Suchergebnisse

This article raises questions about the relationship between theory and practice, legality and illegality in the late Soviet nationalities policy, and the role played by various branches of power. It focuses on the Veps, an indigenous ethnic minority in the northwest of Russia. In the Brezhnev era, quite a few officials and census takers refused to register the Veps nationality in personal identification documents and during censuses, claiming, incorrectly, that the Veps were not in the official list of nationalities or that they were a people (narodnost'), not a nationality (natsional'nost'), and hence could not be registered as one. The Veps were counted as Russians instead. These bureaucratic practices, widespread in Leningrad and Vologda oblasti, but not in Karelia, contradicted official nationalities policy, passport regulations, and census instructions. It seemed that the Soviet state no longer recognized the Veps as an ethnic community. The article claims that the mass refusal to register the Veps nationality was intentional and directed by the regional authorities. The goal was to accelerate the assimilation of the Veps, a policy that worked well. The official number of Veps decreased extremely rapidly in the 1970 and 1979 censuses, only to recover in 1989, after the manipulations had ended.

This is an article on Bolshevik nationalities policy and ethnic engineering, asking who, in fact, decided which populations belonged together as ethnic groups (narodnost') and thus had the right of national self-determination, and how the level of autonomy was determined for each ethnic unit. Scholars have dealt with Russian and Soviet nationalities issues for decades already, but they have turned their attention mainly to the larger nationalities (at the level of SSR, and to a lesser degree the levels of ASSR and autonomousoblast). I argue that the lower levels of national territorial autonomy in the Soviet Union (nationalokrug, raion, volost', andselsovet) are worthy of greater academic attention, at least from the ethnological point of view. Having this kind of low-level territorial autonomy has often been a question of to be or not to be for the small ethnic groups concerned, and hence the subject is connected with the question of preservation of cultural and linguistic diversity in Russia.

This article analyses the conceptual path to the creation of national territorial autonomies of the Komi (Zyrians) and Komi-Permiaks in the 1920s. It focuses on the history of the idea of Komi autonomy and on the formation of the borders of the Komi Autonomous Oblast. The creation of the Komi autonomy was, first of all, the project of the small group of nationalist Komi communists. They tried to unite all the Komi politically, and were successful as far as their aims were in accordance with contemporary Soviet nationalities policy. However, they were not able to include Permiak areas, mainly because of the opposition of neighbouring Russian provincial elites.

The Setus are an ethnic group, small in numbers, in the southeastern part of the Republic of Estonia and the Russian territories bordering on Estonia (Petseri raion of the Pskov oblast). The Setus can be seen as ethnographic raw material that both Estonian and Russian nationalists have attempted to claim. Generally, the Setus has been viewed as an ethnographic subgroup of Estonians and their language as part of the South Estonian dialect. Unlike the Estonians, who are predominantly Lutheran by tradition, the Setus are Orthodox. The specific characteristics of the Setus have emerged as a result of the combined influence of religious and linguistic peculiarities and a historic fate that is different from the Estonian. Because of the fact that they were considered Estonians when the censuses took place, the exact number of the Setus is unknown; however, I estimate the number of the Setus living in Setumaa and in Estonian towns to be about 5,000–6,000.