Historical Legacies, Nationalist Mobilization, and Political Outcomes in Russia and Serbia: AWeberian ViewAuthor(s): Veljko VujačićSource: Theory and Society, Vol. 25, No. 6 (Dec., 1996), pp. 763-801Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/657828Accessed: 09/12/2008 12:12

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Historical legacies, nationalist mobilization, and political outcomes in Russia and Serbia: A Weberian view

VELJKO VUJACIC Oberlin College

The community of political destiny, i.e., above all, of common struggle of life and death, has given rise to groups with joint memories which often have had a deeper impact than the ties of merely cul- tural, linguistic, or ethnic community. It is this

"community of memories" which, as we shall see, constitutes the ultimately decisive element of "national consciousness."

Max Weber'

The closing months of 1991 witnessed the disintegration of two multi- national Communist federal states with a comparable history of indig- enous revolutions and similar, if not entirely equivalent, policies on nationalities. Both in the Soviet Union and in Yugoslavia, the collapse of the state was largely caused by the increasingly vocal demands for

autonomy, sovereignty, or outright independence on the part of repub- lics opposed to the federal center, and the inability of the latter to con- tain the process of disintegration. In both cases, the long-term causes of

disintegration can be attributed to the unintended consequences of Communist policy on nationalities that contributed to the process of

nation-building, especially among the peripheral nations with a hit- herto weak or not fully developed national consciousness.2

The deceptive similarity of outcomes in the two cases, however, hides an important anomaly. The remarkable victory of the Russian demo- cratic movement in August 1991 against the coalition of "empire- savers,"3 embodied in coercive state institutions, conservative party structures, and the military-industrial complex, strongly contrasts with the success of the equivalent Communist-nationalist coalition in Serbia in mobilizing the grievances of Serbian minorities in Croatia and Bosnia, and rallying officers of the Yugoslav army for the cause of state preservation.

Theory and Society 25: 763-801, 1996. ? 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

764

To be sure, neither the triumph of Russian democracy, tainted by numerous problems since 1991, nor the perpetuation of an authoritar- ian Serbian regime is a conclusive development. The relative success of Vladimir Zhirinovsky as well as the revived Russian Communist Party in the December 1993 and 1995 elections points to the presence of a possibly "restorationist" and, at least partially, "imperialist" con-

stituency in the Russian heartland. Nor can the possibility be excluded that a change of regime will occur in Serbia, bringing the defeated democratic opposition into power.

Nevertheless, the difference in outcomes is sufficiently striking to

require explanation. The peaceful disintegration of the Soviet state, for-

mally dissolved with the support of Russian president Boris Yeltsin in December 1991, can be seen as a decisive watershed making the Rus- sian outcome qualitatively different from its Serbian counterpart. Whereas the Serbian regime never formally recognized the existence of the Croatian and Bosnian states within the administrative republican boundaries drawn by the Communist regime after the war, Russia's

recognition of Ukraine, Belorus, and Kazakhstan within pre-existing boundaries has effectively turned the borders between Soviet republics into those of internationally recognized states. Consequently, while the

Yugoslav conflict could be interpreted, at least partially and in its ori-

gins as a "civil war," any attempt by a prospective restorationist Russian

regime to assume a more aggressive stance in defense of its co-nation- als in the so-called "near abroad" will inevitably assume the character of "international aggression."

The element of legal and political discontinuity between the Soviet Union and a hypothetical Russian "restorationist" state is likely to

prove to be one of the decisive constraining factors facing the com- munist-nationalist coalition, even if it succeeds in coming to power. In

addition, any new development that would make the Russian case

qualitatively more similar to its Serbian counterpart, would have to take

place within the context of a formally democratic regime. Consequent- ly, the institutional continuity enjoyed by Milosevic's ruling Socialist

Party as well as the army and federal government institutions in Serbia would be lacking in the Russian case. Such considerations are impor- tant enough to justify the choice of 1991 as an end point for the pur- poses of comparative analysis.4

My main goal in this article, therefore, is to isolate some of the causes for the different reactions of the "dominant" nations - Russians and

765

Serbs - to the disintegration of the larger state. Although I primarily concentrate on the reasons for the emergence of different kinds of "homeland politics" in the two nations, I also emphasize the signifi- cance of the historical role of diaspora communities in explaining dif- ferent patterns of nationalist mobilization.5

The comparative analysis- that follows is informed by Max Weber's

writings on the nation, nationalism, and imperialism. I argue that the

overlap between nationalist and "imperialist" constituencies charac- teristic of "dominant" nations in multinational states makes Weber's ideas particularly appropriate in explaining the "defensive" political coalitions that emerged in Russia and Serbia during the mid-1980s.

Consequently, a related aim in this article is to revive an interest in Max Weber's discussion of nations and nationalism.

Max Weber on nations, nationalism, and imperialism

Max Weber's discussion of nations, nationalism, and imperialism has not been consistently applied in empirical explanations of nationalist mobilization. Nor have his scattered remarks on the topic in Economy and Society exerted the kind of theoretical influence of his short essay on "Class, Status, and Party" that has dominated our thinking about social stratification throughout the post-war period.6 Instead, essays and books on Weber as a political thinker and an ideologist of German Machtpolitik outnumber by far those studies that attempt to apply his ideas on nationalism to empirical explanation. Raymond Aron, Wolf-

gang Mommsen, and David Beetham have particularly contributed to the latter.7 More recently, and along the same lines, Roman Szporluk has suggested that Weber should be considered the foremost ideologist of nationalism of the contemporary epoch.8

Weber's theoretical ideas on nations and nationalism, however, are not only interesting in themselves, but are particularly appropriate for an analysis of the two cases at hand. As will become clear, one reason for this lies in the specific position occupied by nations that find them- selves in a central, if not necessarily "dominant" position in multi- national states.

According to Weber,9 the concepts of ethnic group and national cannot be unambiguously defined in terms of some empirical trait shared by their members. Objective markers of social differentiation such as

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language, religion, common descent, and even physically observable differences can all serve as a basis for status differentiation along ethnic as well as national lines. However, if the subjective belief in common descent is necessary for the constitution of ethnic groups as status groups,"' the same is not necessarily true of nations. Even if ethnic self- identification frequently serves as a basis of national identity as well, the latter varies with historical circumstances, which are often highly contingent.

Thus, the absence of common descent, language, or religion did not prevent the emergence of a distinct sense of Swiss nationhood. On the other hand, the presence of common descent does not automatically lead to a sense of nationhood, as is the case with German-speaking Alsatians who, on the whole, feel a greater allegiance to France than to

Germany. In the case of Alsatians, the elements of shared culture and the prestige of French civilization override the significance of linguistic community. Even more importantly, according to Weber, shared his- torical experience or "common political destiny"; namely the Alsatians' identification of France with a revolutionary regime that abolished odious feudal privileges helps explain their national allegiance. Ob-

viously, the ethnic and linguistic affinity of Serbs and Croats did little to obliterate the significance of religious and national differences between them. In this case, neither common descent nor the existence of a shared linguistic community is enough to foster a feeling of national

solidarity;1' instead, religion has served as a marker of status differen- tiation along national lines, a differentiation, however, which is primar- ily political in character.'2

Weber's first idea, therefore, is that a sense of national solidarity is, more often than not, based on particular historical experiences. These historical experiences are first and foremost political in nature. Natu-

rally, such political experiences are subject to interpretation and change over time, and, moreover, the interpretations vary across national po- litical spectrums at any given point in time as well. For this reason, nationalism is always "in the making,' a field of contested and contest- able possibilities, constantly remade by ideologists and politicians.

Nevertheless, there is one simple test of the strength of subjective feel-

ings of national solidarity on the basis of historical experiences that is

especially relevant for the discussion of the two cases at hand. This is the willingness of the members of one national group to serve in the

army of a state largely dominated by members of another. Weber him-

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self noted the relevance of this criterion, when he contrasted the strik-

ing identification of immigrant Germans with the United States to the unreadiness of diaspora Serbs from Austro-Hungary to serve the larger imperial interest. Apparently, Germans in the United States had come to feel as part of the American nation and were willing to serve, how- ever reluctantly, in an army that confronted their ethnic brethren from Germany; in contrast, the solidarity of diaspora Serbs with Serbs from Serbia was stronger than their identification with the empire.13

A corresponding contemporary example of great relevance for our two cases can serve as another illustration of the same observation. The

surprising ease with which "ethnic" Russian army officers swore alle-

giance to the Ukrainian army strongly contrasts with the behavior of the majority of Serbian officers in Croatia and Bosnia, almost none of whom endorsed the new states. Once again, the reasons for this

"minority stance" are to be found in historical experience: given the

legacy of the Second World War and the extreme "nationalizing" thrust of the Croatian regime, a Serbian officer had no reason to believe that his presence in the ranks of the Croatian army was in the least accept- able, let alone desirable.14 Moreover, for reasons I elaborate later, the solidarity of the Serbian officer from Croatia with Serbs from Ser- bia, as well as his allegiance to the Yugoslav state was stronger than any feeling of attachment to Croatia.

Both the historical experience and the contemporary situation were, however, different for a Russian officer serving in Ukraine. Neither for historical, nor contextual reasons, did a Russian officer need to feel threatened by the prospect of an independent Ukrainian state at the moment of separation. Under these conditions, economic and social considerations predominated at the expense of national solidarity with the external national homeland, Russia.15

These examples should suffice to illustrate the usefulness of Weber's idea of the significance of historical and political experiences in accounting for feelings of national solidarity. They also lead us to Weber's second relevant observation, the idea that national solidarity is always a manifestation of a pattern of interaction with other groups (I would add that this is especially the case when these groups are per- ceived as "historical" or "potential" enemies). For this reason national identity is always partially "negative" in character.

768

Indeed, as Weber writes, the concept of the "nation" and the sense of nationality is highly ambiguous: it always refers to a "specific sentiment of solidarity in the face of other groups." As such, Weber added, the concept of the nation "belongs to the sphere of values and is closely tied to feelings of prestige."'6 Furthermore, this specific sentiment manifests itself in attempts to form a common state. As states are politi- cal communities defined by their monopoly of legitimate violence over given territories, national (as opposed to ethnic or racial) conflicts almost always take the form of struggles over territory.

