THE PHENOMENON OF ETHNICITY IN RUSSIAN CONTEXT

Requiem for ethnos

It is possible to identify three major approaches to the interpretation of ethnicity: primordialist, instrumental and constructivist. The first of these scholarly traditions can be traced to the ideas of 19th century German Romanticism and to the positivist paradigm of social science. Its  adherents see ethnicity  as an objective given, a sort of primordial characteristic of humanity. For primordialists there exist objective entities with inherent features such as territory, language, recognizable membership and even common mentality. In its extreme form, this approach sees ethnicity in socio-biological categories as a "comprehensive form of natural selection and kinship connections", as a primordial instinctive impulse (Van den Berghe, 1981). Some take the point of view that a recognition of group affiliation is included in the genetic code and is the product of early human evolution, when the ability to recognize the members of one's family group was necessary for survival (Shaw and Wong, 1989).

The very notion of primordialism was coined by Shils (1957) and developed by Geetz (1973), who explained it in a following way:

"By primordial attachment is meant one that stems from the "givens" - or, more precisely, as culture is inevitably involved in such matters, the assumed "givens" - of social existence: immediate continguity and kin connection mainly, but beyond them the givenness that stems from being born into a particular relogious community, speaking a particular language, or even a dialect of a language, and following particular social practices. These congruities of blood, speech, custom and so on, are seen to have an ineffable, and at times overpowering coerciveness in and of themselves" (Geetrz 1973:259). Jack Eller and Reed Coughlan (1993:187) summarised the concept of primordialism as containing three major ideas:

a) Primordial identities or attachments are underived, prior to all experiences or interactions - in fact, all interaction is carried out within the primordial realities. Primordial attachments are "natural", even "spiritual", rather than sociological. Primordial identities presumably have long history and they have no social source.

b) Primordial sentiments are "ineffable", overpowering, and coercive and can not be analysed in relation to social interaction. If an individual is a member of a group, he or she necessarily feels certain attachments to that group and its practices (especially language and culture).

c) Primordialism is essentially a guestion of emotion or affect and the concept has most often to do with feelings or identities which are qualitatively different from other kinds of identities. This aspect of primordialism could be called "affectivity".

As critics if primordialism note, "primordialism presents us with a picture of underived and socially-unconstructed emotions that are unanalysable and overpowering and coercive yet varying. A more unintelligible and unsociological concept would be hard to imagine, and furthermore, from a variety of sources - including sociology, anthropology, and psychology - materials has emerged in recent years that renders the concept theoretically vacuous and empirically indefensible" (Eller and Coughlan 1993:187). 

Yes, primordialism is seriously discarded from a contemporary academic discourse, but that is not in  post-Soviet social sciences. The Russian tradition of primordialist interpretation of ethnicity was laid in 1920th by S. Shirogorov, who had used ethnographic materials on the Tungus peoples of Siberia to formulate a general model and "classification of ethnoses" (1922). His work was based on the suggestion that ethnographic occurences must be examined as biological functions. "The form in which this function is arranged,  and, so to speak, its unit, is ethnos. In other words, ethnos is the form through which operate the processes of the creation, development, and death of elements which allow humanity, as a spicies, to exist" (1922:10). According to Shirokogorov, various elements of the "ethnographic complex" exist and develop unequally with some mutual dependence and ties, "which are impossible to destroy and the magnitude of which could be changed only with the retention of balance and buoayancy" (1922:8). In order to exist each people is trying to keep this balance, whish could be reached sometimes in the strong development of some elements at the expence of others which develop more weakly. As an example of the "law of balance" Shirokogorov presents America which "exhibits immense development of technology, but an embrionic state in the arts of painting, music, literature, etc." (1922:21). Summarising,  he proposed the following definition of ethnos: "a group of people, speaking the same language, who recognize their shared heritage, and have a shared complex of social mores, mode of life, retained and sanctified traditions which differ it from other groups, can be called an ethnos" (1922:4).

