation-states, Hirsch claims, were the result
of the USSR’s nation building program. This program existed in order to help build socialism
throughout the Soviet Union. At first, the idea of fostering nationalism in communities seems
like it ought to contradict the idea of building socialism, but Hirsch shows how the Soviet Union
actually saw the nation-state phase as an important step towards socialism. The officials of the
Soviet Union were bothered by the fact that they had so many different peoples within their
borders, most of whom did not consider themselves to be affiliated with any sort of nationality.
This nation-building that the USSR did had several dimensions. The first was that the Soviet
Union actually had to determine and define all the ethnicities in the USSR. This was done by
many Soviet ethnographers, the first generation of whom were all left over from the old regime.
The second generation was true Soviet ethnographers and was better able to conduct their
ethnographies in a Soviet fashion. These ethnographers spent years determining nationalities and
whether or not peoples should be divided into ethnic or economic regions. Ultimately this
culminated in the 1926 census in which regions were divided along sort of ethno-economic lines.
After all this was complete, the USSR set about educating its people on the diversity of the
Soviet Union. The Ethnographic Department created a museum with displays of many different
peoples and their habits. This was all important because the USSR believed that ethnicity did not
matter to one’s humanity. All humans were the same, they were just on different locations on the
path to communism. In the final section, all this culminated to Hirsch’s discussion on Soviet
racial ideology versus Nazi racial ideology and a discussion on how ethnicity played into the
terror. The terror, Hirsch claimed, was in part directed against people (and entire nations) who
exhibited nationalism that appeared to be contradictory to building socialism.
This study fits in well with the subjectivity school. Hirsch seems to be building on the
work done previously by Katerina Clark in Moscow, The Fourth Rome. Early in her introduction,
Hirsch “the Soviet Union took shape through a process of selective borrowing” from the West.1
This allows her to discuss in depth how the Soviet Union’s ethnographic methods were poached
from the West and then Soviet-ized. This argument, of course, is practically right out of Clark’s
book. Hirsch also has many moments in which she seems to repeat Stephen Kotkin from his
Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, particularly in his ideas of “speaking
Bolshevik”.2 Hirsch does this almost explicitly in her first chapter saying, “the Bolsheviks and
the experts used most of the same terms, and thus seemed to speak the same language, they
actually defined these terms somewhat differently”.3 She is even more explicit later in the book
saying, “Soviet leaders … introduced new vocabularies and structures, and then worked to make
sure people found them meaningful”.4 This statement is framed in a slightly totalitarian way that
seems to undermine exactly what Kotkin was getting at however. It comes across mildly
1
Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union, (Cornell
University Press, Ithaca and Lond: 2005), 5.
2
Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization, (University of California Press, Berkeley and
Cambridge: 1995), 199.
3
4
Hirsch, 36.
Hirsch, 147.
totalitarian because it suggests that the state was literally putting words in its subject’s mouths.
Later in the same paragraph, Hirsch even seems to be a revisionist because she says that “local
elites and peasants … learned to frame their protests in the language of the state”.5 However,
overall, Hirsch seems to fit well into the subjectivity school, showing how the peoples of the
Soviet Union participated in the nationalizing process.
Ultimately, though Hirsch’s book is filled with information, it lacks the necessary climax
to get her point across. The final section contains two chapters, the first of which is about the
Soviet racial viewpoint versus the Nazi’s and really could be its own book. The second is about
the way in which the Soviet views on nationalism affected the terror. It is unclear which of these
chapters is meant to be the culmination of her work, but it is clear that only one of the chapters
should be Empire of Nations, and the other one should be the culmination of a different book.
Either that, or the chapter on the Nazi’s should be a part of an argument of a completely different
study. In fact, the first two section alone actually concluded the argument she set out in the
introduction in complete. The final section seemed to be a sort of unnecessary and somewhat
confusing addition.
5
Ibid.