In Place of a Conclusion

Abstract

Although the 1917 Russian Revolution brought the collapse of the old regime, the legacy of imperial Russia, with its sophisticated patterns of political and cultural relations with its eastern and southern peoples, survived and continued to exist in the Soviet period, both in the USSR and abroad. Many imperial ethnographers, such as Lev Shternberg and Sergei Oldenburg, decided to ally with the Bolsheviks since they believed that they could both build a modern progressive socialist state and organize its multinational constituents. As Francine Hirsch points out, the Soviet ethnographers, as expert-consultants, played a “far greater role in the work of government than most European or American anthropologists had ever done.”...