Official Ethnology in Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia in The Service of Russian Nationality Policy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.46585/cargo.2025.2.154Keywords:
Russia’s nationality policy, multinationality, multiethnicity, Yulian Bromley, Valeriy TishkovAbstract
The policy of Russia towards the peoples within its borders follows a consistent trajectory. The strategic goal of this policy is to neutralise the potential for the independent national development of those peoples, to transform them into loyal Russian subjects, and to turn the whole Russian realm into a homogeneous entity, while paying lip service to its multiethnicity. Not only was this the policy of the last Russian tsars but, contrary to popular myth, it was also the original view of Russian communists. The Soviet leadership's abandonment of permanent mass repression in the USSR after Stalin's death reduced the intensity of this policy and led to the emergence of an unstable model of nationality policy. It was at that point that Yulian Bromley’s dualist theory of ethnos emerged in Soviet science. Bromley’s theory sought to overcome the contradictions of Soviet policy, but it eventually turned out to be at odds with the nationality policy of the Russian state, which therefore led to its abandonment in the post-Soviet period. This article describes how the post-Soviet Russian establishment, reverting to the paradigm of the nationality policy of the late Russian Empire, is shedding the legacy of enforced Soviet multinationalism, and how key pro-state Russian ethnologists are providing theoretical justifications for this process.
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