What Makes a People?Soviet Nationality Politics and Minority Experience After World War Two.
[摘要] My dissertation, What Makes a People? Soviet Nationality Politics and Minority Experience after World War Two, foregrounds the politics and practices of suppressing ;;non-titular” minority peoples and identities, and the consequences of such efforts. As opposed to better-known titular nationalities, which had Soviet republics named after them and garnered state support, non-titular peoples were often targeted by assimilationist politics that obscured their place in the Soviet landscape. I use archived documents extensively, but oral histories, private document collections, and ethnographic texts and photographs are also central to my research. Working across these different sources allows me to bring to life remarkably rich histories of peoples who in many cases were effectively written out of existence.My work moves across different spatial scales—Caucasian villages, republican capitals, imperial halls of governance and academia in Moscow, and international arenas of diplomacy and dispute—to argue that non-titular histories help us better understand (post-) Soviet ethnic conflicts, but also have broader implications for regional, Soviet, and even global histories. I connect local narratives to global events such as World War Two and the Cold War to describe a regional world that transcended the political borders dividing the Soviet Caucasus from Iran and Turkey, and show how wartime experiences generated different ways of imagining and policing non-titular communities in the USSR.Further, although the Soviet nationality question was reportedly ;;solved” in the 1930s, my case studies illustrate that local residents, activists, academics, and politicians continuously contested national rights in the post-World War Two period. Ethnographers making propagandistic appeals to the Third World depicted non-titular minorities as disappearing in the face of Soviet modernity, and republican officials pursued assimilatory politics in these communities, but non-titular identifications obtained nonetheless. The oral histories that I collected illuminate the otherwise-obscured lived experience of non-titular minorities who generally lacked state support and recognition.
[发布日期] [发布机构] University of Michigan
[效力级别] Nations and Nationalism [学科分类]
[关键词] Soviet History;Nations and Nationalism;Caucasus;History (General);Humanities;History [时效性]