Suchergebnisse

If until recently Western investigations of "the nationalities question" in Russia and the Soviet Union focused almost exclusively on the larger and more visible "nations" that enjoyed union-republic status in the Soviet period, scholars have now begun to devote more sustained collective attention to the history of smaller ethnic groups that received only "autonomous" units within the Russian republic itself. For many of these peoples, subjected to Russian imperial rule and cultural domination for the entirety of their modern history and endowed with fewer of the opportunities for national development available to titular nationalities in the union republics, the problem of maintaining their particularity and of articulating a vision of collective cohesion has been especially acute both historically and in more recent times. Yet the fact that some of these groups are now threatened with eventual disappearance as distinct linguistic and cultural communities should not blind us to the complex, contingent, and inherently messy nature of their assimilation. Indeed, close scrutiny reveals that the very processes of assimilation contain within themselves possibilities for the emergence of hybrid cultural configurations and the appropriation of dominant conceptions for the transformation of indigenous culture along new trajectories.

In 1846, theOrenburg Provincial Gazettecarried a brief account of the recent baptism of over 800 Mari pagans in a "distant corner" of Birsk district. As the newspaper reported, District Chief N. Bludarov, accompanied by his assistants and a priest, "by gradually gaining the trust of the Cheremis [Maris], finally succeeded in shaking their obdurate superstition by means of persuasion. At first only a few, then a large number, and finally by whole villages, [Cheremis] decided to accept the Christian faith, and in 1845, on the clergy's lists, there appeared up to 900 new Christians."Since the mid-eighteenth century, baptisms on such a scale had been rare in the Volga-Kama region, and virtually none had occurred in northwestern Orenburg province, where the population was predominantly Muslim and "pagan." On the surface, therefore, these baptisms appeared to be a "happy beginning" of the Christianization of local Maris and a foothold for Orthodoxy in a heavily non-Christian area.3 In fact, matters were not quite so simple.