“The Pillars of Our Statehood:” Glasnost’, Soviet Networks, and National Mobilization

Scholars of Gorbachev’s reforms and the Soviet collapse usually note that the last Soviet leader underestimated the power of nationalist mobilization and acted belatedly, and ineffectually, to stop it. In this article, I consider the effects of the strategy that Gorbachev adopted in the wake of the Alma-Ata events (remembered as Jeltoqsan in Kazakhstan), when protests erupted after an ethnic Russian from outside the republic was installed as first secretary. Gorbachev realized the importance of nationalist sentiment and was sympathetic to many of the grievances raised by intellectuals. He hoped that better knowledge of the problem would help him manage it, and he counted on the intellectuals to make common cause with their counterparts across the USSR. They did so, but the all-union publications, institutions, and networks to which they turned ultimately amplified nationalist sentiment and catalyzed the movement for independence, undermining the prospects of all-union reform. I explore this phenomenon by considering the Aral-88 expedition, the role of journals like Druzhba Narodov, and knowledge production on the region among ethnographers and economists at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow.