The Soviet nationalities policies is one of the most intensively studied subjects in the historiography of the Soviet Union. Scholars have shown how the Soviet state elaborated a vision of governing difference grounded not in religion but in ethno-territorial categories, institutionalized during the 1920s through a federative architecture of national republics. This project aimed, above all, to reorder the former territories of the Russian Empire while tightening Moscow’s political authority. Yet we still know remarkably little about how Soviet ideas of ethno-territorial self-determination travelled beyond Soviet borders. This lecture argues that Soviet approaches to managing diversity acquired unexpected resonances across parts of the global South, becoming an object of engagement for a wide range of state and non-state actors. It focuses on the post-Ottoman Middle East and British-ruled South Asia – two arenas in which anti-colonial politics and rival imaginaries of sovereignty took especially sharp form during the interwar years. Drawing on sources in Arabic, Urdu, Russian, and other languages, the lecture places Soviet nationalities policy in dialogue with select case studies from the interwar histories of both regions. In doing so, it seeks to generate new questions not only about Soviet nationalities policy itself, but also about the political and intellectual trajectories of South Asia and the Middle East in the first half of the twentieth century.
Dr. Roy Bar Sadeh is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the History of the Islamic World at the University of Manchester. Working in a global and multilingual frame, his research traces debates over sovereignty, citizenship, and religious and social difference across the Middle East, South Asia, and Eurasia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He previously held postdoctoral positions at Freie Universität Berlin and at Yale Law School’s Abdullah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 2022, where his dissertation won the Ab Imperio Prize. His current book project, Muslims and the Minority Question: A Global History, 1856–1947 (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming), follows transimperial Muslim intellectual networks and their engagement with the idea of “minority” in wider debates on pluralism and international law. His work has appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals, including Comparative Studies in Society and History, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, with an article forthcoming in Past & Present. He also writes for public outlets, including Haaretz, and has appeared on BBC Radio 4.