This definition is notable in many respects. It provided one of the earliest scholarly view of ethnos but without defining it as a biological class - an analogue, perhaps, to classification of classes in zoology. In his book "Ethnos" Shirokogorov wrote, that "for ethnos any form of existence is acceptable, if it sustains its being, that is the goal of its life as a species. The more complex the organization and the higher the form of specialized adaptation, the shorter the existence of the species" (that is of the ethnos) and "less developed ethnos survive longer" (1923:100, 118-119).  The superficity of these observations was so obvious that even in times when his book was published in French (Shirokogorov emigrated to China) it did not find any noticable recongnition and did not influenced world ethnology dominated by great names of British and North American evolutionists. But it found its followers in the Soviet ethnography, especially in a post-Stalin's period when this name became known among those few who could get it from closed for lay public book shelves.

Two well-known authors and an army of their followers in 60-80th made powerful contributions to what was called the "Soviet theory of ethnos" which is still a dominant theoretical paradigm for a study of ethnicity in this country. In recent years the concept of Lev Gumilev, attractive in its literary form, problemmatic approaches and factual marerial, has acquited enormous popularity. The name of this scholar (he died in 1992) was surrounded by a tragic aura of his parents (two great Russian poets - Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev) and personal life history, which includes Stalinist camps and a ban for publishing his works till late 80th. His last two monographs on the geography of ethnos and ethnogenesis (1989, 1990) published in enormous printings and becaming bestsellers, in essence, revived, or rather strengthen, the existing tradition of treating ethnicity. For Gumilev, "ethnos" is a form of existence of Homo sapiens as a species (full repetition of Shirokogorov), but at the same time, however, it is something greater - "a phenomenon on a border of biosphere and sociosphere and which has a highly special fuction in the formation of biospheres of the earth" (1989:24). Gumilev extremely uncritically included into category of ethnos practically all historically known cultural, political, religious and other formations, groupings and polities dividing them into categories of "superethnos", "ethnos", "subethnos", "ethnic relicts", etc. Depending landscape, energy resources and most of all - of internal "passionarism", ethnoses, by Gumilev, live their own lifes (about 1200-1500 years) going through different stages or "phases", like ethnogenesis, rise, breakdown, inertia and dying.

Probably, best illustrations for Gumilev's constructions could be quations from the glossary he provided his book "Ethnogenesis and a biosphere of the Earth":

"Ethnos - naturally formed on a basis of original stereotype of behaviour of numan collectivity, existing as energetic system (structure), positioning themselves against the same all other collectivities on the feeling of complimentarity" (in the text of the book there are about a dozen of other mutually exclusive and contradictory definitions - VT).

"Ethnogenesis - all stages of a process from the moment of a birth and to the moment of disappearence of an ethnic system under the influence of enthropy process of loosing passionariity".

"Passionarity - affective surplus of biochemical energy of living material, which generates sacrificity for oftenly illusionary purpose".

"Chimera - coexisting of two or more rivaling superethnic ethnoses in one ecological nishe".

"Ethnozenosis - biogeozenosis in which limits the development of the ethnos is taking place, including a process of its adaptationn" (1989:477-481).

These are only few from about a hundred of invented pseudoscholarly terms and categories which could not be placed any disciplinary discources or tested seriously as a piece of individual intellectual exercise. Meanwhile, there were no any serious criticism of Gumilev's works in Russian literature done, besides a couple of articles written by Bromley and Kozlov (1989) and by Kozlov (1990). Strangely enough, but no one Western expert on Russian ethnology and anthropology did untertake a review of Gumilev's writings. Meanwhile, it is not only curious academic episode, but a real public phenomenon and a political event when racist and nationalist indoctrinations are taking place from school classes to TV programmes largely based on this author's writings. At the same time it would be wrong not to see certain positive and attractive moments of what has been written by Gumilev and what explains additionally his popularity among non-Russian audience. He was one of few historians writing about the role of other cultures and peoples in the country's past and about mutually enriching cultural interactions and cooperation not only about "invaders", "the yoke", "patriotic wars" and other clishe of Russocentric official Soviet historiography.

