ABSTRACT
The death of Stalin in March 1953 was the first of a series of events leading to a renegotiation of the relationship between the non-Russian republics of the USSR and the central authorities in Moscow. One of the most concrete outcomes of de-Stalinization was the partial or full rehabilitation of the Chechen, Ingush, Crimean Tatar, German and other peoples deported from their homelands on Stalin’s orders before and during the Great Patriotic War. Before then, the ‘gift’ of the Crimean peninsula to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic at the expense of the Russian Soviet Federation of Socialist Republics (RSFSR) in 1954 signalled an end to the increasingly russo-centric political, cultural, demographic and ideological shifts of the 1930s and 1940s. On the other hand, the Virgin Lands campaign centred on settling Slavic farmers into northern Kazakhstan, with little effort made to refute the appearance of a return to colonialism. The decentralizing sovnarkhoz reform of 1957, as discussed in other chapters in this volume, further altered the balance of authority in favour of the republics and away from the centre, only to be partially reversed by the language provisions of the education reform the following year and the abandoning of the sovnarkhoz reform in the early 1960s.
