This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series The Rediscovery of Politics, given by Geoffrey Hosking, was originally broadcast in 1988.

The national question in the Soviet Union provides a striking illustration of Topville's celebrated dictum

that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it seeks to mend its ways.

Although the various Soviet nations often resent having their lives controlled from a distant and unresponsive Moscow,

one would have said until very recently that there was no way they could seriously challenge their rulers

simply because they did not have any effective autonomous organisations of their own.

Today, the picture is quite different.

The factors which have given birth to informal associations in Russia

make themselves felt with redoubled intensity in the non-Russian areas.

There, issues of history, culture and the environment are even more salient as symbols of national distinctiveness,

and for the same reason, writers and scholars enjoy a uniquely respected status.

The whole dynamic of glass-nesty and democratization has propelled ethnic factors to the center of the Soviet political stage.

Glassness did not, however, actually create this situation. It has merely made it manifest.

The Soviet multinational state is the last of the great European empires.

And since the others have all fallen apart

in the present century, it's to be expected that the Soviet one too should come under pressure

from national liberation movements. But viewed in that perspective, the Soviet Union is a

decidedly unusual imperial entity. It resembles the Habsburg or Ottoman empires, contiguous agglomerations of

territory held together by military and administrative power. Yet more than either of those,

it's numerically and politically dominated by one nation, the Russians. But, and here the paradoxes

begin, that domination has not enabled the Russians to flourish economically,

...