There was another lohg-time authority in Soviet ethnic studies whose works has been cited as a reference no.1 practically in all research texts of 70 and 80th. Academician Yulian Bromley, former Director of the Institute of Ethnography, USSR Academy of Sciences, has published a series of standard monographs (1973, 1981, 1983, 1987) largely of theoretical character, which greatly influenced few generations of social scientists in this country. Many practioners of Soviet ethnography co-authored Bromley in elaborating "theory of ethnos" and still attach its deeply (but without explicit biological or geographic projections) primordial positions. For Bromley, "ethnos is historically stable entity of people developed on a certain territory and possessing common, relatively stable features of culture(including language) and pshyse as well as a consiousness of their unity and of their difference from other similar entities (self-consiousness) fixed in a selfname (ethnonym)" (1981:27). This definition is not very differed from those given in 1922 by Shirokogorov and primarily based on assumption that ethnoses are oldest and hollistic bodies making their own journey through history. In this case ethnicity (this term actually has never been used till recently in Russian academic language) is natural, innate and inescapable; "ethnos" as a "ethno-social organism- ESO" is the basic category and archetype, its highest manifestation being the nation. To build in existing political ideology and practice sholastic definitions, a special taxonomy of ethnoses was invented, including a notion of "ethnikos" or "ethnos in its large meaning" as all people of the same ethnic origin. In other words, Ukrainians in the Ukraine, or Tatars in the Tatar republic, or Armenians in the Armenia - were ESO, but Ukrainians, Tatars, Armenians in Moscow, Georgia or in the USA and in Canada were members of "ethnikoses". Even when it happends for people of the same ethnicity to live in neigbouring vallages but divided by administrative borders they suppose to be belonging different types of ethnic entities.

In spite of being much more sensitive identity (the term never used before also) aspects, that is of self-consiousness, the ethnos theory was mainly (but not openly) based on such key factors as exclusive group membership and status reflected in titular statehoods granted major non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union. Those who had their "own" union or autonomous republics were considered "socialist nations", that is a highest type of ethnos; those who enjoyed a lower status of administrative autonomy (like the Northern indigineous peoples), or did not have any status at all (like Volga Germans, Poles, Gews, and others) were defined by untranslated term "narodnost" - something between a tribe and a nation and even not "ethnikoses" because many of them did not have their own ESO.

Soviet ethnic studies became the subject of recent serious critism in world ethnological literature (Skalnik, 1990; Plotkin, 1990) and in few domestic publications (Ochirova, 1990), but generally speaking, a routine ethnographic literature was not so overloaded with ideology and scholastics: in a contrary, it was heavily empiric and based on serious field research guarded by the idea to establish cultural differences and to map an ethnic mosaic, especially in the field of so-called "material culture". Immense efforts were put in detailed descriptions of ethnic histories, traditional ways of subsistence, patterns of dwellings, food, costumes, folklore, rituals and ceremonies, ethnic demography and cartography. This discipline, because of what looked like archaic and non-ideological character, had been able to preserve rather good academic standards in Soviet times and as a result ethnographic writings were not so desisterously devaluated with the coming of liberalization as it happened with many other social science disciplines. Even more, ethnic cultural and political revival has derived its arguments and recruits in many respects from existing ethnographic literature and from a pool of professional ethnographers mainly trained in the Center and, precisely, at the Institute of Ethnography in Moscow. Many ideological and political leaders of ethnic movements in former union and now in Russia's republics has got their PhD's from this Institute. Many arguments and postulates for political platforms and for cultural programmes were borrowed from academic publications.

The use and misuse of theory

With the emergence of ethnic politics in the former Soviet Union ethnographic primordialism has stopped to be just a marginal and empirical approach in a context of broader methodological horizons and ideologically rather "silent" in totalitarian political environment. It has suddenly displayed its potentials for being used enthusiastically in a quest for new identities and in a nationalist political discourse. The term "ethnos" became a core definition and a starting point of references in intellectual and political debates of late 80th and early 90th. Many aspects of the ethnos theory looked like purely scholarly exercices acquired vocality and painful manifestations. Theoretical contradictions and incompetencies projected conflict-generating political statements and,finally, violent mahifestations. First, the very notion of ethnos as an archtype for any other social groopings, especially nations, provided the most persuasive arguments to make people believe that all and each of them first of all are members and cells of certain organism having its own internal logic of evolution and demanding environmental conditions irrespective of individual choices. The fate of an individual as a member of the organism to obey and to follow this logic and to fight for these conditions allegably vital and most crucial for a human being.

