The Soviet Approach: Political Implications and Reception at International Scale

Ethnogenesis originally served as a Soviet approach concerned with the National Question in the new context after the October Revolution in 1917. In 1913, Lenin wrote his “Theses on the National Question” in opposition to the tsarist monarchy of the Great Russians. He argued for the self-determination of nations and their right to secede and form a separate state.|¹⁰ “[…] this a) for the sake of the basic principles of democracy in general; b) also because there are, within the frontiers of Russia and, what is more, in her frontier areas, a number of nations with sharply distinctive economic, social and other conditions; furthermore, these nations (like all the nations of Russia except the Great Russians) are unbelievably oppressed by the tsarist monarchy” (excerpt from the second thesis). Lenin wrote 10 theses for his lectures on the national question delivered on July 9-13, 1913 in the Swiss towns of Zurich, Geneva, Lausanne and Berne. Lenin, (Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1977, Moscow, Volume 19, pages 243-251.)| In 1922, when the new Marxist-Leninist state on the Eurasian continent, the Soviet Union, integrated multiple subnational Soviet republics, the National Question took a new turn. Ethnogenesis was developed and employed to acknowledge and preserve sub-national entities. But it also served to place them on an evolutionary scale towards an idealized concept of “civilization”. This theory not only helped to construct separate ethnic units, later, it became the platform for independence movements during perestroika (Slezkine 1994).

During tsarist times, the antecedents of ethnogenesis as they were known in Great Russia, were still in the work of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814). In his “Addresses to the German Nation”, Fichte outlined an idea for the construction of the German nation through education. He argued that not only would people see themselves as a separate ethnic social entity, but through education, they would train future generations to act in defence of this collective.|¹¹ His views were no doubt influenced by the French occupation of parts of Germany in 1808 when he delivered these lectures in Berlin. Furthermore, he gained the support of a large segment of the public who were also tired of the occupation and energised by this patriotism. As Fichte argued: “it is only by means of the common characteristic of being German that we can avert the downfall of our nation which is threatened by its fusion with foreign peoples, and win back again an individuality that is self-supporting and quite incapable of any dependence upon others” (Fichte 1968: 3).| The education reforms introduced in Russia in the 1820s, reflecting Fichte’s argument, sought to train people’s minds and bodies in order to create a coherent nation (Shnirelman 1996).

From the 1930s onwards, ethnogenesis was the predominant theory in much Soviet research. “Ethnogenetic studies” focused on demonstrating the existence and stable development of “nations” through language, customs, territory and economic life throughout history. Censuses in the 1920s and 1930s helped establish rigid concepts of ethnic groups and the development of peoples into nations through these categories (Hirsch 1997). In his famous “Marxism and the National Question”, Stalin (1973) formally outlines these characteristics of a “nation,” providing a framework for much research (Shanin 1989). Stalin’s piece on the National Question is a short work of Marxist theory, written in January 1913 while living in Vienna.|¹² First published as a pamphlet and frequently reprinted, the essay by the ethnic Georgian Stalin was regarded as a seminal contribution to Marxist analysis of the nature of nationality and helped to establish his reputation as an expert on the topic. Indeed, Stalin would later become the first People’s Commissar of Nationalities following the victory of the Bolshevik Party in the October Revolution of 1917.| Although it did not appear in the various English-language collections of Stalin’s Selected Works which began to appear in 1928, “Marxism and the National Question” was widely republished from 1935 as part of the topical collection Marxism and the National and Colonial Question |¹³  Eager to denigrate his nemesis, in his 1941 biography of Stalin, exiled Soviet leader Leon Trotsky intimated that primary credit for all that was worthy about Marxism and the National Question actually belonged to V.I. Lenin and party theoretician Nikolai Bukharin.|. However, Victor Shnirelman (1996: 10), a social scientist, explains, as “Soviet patriotism” or nationalism grew, scholars were encouraged “to study the formation and evolution of peoples living in the USSR”. Here, the most pressing problem for the Russians was obviously the origin of the Slavs in ancient history, and a considerable amount of work is devoted to the subject (Schlesinger 1950). Following Rudolph Schlesinger, the influence exercised on the development of historiography among Slavs by the absence of political independence, and the prolonged struggle for it, was well known.

In the struggle for political independence and the mobilization of society for its purposes, a very important part was intended to be played, and was actually played, by the reproduction of a distant past when independent Slav states existed.

“From the point of view of those who made such statements the fact of the existence of those states was regarded as a guarantee for future ‘capacity of independent state-hood’ and as a foundation of the claim to it. Naturally such an application of the distant past could be successful only if the latter was idealized. This was the origin of the numerous ‘golden ages’ to be found in the works of Polish, Czech, Croat and other historians. In fighting this approach, Soviet historians were motivated by the fact that Marxist theory demands an application, to however diverse conditions, of ‘fundamental laws of historical development valid for all human society’” (Schlesinger 1950: 9).