But the concepts of "nation" and "state" in Weber's thought, as David Beetham has lucidly pointed out, do not operate on the same plane of sociological reality. Whereas the existence of a "nation" is predicated upon feelings of cultural solidarity that are reinforced by common his- torical and political experiences, the state is "an association developed consciously for specific purposes." Consequently, the "nation" is a community of affective ties, i.e., a Gemeinschaft; the state, in contrast, is a political association, a Gesellschaft.17 It was the fusion of the two

sociological realities of cultural solidarity and political association that gave birth to the modern nation-state. Under modern conditions, thought Weber, the striving for political power on the basis of a shared culture was central to the notion of the nation.'8 It was precisely this

pretension to political power that gave the status of national commu- nities to such relatively "small language groups" such as the Hungar- ians, Greeks, or Czechs.19

But the "communal-affective," national-cultural foundation of the modern state also accounted for the superiority of modem nation- states to traditional empires in the face of adversity:

What then is the realpolitisch significance of Kultur? ... The war has power-

fully increased the prestige of the state: 'The state, not the nation,' runs the

cry. Is this right? Consider the fundamental difficulty confronting Austrian

officers, which stems from the fact that the officer has only some fifty Ger-

man words of command in common with his men. How will he get on with

his company in the trenches? What will he do when something unforeseen

happens, that is not covered by this vocabulary? What in the event of a

defeat? Take a look further east at the Russian army, the largest in the world; two million men taken captive speak louder than any words that the state can

certainly achieve a great deal, but that it does not have the power to compel the free allegiance of the individual....20

Weber's distinction between the mobilization capacity of imperial states and that of the modern nation-state is of particular relevance for

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an understanding of the difference between the two cases analyzed in this article. To anticipate the argument, the existence of a Serbian nation-state prior to the formation of the larger multinational state strongly contrasts with the fusion of national and imperial identities under both the Tsarist Russian and, in a different way, the Soviet regime. The greater mobilization power of contemporary Serbian nationalism in comparison to its Russian counterpart is partially ex- plicable in terms of this key difference in historical legacies.

It would not be too difficult to demonstrate that Weber's definition of the nation as a cultural community of shared memories and a common political destiny, striving for prestige and territorial political power, could serve us well in interpreting national conflicts within select historical contexts and, perhaps, as a source of further hypotheses about the like- lihood of such conflicts elsewhere. Thus, the differential distribution of prestige and power between Serbs and Albanians has served as the basis of ethnic and national conflict in the Yugoslav region of Kosovo. On both sides, painful historical memories, dating at least to the end of the nineteenth century, were reinforced by a constant process of status- reversal and conflict over a shared territory.

This never-ending cycle of status-reversal can be briefly summarized as follows: Moslem (not Catholic or Orthodox) Albanians were the privi- leged group under the Ottoman empire (at least relative to Orthodox Serbs); Serbs "came out on top" after the Balkan wars (1912-1913) and the formation of Yugoslavia (1918); the status/power relationship changed in World War Two when Kosovo became a part of "greater Albania" under Italian sponsorship; in 1945, the Serbs "took over," albeit under the auspices of communist Yugoslavia and in the name of "brotherhood and unity"; after Kosovo became a fully autonomous region (1974), high Albanian birth rates and the gradual "Albanianiza- tion" of the party once more raised the painful specter of status- reversal (for Serbs); with the advent of Milosevi6 to power, Serbs emerged as the dominant status group for the third time in this century.

In each of these cases, the process of status-reversal was accompanied by a revival of unpleasant memories as well as actual instances of per- secution that further reinforced them. At the same time, all the markers of status-differentiation along ethnic or national lines were present, including physically observable differences. The superimposition of physical, religious, and linguistic markers of status differentiation, accompanied by a constant process of status/power reversal, which

770

revived negative historical memories, cemented the solidarity of each

group as a "community of political destiny."

Although this necessarily brief analysis of some of the main reasons for the protracted conflict between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo goes well beyond Weber's own exposition, it is not only consistent with his definition of the nation, but also logically derivative from his frame- work. Undoubtedly, other conflicts in the post-Yugoslav or post-Soviet space could be analyzed with the same considerations in mind.2

These preliminary observations, of course, do not exhaust Weber's view on the nation. Nationalism - a political claim based on feelings of

prestige and cultural solidarity felt by members of a "nation" - has a differential appeal among social strata. Since the idea of the nation is based on considerations about the uniqueness of national culture and

prestige, it is only natural that the Kulturtrager will play a special role in the formation of nationalist ideologies.22 The important role of the Ser- bian Academy of Sciences and the Russian Union of Writers, of the writer Dobrica Cosic in Serbia and the world-renowned mathematician

Igor Shafarevich in Russia in the formation of nationalist world views, should come as no surprise in this context: all the more so because in this part of the world the intellectual, the writer, and the poet appeared as the true "conscience of the nation" in the absence of strong indig- enous bourgeois classes.23

But if nationalist ideologies are largely the work of intellectuals, nation- alism has a far broader appeal. When it comes to feelings of prestige, "ethnic honor," writes Weber, appears to be the only form of status

superiority available to the masses at large (Weber adds: "under modern conditions"):

The sense of ethnic honor is a specific honor of the masses, for it is acces- sible to anybody who belongs to the subjectively believed community of

descent. The "poor white trash," i.e., the propertyless and, in the absence of

job opportunities, very often destitute white inhabitants of the southern states of the United States of America in the period of slavery, were the actual bearers of racial antipathy, which was quite foreign to the planters. This was so because the social honor of the "poor whites" was dependent on the social declassement of the Negroes.24

A few examples from the Yugoslav civil war can serve to illustrate the usefulness of Weber's observation. One glance at the backward moun- tainous areas of the Serbian Krajina in Croatia, or the rocky landscape

771

of Croatian Herzegovina can help us understand why national war can be such an attractive prospect in these regions: for the absence of eco- nomic opportunities and the traditionally low peacetime status of poor villagers makes the belief in the "superior Croatian or Serbian way of life" one of the few available sources of prestige in which everyone can

partake.25

Not surprisingly, it is from these desolate, ethnically intermixed areas, with strong rural traditions and historical memories that the fiercest Serbian and Croatian volunteers in the Yugoslav war have been recruit- ed.26 Herzegovina offers a classic case of the superimposition of con- flicts: negative historical experiences (inter-ethnic warfare and exter- mination in World War Two) contribute to the sense of ethnic threat (fear of a repetition), which, in the absence of any compensatory mechanism (economic prosperity, prestige) turn the '"nation" into a unique source of pride and status.27 The feeling of ressentiment caused

by low peacetime status also expresses itself in a revengeful attitude towards urban dwellers, and in some cases, the city as a symbol of

modernity as well.28

The importance of prestige considerations, however, is not limited to these regions of Yugoslavia alone: many poor urbanites, some of them ordinary criminals, for example, have become national heroes in the current Yugoslav war. Proud to be a Serb, Croat, or Moslem, as it goes, regardless of social status. It is for such reasons that nationalism is a "democratic" force, able to cut across class lines too easily, regardless of more mundane considerations. War, and especially one fought in the name of the nation, is profoundly democratic in this sense: it can do wonders for one's status, especially since it inverts traditional, peace- time social hierarchies.29

This observation can be independently confirmed in the Russian case as well. It is enough to take a look at the "shock-troops" of Vice-Presi- dent Rutskoi during the October 1993 crisis, the people who so des- perately stormed the Moscow City Hall and the main television tower, and later attempted to resist President Yeltsin's paratroopers, defending the "Constitution." The social base of this right-wing coalition consist- ed of young male volunteers from the Transnistrian diaspora, declasse policemen and officers, fascists recruited from working-class "toughs," neo-Stalinist pensioners, and the lumpen-proletariat.3" As for the intel- lectuals, they preferred to write about it in right-wing dailies and week- lies, or at best watch it all from inside the parliament building under

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siege. With little to lose and much to gain, these volunteers were not driven by their love for Vice-President Rutskoi, but rather by their belief in the superior Soviet or Russian way of life: battle on the "field of honor" is how Aleksandr Barkashov, the leader of the "Russian National Unity," openly fascist, paramilitary group called it, after many of his men lost their lives in the Russian White House.31

But such intellectuals, peasants, and threatened ethnic diasporas alone do not produce national conflicts or wars. When it comes to the raison

d'etat, as Weber reminds us, it is military officers, civil servants, and

politicians whose sinecures and prestige depend on the perpetuation of state power:

Feudal lords, like modern officers or bureaucrats, are the natural and pri- mary exponents of this desire for power-oriented prestige for one's own

political structure. Power to their political community means power for

themselves, as well as the prestige based on this power.... The prestige of

power means in practice the glory of power over other communities; it means the expansion of power, though not always by way of incorporation or

subjection. The big political communities are the natural exponents of such

pretensions to prestige.3

Naturally, Weber's observation first and foremost applies to "great power nationalism" and is, for this reason, particularly appropriate in the Russian case. Nevertheless, in both the Russian and Serbian con-

texts, army officers and other representatives of coercive state institu- tions (police, secret services), and the remnants of Party and federal nomenklatura structures have formed the core of "imperial" or "statist" as opposed to purely "nationalist" constituencies. The most typical example of such an imperial constituency was the Soiuz (Union) group of deputies in the former Soviet parliament. Led by several army officers of mixed ethnic background and from the peripheral republics (Baltic states, Moldova, Kazakhstan), Soiuz placed the preservation of the Soviet Union as a "great power" above the cause of all national par- ticularisms, including the more isolationist or "ethnic" brands of Rus- sian nationalism.33

Finally, as far as broader social strata without a vested interest in

nationalism are concerned, Weber's pessimistic conclusion about the ease with which they can be mobilized for "imperialist" goals unfor-

tunately rings true in view of the frightening example of the Yugoslav war:

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Experience shows that the pacifist interests of petty bourgeois and proletar- ian strata very often and very easily fail. This is partly because of the easier

accessibility of all "unorganized" masses to emotional influences and partly because of the definite notion (which they entertain) of some unexpected opportunity somehow arising through war.... The masses as such, at least in their subjective conception and in the extreme case have nothing to lose but their lives. The valuation and effect of this danger stongly fluctuates in their own minds. On the whole, it can be easily reduced to zero through emotional influence.34

The remarkable frivolity with which masses of Serbs and Croats have rushed to meaningless (or alternatively "meaningful") deaths is more readily understood when the relentless war propaganda campaigns car- ried out by the state-owned media in the two republics are taken into account. However, the attractiveness of "war booty" (the widespread practice of the "acquisition" of goods from the homes of refugees) as well as the status considerations mentioned above should also be taken into account in explaining the "availability of masses" for nationalist mobilization.

With this Weberian framework in mind, let me now return to the main empirical question: why was a nationalist authoritarian regime able take power in Serbia, surviving the downfall of Communism, the disintegra- tion of the state, and the pressure of the whole international commu- nity? Why was this regime so successful in mobilizing the grievances of Serbian minorities in Croatia and Bosnia? What, in contrast, explains the ascendance of a generally pro-Western and democratic regime in Russia and the peaceful disintegration of the Soviet state roughly along the borders of former republics?