Practically all leaders and propponents of ethno-nationalism are using in their language these category and logic very extensively. Rafael Khakimov, political advicer for the President of Tatarstan and one of ideological guru for the nationalist movement, in his propagandist brochure "Glimses of Empire. On a guestion of nation and state" writes: "Ethnos is a biosocial phenomenon, combining nature and society. Ethnos carries in itself a biological energy and subjected other laws then those for social processes. Sometimes one can here appeals to forget about ethnic origin and not to divide people by this category. These appeals are deriving from the misunderstanding of the nature of the phenomenon. Ethnic feature is not a wishful thinking and more - not a devil's plot on a part of "separatists"; it is given by a birth (1993:19). A representative of another "ethnos" Ulyana Vinokurova, member of Yakut parliament and professional ethnosociologist, after receiving her PhD's from the Moscow ethnographic institute writes about a necessity of establishing "own scientific interdisciplinary approach to ethnogenesis of the people of Sakha (Yakuts)" opposite "old greatpower ethnography". Referring to archealogical materials, she postulates that it was on a vast territory of middle Lena river - a nestplace of contemporary Yakut ethnos, - where Yakut narodnost was formed before 16th century. "Thus, the Yakuts is a very young ethnos formed from mongolo- and turko-linguistic components and, probably, influenced by samoyed auchtochtonous population of Siberia and the North. According the Gumilev's theory, energetic potential of ethnos lasts for approximately 1200-1500 years. Then, ethnos becomes a component of a continious network of ethnic varieties of the humanity. In this inavoidability of historical substitutions of ethnoses, for the Yakut people a sad destiny of the old man was assighned.... Even hypothetically, it is petty to belong a disappearing ethnos"(Vinokurova 1994:27).

The use and misuse of a "theory" about ethnoses as living bodies carries a double-edge contradiction. On one hand, it is nicer to feel young, dynamic and with good prospects for a future; on the other it should be old enough to prove aboriginality and being exclusively indigenous for this or that territory (in Soviet ethnography - "ethnic territories"). So, for example, for one propponent of ethnos few centuries are more then enough to declare that "the people of Sakha is an indigenous people of Yakutia, formed as a unified ethnos on a middle Lena" and "Yakutia is a historical motherland of the people of Sakha" (Vinokurova 1994:30-31). For another, it is more important to prove another political message: "History knows cases of existing empires including hostile ethnoses, not making one nation. Such forceful conglomerates are possible, but they are temporal phenomena compariing with the lives of ethnoses (by L.N.Gumilev, circa 1200 years)" (Khakimov 1993:21). So, ethnoses are formations with deep roots on a proper territory and there may be only one ethnos-owner of this territory, That is so-called indigenous ethnos: "The indigenous people is an ethnos, formed on the very this territory and preserved its ethnic features" (Khakimov 1993:26). 

The most alarmist debates in ethnic discourse are taking place around a thesis of "dyiing out" or "disappearing" of ethnoses implicitly read as psychical extinction of numan beings and that is why extremely painfully and emotionally propagated, especially in a situation of real socio-economic crises of society and of its relatively low living standards existing before ongoing transformations for long historical period. Concerns about a "death of ethnos" expressed by experts writing not only about extinguishing cultures but about large dominant groups, like the Russians: "Growing process of uncomprimisable reorientations of economic and social relations has put the Russian ethnos (and not for the first time!) before a test for surviving. At the breaking up stages of history, similar contemporaty one, not only ethnoses but whole civilizations were disappearing. "What would happend to the Russians?" - this question is not properly asked yet" (Bagramov et al. 1993:63). One may read easily an implicit anti-reformist message in this statement too.

Some aspects of debates on ethnos category leaving pages of academic texts for more wider audience carry strong elements of racism and intolerance. On a level of academic texts it was elaborated by Bromley a thesis on "ethnic functions of endogamy" meaning that for the ethnos as a "stable entity" there should be certain mechanism providing this stability and "reproduction of ethnos". One of these mechanism is endogamy, that is a predisposition of marriges inside of one's own group. "Like a marrige, endogamy is not only social, but biological phenomenon. And because of this it plays a role of specific genetic barrier of ethnos". Note, that Bromley speaks of not primieval tribes or isolated communities, but of "large ethnosocial organism, like, for example, contemporary nations"(1989:200-211). Even more contriversial arguments on this issue was expressed by Gumilev, who wrote that ethnically mixed marriages are "anomalies" and "chimeras"; "Bromley's view on stabilizing role of endogamy - a barrier against of incorporation - is undebatable" (Gumilev 1989:90).

