The digitization of the Stalin archive presents scholars of Soviet history with a wealth of materials that can provide insight and, in some cases, discoveries, about politics and policy in the Stalin era. Owing to the serendipitous quality of the collection, which brings together Stalin’s writings, his correspondence, materials of the Politburo, and other documents over several decades, and it’s sheer size, what one finds in part depends on what one is looking for. And just as there are insights and discoveries, there are disappointments and absences. The collection offers value to the study of nationality policy, by which we mean not merely policies, practices, and discourses affecting the non-Russian populations of the Soviet Union, but rather those that specifically address the multiethnic character of the Soviet state and how to manage it as such, but researchers seeking groundbreaking discoveries will no doubt disappointed.

One will not find new documents here of Stalin musing about the fundamental questions about the problems facing the Soviet Union as a multiethnic state. Some of the more notorious wartime and postwar events, such as the deportations of entire ethnic communities, or the anti-Semitic campaigns, are hardly represented in the collection. In short, neither the mundane details of nationality-policymaking nor many “smoking guns” are to be found. Yet, the available documents do reveal Stalin’s own thinking, and, perhaps no less important, the ways in which official discourse on nationality was adopted and shaped by Soviet citizens who sought to speak back to the authorities.

First, to Stalin’s own thinking. We have here draft versions of many of Stalin’s most important statements on the “national question.” Many of these offer little new insight to materials long ago in the public domain (not least in the official works published by the regime). But one exception is that we can trace the origins of the essay “The National Question and Leninism,” first published in March 1929. Ostensibly a response to questions about the future of nations under socialism, it was here that Stalin elaborated most fully (and for the first time) his theoretical innovation that nations would not whither away under socialism, but would rather further develop. Thus the concept of “socialist nation” was born. In the collection, we have available the exchange of correspondence between V. Kasatkin and Stalin himself, which sheds light on Stalin’s efforts to clarify the definition of “nation” and its role in the coming socialist society.

In addition to such theoretical documents, the collection includes communications between Stalin and regional party and state officials dating from the mid-1920s through the late 1930s. These generally reveal his “realistic” perspective on nationality problems, in the sense that they see nationality as deeply-rooted and unlikely to change, with ethnic groups having clear interests, and potentially posing clear dangers to the Soviet state. This thread of his thinking is revealed in notes on the situation in the Northern Caucasus in 1925, where he works through the consequences of national-territorial delimitation. In particular, we see his rejection of the possible union of Northern and Southern Ossetia. In the later 1930s, with a different policy valence, we have telegrams about the necessity of deporting the Korean population from the Soviet Far East to Kazakhstan, as well as his concerns about the treatment of the Polish population of recently-annexed Lviv in 1940.

Finally, the Stalin archive includes many letters from Soviet citizens to Stalin on the subject of nationality policy in the postwar years. These fall, broadly, into three categories. First, there are quite a few letters, both individual and collective, from representatives of the wartime deported peoples—Germans, Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks, and others—appealing for personal rehabilitation. Second, there are letters from representatives of groups—the Gagauz, the Abkhaz, and Jews—seeking to make a case that nationality policy is not being properly implemented for them. In both of these kinds of letters, what is striking is that the language of nationality policy—of self-determination, territorialization, and cultural and linguistic autonomy—is used to draw attention to its very violation. Finally, the collection is rich with letters to Stalin asking for clarification about the theoretical basis of nationality policy. Questions about the definition of “nation” in particular are raised in several letters. These, probably unintentionally, point out the internal contradictions within Stalin’s writings, and the ways in which policy and theory were at odds. There is no record of a response to these letters in the collection, and if there had been it would not have come from Stalin himself. But they do reveal the manifold ways in which Soviet citizens spoke to power about the nuances and complexities of the “nationality question” in Stalin’s last years.