Imperial versus "dominant" nation: A comparison of historical legacies in Russia and Serbia

It is imperative, however, first to consider some of the important simi- larities in the relative positions of Russians and Serbs with respect to other nations within the larger Soviet and Yugoslav contexts. In multi- national contexts, "dominant nations" occupy a unique position, form- ing the founding block of the larger state. In both the Soviet and Yugo- slav cases, the political center of the federal state coincided with the traditional seat of authority of the dominant national group. Whether in terms of numbers, military power, or historical prestige, Russians and Serbs occupied a special position vis-h-vis other nations in the

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polity, including those who could hardly be considered "peripheral" in a meaningful sense.35

Historically, both Russians and Serbs have played a special role in the

process of unification, achieved either in the context of liberation wars

(Serbia), or centuries-long military conquest (Russia). This "heroic" tradition is reflected in what could be called the special "social psychol- ogy" of dominant nations: their sense of historical mission, the em-

phasis on military valor and their special role in the state-building process, as well as in any situation of grave state crisis, for example the Second World War. As the Soviet-Russian communist anthem puts it: "The indestructible union of free republics was united forever by Great Rus." Not accidentally, at the turn of the century, the role of Serbia in

Yugoslav unification was compared to that of Piedmont in Italy, or Prussia in Germany, however inappropriate the analogy might seem from our vantage point.3'

The unique position of state-building peoples in multinational contexts makes for their strong attachment to the state and a willingness to

adopt a state-wide identity. Although this state-wide identity partially overlaps with the narrower national self-identification of the dominant

group, it is not just a simple extension of the latter, nor is it coterminous with it (Yugoslav-Serbian; Soviet-Russian; Spanish-Castillian).37 Typi- cally, the willingness of dominant national groups to identify with the

larger state is accompanied by a rejection of narrower particularist goals and aspirations. This "assimilation" or even "dissolution" of the dominant national group into a state-wide identity is not perceived as a threat, because the larger state satisfies the more limited nationalist

goal of "ethnic" or "cultural" unification. Thus all Serbs could have been united either in a greater Serbia, or in Yugoslavia. But once united in Yugoslavia, they identified with the larger state, often suppressing their narrower nationalism.35 It comes as no surprise that the identifi- cation of Serbs with Yugoslavia, and Russians with the empire or the Soviet Union, was much stronger than among the other nationalities.

What this leads to is a simple, but highly relevant observation. In multi- national contexts, "dominant nations" have no reason to develop a par- ticullarist political nationalism of their own. Both in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, Russian and Serbian nationalism developed largely as a reaction to peripheral nationalist movements threatening the larger state. Once the superior status of the dominant national group comes into question, the stage is set for the reemergence of particularist claims.

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Initially, these particularist claims take the form of defensive postures, and reflect a disappointment with the "ingratitude" of smaller national- ities or the ineffectiveness of the larger state in containing secessionist claims. An interesting illustration of this defensive stance characteristic of "dominant" nations "under threat" is the speech of the well-known writer Valentin Rasputin to the First Congress of People's Deputies in 1989:

Russophobia is spreading in the Baltics, in Georgia, and is making its way into other republics as well .... Anti-Soviet slogans are accompanied by anti- Russian ones:.... Perhaps Russia should leave the Union, if you accuse her for all your difficulties, if its poor level of development and awkwardness make your progressive aspirations more difficult to achieve? Maybe that would be better? By the way, this would help us solve a lot of our problems in the present as well as the future.39

There is a striking parallel between Rasputin's and Shafarevich's ressen- tinzen toward the nationalism of peripheral nationalities, and their condemnation of "Russophobia" and the underlying mood expressed in the following excerpt from the "Memorandum of the Serbian Acad- emy of Sciences," the key document of a reemerging Serbian particu- larism in the 1980s:

It is first and foremost a question of the Serbian people and its state. The nation which had achieved statehood after a prolonged and bloody struggle, had created a parliamentary democracy on its own, and which in the last two wars lost 2.5 million compatriots, is the only one which has been deprived of its own state by a party apparat committee after four decades in the new Yugoslavia. A worse historical defeat in peacetime can hardly be imagined.4'

Not surprisingly, the authors of the "Memorandum" used the equiva- lent term "Serbophobia" to describe the attitude of peripheral national- ities toward the Serbian nation, condemned secessionist trends, and argued for the recentralization of the weakened Yugoslav state. Much like Rasputin and some of their other Russian counterparts, however, they left open the possibility of Serbian secession from Yugoslavia unless these conditions were met, naturally within the "historical bor- ders" of the nation.

Under conditions of increasing ethnic polarization, however, these ini- tially defensive stances are replaced with more aggressive postures. When the legitimacy crisis of the state and the sense of "ethnic threat" reach a peak, the political space is open for the emergence of new types of coalitions that span the traditional left-right spectrum. Conserva-

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tive party officials at first eager to defend Communist orthodoxy find a substitute class enemy in peripheral national groups dismembering the

larger state, an ideological development that leads to a gradual en- dorsement of what are more typically seen as "right-wing" values such as extreme nationalism, imperialism (statism), and anti-Semitism (in the Russian case).41 Army and state security officers threatened by reforms, peripheral nationalisms, loss of territory, and prestige jump to the defense of state borders or super-power status. They are joined by nationalist intellectuals of the "dominant nation" opposed to state

disintegration on completely different grounds, i.e., particularist na- tionalism. It is this overlap of imperial (statist) and nationalist constitu- encies among dominant nations in multinational states that makes Weber's framework particularly useful for explaining the types of po- litical coalitions that emerged in Russia and Serbia (it is impossible to

imagine the same constellation of forces in Croatia or Ukraine, for

example).42

There are a number of other important similarities between Russians and Serbs in terms of historical experience, a historical affinity that, incidentally, helps explain Russia's reluctance to support any form of

military intervention against Serbia, regardless of the regime in power. The most important ones are Christian Orthodoxy, their struggle on the same side in both the First and Second World Wars or the earlier com- mon struggle against the Ottoman Turks, Tsarist attempts to enlist the

support of Balkan nationalism for the larger imperial cause, the ideas of Pan-Slavism. Most importantly, in the present context, the growing perception among Russian political elites that the disintegration of

Yugoslavia was just a small-scale testing ground for the dissolution of the Soviet Union and perhaps Russia as well, all under the auspices of the "new world order."43 But the differences between the two cases are of equal, if not greater importance. The most significant one has to do with the divergent paths of state and nation-building in Russia and Serbia.

Russia was first formed as an empire, a multinational civilization of its own. Moreover, unlike many other empires, the Russian one was

geographically contiguous, with the consequence that there was no clear distinction between the metropole and the periphery. The overlap between the frontiers of the Russian nation with state borders, the colonization of vast expanses and the accompanying subordination of local populations, made for a strong identification of Russians with the

empire, but also for a weaker sense of "ethnic" or national particu- larism.44

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To be sure, a strong sense of Russian cultural separateness, of the spe- cificity of Russian civilization and its institutions, was evident through- out the nineteenth century, its most characteristic expression being Slavophilism in its many varieties and transformations. But the defense of one's own traditions and mores, and the resistance to the adoption of foreign models, is different from positing the question in purely "ethnic" terms. Here, the absence of the "Russian question" offers a most striking contrast to East-European nationalisms like the Polish or Serbian ones, which crystallized in opposition to imperial domination, and sought to incorporate the fragmented ethnic elements under the roof of the emerging nation-state. The sense of "Russianness' there- fore, might have been "imperial" or "cultural" but was not sharply defined in ethnic terms.45 As Roman Szporluk has written:

As a result of this reversal of stages - the formation of an empire before the

completion of nation-building - the Russians themselves have never been quite sure what is "Russia" and what is not Russia even if it is under Russian rule.46

While the argument can easily be pushed to an unacceptable extreme, it serves to illustrate the crucial difference marking off Russian nation- alism from its East-European and, in this case, Serbian counterparts: because ethnic Russians were already incorporated into the imperial state, ideological Russian nationalism lacked the necessary external impetus that would have inevitably pushed it in an "ethnic" direction. Characteristically, unlike the Serbian "national idea" with its limited aim of marking the borders of a prospective "greater Serbia," the much more celebrated "Russian idea" was imperial and universalist almost by definition.47

The relative ease with which many non-Russians "became Russian" by assimilating into Russian culture was in line with these developments. Even if the possibility of cultural assimilation was differentially distri- buted among the different nationalities (for many, assimilation to cul- tural Russianness was predicated upon conversion to Orthodoxy), such acculturation was widespread in the empire, reinforcing a non-ethnic definition of Russianness.48

At different times, linguistic assimilation served a similar purpose, despite the fact that the distinction between "Russians" (russkie) and "Russian-speakers" (russkoiazychnie) still enables us to differentiate between ethnic and "linguistic-cultural" Russianness.49 However, the sociologically decisive point is that the distinction is not necessarily

778

perceived as a practically relevant one by many Russians. As frequently as not, the "subjective belief in common descent" is a less important criterion of membership than participation in the linguistically and cul-

turally defined national community.

Strikingly, even some contemporary extreme right-wing nationalist

parties shy away from defining "Russian" in an ethnic sense, despite their explicit ideological commitment to defending "ethnic Russians"

(russkie) in the near-abroad. Thus, for Russkii Natsionalnyi Sobor, an extreme right-wing organization led by former KGB major-general Aleksandr Sterligov:

Russian is neither a racial, nor a genetic, but rather a cultural-historical notion. Russians are all those who accept and defend Russian values, the

uniqueness and distinctive character of Russian statehood as a union of

many peoples, in which the 82% of ethnic Russians play a cementing role.5"

In this view, Russians obviously play the first violin, but Russia is not for Russians alone. The nation-building process in imperial Russia was further hindered by internal developments. The patrimonial features of the old order, manifested in the wide gulf separating state and society and even the intelligentsia from the people, inhibited the process of

nation-building in the Russian case. The partial extension of citizenship in the short period between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 could not fully compensate for these trends.51 As Hans Rogger has written, the troubled relationship between ideological Russian nationalism and the Tsarist state was the single most important differentiating mark of the Russian experience:

The dilemma of nineteenth-century Russian nationalism, so defined, consists

in this, that it could only with difficulty, if at all, view the tsarist state as the

embodiment of the national purpose, as the necessary instrument and

expression of national goals and values, while the state, for its part, looked

upon every expression of nationalism with fear and suspicion.52

Consequently, the kind of positive identification of national Kultur with the state, which Weber posited as the necessary precondition for the

emergence of the modern nation-state, was lacking in the Russian case.

Paradoxically, the process of nation-building was hindered further by the communist party-state, which resurrected the former empire in a

completely new form. Despite Lenin's warnings against "great Russian

chauvinism," Russians again became the dominant nation within the

"empire," but at the staggering cost of losing many historical attributes

779

of their identity. The suppression of Orthodoxy and Russian traditions under the Soviet regime, not to speak of the devastating legacy of col- lectivization, was a process as brutal as the persecution of some periph- eral nationalities.

The most important long-term consequences of the traumatic legacy of Stalinism, however, became apparent only with the advent of glasnost and political liberalization, when it transpired that authentic (as op- posed to officially sponsored) national memory was much better repre- sented by the society for the commemoration of the victims of Stalin- ism (Memorial) than by the anti-Semitic chauvinists of "Memory" (Pamiat').s3 Insofar as the "Russian nation" indeed represented a com-

munity of shared memories, therefore, these memories had as much or more to do with the experience of political victimization at the hands of a totalitarian state as with the officially sponsored pride in the historic achievements of the Soviet Union as a "great power."

