National delimitation in the Soviet Union

National delimitation in the Soviet Union refers to the process of creating well-defined national territorial units (Soviet socialist republics – SSR, autonomous Soviet socialist republics – ASSR, autonomous oblasts (provinces), raions (districts) and okrugs) from the ethnic diversity of the Soviet Union and its subregions. The Russian term for this Soviet state policy is razmezhevanie (Russian: национально-территориальное размежевание, natsionalno-territorialnoye razmezhevaniye), which is variously translated in English-language literature as national-territorial delimitation, demarcation, or partition. National delimitation is part of a broader process of changes in administrative-territorial division, which also changes the boundaries of territorial units, but is not necessarily linked to national or ethnic considerations. National delimitation in the Soviet Union is distinct from nation-building (Russian: национальное строительство), which typically refers to the policies and actions implemented by the government of a national territorial unit (a nation state) after delimitation. In most cases national delimitation in the Soviet Union was followed by korenizatsiya.

Pre-1917 Russia was an imperial state, not a nation. In the 1905 Duma elections the nationalist parties received only 9 percent of all votes. The many non-Russian ethnic groups that inhabited the Russian Empire were classified as inorodtsy, or aliens. The Soviet Russia that took over from the Russian Empire in 1917 was not a nation-state, nor was the Soviet leadership committed to turning their country into such a state. In the early Soviet period, even voluntary assimilation was actively discouraged, and the promotion of the national self-consciousness of the non-Russian populations was attempted. Each officially recognized ethnic minority, however small, was granted its own national territory where it enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy, national schools, and national elites. A written national language (if it had been lacking), national language planning, native-language press, and books written in the native language came with the national territory. The attitudes towards many ethnic minorities changed dramatically in the 1930s–1940s under the leadership of Joseph Stalin (despite his own Georgian ethnic roots) with the advent of a repressive policy featuring abolition of the national institutions, ethnic deportations, national terror, and Russification (mostly towards those with cross-border ethnic ties to foreign nation-states in the 1930s or compromised in the view of Stalin during the Great Patriotic War in the 1940s), although nation-building often continued simultaneously for others.

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