Suchergebnisse

A key element of the propaganda campaign to get the Russian public behind the invasion of Ukraine has been a program of national-patriotic education. Nationwide exhibitions present World War II history with a slant calculated to instill pride in Russian heroism and stir up hostility toward Ukraine.

In this article, Francine Hirsch examines the Ethnographic Department of the Russian Museum as a venue for virtual tourism, where museumgoers were able to become acquainted with "the Peoples of the USSR" and where Soviet ethnographers and Politprosvet activists attempted to work out an idealized narrative about the socialist transformation of the Soviet Union. Focusing on the period of the "Great Break," Hirsch investigates the role of "the narrative" in the process of Soviet state formation and the role of mass participation in facilitating Soviet authoritarian rule. Hirsch treats the "ideological front" as a dynamic realm and shows how ethnographers, activists, and museumgoers attempted to reconcile disparities between "the real" and "the ideal" in the Soviet Union. In addition, she evaluates how the Soviet developmentalist narrative evolved after 1931, as ethnographers attempted to formulate a nonbiological, sociohistorical explanation for the persistence of traditional culture among certain population groups in an effort to counter German racial theories.

Eric D. Weitz argues that the Soviet Union promoted the development of national institutions and consciousness and explicidy rejected the ideology of race. Yet traces of racial politics crept into Soviet nationalities policies, especially between 1937 and 1953. In the Stalin period particular populations were endowed with immutable traits that every member of the group possessed and that were passed from one generation to the next. Recent scholarship, he suggests, has been resistant to drawing out the racial elements in the Stalinist purges of certain nationalities. Francine Hirsch challenges Weitz's argument, arguing that the Soviet regime had a developed concept of "race," but did not practice what contemporaries thought of as "racial politics." Hirsch argues that while the Nazi regime attempted to enact social change by racial means, the Soviet regime aspired to build socialism dirough die manipulation of mass (national and class) consciousness. She contends that it is imperative to analyze the conceptual categories that both regimes used in order to undertake a true comparative analysis. Weiner proposes that Soviet population politics constandy fluctuated between sociological and biological categorization. Although the Soviets often came close to adapting bioracial principles and practices, at no point did they let human heredity become a defining feature of political schemes. Race in the Soviet world applied mainly to concerns for the health of population groups. Despite the capacity to conduct genocidal campaigns and operate death camps, the Soviets never sought the physical extermination of entire groups nor did they stop celebrating the multiethnicity of tiieir polity. The radicalization of state violence in the postwar era was triggered by die nature and role of the war in the Soviet world, the alleged conduct of those who failed to rise to the occasion, and the endemic unstable and unassimilated borderlands, and not by die genetic makeup of the internal enemies. Alaina Lemon's contribution suggests that scholars seek racialized concepts by treating discourse as situated practice, rather than by separating discourse from practice. This allows consideration of the ways people use language not only to name categories but also to point to social relationships (such as "race") with or without explicidy naming them as such. Doing so, however, is admittedly more difficult when die only available evidence of past discursive practices are printed texts or interviews. In conclusion, Weitz responds to these critics.

The All-Union Congress of Soviets ratified the Constitution of the USSR on 31 January 1924 and, according to traditional narratives, brought the formation of the Soviet Union to a close. The very same day, a group of leading ethnographers met at the Academy of Sciences in Petrograd to discuss a directive they had received from the Soviet of Nationalities: define nationality, determine "rational criteria" for classifying the population in the first All-Union Census, and notify the Central Statistical Administration as soon as possible. The legal formation of the Soviet Union had been completed, but the state-building process, which involved "re-imagining" the former Russian empire as a socialist federation of nationalities, was just getting under way. This essay argues that the classification of Soviet citizens by nationality in the All-Union Censuses of 1926, 1937, and 1939 was a fundamental component of the creation of the multinational state. The very establishment of the census categorynationalitymarked a critical break with the tsarist regime, which had categorized its subjects on the basis of religion and native language. Ethnographers, statisticians, and linguists from Minsk to Vladivostok who formulated questionnaires and drew up lists of nationalities for all three censuses used their expertise to divine order out of chaos and create a new definitional grid. Not only did they have to decide which tribes, clans, and peoples belonged to which nationality, they also had to figure out what "nationality" meant.

Frontmatter --CONTENTS --FIGURES AND MAPS --ACKNOWLEDGMENTS --NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND DATES --TERMS AND ABBREVIATIONS --Introduction --PART ONE. Empire, Nation, and the Scientific State --CHAPTER 1. Toward a Revolutionary Alliance --CHAPTER 2. The National Idea versus Economic Expediency --CHAPTER 3. The 1926 Census and the Conceptual Conquest of Lands and Peoples --CHAPTER 4. Border-Making and the Formation of Soviet National Identities --CHAPTER 5. Transforming "The Peoples of the USSR": Ethnographic Exhibits and the Evolutionary Timeline --PART 3 The Nazi Threat and the Acceleration of the Bolshevik Revolution --CHAPTER 6. State-Sponsored Evolutionism and the Struggle Against German Biological Determinism --CHAPTER 7. Ethnographic Knowledge and Terror --Epilogue --APPENDIX --BIBLIOGRAPHY --INDEX