INTRODUCTION

June 1991, Yugoslavia, Dubrovnik. It was the last peaceful summer for this ancient Adriatic city and for the country at all. No one experts, including local ones, gathered at the international working seminar on Ethnic Conflict and Development organised by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) could predict the coming fall of ethnic war and destructions. Meanwhile, there were serious concerns among specialists about growing challenges of extreme ethnonationalism and ethnic conflicts in a contemporary world, including the region of the former Communist countries block. The result of this concern and of academic interest became a programme of preparing a series of monographs on ethnic conflicts and it was my assignment to write a book on the Soviet Union. Who could predict that only few months left for this country also to exist on a World map! And it was the same ethnic factor among others which largely contributed the demise of one of the largest state. The research agenda looked like extremely intriguing and providing rare opportunities to study ongoing events in all complexities of their manifested forms.

It is not an easy mission to analyse and to decsribe social realities when they are in rapidly changing and in "inacomplished" status and when you as an author in a middle and a part of these realities. Beloved social anthropology method of "included onservation" proves to be a fragile foundation, especially if it happens that the author is not only in "a middle" but in "a centre" of ongoing events and assumes certain power positions influencing the cause of these events. That is precisely what had happended to me when I served as a Minister of nationalities in the Government of Russia for the period of February-October 1992.

It stopped my academic exercises for about a year demanding some "recoveries" after resignation period but it enreached my concrete knowledge and deepened the vision of ethnic and conflict issues primarily in a context of the domain of power and of its actors. Rodolfo Stavenhagen, coordinator of the project on Ethnic Conflict and Development, has asked me in Dubrovnik what kind of methodology I am going to apply for my study. I answered this reasonable question that would prefer "methodological individualism" meaning for myself different things. First, the very complexity of a chosen subject cross-cutting a variety of social science disciplines motivates the use of different approaches and even the patterns of writing texts. Second, for a post-Soviet scholar who went through a period of prescribed hollistic methodology it is quite understandable to feel avoiding still dominant mentalities based on romantic/positivistic beliefs in a power of "scientific knowledge" to reflect adequitly "social realities".

Writing this book, we do not subscribe ourself any exclusivist conceptional paradigm in interpreting ethnicity and conflicts. Meanwhile, one set of ideas influenced our research preferences probably more then others. It found its explicit expression in the very title of the book "The Mind Aflame" showing priority interest to what is defined by a french sociologist Pierre Bourdieu as "social agent" and "social space" in which agents execute their strategies through the logics of dispositions. This system of dispositions (or "habitus") allows an agent to orient itself and react to social events and situations. Behind this process there are sociolizing and education of an individual, interiorisation of a life experience, which provide an agent or a group of agents a capability to act and to keep or to change his position in a social space and by this changing a space itself. There is a complex discourse taking place between two "realities" or substances of social universum: one - what is given through operation of distribution of naterial resources and of prestigious values ("forms of capital"); another - what is exist in structures of views, representations, and behavioral strategies as a symbolic matryce of practical activities, mentalities, emotional judgements of social agents. Thus, a society should be considered as a constant and active interactions of agents and practicies, as a social world, "contingent and time-spaned through activities of delegated social agents, who are constantly constructing this world by practical organisation of everyday life"(Bourdieu 1987:113).

This approach radically differs from those which dominated and still prevail in post-Soviet social sciences and in the public mentality. This situation deserves more detailed explanation for the outside audience. A monistic ideology and a totalitarian style of thinking and of politics has produced a powerful system of the sacral, including what was expressed in the formula of "the scientific management of society". A society was viewed as a body living by rules of primordial laws and those who rules the society, the Party and the state nomenclature, are exercising orders, prescriptions and force because they "know" the direction a history moves. The rulers get this knowledge from scholars who can penetrate and reflect "objective realities" because they are armed with "the only scientific and right teaching - the theory of Narxism-Leninism", which includes as an important ingredient "the Marxist-Leninist theory of nation and of the national question"(Gellner 1988; Connor 1981).

The old system, including its ideology, has collapsed, but the mentality and actions of layment, including proffesional producers of "knowledge" (beter to call it "nominations" or "prescriptions"), remain almost what they were and still quite often demostrate "a hostility towards deviation from approved (and long-time treached - VT) theory" (Plotkin 1990:239). At the Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the summer 1991 I was struck by the frenzied demands of party functionaries that the supreme leadership give them a clear "scientific formula" showing "what stage of development we are in now and where we are going" so that they could "go back to the provinces and explain this to the simple people." The former right of the party high priests to formulate programmatic postulates from above and transmit them downward was, along with the repressive party-state apparatus, one of the most important bases of their power. The same basis for prestige and status was exercised by Soviet social scientists serving the ideology and legitimizing the System.