The political significance of this legacy, however, was obscured for the

longest time by the incorporation of select elements of traditional Rus- sian nationalism into the dominant ideology of the party-state, a devel-

opment that led observers to speak of Soviet-Russian nationalism as the main legitimating formula of the Soviet regime.54 In fact, Stalin's famous dictum ("national in form, socialist in content") applied to Rus- sians as well as others, despite the great tyrant's instrumental use of nationalist symbols and his elevation of the Russian national form above the forms of smaller nationalities. Nevertheless, the merger of Soviet and select Russian national themes in official ideology per- formed its function: by coopting elements of traditional right-wing nationalism into the dominant world-view, it hindered the development of anti-Soviet Russian nationalism until the process of liberalization opened the political space for the emergence of alternative ideologies and, ultimately, the "velvet divorce" of democratic Russia from the Soviet state.

This "Soviet-Russian" ideological merger had its institutional counter- part in the absence of RSFSR-wide political and cultural organizations, from a separate communist party to the Academy of Sciences and the media. The absence of national institutions graphically underscored the Russians' dual role in the Soviet Union: at the same time a "domi- nant" nation and one, in contrast to others, deprived of its own venues for national expression. As a result, the Russian Socialist Fed- erated Soviet Republic was somewhat of a residual category, a kind of

780

Russian nation-state by default. Moved by such considerations, self- professed Russian nationalists like Solzhenitsyn argued for dismantling the empire in direct opposition to communist and right-wing "imperi- alists" from Soiuz and other organizations of the Soviet-Russian "left- right" coalition.55

The historical legacy was very different in Serbia. Historically squeezed between Austro-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey, Serbs developed a strong national consciousness through a long process of struggle with the surrounding empires. As the Serbian state gradually expanded to incorporate more and more co-nationals in its fold, the Serbian nation- al question took ever sharper forms. As Ivo Lederer has written:

The elemental fact that all throughout the nineteenth century the frontiers of the Serbian state did not coincide with the boundaries of the Serbian nation lent a galvanic quality to the very notion of Serbian nationality while, politi- cally and ideologically, every Serbian national program perforce looked to

changes in the international status quo.56

Moreover, the better educated Serbian diaspora from the Habsburg lands played a special role in the process of national cultural revival.57 Later, at the turn of the century, these Habsburg Serbs were instru- mental in forging anti-imperial coalitions, reemerging as key propo- nents of the idea of Yugoslav unification. Finally, during World War Two, "Western" Serbs (from Croatia especially, but also from Bosnia and Herzegovina) participated en masse in Tito's partisan movement, playing an important role in the reintegration of Yugoslavia in the after- math of a devastating civil war.58 However different their role might have been at different times, "diaspora" Serbs continued to exert an influence in Serbian and Yugoslav politics disproportionate to their numbers. It should be stressed that this special role of the diaspora in the internal process of Serbian and Yugoslav nation and state building has no counterpart in the Russian case, and goes a long way in explain- ing the strong feeling of solidarity between Serbs from Serbia and their co-nationals in Croatia and Bosnia.

This outward and "expansionist" process of nation-building was

accompanied by internal developments that favored the nation-state form in Serbia itself. By the turn of the century, Serbia emerged as a constitutional monarchy with vibrant political parties that largely suc- ceeded in extending a sense of political participation (if not full citi-

zenship) to the peasantry, despite illiteracy and backwardness in the

countryside.59 The peasants' sense of nationhood was further fortified

781

in the Balkan wars of 1912-1913, as well as the First World War, which affected practically every Serbian family and contributed to the sense of martyrdom at the hands of empires. Most importantly, the costly road to independence fortified the nation as a community of shared memories and a common political destiny, making the cult of strong statehood one of the defining elements of Serbian political culture.60

However different in character and outcome, the historical experiences of persecution in World War Two further reinforced these political- cultural elements. As two Western anthropologists wrote in the conclu- sion of an in-depth study of a Serbian village:

To be a Serb is implicitly to be Orthodox, explicitly to celebrate the slava and

importantly to associate oneself with a heroic tradition of struggle. Here the covert linking of the Partisan struggle against the Germans with earlier

struggles against the Turks and later as a nation-state against the Austrians and the Germans is of great significance.6'

From the comparative point of view of this study, the most important consequence of this legacy was that, in marked contrast to Russians, Serbs saw themselves as the ethnic victims of alien empires and some of their proximate neighbors as well, not the political victims of an over- bearing state.

For all these reasons, the merger of Serbianism and Yugoslavism was never as great as in the case of imperial or Russian and or Russian and Soviet identities. Even if there was room for the confusion of "greater Serbianism" and Yugoslavism in the inter-war state, the creation of Yugoslavia was not achieved at the cost of "blurring" Serbian national consciousness. However, the link between "greater Serbianism" and "Yugoslavism" was decisively severed only in communist Yugoslavia.

In sharp contrast to the official sponsorship of "Soviet-Russian nation- alism," in communist Yugoslavia "Serbo-Yugoslavism" was not to be, and no toasts were ever raised to the special historic role played by the "leading Serbian nation."62 The existence of Serbian institutions in addition to federal ones in post-war Yugoslavia, however, was not only a manifestation of the recognition of Serbian particularism on the part of the Communist regime, but also a sign that in the new Yugoslavia, Serbs would not be allowed to play the "imperial glue" role accorded to Russians in the Soviet Union. Once the prospect of Yugoslav disinte- gration had become a reality, therefore, Serbs could fall back on their own strong sense of national identity, mobilizing their energies for the defense of greater Serbian borders.

782

Explaining nationalist mobilization in Russia and Serbia

The main argument made in the preceding two sections can be summa- rized as follows. As "dominant nations" in multinational communist party-states with a comparable history of indigenous revolutions and similar policies on nationalities, Russians and Serbs occupied struc- turally similar, although not equivalent positions. In both cases, the prospect of state disintegration triggered the emergence of left-right, statist-nationalist political coalitions made up of orthodox party cadres, army officers, officials from federal party and state structures, nation- alist intellectuals of the dominant nation, and segments of diaspora populations threatened by the prospect of state disintegration along republican lines. But the existence of structurally equivalent elites striv- ing to mobilize for the cause of state preservation or, alternatively, the narrower nationalist project of incorporating the diaspora into an

enlarged state of the dominant nation, was accompanied by the differ- ential availability of the masses for statist-nationalist mobilization in the two cases.63

This differential availability of the masses for nationalist mobilization has to be understood against the background of long-term factors, most

importantly, the different historical legacies of state, and nation-build-

ing in Russia and Serbia. These legacies, and the corresponding politi- cal experiences and historical memories, were different in at least four

important respects:

1) The conflation of empire, state, and nation-building in the Russian case blurred the boundaries of "ethnic Russianness." The Russians'

"imperial" self-identification was reinforced by linguistic and cultural definitions of "Russianness" and the absence of a diaspora question. In contrast, Serbian state and nation-building occurred in the context of

opposition to imperial domination and with the goal of incorporating the ethnic diaspora into the emerging nation-state. The very existence of this state prior to Yugoslav unification fortified a sense of Serbian

nationality. On the ideological level, the most important contrast is the one between the national "Serbian idea" and the universalist "Russian idea."

2) The internal dynamic of state-society relations was very different in the two cases. The patrimonial features of the old order, partially resur- rected by Stalin in the context of a totalitarian state, made for an at best ambivalent and, at worst, a negative identification of Russians with the

783

state.64 In contrast, Serbs identified with both the Serbian and Yugoslav states in a manifestly positive manner.

3) Different historical experiences made for very different "collective memories" in the Russian and Serbian cases. The shared collective memory of most Serbs was one of victimization at the hands of em- pires. This memory was reinforced by the experience of ethnic victimi- zation in World War Two. In contrast, Russians were the creators of empire. Insofar as a sense of victimization was involved in Russian national self-identification, it was related to the legacy of an overbear- ing autocratic state, reinforced by the Stalinist experience. Consequent- ly, the subjective experience of victimization was political, not ethnic in character.65

4) The institutional arrangements of communist federalism reflected these differences. While the communist policy on nationalities had similar effects insofar as most peripheral nationalities were concerned, the treatment of the "dominant nation" was very different in the two cases. In marked contrast to the Soviet case, there was no overlap between Serbian and Yugoslav institutions.

The existence of Serbian cultural and political institutions not only fostered the separation of Serbian and Yugoslav identities, but also created the structural preconditions for nationalist (as opposed to pure- ly statist) political mobilization. Whereas the Russian equivalents of Milo'sevic were hard pressed to create an RSFSR-wide communist party in a late effort to mobilize against the reformist coalition spon- sored by Gorbachev, the Serbian party leader had at his disposal a ready-made republican apparatus, from party and government institu- tions to the republican media.

National self-identifications, political experiences, historical memories, and institutional legacies create the long-term social-structural and political-cultural preconditions for different types of nationalist mobili- zation. Individual instances of nationalist mobilization, however, can only be explained with reference to contextual factors that favor the "selective reactivation" of elements of these historical and political-cul- tural legacies on the part of elites and leaders.

It is not too difficult to demonstrate that the contextual factors that favored nationalist mobilization in the Serbian case largely fall under the familiar heading of "unintended consequences of social action" in

784

this case, of the asymmetrical application of the federal principle. Alone among the Yugoslav republics, Serbia contained two autono- mous provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina. Although formally a part of Serbia, the autonomous provinces practically gained the status of fed- eral republics after the adoption of the 1974 constitution.66

The prospect of the "confederalization" of the republic of Serbia was an object of criticism by Serbian intellectuals already in the early 1970s. As of the mid-1970s, the question of the status of autonomous

provinces was repeatedly on the agenda of the Serbian party organiza- tion. Prior to Milosevic's advent to power in 1987, however, Serbian elites were manifestly unsuccessful in reintegrating (not incorporating) the autonomous provinces into Serbia within the ideological frame- work of the Titoist policy on nationalities.

By the early-1980s, national conflict in the southern province of Kosovo assumed critical proportions, with Albanian riots and demands for full republican status threatening not only the fragile inter-ethnic balance of the weakened federal system, but the integrity of the Yugo- slav state as well. This political threat was accompanied by a perceived "ethno-demographic threat," caused by high Albanian birth rates and Serbian immigration from the region. While the process of Serbian

immigration from Kosovo began already in the 1960s, the cumulative effects of demographic change were felt only by the mid-1980s when the proportion of Serbs and Montenegrins fell to little more than 10

percent of the region's total population.68

The institutionally weak Yugoslav federal state was unable to halt Ser- bian immigration: instead, it indiscriminately persecuted the 'Albanian irredenta" with the help of the federal army. Simultaneously, the federal state failed to address the grievances of local Serbs, who found them- selves under the jurisdiction of the province's "Albanianized" party organization (one more instance of the historically traumatic cycle of

status-reversal).69

To make matters worse, the myth of Kosovo occupied a special sym- bolic place in traditional Serbian national mythology.70 During the

1980s, the prospect of "losing Kosovo" and the weakened position of the republic of Serbia in the larger federation provoked a dramatic revival of Serbian particularism, culminating in the already mentioned Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences (1986). Initially, this document was treated as an ideologically unacceptable manifesta-

785

tion of "greater Serbian chauvinism" and anti-communism, and was sharply attacked by the Serbian party leadership.