The chauvinist application frequently made (often by Polish historians against the Eastern Slavs) of the migration theories cultivated by the nationalist schools of German history, made it necessary to give a fundamental counter-argument to all theories operating on a racial stratum, thus encouraging claims to racial superiority. This is the very specific historical context in which the Soviet Theory of Ethnogenesis gained popularity, as developed by the late Marr’s scholars, second to none by Aleksandr Dmitrievich Udaltsov.|¹⁴ Udaltsov was a Soviet historian and corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1939). From 1946 to 1956 he was director of the Institute of the History of Material Culture of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.| It is an anti-racist conceptualization of ethnogenesis which emerged earlier than The Online Etymology Dictionary notes, as “since 1957 in modern usage, from ethno- + -genesis ‘birth, origin, creation’.” Accordingly to Udaltsov et al., national characteristics, especially language, are comparatively late formations resulting from common material conditions of life, and by implication, common forms of social thought. It follows that the current explanation of the geographical distribution of certain nationalities by migrations, though not quite without foundation, “can be reduced to a very secondary place in the explanation of archaeological evidence on changes in social life, and replacements of one ‘culture’ by another. The traditional concepts of the ‘original home’ of certain nations or of an ‘ancestral nation’ belong to the realm of nationalist mythology.” |¹⁵ Schlesinger (1950: 9) citing Udaltsov’s report at the Anniversary Session of the Institute for the History of Material Culture, in S.I.F., I949/3.|

Schlesinger sums up that in this concept there is no longer any room for autochthony in any other sense; that migrations in prehistoric times become irrelevant for the formation of the present nations. By that time, the need for verification of the “Soviet theory of ethnogenesis” by concrete application to archaeological and linguistic material was generally recognized (Schlesinger 1950: 10). As a consequence, Soviet ethnologists started exploring ethnogenesis outside the Soviet Union. This connects back to our bibliographical research on ethnogenesis, where the very first contribution on the topic from journals of African Studies, published in 1968, reported on the “Explosion of African Studies in the Soviet Union” (Desai 1968). Desai reviews works of Soviet scholars from the 1950s and 1960s who engaged in understanding the origin of the peoples of the Guinea coast, or were concerned with the origin of the people of the Central Sudan; “and some others which display a new approach to the very intricate problems of the ethnogenesis and cultural histories of Africa” (Desai 1968: 250).

It was not only the first appearance in African Studies that referred to the Soviet Theory of Ethnogenesis. This same holds true for the majority of early contributions to journals American Archaeology, American History, and even the English Historical Review, which refer, above all, to the works of Udaltsov.

Apart from its ideological use to classify the diverse national entities, the weakness of the Soviet concept of ethnogenesis lies in the assumption (or political programme) that ethnic groups are stable and continuously transmit their social structures from one generation to the next. The reforms introduced by Gorbachev in the 1980s, however, permitted Soviet scholars to reconsider the theoretical basis of their disciplines (Gullette 2008: 264f). The purpose and intention of nationalist ideologies in the post-Soviet period were hotly debated. In 1990, Anatoly Khazanov, an anthropologist, remarked that “Soviet anthropology is at present at the crossroads […] connected with the general theory of ethnicities and particularly in its application to the ethnic situation in the USSR” (Khazanov 1990: 220; cited by Gullette 2008: 264). But this did not, accordingly to Khazanov— and like the situation in Bosnia at roughly the same time (Claussen 2000)— explain or moderate the rising ethnic tensions visible in various parts of the Soviet Union. Following Gullette, Soviet scholars concerned with ethnic studies were hoping that the social sciences would move beyond this impasse and adopt a multiplicity of views. A few years later, Valéry Tishkov, director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology in the Russian Academy of Sciences, lamented that ethnos – a term describing a community consciously aware of its distinctiveness and particular interests – and ethnogenesis were still the most “[…] powerful and sacred categories in post-Soviet Anthropology and in public discourse” (Tishkov 1994: 88). Tishkov, who was writing not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, reported that ethnogenesis was regarded as “sacred”, because it supported ethno-nationalist ideologies. While ethnogenesis had been a Soviet tool to authenticate different “peoples” and to chart their position on a scale of civilisation, it was now used to demonstrate the independence of new countries and separatist movements (Gullette 2008: 265).

In his work on The Use of Ethnogenesis in Kyrgyzstan, Gullette explains that while ethnogenesis supported independence movements, its proponents also used it to express chauvinism and xenophobia:

“Scholars, such as Viktor Shnirelman and Sergei Panarin, criticised this view, specifically targeting the work of Lev Gumilev, one of the most popular ethnogenetic theorists since the 1960s. They claimed that nationalist leaders could easily use his work to create biased images for independent movements. Viktor Shnirelman and Sergei Panarin, two Russian social scientists, have summarised Gumilev’s formulation of ethnogenesis as:

[…] the birth of an ethnos [is formed] by [the] appearance of a small group of people, united by common sympathy and a great feeling of patriotism, who are prepared to sacrifice personal prosperity and even their lives for the achieving of their projected goal. In its name they are ready to break with their usual norms of behaviours, i.e. with the existing stereotype (Shnirelman and Panarin 2001:10)” (Gullette 2008: 265).

We conclude by highlighting that the first references to the term ethnogenesis are to be found in Literature Studies. A descriptive use of the concept, on the other hand, was first implemented in Latin American Studies, circa 1930s, followed by its use in the fields of Anthropology and Archaeology in different regions and scholarly traditions in the 1940s. While the term “ethnic group” had been established long before, the novelty of the notion of ethnogenesis was in its explicit emphasis on the genesis, on a formative process of ethnic groups and entities, thus acknowledging, implicitly at least, that ethnic groups are not natural, given entities, but instead result out of historical processes.