Racial Politics without the Concept of Race: Reevaluating Soviet Ethnic and National Purges
Racial Politics without the Concept of Race: Reevaluating Soviet Ethnic and National Purges
复制标题
没有种族概念的种族政治：重新评估苏联的种族和民族清洗
作者：
E. Weitz
Eric D. Weitz认为，苏联促进了国家制度和意识的发展，并明确拒绝了种族意识形态。然而，种族政治的痕迹悄悄渗透到苏联的民族政策中，尤其是在1937年至1953年间。在斯大林时期，特定的人群被赋予了群体中每个成员都拥有的不可改变的特征，并代代相传。他认为，最近的学术研究一直不愿从斯大林主义对某些民族的清洗中找出种族因素。弗朗辛·赫希（Francine Hirsch）对韦茨的观点提出了质疑，她认为苏联政权有一个发达的“种族”概念，但并没有实行同时代人所认为的“种族政治”。赫希认为，纳粹政权试图通过种族手段实施社会变革，而苏联政权则渴望通过操纵大众（民族和阶级）意识来建设社会主义。她认为，必须分析两种制度所使用的概念范畴，以便进行真正的比较分析。韦纳提出，苏联人口政治在社会学和生物学分类之间不断波动。尽管苏联人经常接近于采用生物种族的原则和做法，但他们从来没有让人类遗传成为政治计划的一个决定性特征。在苏联世界，种族主要适用于对人口群体健康的关注。尽管有能力进行种族灭绝运动和运营死亡集中营，但苏联从未寻求对整个群体进行物质灭绝，也没有停止庆祝其政体的多民族。战后时期国家暴力的激进化是由苏联世界战争的性质和作用、那些未能挺身而出的人的所谓行为、以及普遍存在的不稳定和未被同化的边境地区引发的，而不是由内部敌人的基因构成引发的。Alaina Lemon的贡献表明，学者们通过将话语视为情境实践来寻求种族化的概念，而不是将话语与实践分开。这允许考虑人们使用语言的方式，不仅是命名类别，而且还指向社会关系（如“种族”），或不明确地命名它们。然而，当过去话语实践的唯一可用证据是印刷文本或访谈时，这样做无疑更加困难。最后，Weitz回应了这些批评。
Eric D. Weitz argues that the Soviet Union promoted the development of national institutions and consciousness and explicidy rejected the ideology of race. Yet traces of racial politics crept into Soviet nationalities policies, especially between 1937 and 1953. In the Stalin period particular populations were endowed with immutable traits that every member of the group possessed and that were passed from one generation to the next. Recent scholarship, he suggests, has been resistant to drawing out the racial elements in the Stalinist purges of certain nationalities. Francine Hirsch challenges Weitz’s argument, arguing that the Soviet regime had a developed concept of “race,” but did not practice what contemporaries thought of as “racial politics.” Hirsch argues that while the Nazi regime attempted to enact social change by racial means, the Soviet regime aspired to build socialism dirough the manipulation of mass (national and class) consciousness. She contends that it is imperative to analyze the conceptual categories that both regimes used in order to undertake a true comparative analysis. Weiner proposes that Soviet population politics constandy fluctuated between sociological and biological categorization. Although the Soviets often came close to adapting bioracial principles and practices, at no point did they let human heredity become a defining feature of political schemes. Race in the Soviet world applied mainly to concerns for the health of population groups. Despite the capacity to conduct genocidal campaigns and operate death camps, the Soviets never sought the physical extermination of entire groups nor did they stop celebrating the multiethnicity of tiieir polity. The radicalization of state violence in the postwar era was triggered by the nature and role of the war in the Soviet world, the alleged conduct of those who failed to rise to the occasion, and the endemic unstable and unassimilated borderlands, and not by the genetic makeup of the internal enemies. Alaina Lemon’s contribution suggests that scholars seek racialized concepts by treating discourse as situated practice, rather than by separating discourse from practice. This allows consideration of the ways people use language not only to name categories but also to point to social relationships (such as “race”) with or without explicidy naming them as such. Doing so, however, is admittedly more difficult when the only available evidence of past discursive practices are printed texts or interviews. In conclusion, Weitz responds to these critics.