We are not going to debate "undebatable" and would like to point only how this theme is echoed in popular literary texts. In 1993 Aidar Khalim, editor of the journal "Argamak" published in Kazan (Tatarstan) in Russian, wrote an article "Contemporary mixed marriage, or a ring of irresponsibility", which was reprinted in other periodicals. The author took a stand agaisnt of tatar-russian marriages, which in his opinion had aquired scales of "cholera epidemia" and should be qualified as "immoral and destroying national culture and language". "As all other nations, Tatars were making marriages with representatives of other ethnoses in all times. Such families, being based, as a rule, on a real love, had been improving genofund and had refreshed a blood of a nation. These marriages had differed nowadays interethnic marriages as a day differs a night. In those times they were like tein in a tea, a microscopic ingredient in a body of ethnos and not destroying its essence and existing as an isolated phenomenon. What we can see now? Mixed families, encouraged by the state policy of nation-merging, serve now as the main reason for depriving the people of its national features, of inpersonality, of the genetic decline" (Khalim 1993:4-5).

The "organic" visions of ethnos causes a lot of pseudo-scholarly speculations of ethnocentric character in which ones' own ethnos is described in most complimentary terms contrary to "others". As Vinokurova writes, there is exist "Yakutian way of thinking by scholars of different scientific disciplines and by philosophers". "Compariing neighbouring and kin ethnoses, the people of Sakha are marked by especially careful attitude towards traditional sources of their own culturew... The Yakuts as ethnos are tend more Asiatic, then Europeoid people and they are exosting their tolerance to European influence". And finally, as a striking discovery, "the Yakuts have special predisposition for a long-distance running"(1994:52-56), because several athletes achieved recently good results in sports competitions. We quote only few examples from an affluent amount of the same kind of literature produced on the territory of the former Soviet Union. But it may be enough to prove our thesis that the "poverty of primordialism" co-exist with the power of primordialism to influence not only intellectual debates, but political inspirations and behaviour of social actors. At least, in a post-Soviet context. That is why we prefer to look for another approaches of interpreting ethnicity which probably more relevant for better understanding of our field of analysis.

Mobilized and constructed ethnicity

During recent decades scholars have began to focus more attention on ethnicity as a means for collective striving to material or political advantage  in the social arena. This instrumentalist, or mobilization approach sees a collectivity's claims to ethnicity and to ethnic status as based on academic and political myths created, propagated and often manipulated by elites that are seeking recognition and power. Ethnicity began to be seen as a part of the repertoire that is calculated and chosen consciously by an individual or a group to satisfy certain interests and achieve certain goals. Close to this approach is what is called the constructivist view of ethnicity which also regards it as a modern phenomenon, but posit a process of identity formation in which cultural elites play significant, but not necessary manipulative or exclusive role. According to this perspective, ethnic identities frequently develop out of recognition and articulation of a shared experience of discrimination and subordination. Adherents of these both approaches tend to see ethnic boundaries as constantly appropriating and eliminating elements, that is, as permeable and relatively fluid (Barth, 1969; Handler, 1988; Verdery, 1991).

The constructivist approach views ethnic sentiment, which is engendered on the basis of historical differences in culture, as well as the myths, conceptions and doctrines that are formed in its context, as an intellectual construct. as such, ethnic ethnic sentiment is seen as the result of purposeful efforts of elites who are playing a role of professional producers of subjective visions of the social world. These "professionals" include writers, scholars and politicians, whose intellectual production became trasmittable on a mass level with the spread of the printed word and education. The very idea of nation and so-called national consciousness (or self-consciousness), the intellectual product of Western elites, thus spread around the world almost simultaneously with the process of modernization (Gellner, 1983; Hobsbaum, 1990; Greenfeld, 1992). In the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, it had found support in Eastern Europe and Russia, especially among leaders of the peripheral nationalities of the former Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. Later, specifically because of increasing availability of education and the creation of intellectual elites among the nationalities of the former Soviet Union, the idea of nation acquired deep emotional legimacy; now they are stimulating attempts to convert myths and emotions into socio-political engineering.

