This piece is a nice compliment to Anderson’s “Imagined Communities.” Kolossov also identified national (or political) identification as ultimately being an arbitrary social construct. Kolossov’s primary focus is on the ethnic identities of former members of the Soviet Union and how their perception of ethnicity and its significance in their life has changed.
Ethnic identification was vital for the new states emerging from the Soviet Union because these suddenly independent nations had to very quickly establish a sense of unification amongst a people that had none of cultural or linguistic ties that might have traditionally bound them together politically. This is, in large part, due to the (again) rather arbitrary regional division by the USSR. The newborn states born of the USSR had to create some form of community in the wake of an incredibly diverse empire. This brings to mind the post-World War I carving up of the Middle East by Great Britain and other European powers. In that case, those decisions exacerbated pre-existing tensions between religious and ethnic groups. Though these situations are quite different, it does remind us of the importance of self-identification in the creation and destruction of communities.
This article, particularly at the beginning, emphasizes the idea of individual choice reminding me of our discussion a couple of weeks ago. Kolossov argues that both ethnic and political identity are ultimately decided by an individual and spends the rest of the article demonstrating ways a state might try to manipulate social factors such as language to help form an identity that aligns personal affiliation to an ethnic group (such as Ukrainian) and state (such as the Soviet Union). Where that social influence begins and ends is up for debate but it seems that Kolossov is arguing that a successful state is reliant on a series of individual choices. It’s a provocative statement. Again, those choices can be motivated by a plethora of factors but it is ultimately the choice (or in some cases I would argue inability to choose otherwise) to identify as a member of a nation.