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Review of “Empire of Nations” (Hirsch, 2005)
Muling He
In 1917, the Soviet state inherited from the Russian Empire a vast territory inhabited by a diverse range of peoples. Seeking to understand who exactly is under its jurisdiction, and how to incorporate them into the new socialist polity, the Bolsheviks collaborated with ethnographers to catalogue, define and transform its population. Francine Hirsch’s 2005 work, “Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union,” investigates this unique process, during which a consequential “cultural technology” was formed and revised.
The book opens by introducing how the Soviet state and former imperial ethnographic experts came into collaboration, despite the difference in their political visions. It also delineates the tension between the ethnographic paradigm and the economic paradigm in state organization, and characterizes the approach adopted as a compromise between the two. In the subsequent part, Hirsch brings our attention to the 1926 census, through which the regime understood the population. This ethnographic knowledge, together with all-union economic needs, shaped the formation of national administrative units. Meanwhile, citizens of the USSR also began to describe themselves in official, national terms. This narrative is no more evident than in Soviet museums, where experts and activists carved up exhibitions of Soviet nationalities. The Sovietized transformation in depicting national peoples in these museums foreshadowed the ideological turn later in Soviet ethnography. In the final part, Hirsch examines the Soviet response to the deterministic Nazi racial ideology. This took place in anthropological and ethnographic research conducted by Soviet experts in the 1930s, the triumph of Marxist scholars over the former imperial ones, and the exclusion of “foreign” nations in the late 1930s.
“Empire of Nations” is an important contribution to how modern states understand and control their population. Early Soviet leaders, who aspired to “scientific rule,” relied on ethnographic knowledge not only to catalogue its peoples but also to transform them in terms of socialist ideologies. However, as the monograph suggests, scientific objectivity and the experts’ idealism often gave way to political needs and economic demands, leading to awkward and arbitrary policies as seen by the population. After all, as the book argues, the USSR carried out a campaign of “double assimilation,” categorizing national groups to Sovietize these groups. It is therefore, fundamentally political.
The book is also notable in characterizing Sovietization not as a solely top-down process. Hirsch suggests that the 1926 census, done by in-person interviews, informed the population of the official means of categorization. And when national peoples realized the political benefits of using state-sanctioned language, they incorporated official narratives into their political demands. In this respect, the book departs from previous views of Soviet rule and shows Soviet political practice as a process of mass mobilization.
“Empire of Nations” vividly illustrates how the Soviet Union acquired ethnographic knowledge, utilized it in state organization and manipulated it for political ends. By showing how the USSR began to understand its population, it provides unique insights on how the state was built, endured and in part, collapsed. It is excellent in detailing the dynamics between Soviet politicians, scholars, elites and the general population, marking a break from the “totalitarian view” of Soviet political practice.
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发表于 2021-10-22 22:09
