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Discusses the misunderstanding on the political role of ethnic and national identity in the Soviet Union. Reasons for its misunderstanding; Results of studies on the confrontation between nationalism and communism during the formation of the Soviet Union.

Twenty years ago most Western and Soviet analysts agreed that ethnicity was of only marginal significance in the Soviet Union. Since then this position has been challenged in the West, and has been slowly eroded in the Soviet Union by empirical ethno-sociological research. This shift is partly due to a growing recognition that the tenacity of ethnicity has been seriously underestimated worldwide, but political events and social processes in the Soviet Union were at the core of this change. One of the big surprises of the late 1960's and early 1970's was the emergence of Soviet Jews as a distinct community voicing ethno-political demands, especially for the right to free emigration. Studies of ethnicity have shown that awareness of it frequently arises in the course of contact with other ethnic groups who assign names to new groups they meet. Thus ethnic identification depends not only on objective traits and subjective feelings of self, but also on the degree to which the environment pays attention to it and calls it by name. According to the author, his analysis of the changing nature of Soviet Jewish identity illustrates the fluidity of the phenomenon and that no single criterion can be taken as decisive.

This analysis of voters and nonvoters in a large sample of recent emigrants from the Soviet Union shows that nonvoting is correlated with high interest in politics, a critical political outlook, and dissident modes of behavior. Thus, voter abstention in noncom petitive balloting can be hypothesized to constitute a significant political act rather than passivity. Single-party states use single-candidate elections for a variety of purposes, one of these being the psychological reinforcement of unity between regime and subjects. In this context, the only choice left to the dissenting citizen is not to vote at all. In the contemporary Soviet Union, nonvoting is regionally focused on Moscow and Leningrad, and is associated with post-Stalinist generational change. The covert nature of vote evasion and its informal tolerance provide a new perspective on the character of the Soviet system and its political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]