With the ascent of Slobodan Milosevic to leadership in 1987, this ideo- logical configuration began to change.71 Not accidentally, Milosevic made his first populist breakthrough among the Kosovo Serbs, by- passing local officialdom. By mid-1988, Milosevic positioned himself as the leader of a "guided" grass-roots national movement in which Kosovo Serb activists occupied the most prominent role. This move- ment culminated in mass rallies that forced the resignations of the "treasonable" (from the nationalist point of view) as well as politically corrupt elites of Vojvodina and Montenegro (October 1988, January 1989).

The Serbian leader's appeals, however, also had a strong social com- ponent. Milosevi6's emphasis on social justice and promises of eco- nomic reform in the context of frustrated expectations and the political corruption of communist officialdom brought him the support of broad social strata, from workers to intellectuals. In a striking parallel to the early Yeltsin, Milosevi6 was perceived as an honest communist "of the people"; he like Yeltsin, fought the "bureaucrats," referring to the mass rallies as an element in a broader "anti-bureaucratic" revolution. But unlike Yeltsin's anti-corruption drive in Moscow, Milosevi6's social appeals were increasingly subordinated to nationalist goals. Thus, Ser- bia's developmental lag was not explained by the weakness of its own economy, but by exploitation on the part of richer republics, Slovenia and Croatia.72

Moreover, unlike Yeltsin, Milosevi6 never experienced a political trans- formation. The increasingly divided and quasi-confederal Yugoslav League of Communists had no strength to remove Milosevi6 from the heights of power for violating party norms (his endorsement of "spon- taneous mass activity," and his subversion of the internationalist spirit of the Yugoslav revolution). In the absence of a Yugoslav equivalent of Gorbachev, Milosevi6 remained in the party and, in spite of his reform- ist rhetoric, never tied the fate of Serbia to anti-communism or West- ern-style market reforms.

The Serbs' growing obsession with historical and ethnic grievances was deliberately fostered by the republican media. At the same time, the attempts of the newly formed opposition parties to provide an alterna- tive to Milosevi6's populist revolution were treated as instances of

786

"internal treason." As the "national danger" never really subsided, Ser- bian democratic parties found themselves ideologically torn between the conflicting imperatives of liberalism and the emotionally charged "patriotic" cause. In this fashion, Milosevic succeeded in narrowing the social base of the Serbian opposition, whereas the larger raison d'etat provided him with a welcome excuse for indefinitely postponing eco- nomic reform and political liberalization.73

Milosevic's uncompromising leadership style, part and parcel of the political-cultural legacy of orthodox Communism, and characteristic of most national leaders in former Yugoslav republics (and especially Ser- bia and Croatia), not only hindered attempts at conflict-resolution, but also provoked a chain of ethnic reactions in other republics, threatened by the renewed prospect of "greater Serbian hegemony." The vicious

cycle of self-fulfilling ethnic prophecies created a highly irrational

dynamic in the Yugoslav body politic, reinforcing national self-identifi- cations until the outbreak of the war made the process practically ir- reversible.

But the Serbian President's "combat" rhetoric was not only a reflection of his "Bolshevik ethos"; it also played into a long-standing national tradition of "heroic struggle."74 The political-cultural foundations of this rhetoric, however, should not prevent us from perceiving its main

political function: to preempt rational alternatives by presenting politi- cal problems as instances of the "struggle of life and death" between nations. Hence, "Serbia will either be united, or it will perish."75

The secessionist drive in Croatia was the final factor that tipped the scales in favor of national war. Tudjman's new government not only created a difficult situation for the Serbian minority in Croatia, but, more importantly, revived unpleasant shared memories of wartime massacres. As Serbs from Croatia (and Bosnia) played a special role in the partisan movement and were over-represented in the officer corps, coercive state institutions, and communist party structures, they had a vested "ideal" and "material" interest in the preservation of Yugoslavia, or by default, a greater Serbia.76 Last, but not least, the drive for Croat- ian independence was perceived as a threat in Serbia itself, homogeniz- ing the "nation" as "a community of shared memories" and "common

political destiny."

The nature of contextual factors and the political process were alto-

gether different in the Soviet Union. Although the advent of peres-

787

troika and glasnost quickly led to the rise of potentially threatening peripheral nationalist movements, both the ethos of Gorbachev's reform program and the revival of public debate about the Stalinist legacy delegitimized the use of military force in containing them. In fact, almost every attempt to use military force against the recalcitrant republics on the part of the "empire-savers," revived the traumatic sym- bolic legacy of the totalitarian state terrorizing its own citizenry (Tbilisi, April 1989; Vilnius, January 1991, etc.). This legacy was brought into focus by the increasingly liberal media that, to the regret of conserva- tives like Yegor Ligachev, fell into the hands of the archenemy of Rus- sian nationalists, Aleksandr Yakovlev.77

The widespread perception of Russians as "occupiers" and "colonists," associated with the imposition of Stalinist terror and communist rule in the republics, contributed to an intense sense of shame among impor- tant sections of the Russian intelligentsia who formed the core of democratic coalitions, and strengthened anti-imperial feelings. Con- sequently, in sharp opposition to the Yugoslav political dynamic, as of mid-1989, Russian democrats embraced the cause of the republics, creating a broad coalition with peripheral nationalists against the oppressive Soviet center and its ideological superstructure - "imperial chauvinism."

The suppression of authentic Russian cultural traditions, the devasta- tion of the countryside and ecological catastrophies in the Russian heartland, and the experience of a recent and meaningless imperialist war (Afghanistan) were further proofs of Russia's victimization by the Soviet center, and developments that could hardly be blamed on exter- nal ethnic enemies. Finally, the growing perception that the empire put a heavy burden on the Russian economy, by syphoning off Russia's natural resources to the republics also favored the emergence of a new Russian "isolationism."

Not accidentally, as of 1990, the theme of Russia's exploitation by the "imperial center" appears in many of Yeltsin's speeches.78 In direct con- trast to Milosevic, who channeled social discontent into national con- flict, Yeltsin tied the solution of the economic problem, i.e., the social question, to Russia's independence from the Soviet center and its his- toric reconciliation with newly independent republics. Yeltsin's per- sonal political trauma (exclusion from the Politburo) led him to em- brace "Western values," and position himself as the populist leader of an intelligentsia-led democratic coalition. The fusion of liberal-univer-

788

salist, social, and national goals and appeals proved to be a most

explosive populist mix, undermining the belated attempts of Rus- sian communists to form a counter-reformist coalition based on a

Milosevic-type combination of orthodox communism and extreme nationalism.

The demoralization and lack of internal coherence of coercive state structures was most evident during the dramatic August 1991 coup. The image of complete political impotence, best illustrated by the Brezhnevite iconography of the coup, graphically underscored the

political senility of the communist ancien regime. In addition, the

prospect of shooting at the first freely elected President of Russia had a

great impact, especially on some military and KGB officers.79

The dissolution of the Soviet state in December 1991 formally ratified this state of affairs but, at the same time, also created structurally a

completely novel situation. Without the protection of the over-arching Soviet center, 25 million ethnic Russians (and 11 million "Russian-

speakers") have found themselves in the position of minorities in newly independent states. The intrinsically unpleasant experience of "status- reversal" is not rendered easier by the gradual "nationalization" of the

newly independent states, that are primarily seen as nation-states of and for the dominant (titular) nation.

Critically, however, Russian minorities in the truly important republics with compact areas of Russian settlement - Ukraine and Kazakhstan - did not experience a sense of ethnic threat at the time of separation. Here, the contrast between the heavily Russified Ukrainian nation and the remarkably strong resistance of Croats to "Serbianization" under

Yugoslav auspices both in inter-war and post-war Yugoslavia, as well as the different experiences of World War Two in the two cases, offer a clue for explaining the relative docility of Russian minorities in Ukraine.8" Only in western Ukraine does the dynamic of Russian- Ukrainian relations approach the Serb-Croat experience; however, the absence of compact Russian settlement in western Ukraine, i.e., the

geographical separation of the two ethnic groups, inhibits conflict.

Despite the periodic setbacks in Russian-Ukrainian relations in the

presence of highly symbolic and divisive issues such as the status of

Sevastopol, Crimea, and the Black Sea Feet, the continued migration of ethnic Russians into Ukraine is a process that demonstrates the absence of strong "grassroots" Russian hostility toward the Ukrainian

789

state.81 However, the regional polarization of the vote in Ukraine along linguistic, and potentially national lines, raises the question of whether this relatively friendly grassroots reality will prevail in the long run.82

Certainly, the ultimate outcome will depend as much on the constel- lation of political forces in Russia itself, in which the distortions of the reform process and the decline in great power status have affected the material and ideal interests of large, traditionally state-dependent con- stituencies, from pensioners to security and military officers, different groups of industrial workers, collective farmers, and the formerly state- subsidized intelligentsia. Far from being socially, politically, or "nation- ally" neutral, marketization has raised anew a whole set of questions about the viability of Russian democracy and the relation of Russia to the West, adding credibility to the anti-liberal, extreme "left-right" ideological concoctions of orthodox communists and right-wing na- tionalists.83

On the other hand, the war in Chechnia has made clear the costs of adventurous national projects. Despite the Russians' manifest lack of enthusiasm for Chechens, perceived as mafia ringleaders in the big Russian cities, the application of indiscriminate force has revived the traumatic memory of the oppressive state, provoking the resistance of Russian public opinion.84 Ironically, the ultimate lesson of Chechnia might be lost on the Russian electorate for the simple reason that, in this instance, state oppression was associated with the "democratic regime." Moved by these and other, more important social and eco- nomic considerations, the voters might decide that communists and nationalists will make the state into a better instrument of economic policy and the national purpose, thus making the Russian outcome closer to its Serbian counterpart.

Conclusion

In the preceding analysis, I'attempt to demonstrate the usefulness of some of Weber's key theoretical ideas on nations, nationalism, and imperialism by way of a comparative examination of contemporary Russian and Serbian nationalism. More specifically, I try to show how long-term historical and institutional legacies, shared memories, and defining political experiences, played themselves out in the contem- porary period, influencing the different availability of mass constituen- cies in Russia and Serbia for nationalist mobilization under the auspices of new "empire-saving coalitions."

790

But political outcomes are never wholly pre-determined as historical

legacies are subject to different cultural interpretations and political contest. To put it simply, nationalism is made and remade by politicians and ideologists; and there is no need to gloss over the frequently bloody and unpredictable consequences of their struggles with unduly abstract sociological generalizations. Instead, we should theorize our

narratives, while giving contingency its place.

