Inventions and Manifestations of Ethno-Nationalism in and after the Soviet Union

Abstract

A striking feature of the entwining of ethnic nationalism and academic writings in recent decades is how often East European studies have been dominated by political considerations. The topic has been approached more as a political than as an intellectual problem; there has been a tendency to support the social engineering designs of Communist rulers and official ideology, rather than break significant new ground. These approaches served as a basis for elaborations of ‘imagined communities’ as proclaimed by the propagandists of existing regimes in ‘ocialist nations’. This was true for the USSR where all major ethnic groups (not only the largest one, the Russians, but also dozens of cultural minorities and Siberian indigenous groups) were granted this status; it was true for Yugoslavia with its republican ‘nations’ including the Macedonians; it was true for the Czechs and the Slovaks as well as for the Eastern Germans, who were treated as a new ethnic entity — ‘the German socialist nation’. For at least half a century, the ethno-nation became a basic public category in this part of the world with its eclectic Stalinist definition combining territory, common economic ties, language and culturally constituted collective mentality dominating all spheres including anthropological studies.