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Ernest Gellner's (eg, 1974, 1977) treatment of the anthropological work of Soviet scholars is discussed in the context of the political climate of the Cold War. Conversations among colleagues had to be held surreptitiously. The tension between Gellner & his Marxist counterparts did not prevent him from recognizing the world-class anthropologists who worked within Soviet Marxist constrictions. Western & Soviet anthropologists worked on similar questions, eg, power relations in early preindustrial societies. Soviet ideology also posed some special questions for anthropologists, eg, the relevance of ethnographic analysis & the schema of historical stages of development. H. von Rautenfeld

In dem Bericht kritisiert die Autorin die aus ihrer Sicht unkritische Übernahme russischer Ansichten in der Frage des Tschetschenien-Krieges durch die britische Regierung und stellt demgegenüber die Tschetschenen als Opfer einer aggressiven russischen Politik dar. Sie analysiert den Tschetschenien-Krieg unter menschenrechtlichen Gesichtspunkten und gibt abschließend Empfehlungen im Hinblick auf eine friedliche Regelung des bewaffneten Konflikts. (BIOst-Mrk)

Moscow allows debate but guards against foreign reporting of any challenge to its control over Tbilisi

Tamara Dragadze, Some changes in perspectives on ethnicity theory in the I980's. A brief sketch.
To a certain extent. Western trends have often been marked by a greater recognition of essentialist, reflexive or cultural traits in die social coastruction of ethnic identity and the class-conflict based models arc on the wain. There are several reasons for this, one of them being the impact of the voice of members of ethnic minorities in Britain themselves.
In the Soviet Union in the past, a Marxist framework was adapted to an essentialist, cultural model in order to escape the confines of simple class analysis and also to present a sanitized version of Soviet ethnic relations. The new glasnosť and the force of events themselves are permitting a review of some of the tenets of ethnicity theory. The materials are still being written and the diversity between Moscow and the republics has yet to be documented. This paper nevertheless attempts to elicit some thoughts on the direction some Soviet authors might be moving towards. The paper ends with a few comments on how I am trying to combine in my own work a selection of approaches from the vast variety of trends in both Western and Soviet anthropology.