I suggest that the presence of a highly symbolic issue (such as the World War Two experiences of Serbs in Croatia, the mythology of Kosovo, Sevastopol or the mythology of the Russian fleet), which touches on the core historical mythology of one "nation," but is contested by another on different grounds (demographic, ethnic, or for reasons of "historical

justice," for example) increases the likelihood of national conflicts. Once highly symbolic issues are involved, national conflicts quickly assume the form of struggles over "ultimate values" not subject to com-

promise and conflict-regulation. However, as the Russian case demon-

strates, other symbolic legacies (the experience of Stalinism) might be

powerful enough to override nationalism.

I also suggest in this article a few simple ways in which we can interpret, and possibly, test the likelihood of the emergency of national conflicts: the significance of prestige considerations, the absence of compensa- tory mechanisms such as economic prosperity, the egalitarian character of nationalist appeals, the dynamic of status-reversal, and the theory of

the superimposition of conflicts. To understand the exclusivist over-

tones of much of contemporary nationalism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, however, it would also be necessary to pay more

attention to the political-cultural and social-structural legacy of Com-

munist rule. The prevalence of uncompromising stances among politi- cal leaders, the absence of mechanisms of conflict-regulation, the hos-

tility to proceduralism and legal mechanisms as a means of resolving the emerging "national questions," and the appeal of the new nation-

alism to "state-dependent" and traditionalist strata are among the most

important elements of this legacy.

Acknowledgments

The first version of this article was presented to the conference on

"National Minorities, Nationalizing States, and External National

Homelands in the New Europe," Bellagio, Italy, August 22-26, 1994. I

791

want to thank all conference participants, but especially Dominique Arel, Mark Beissinger, Rogers Brubaker, Victoria Koroteyeva, David Laitin, Alexander Motyl, and Nikolai Rudensky, for their helpful com- ments and criticisms. I would also like to thank my colleagues Audrey Helfant Budding, Tomasz Grabowski, Jeremy King, and Jeff Manza, for helping me clarify several critical points in the text. During the last stages of rewriting, Andrew Arato of the New School, Leon Kojen of Belgrade University, and David Woodruff of MIT, provided invaluable advice. Special thanks are due to the members of my dissertation com- mittee, Victoria Bonnell, Ken Jowitt, and Neil Smelser, all of whom suf- fered through various versions of the argument presented in this article. Finally, I thank the Academy Scholars' Program of Harvard Univer- sity's Center for International Affairs for providing me with the time and resources necessary to complete this article, and the reviewers and Editors of Theory and Society for useful criticisms and suggestions.

Notes

1. Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1978), Vol. 2, 903.

2. I have analyzed the long-term disruptive effects of communist nationality policy in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia together with Victor Zaslavsky in our "The causes of disintegration in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia," Telos 88 (Summer, 1991): 120-140. See also Victor Zaslavsky, "Nationalism and democratic transition in postcommunist societies," in Stephen R. Graubard, editor, Exit from Communism (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1993), 97-123. For a very lucid theoretical exposition of the pervasive institutionalization of multinationality in the Soviet case, its impact on state breakdown, and the new national questions in the post-Soviet space, see Rogers Brubaker, "Nationhood and the national question in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Eurasia: An institutionalist account," Theory and Society 23 (1994): 47-78. For the ideological justification and content of these policies under the Soviet regime during the 1920s and 1930s, see Yurii Slezkine, "The USSR as a communal apartment, or how a socialist state promoted ethnic particularism," Slavic Review 53 2 (Summer, 1994): 414-453. For an alternative view that sees the disintegration of the Soviet Union through the prism of imperial collapse, see Alexander Motyl, "From imperial decay to imperial collapse: The fall of the Soviet empire in comparative perspective," in David Good, editor, Nation- alism and Empire (New York; St. Martin's Press, 1992), 15-44. Although my gen- eral approach to Soviet disintegration is closer to the views of Zaslavsky, Brubaker, and Slezkine, the analysis of Russians as an "imperial nation" in this article incor- porates some of the insights of the empire perspective as well.

3. For the "empire-savers" see Roman Szporluk, "Dilemmas of Russian nationalism," Problems of Communism, July-August (1989): 15-35.

4. Or, to use another analogy, although the overthrow of the Tsarist regime in 1917 and the disintegration of the imperial state did not mark the end of Russia's historic "imperial role," the Soviet state was more than just a continuation of the old empire

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in communist form. There is no reason not to believe that the breakdown of the Soviet empire in 1991 is a decisive outcome, especially since there is a lot of evi- dence to suggest that there is little desire in present-day Russia to restore "historic Russia" within the old borders of the Soviet Union, regardless of communist-na- tionalist rhetoric. It is an altogether different matter when it comes to defending the

rights of Russians and Russian-speaking populations in those former Soviet repub- lics in which they form large, rooted, compactly settled, and relatively homogenous new minorities. This is especially true of Ukraine and Kazakhastan and, to a lesser

extent, of Estonia and Latvia. But such "homeland stances" are typically "nation-

alist," not imperialist in character, even if they appear in a different light to many Ukrainians, Kazakhs, and others.

5. The very notion of "dominant" nation is, of course, problematic. How dominant the

most numerous national element truly is in a multinational state, and in what sense, is a matter of interpretation as well as empirical investigation. The notion of "home-

land politics" refers to the claim of "political and cultural elites" in the "external

national homeland" (in this case Russia and Serbia) that the ethnic diaspora

rightfully "belongs, in some sense," to the state. "Homeland politics" can take dif-

ferent forms, from granting citizenship or privileged immigration rights to members

of the ethnic diaspora to territorial claims on neighboring states. See Rogers Brubaker, "National minorities, nationalizing states and external national home-

lands in the new Europe," Daedalus 124 2 (Spring, 1995): 107-132.

6. Two noteworthy exceptions are Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict

(Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1985), and, in

different way, Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1992). Both works

incorporate significant elements of Weber's view on ethnicity, nations, and nation-

alism into broader theoretical frameworks. Characteristically, both Horowitz and

Greenfeld emphasize, however differently, the significance of status considerations

in explaining ethnic or nationalist mobilization. 7. Raymond Aron, "Max Weber and power-politics," in Otto Stammer, editor, Max

Weber and Sociology Today (New York, Evanston, San Francisco and London:

Harper & Row, 1971), 83-116. David Beetham, Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1974). Wolfgang Momm-

sen, Max Weber and German Politics: 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1985). 8. Roman Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List

(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), vi-vii. For a very interest-

ing recent discussion of the tension between "cosmopolitan" and "ethnocentric"

elements in Weber's thought see Guenther Roth, "Between cosmopolitanism and

ethnocentrism: Max Weber in the nineties," Telos 96 (Summer, 1993): 148-163.

9. Max Weber, Economy and Society, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cali-

fornia Press, 1978, 2 vols.). The relevant sections on ethnicity and nationalism are

Vol. 1,385-399, and Vol. 2,901-941. 10. Weber's definition reads: "We shall call 'ethnic groups' those human groups that

entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities in

physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and

migration; this belief must be important for the propagation of group formation;

conversely, it does not matter whether or not an objective blood relationship exists."

Weber, ibid., Vol. 1,389. 11. Ibid., Vol. 1,395, and Vol. 2,923-924.

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12. This claim appears controversial in light of the present war in Croatia and Bosnia in which religious divisions appear to be more than mere "markers" of status dif- ferentiation along ethnic or national lines. At least one prominent Serbian and Yugoslav historian, Milorad Ekmecic, has seen religious divisions as the main obstacle to the historical integration of different Yugloslav communities on the basis of language. See his monumental work, Stvaranje Jugoslavije: 1790-1918 (Beograd: Prosveta, 2 Vols., 1988). Other scholars, however, have stressed the his- torical absence of confessional and religious wars on Yugoslav territory prior to the emergence of the modern Serb and Croat "national ideas." See, for example, Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univer- sity Press, 1984), which sees the development of Serb and Croat national ideologies as decisive for shaping the Yugoslav national question. Although not underesti- mating the significance of religion or ideology, in line with Weber's framework, I look at the decisive historical and political experiences that have shaped the current animosities between Serbs and Croats.

13. Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. 2, 924-925. The contrast becomes even more striking once it is recalled that many Serbs in the Austro-Hungarian empire were professional soldiers in the so-called Military Frontier, i.e., the border zone sepa- rating the Habsburg domains from the Ottoman empire. But even this experience of serving the empire was not enough to contain the attractiveness of unification with Serbia once the "Serbian idea" emerged in the nineteenth-century age of nation- alism. This process reached critical momentum after the advent of the parliamen- tary monarchy in Serbia under the auspices of the Karadjordjevi6 dynasty (1903).

14. Here I follow Rogers Brubaker's terminology, in which "nationalizing state" serves to denote a "set of stances" and perceptions shaping the political choices of the elites of prospective nation-states striving to create a "state for the nation" by "promoting the language, culture, demographic position, economic flourishing, or political hegemony of the nominally state-bearing nation." As Brubaker demon- strates himself, the Croatian elite under Tudjman fits the description only too well. See Brubaker, National minorities, nationalizing states, 114. It should be stressed that, in contrast to Croatia, some Serbian officers did remain in the newly formed Bosnian army, a fact which underscores the somewhat greater attractiveness of "Bosnian multinationalism" as opposed to "Croatian ethnocentrism." Nevertheless, even in the Bosnian case the proportion of such Serbian officers is small enough to warrant the contrast.

15. This, of course, is not meant to imply that the situation might not change. Even at the moment of "friendly" separation, Russian officers from the Black Sea fleet accepted Ukraine only on condition that the fleet be governed by a joint strategic command. Here a highly symbolic national issue, the mythology of the Russian fleet, was of decisive importance. The significance of symbolic issues in nationalist mobilization is explored throughout this article.

16. Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. 2, 922. 17. Beetham, Max Weber and German Politics, 128-129. The interpretation is Beet-

ham's. It should be pointed out that Weber shied away from Tonnies' terminology, developing the concepts of "communal" (Vergemeinschaftung) and "associative" (Vergesellschaftung) social relationships. See Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. 1, 40-43, as well as the introduction by Roth, cii-ciii. Weber, did, however, consider the nation a community of "affective ties," ibid., 41.

18. This idea is very close to Ernest Gellner's much quoted definition of the nation in his Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, and London: Cornell University Press, 1983).

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19. Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. I, 398. On the other hand, Weber noted that there were national communities, such as the Swiss one, whose very existence was

predicated on the renunciation of political power. On the whole, however, Weber was inclined to treat such cases as exceptional, at least as far as modern "nations" are concerned.

20. Quoted in Beetham, Max Weber and German Politics, 129. 21. Both the present Croatian and Bosnian conflicts could be analyzed from the point

of view of sudden and dramatic status-reversals that evoked painful historical memories among members of the national group that found itself on the "losing side" of the equation (Serbs). Structurally, the most dramatic example of status- reversal in the Soviet case is offered by 25 million ethnic Russians who have found themselves in the position of minorities in newly independent states. See Brubaker, "Nationhood and the national question...." But the historical experiences of Rus-

sian minorities vis-a-vis the titular nations vary from case to case, as do contextual factors. The contrast between Moldova and Ukraine is telling in this respect. There-

fore, it is not only the mechanism of status-reversal, but also the historical and

present content of "ethnic interaction" which helps explain variation. 22. Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. 2, 925-926. 23. See Igor Shafarevich, Est' li u Rossii budushchee (Moskva: Sovetskii pisatel', 1991)

and Dobrica (osic, Promene (Novi Sad: Dnevnik, 1992) for the views of these key ideologists of Russian and Serbian nationalism.

24. Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. I, 391. Whether Weber's empirical assertion is

true in this case is debatable. Nevertheless, as I try to show, it is highly suggestive. 25. A good impression of the importance of nationalism as a source of ultimate mean-

ing and prestige considerations among Serbian peasants or small-town residents in

the rocky Dalmatian hinterland can be gathered from Misha Glenny, The Fall of

Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books,

1992). This is one of the few recent books on Yugoslavia sensitive to the "native's

point of view" and written with an appreciation of complex regional differences.

26. Understandably, data on the social and regional structure of volunteer units are not

readily available. Nevertheless, to take just one example, there is enough circumst-

antial evidence to suggest the over-representation of Herzegovina Croats, (relative to Croats from Dalmatia, Istria or even Slavonia) in volunteer units. Thus, many

Herzegovina Croats participated in the defense of Vukovar (Slavonia), a town far

removed from their native region, both physically and culturally. Not surprisingly, the influence of the "Herzegovina lobby" in internal Croatian politics has grown

almost in direct proportion to the intensity of military conflicts. For such reasons, a

sociological history of the war in Croatia and Bosnia written from the point of view

of the "micro-foundations" of violent ethnic conflict would be of great value. For a

highly imaginative and suggestive analysis along these lines in other contexts see

David Laitin, "National revivals and violence," Archives Europeenes de Sociologie XXVI 1 (1995): 3-44. It could be shown quite easily that some of the main factors

which Laitin identifies as the necessary micro-conditions of violent ethnic conflict,

are also present in the case of Krajina, Herzegovina, and much of Bosnia as well

(for example, the density of rural networks, exemplified in the high salience of the

extended family in these parts of Yugoslavia). However, these rural networks are

not only the source of the canon fodder of nationalism (guerilla fighters), but also

the repositories of collective memory. For this reason, I argue that a full explanation necessitates attention to macro-social processes and decisive historical experiences as well.

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27. The classic formulation of the theory of the superimposition of conflict is, of course, Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1959). The implications of sociological con- flict theory for ethnicity are explored and elaborated with great erudition in Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict.

28. The relentless bombing of Sarajevo by the Serbian army, the leveling of Mostar by the Croatian army, or the persistent destruction of cultural monuments (in Sarajevo, Dubrovnik, Mostar) is a testimony to the importance of anti-urbanism as a strong cultural component in the Yugoslav war. Although the destruction of cities has had its instrumental-rational (purely military) dimension as well, the destruction of monuments testifies to the significance of affective and symbolic (value-rational) considerations in nationalist "social action." Neither the bombing of the national library in Sarajevo by the Serbian army, nor the leveling of the old bridge in Mostar by Croatian forces was motivated by military considerations alone. In contrast, it is the desire to eliminate all traces of an enemy group's culture (in this case that of the Bosnian Moslems), that explains such behavior. In both of these cases, however, there is considerable evidence to the effect that the bombardments were carried out by army officers who had little appreciation of the cultural significance of old manuscripts or the uniqueness of sixteenth-century bridges. It is instructive to remember that the hostility towards the city as such was also a significant com- ponent in extreme right-wing ideologies (fascism in some of its varieties), and some extreme left movements as well (Pol Pot). The relationship among prestige consid- erations, ressentiment, and nationalism is, of course, the main theme of Liah Green- feld's Nationalism. The connections among all these elements and tyrannical forms of government is the subject of Daniel Chirot's Modern Tyrants (New York: The Free Press, Macmillan, 1994).

29. For the democratic implications of modern warfare, see Raymond Aron, The Cen- tury of Total War (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1954).

30. Although I do not have precise information about the social origin of these volun- teers, there are suggestive eye-witness accounts that project a roughly similar pic- ture. See, for example, the contribution of journalist Veronika Kutsyllo, who was present in the White House throughout the siege, Zapiski iz belogo doma (Moskva: Kommersant', 1993). For the participation of Transnistrian Russians and Russian- speakers see Charles King, "Moldovan identity," Slavic Review 532 (Summer, 1994): 345-369. For the "extreme left" and "extreme right" political mentality of the defenders, see the collection of leaflets, Listovki belogo doma (Moskva: Memorial, 1993).

31. Aleksandr Barkashov, "Pole chesti," in the right-wing weekly Zavtra 1 (January, 1994). For other reactions on the Russian right to the October events in the same spirit see My i vremia 48 (November 1, 1993).

32. Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. 2, 911. 33. It is for this reason that among the leaders of Soiuz one could find Viktor Alksnis (a

half-Latvian), Yevgenii Kogan (a Russian Jew), Nikolai Petrushenko (a Russian- Ukrainian from Kazakhstan), a female delegate from Chechnia (Sazhi Umalatova), as well as "pure Russians," such as Yurii Blokhin (Moldova). The difficulty in pre- serving the loyalty of such an ethnically mixed group of officers in Yugoslavia points to a crucial difference between the two cases, despite important exceptions (such as the Slovene Stane Brovet who remained Admiral of the Yugoslav fleet even after the outbreak of the war, and some other highly ranked officers). The increasing identification of the Yugoslav army with Milosevic's Serbocentric regime in the last

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years of Yugoslavia's existence was one of the decisive factors deterring hitherto

loyal officers of non-Serbian, and especially Slovene and Croat ethnic background, from forming what could have been a more purely state-centered coalition.

34. Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. 2, 921. 35. I have in mind Ukrainians and Croats respectively. It should be pointed out, how-

ever, that in comparison to Russians, Serbs were at best an incomplete "hegemon" in terms of numbers. The last reliable Yugoslav census (1981) registered that self- declared Serbs constituted only 36.3% of the total population. Even if one assumes that most Montenegrins (2.6%) consider themselves close to Serbs in national

terms, and that there was a significant number of Serbs among self-declared "Yugo- slavs" (5.4%), that would bring the relative proportion of Serbs to little more than 40% of the total. In contrast, ethnic Russians constituted about 52% of the popula- tion at about the same time (1980), although the proportion declined during the next decade.

36. For a series of speculative, but highly suggestive comparisons between Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia on the one hand, and late unifiers such as Germany and Italy on the other, see A. J. P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy: 1809-1918) (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press: 1976), 252-261.

37. In the Russian empire, this distinction was captured by two adjectives denoting a

territorial (rossiiskii) as opposed to an ethnic (russkii) identification. Hence, Ros- siiskaia imperiia (a term introduced under Peter the Great), but russkii narod (the "Russian people" in an ethnic sense). The distinction is lost in translation.

38. This does not mean that there were no instances of the advocacy of narrower Ser- bian and Russian "national interests" in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union on the level of political and intellectual elites. Naturally, both in Russia and Serbia, cultural elites continued to reproduce a largely "national culture." Yet, to take just one

example from Yugoslavia's more liberal environment, unlike Croats or Albanians, Serbs did not develop a mass nationalist movement until the rise of Milosevic to

power. It could be shown without great difficulty that even the earlier mani-

festations of ideological or political Serbian particularism on the elite level were

largely a reaction to the decentralization of the state (late 1960s), the rise of poten- tially threatening nationalist movements (Croatia in 1971; Kosovo after 1981), or

the growing demands on peripheral nationalists (Slovenia in the 1980s). This would

seem to bear out the point that assertions of dominant nation particularism are

largely "reactive" in character. 39. For Rasputin's speech see Sovetskaia Rossiia 131 (June 7, 1989). 40. "Memorandum SANU," Duga (June, 1989, special edition), 38-39. This unfinished

document originally appeared in September 1986 and was circulated privately in

Belgrade. 41. Anti-semitism was, of course, a long-standing component of both "official" as well

as "grassroots" right-wing nationalism in Tsarist Russia. Revived during Stalin's notorious "anti-cosmopolitan" campaign, it became a standard, although subsidiary component of official ideology during Brezhnev's long tenure ("anti-Zionism"). It is

not surprising, therefore, that anti-Semitism was a part of the world-view of select

members of the conservative party elite. Yet, the appearance of explicitly anti-

Semitic tracts such as Shafarevich's Russophobia on the pages of literary journals like Nash sovremennik can be dated to the second half of 1989.

42. I explore the emergence of these new coalitions in my dissertation, Communism

and Nationalism in Russia and Serbia, University of California at Berkeley, 1995.

For the development of the "new Russian ideology" during the early years of pere-

797

stroika see Yitzhak Brudny, "The heralds of opposition to perestroika," Soviet Economy 5 2 (1989): 162-200.

43. See, for example, Ruslan Khasbulatov, "Vozmozhna li Balkanizatsiia Rossii?," Rossiiskaia gazeta (May 27, 1993). Such analogies were regularly made in the Rus- sian nationalist press during the last few years, but it is interesting to note that even a "moderate" like Khasbulatov came to the same conclusion.

44. See Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1974) for the blurred boundaries among empire, state, and nation in the Russian case. See also Marc Raeff, "Patterns of Russian imperial policy toward the nation- alities," in Edward Alworth et al., Soviet Nationality Problems (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1971), 22-43.

45. For an interesting discussion of the distinction between "ethnic" (Volksnation) and "cultural" notions of nationhood (Kulturnation) in the German historical context, see Reiner Lepsius, "Nation und Nationalismus in Deutschland," in his Interessen, Ideen, und Institutionen (Westdeutscher Verlag, 1990), 232-246. I would like to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for addressing my attention to this refer- ence, which has helped me clarify my views on this problem.

46. Roman Szporluk, "The Ukraine and Russia," in Robert Conquest, editor, The Last Empire (Stanford, California: Hoover Institution, 1986), 151-183. For the citation, see 157. The statement, however, deserves some qualification. Neither Central Asia (with the exception of northern Kazakhstan), nor the Baltic states evoke the same kind of emotional response among Russians as do Ukraine and Belorus.

47. It is important to remember that the more universalist Yugoslav idea was born in Croatia, not Serbia, and held greater attraction for Croats and Serbs in the Austro- Hungarian empire than for Serbs in Serbia proper. Prior to unification, Serbs in Serbia were taught "Serbianism" not "Yugoslavism," which helps explain why Ser- bian political elites could see Yugoslavia as an "extension" of Serbia during the inter-war period. See Charles Jelavich, South Slav Nationalisms: Textbooks and Yugoslav Unification in 1918 (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1990). For the universalist, as well as messianic implications of the "Russian idea" see Nicholas Berdiaev, The Russian Idea (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962).

48. Significant exceptions were, and remained, Jews, who ironically, frequently ex- hibited a manifest desire to assimilate. For imperial policy on the Jewish question see Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (Berke- ley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). For the Soviet period, see Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1988).

