Empire of nations. Ethnographic knowledge and the formation of the Soviet Union

The “Empire of Nations” published in 2005 has already earned the status of a classical study on the history of Soviet national policy. Francin Hirsch trains the interaction of power and expert knowledge in the process of state construction, showing the contribution of ethnographers, anthropologists, geographers, linguists and other specialists in the formation of Soviet ideas about the nation and race, as well as the development of the principles of the USSR as a multinational state. It was from experts who had pre-revolutionary training and based on Western European ideas that specific forms of state policy regarding certain peoples depended in the 1920-1930s. Based on extensive archival research, the author shows how, through planning and conducting census, cartographic, creating museum expositions, the general ideas of the Bolsheviks crystallized into political decisions. The European idea of ​​cultural evolutionism, the Marxist theory of stadium development and the Leninist idea of ​​the ability of the revolutionary party to accelerate the historical development of the state policy of the integration of different peoples and cultures within the framework of the Soviet project. Francin Hirsch is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (USA)