Gathering the Nation in the Village: Intellectuals and the Cultural Politics of Nationality in the Late Soviet Period

Abstract

AbstractThis article analyzes the activities of three Soviet intellectuals–the Ukrainian artist Ivan Honchar, the Russian writer Vladimir Soloukhin, and the Gagauz poet Dmitri Kara Çoban–who launched independent projects to collect and preserve artifacts of pre‐Soviet peasant culture in the 1960s. Reacting against representations of their national culture in state museums that they considered inauthentic and incomplete, these three collectors were part of a broader movement of intellectuals in the post‐Stalin period who sought to return to the village as the original source of “authentic” national culture. State responses to these intellectual initiatives were determined not by clearly articulated policies made in Moscow, but through the “cultural politics of nationality”–the interaction of intellectuals, republican leaders and central authorities. Demonstrating the enduring impact of these three independent collecting projects on Soviet and post‐Soviet thought about the nation, this article argues that changing conceptions of the nation in the post‐Stalin period are best understood as the result of a nationalities process involving intellectuals, republican leaders and central authorities, rather than an explicitly defined nationalities policy.