The constructivist approach pays special attention to mentalities and language as key symbols around which a perception of ethnic distinctiveness crystalizes. Written texts and speeches contain, foe example, historical reconstructions which are used to justify the authenticity and the continuity of one or another ethnic identity. Soviet and post-Soviet historiography, archaeology and ethnography, in many of their manifestations, reduce the past to the present, and represent a projection based on the concept of the "gradualness" and "homogeneity" of the historical process. Im each contemporary reading of past cultures, history is drawn upon as a resource for addressing today's political tasks. Political and heavily ideological archeology and ethnograohy has been flourishing for decades in central and peripheral academies of the former Soviet Union. Now, unprecedented battles to "reconcile the past" with new political agendas are taking place with much more ferocities and insulting language then it was in times of cencorship and limited publishing opportunities. A number of items in a the National Library catalogue on ethnic issues icreased three-fold for recent five years that for the previous decade. Established scholars prefer to publish widely circulated pamphlets and brochures then heavy monographs to achieve immediate political effects. We can give only few examples in spite of this "cultural revolution" deserves special analysis (Shnirelman, 1993). 

There is on my desk a 70-pages brochure "Abkhazi and Abkhazia" in Georgian, Russian and English languages and written by a well-known Georgian archaelogist and medievist Mariam Lordkipanidze. Describing the IX-Xth centuries events, the author concludes that "The Kingdom of Abkhazia was a Georgian (Western Georgian) state. A vast majority of its population were Georgians: Karts, Egris, Svans, and part were Abkhazians proper.... Had the kingdom of the Abkhazians not been a Georgian state its capital would not been Kutaisi, centre of ancient Georgian statehood and culture, in the heartland of Georgian population, but..." Further one can find out that "the Abkhazian Principality of the late feudal period was culturally and politically the same "Georgia" as were the other "Georgias" and that "the Abkhazians did not live in cities and strongholds.. and they were never molested by others, but they attacked and plundered one another". And finally, when an independent Abkhazian republic was proclaimed in 1922, "Georgian Bolsheviks were neither interested in nor worried about the fact that by this concession they were compromising Georgia's unity - her historical borders in defence of which the georgian people had fought over the centuries. They ignored and violated the legitimate rights of the Georgian people, in particular of that part of the Georgian people which had for centuries lived on their own land, and would now have to live inthe Abkhazian state... The so-called independent Abkhazian SSR was an artificially created entity, whose existence in isolation from Georgia was absolutely unnatural and untanable historically and culturally. The existence of Abkhazian autonomy in any form within the boundaries in which it took shape under Soviet rule is absolutely unjustified" (1990:64-74).

These ten pages were written at the moment of coming to power of Zviad Gamsakhurdia and proclaiming independent Georgia. They were widely read in a society with highest in the World proportion of PhD's and professional intellectuals. Evidently they were more then academic argument in long-time debates between Georgians and Abkhazians. They were a moral order and a vindication to start realizing into political practice  a slogan "Georgia is for the Georgians!" under which a philologist Gamsakhurdia was delegated to power. This start was taken first not in Abkhazia, but in the Southern Ossetia autonomy which Georgian intellectual declared in the same way Shida Kartli or Samochablo - "the heartland of Georgia". An attempt to abolish this autonomy by force has caused three-years war and the conflict is still not over. Practically, not so much changed with the rise to power of Alexander Shevardnadze, who has formed the Government of 28 people representing 11 philologists, historians and philosophers, seven art figures and journalists and only three lawyers and one economist. His War Minister Tengiz Kitovani, a former artist, initiated military operations against Abkhazia involving the state and the people into ongoing devastating ethnic conflict. 

Trivial similarities could be observed practically for all other conflicting areas of the former Soviet Union. The Azerbaijani historians were practicing for decades the challenging conception of Caucasus Albania, including ancient Albania, as the "grand-fatherland of Azeris", territories which Armenians view as "historical Armenia". This construction of a "rich" and "ancient" history of the Azerbaijani people has, as a necessary component, a description of the Karabakh territory as the "heart of Azerbaijan". In responce, Armenian intellectuals produced enthusiastically academic propaganda about "barbarian", "bloodthursting" Turks from whom Azeris were formed and who exercised a genocide against Armenians. Moscow-based representatives of armenian diaspora, like a journalist, writer and member of the Gorbachev's parliament Zori Balayan, has contributed also the legitimization of the claim for reuniting the Karabakh autonomy with the "motherland" to "correct historical injustices". Ingush leaders consider the village of Angusht, located in a disputed area, as the "grand-fatherland of the Ingush", and Ossetian intellectuals formulate a thesis about the Alans, the cultural predecessors of the Ossetians, whose "bones are scattered about all of the Northern Caucasus" (quote from personal conversation with Akhsarbek Galazov, President of Nothern Ossetia).

