Since I work for the government, I must stress, by way of introduction, that whatever I say reflects my opinion and not necessarily the opinion of the U.S. government.

We have come to the human dimension in this discussion. It would, therefore, be useful for us to consider two different ways of approaching this. One is talking about people at arm's length, in the way we have been doing most of the day; to a certain extent we have had to do so, as social scientists or even as humanists. I am going to try the other approach, namely, to talk about a few individuals to see if there is anything there that might help us in understanding the nationality question. My subject is literature and language. First, I will cover literature as an instrument, as something of interest to social scientists; and then I will discuss certain important individuals. As far as the nationality question is concerned, the individual does matter, although, it seems, the Party places that aspect at the bottom of its list of nationality concerns deemed important.

As Paul Goble pointed out, it is hard to give historical perspective to recent facts. My own comments started out as a footnote or paragraph for a piece I prepared for The Harriman Institute Forum on the current political situation and the Soviet historical profession, in which I mentioned that Soviet historians put the nationalities issue, among others, high on their agenda for opening up the past. Presumably, they are trying to make themselves into a force for reformist politics on the nationality question. In some important ways, the nationalities offer all sorts of important changes to the picture I presented for the central Russian dialogue on history.

Rather than stress policy to explain the geographic and ethnic bases of nationalism in the USSR, my emphasis will be on the universal features of these processes, or what we can learn about these important aspects of nationalism from comparative investigation: logic should compel one to demonstrate that the processes under investigation are not universal before one accepts a unique approach to the study of a region, country, or nation. Clearly, not all societal processes in the USSR are universal. The centrally planned economy is directed by policy, which, of course, affects geography, demography, and nationalism indirectly, and the unique aspects of Soviet society and history also affect these processes. However, empirical research indicates that there is a considerable universality in demographic, geographic, and ethnic processes in the USSR. Marxist-Leninist nationality policy has not been very effective, largely because such processes are difficult to control in any society and are not well-understood in the USSR.

Motyl

Let me open by making one or two minor remarks and then raising a broader issue which, I believe, is relevant to all the papers and may lead to further discussion if the panelists are so inclined. The minor points speak to methodological and ideological concerns, and are addressed to Paul Goble's comments about the theorizing and the break-up scenarios of the 1970's and the 1980's. For what it is worth, that really is not the issue. From the 1970's through today, the central issue in interpreting the nationality question has been the stability of the system, whether one interprets this from a conflict model perspective or consensus model perspective, to put it simplistically. The conflict perspective has so far been validated. It has also been suggested that, if one removes the coercive apparatus—the influence of the police—and liberalizes society, conflict will become manifest. That should not happen according to the consensus perspective. Consensus is, as it were, a permanent feature.