Getting to Know “The Peoples of the USSR”: Ethnographic Exhibits as Soviet Virtual Tourism, 1923-1934

Abstract

In this article, Francine Hirsch examines the Ethnographic Department of the Russian Museum as a venue for virtual tourism, where museumgoers were able to become acquainted with “the Peoples of the USSR” and where Soviet ethnographers and Politprosvet activists attempted to work out an idealized narrative about the socialist transformation of the Soviet Union. Focusing on the period of the “Great Break,” Hirsch investigates the role of “the narrative” in the process of Soviet state formation and the role of mass participation in facilitating Soviet authoritarian rule. Hirsch treats the “ideological front” as a dynamic realm and shows how ethnographers, activists, and museumgoers attempted to reconcile disparities between “the real” and “the ideal” in the Soviet Union. In addition, she evaluates how the Soviet developmentalist narrative evolved after 1931, as ethnographers attempted to formulate a nonbiological, sociohistorical explanation for the persistence of traditional culture among certain population groups in an effort to counter German racial theories.