Ironically, most of national histories, encyclopedias and cultural research produced on a large scale during recent decades have little in common with the people's factual history and ethnography. These texts and beliefs were introduced rather recently mainly to legitimate politically constructed ethno-nations and their "own" states. Even the very nomenclature of the peoples (or ethnoses) being the result of "outsiders' prescriptions", whether by ancient authors, travellers or contemporary scholars and politicians, differs quite significantly from those reflected, for example, in the Russian census of 1897. All these observations on the role of intellectual constructions do not deny the reality of cultural/ethnic mosaic per se as well as existing collectivistic identities. But the definition of "the people" in a sence of an ethnic community needs serious reconsideration. It is most often understood in contemporary scholarship as a group whose members share a common name and common elements of culture, possess a myth of common origin and a common historical memory, who associate themselves with a particular territory and possess a feeling of solidarity. Shariing beliefs and feeling of solidarity are key elements of this definition. Because all of these indicators are the results of special efforts, and in particular the process of nation-building. Ethnic identity is a sort of "constant internal referendum" on affiliation and loyalty to one or another collective community. It is the result of family education and socialization. In the same way, nations are, according to Benedict Anderson's widely accepted defibition, "imagined communities" (Anderson 1983).

It is, nevertheless, difficult to overcome the dogmatism derived from the stalin's definition of a nation as a community of people with objective characteristics (territory, common form of economy, language, mentallity). But it is no less imperative to percieve the nature of ethnic phenomena and their projection onto socio-political life in a more sophisticated manner. As Ernest Gellner observed, " a person must have a nationality, just as he must have a nose and two ears... All of this seems self-evident, although, alas, it is not. But that which unwillingly was driven into consciousness as self-evident truth represents the most important aspect or even the essence of the problem of nationalism" (Gellner 1989:124).

Nationality ot ethnic identity is not an innate human trait, althoug it is most often perceived as such. Nations are also created by people, by the efforts of intellectuals and by the state's political will. "Nations" is an in-group definition: it is not possible to assign it strictly scientific or legal formulae. As to the category of "ethnos", it is a scholastic construct which does not test any serious criteria and, by our opinion, should be dismantle from public and, probably, academic discourse. Unfortunately, both primordial definitions (nations as ethno-nations and ethnos) are widely present and are carelessly used in contemporary political language and normative and legal texts. For example, Gorbachev - distressed by the inability of the central government to manage ethnically motivated groups and coalitions - made statements like, "all peoples, small and large, are God's creatures" ("Izvestia", 15 September 1991). Another example might be the aspirations of achieving certain political aims through the mobilization of memory about the socio-cultural traditions of Russian Cossaks, which finally resulted in the official definition of Cossaks as an "ethno-cultural entity" at the highest state level in a decree by Yeltsin and in the Supreme Soviet's law passed in summer 1922. This may be considered an example of Bakhtin's "raising" of roots-level myths and memories under the pressure of politics and for the sake of populist gesture. 

Although the concept of ethno-national communities may be an imagined one, this does not keep it from becoming a powerful reality and a most important basis for collective action. In a contemporary world ethno-cultural diversity does not remain just a result of historical evolution, but encreasingly moves more from the domain of material culture and "silent ethnicity" to the sphere of consciousness and applied values. A person employs ethnic identity and affiliation as a means of adaptation and better orientation in a complex modern challenges, and as a mechanism for achieving certain social goals. In Russia, citizens regain lost feelings of personal worth and collective pride through ethnicity, while leaders often realize social control and political mobilization by evoking ethnic teasoning or coalitions. Thus this ethnic construct is directly prijected onto the exercise of power. It is coupled with the realization hedonistic strife and political will, ensuring for this purpose a necessary arsenal of arguments and recruits, as well as tool of force and negotiation.