49. The 1989 census registered 11.2 million "linguistic Russians" or "Russian-speakers outside of the RSFSR, mostly in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. See Nikolai Rudensky, "Russian minorities in the newly independent states" in Roman Szpor- luk, editor, National Identity and Ethnicity in Russia and the New States of Eurasia (Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 58-78, for the breakdown of ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking minorities by republic. See also Hugh Seton-Watson, "Russian nationalism in historical perspective" in Robert Conquest, The Last Em- pire, 14-30, for the view that linguistic Russification did not necessarily help the cause of "ethnic" Russian nationalism.

50. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 82 (June 20, 1992). 51. See Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, for the patrimonial features of the

Tsarist regime. In his sequel, The Russian Revolution (New York: Random House, 1990), Pipes argues that the legacy of imperial patrimonialism was a key factor

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inhibiting nation-building in the Russian case. In Pipes's view, while many contex- tual factors contributed to the collapse of the Russian empire in 1917, the rapidity of the process of disintegration can only be explained by Russia's lack of "organic national unity." It would be an interesting task for the historical sociologist to com-

pare the processes of Tsarist Russian and Soviet disintegration from this point of view.

52. Hans Rogger, "Nationalism and the state: A Russian dilemma," in S. N. Eisenstadt, editor, Political Sociology (New York and London: Basic Books, Inc., 1971), 474- 482.

53. See, in this respect, the analysis of the Kathleen E. Smith, Remembering Stalin's Vic- tims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996).

54. Frederick C. Barghoorn, Soviet-Russian Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956).

55: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Rebuilding Russia (New York: Farrar, Straus & Girrar,

1991). First published in the newspaper Komsomol'skaia pravda (September 18,

1990). 56. "Nationalism and the Yugoslavs,' in Peter F. Sugar and Ivo John Lederer, Nation-

alism in Eastern Europe (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press,

1994), 396-439. For the citation see 405. 57. The historical term for this diaspora was precani, which refers to those who went

preko (across) the Sava and Danube rivers on the wave of successive migrations from Ottoman to Habsburg lands. As of the late eighteenth century, Serbs from

Hungarian Vojvodina played an increasingly significant role in Serbian national and cultural revival.

58. For the special role of Serbs from Croatia and Bosnia in the Partisan movement

during the first years of the war, see R. V. Burks, The Dynamics of Communism in Eastern Europe (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1961), 107-

131. 59. See Gale Stokes, Politics as Development: the Emergence of Political Parties in

Nineteenth-Century Serbia (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1990). 60. See, in this respect, the speculative, but extremely imaginative contribution of one

of Serbia's greatest historians, Slobodan Jovanovid, "Jedan prilog za proucavanje

srpskog nacionalnog karaktera" (Canada: Windsor, 1964). For the social origins of

Serbian statism in comparative perspective see Gale Stokes, "The social origins of

East-European politics," in Daniel Chirot, editor, The Origins of Backwardness in

Eastern Europe (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 210-253.

61. Joel M. Halpern and Barbara Kerensky Halpern, A Serbian Village in Historical

Perspective (New York: Irvington Publishers, Inc., 1984), 123. The slava is a Serb-

ian Orthodox family holiday in celebration of a Christian saint who serves as the

protector of the household. The custom serves as one of the defining markers of

Serbian orthodoxy. 62. For Stalin's famous toast to Russians as the "leading nation" in the Soviet brother-

hood of peoples, see Barghoorn, Soviet-Russian Nationalism, 27. In contrast, at

about the same time, Tito felt compelled to explain to the founding congress of the

Communist Party of Serbia (May 1945) that "Tito and the communists have not

divided Serbia" by creating Bosnia and Herzegovina as a separate federal unit. For

Tito's speech see Branko Petranovic and Momcilo Zecevic, Jugoslovenski federali- zam: ideje i stvarnost (Beograd: Prosveta, 1987), Vol. 2, 158-159.

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63. To my knowlege, the first clear formulation of the concepts of elite and mass "avail- ability" in the context of social movement mobilization can be found in the unjustly neglected book by William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (Glencoe, Illi- nois: The Free Press, 1959).

64. For the Russian image of the state as "a bleak, elemental force that holds the land in its grasp" and the resurrection of this image as a consequence of Stalin's return to "autocratic motifs," see Robert Tucker, "The image of dual Russia," in his The Soviet Political Mind (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1971), 121-143. For a cri- tique of the application of the concept of patrimonialism in the context of Soviet communism, see Stefan Breuer, "Soviet communism and Weberian sociology," Journal of Historical Sociology 53 (September, 1992): 267-290. While I agree with Breuer's general point, I believe that it is not inappropriate to speak of certain "patrimonial features" of Soviet political culture, especially in the context of Stalin's rule.

65. It is characteristic that the sense of victimization of the nation at the hands of the state is a leitmotif in the works of the most celebrated ideological Russian nation- alist, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, most clearly in his recent book, The Russian Ques- tion (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995).

66. For the growing national tensions in the Yugoslav federation during the 1980s, see Sabrina P. Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia: 1962-1991 (Bloom- ington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992). For the asymmetrical application of the federal principle in the Serbian case, see Kosta Cavoski, "Ustavni polozaj Srbije," in his Revolucionarni makijavelizam (Beograd: Rad, 1989), 318- 343. It could be objected that a similar asymmetry can be observed in the case of the RSFSR and its autonomous republics. That, however, would entail missing the central point of this essay, i.e., that the RSFSR was never conceived as a genuine federal unit, much less a Russian "national homeland."

67. For the attempts of Milosevi6's predecessor, Ivan Stambolic, in this respect, see his collection of speeches from the 1980s, Rasprave o SR Srbiji (Zagreb: Globus, 1988).

68. See Michel Roux, Les Albanais en Yougoslavie. Minorite nationale, territoire et developpement (Paris, 1992: La Maison des Sciences de l'Homme), 379-395, for an "ethnically neutral" estimate of Serbian immigration from Kosovo in the 1961- 1987 period.

69. For the growing number of Albanian political prisoners in the 1980s, see Kosovo: dresiti ili seci (Independent Commission Report, Beograd: Chronos, 1990). For the gradual 'Albanianization" of the local party organization, see Lenard J. Cohen, The Socialist Pyramid: Elites and Power in Yugoslavia (Oakville and New York: Mosaic Press, 1989), 354-366.

70. The battle of Kosovo (1389) marked the beginning of the fall of the medieval Serb- ian kingdom to the invading Ottomans. It was turned into a myth of Christian martyrdom at the hands of "Moslem aliens" through cycles of epic poems which were passed on orally from generation to generation. The idea of "reconquering Kosovo" was a strong motivating factor in nineteenth-century Serbian nationalism, but the reconquista took place only in the First Balkan War of 1912. The "Kosovo myth" was resuscitated in the 1980s in many books and publications, for example, in Kosovo i Metohija u srpskoj istoriji (Beograd: Srpska knjizevna zadruga, 1989).

71. Milosevic's rise to power is well covered in Slavoljub Djuki6, Izmedju slave i ana- teme: Politicka biografija Slobodana Milosevica (Beograd: Filip Visnjic, 1994).

72. Compare Ralf Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany (New York and

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London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1967), 3, in the context of the German's his- torical obsession with the "national," at the expense of the "social" question: "As it happens, national questions, in contrast to social questions, invariably tend to be questions posed to others rather than to oneself. Moreover, while social questions generally call for answers for which the questioners themselves are responsible, responsibility for national questions can easily be shirked or rationalized."

73. In a certain sense, this dilemma was not unlike that of the many European social- democratic and socialist parties on the eve of World War One. For the connection between the ethnic conception of the nation (Volksnation) and the tendency to treat political opposition as treasonable in the German historical context, see M. Reiner Lepsius, "Nation und Nationalismus in Deutschland," 235-238.

74. For the "combat ethos" as the defining feature of communist parties, see Philip Selznick, The Organizational Weapon (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1960) and Ken Jowitt, The New World Disorder (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 1-50.

75. A good analysis of the combat spirit of Milosevic's speeches can be found in Kosta tavoski, Slobodan protiv slobode (Beograd: Dosije, 1991).

76. For the relative over-representation of Serbs in the officer corps and Croatian party structures, see Cohen, The Socialist Pyramid 128, 419. Although I do not have data on the exact proportion of Serbs from Croatia (as opposed to Serbs from Serbia) in the officer corps, Serbian officers from Krajina played a special role in the high command and Yugoslav politics as a whole. Thus, Nikola Ljubicic, the retired com- mander in chief of the Yugoslav army, was instrumental in bringing Milosevi6 to

power in Serbia, and Veljko Kadijevic and Blagoje Adzi6 commanded the army during the first stages of the war in Croatia.

77. Yegor Ligachev, Inside Gorbachev's Kremlin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993). 78. Yeltsin's (and Gorbachev's) most important speeches from the perestroika period

are collected in Gorbachev-Yeltsin: 1500 dnei politicheskogo protivostoiania (Moskva: Terra, 1992). The theme of the Stalinist legacy and Russia's victimization

by the Soviet center also runs through Yeltsin's memoirs, The Struggle for Russia (New York: Random House, 1994).

79. See Victoria Bonnell, Gregory Freidin, and Ann Cooper, editor, Russia at the Barricades: Eyewitness Accounts of the August 1991 Coup (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1994) and John Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet

Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) for two analyses of some of the causes of the failure of coercive state institutions during the dramatic days of

August, 1991. 80. For "Russocentrism" as an element in Ukrainian political culture, see Orest Sub-

telny, "Russocentrism, regionalism and the political culture of Ukraine," in Vladi- mir Tismaneanu, editor, Political Culture and Civil Society in the New States of Eurasia (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), 189-208.

81. For survey data that demonstrate the relatively friendly grassroots ethnic reality, see

Evgenii Golovakha, Natalia Panina, and Nikolai Churilov, "Russians in Ukraine," in Vladimir Shlapentokh, Munir Sendich, and Emil Payin, The New Russian Diaspora (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 59-72. This, naturally, does not mean that hostility could not be mobilized by both Russian and Ukrainian "political entrepreneurs."

82. For an excellent discussion of linguistic divisions and their contribution to the re-

gional, East-West polarization of the vote in Ukraine, see Dominique Arel, "The

temptation of the nationalizing state," in Tismaneanu, Political Culture, 157-189.

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83. Although the ideological transformation of the current leader of Russian commu- nists, Gennadii Ziuganov, from a believer in class struggle into a defender of Russian national interests began prior to August 1991, his recent rejection of "Western evolutionism" in the name of "Spenglerian" thoughts, is telling. See his latest books Derzhava (Moskva: Informpechat', 1994) and Za gorizontom (Moskva: Inform- pechat', 1995) for the peculiar mixture of "left" and "right" values and ideals that informs much of communist-nationalist thinking in Russia.

84. It is indicative that Yeltsin's popularity rating dropped dramatically in both in- stances in which he had applied military force against civilians (parliament - October 1993; Chechnia - December 1994).