In many respects there are no "new thinking" concerning methodological horizons and mentality of academic and policy practitioners in the post-Soviet space. A search for the causes of disorders, crises, and conflicts, among them interethnic ones, in the absence, among the leadership of Russia, of a "unified nationality policy," a "scientific conception," and mechanisms for regulating this sphere of life in society continues even today in academic discussions, parliamentary and political debates, and the mass media. At the session of the USSR Supreme Soviet in February 1991, a decision was taken, on the proposal of Mikhail Gorbachev, "to develop a general conception of the mechanisms for overcoming interethnic conflicts." Later, the Council of Nationalities of the Russian parliament approved a "state programme of national rebirth for the peoples of Russia." I myself in a capacity of a Minister took the initiative in bringing up for discussion on July 30, 1992, a "Conception of Nationality Policy in the Russian Federation." Many of my academic colleagues participated enthusiastically in the preparation of the document, even though it was clear for me that its mission was limited and that it was most of all a reply to criticism and public demands as well as, probably, (self-reflection is the most difficult intellectual exercise!) a desire of a Minister to strenghen his own status and a prestige of his Ministry.

One must understand that a society that is accustomed to a one-dimensional symbol system and has delegated the power to produce symbols and genarally agreed-upon values to an elite stratum of "professional producers of objectified concepts about the social world and of methods for such objectification" (Bourdieu 1984:6)-or, more precisely, has had this power usurped from it by the Apparatus - cannot all at once become a multidimensional space. It is difficult for such a society to abandon the absolutization of political power, state institutions and academic statements. Following of formulae supplied by the intellectual and political elites, by ethnic entrepreneurs has become almost a genetic characteristic of Soviet people. Just as the scholar has not yet achieved the status of autonomous agent in post-Soviet academia, so there is as yet no strong sign of civil - that is to say, "private"- society, expressed in a high degree of autonomy for individuals and in selforganizing groups on various levels, including that of athnocultural and communal groupings.

In a situation of identities crisis and radical societal transformations, in which the perception of the world is slipping away, the magic of the word - the right and ability to name things and call them into existence by naming them (like "ethnos", "national idea", "sovereignty", "independence", etc.) - has become one of the simplest and most readily accessible forms of political power, just as it was in archaic societies. As in ancient times, the function of producing and explaining "the symbolic" is assigned to literary writers, artists, sculptors, and now dramatists, film and mass media makers, and scholars in humanities (historians, ethnographers, and archaeologists) as well. Today's politicians and leaders of ethnic movements, in order to achieve recognition and a mandate, use words that carry special weight for this or that group and reanimate within it mystical arguments - a reaction to traumas mainly experienced in the past (usually by previous generations). The inertia of totalitarism has promoted the replacement of the tyranny of party programs by the no less rigid tyranny of group thinking (or myths) and mobilizing concepts raised to the level of political declarations and demands. One can designate as a new form of dictatorship the situation in societies recently freed from Communist rule in which, for example, not a single Armenian can speak in opposition to the policy of the Karabakh movement and not a single Ingush in opposition to the unification of the foothill region of North Ossetia with the Ingush Republic now being formed. I can remember only one exceptional example of the free spirit - that of the recently deceased Georgian philosopher Mamardashvili: "For the truth's sake I will go against my own people." It was his negative reaction to the people's euphoria which has brought to power in Georgia ultra-nationalist philologist Zviad Gamsakhurdia.

There is another striking phenomenon which a post-Soviet space is encountering on a large scale. In fully literate societies with unproportionally high representation of well-educated intellectual elites it were they who took many positions of partly demoralized and ousted old nomenclature. A struggle for power by means of knowledge became a sign of post-Communism time. In a desintegrating multiethnic state, the knowledge of humanistic scholars has proved most "professional" in terms of their possibly being in demand and having the opportunity to exerty influence with a view of political mobilization. After the cruel conflicts in Nagorni Karabakh, South and North Ossetia, Abkhazia, Moldova, the problem of proportionality of the cost and the responsibility of intellectuals participating in political action and administration is the most crucial for understanding and interpreting of what had happened and what is going on in this region of the World. Since the break up of the USSR with piles of left without control military arsenals it has become a simple matter for new leaders who previously had lead academic fights through the texts (like Abkhazian philologist Vladislav Ardzinba with Georgian philologist Zviad Gamsakhurdia), to arm their followers with the most up-to-date weapons and to organize a war and to give orders for killing. 

In this situation, the struggle for knowledge, for the right to an official designation, for "correct classification", and for "correct order" is very easily and quickly transformes into or combined with mass violence and huge destruction. The damage is done primarily to the very peoples in whose name the positions and arguments are formulated and the slogans and demands advanced by their leaders. The former academic and social-science professor and the leader of Karabakh movement, now the president of Armenia, Levon Ter-Petrosyan (Komsomol'skaia Pravda, July 6, 1991), advances the thesis that "the right of a nation to self-determination is an absolute. Once a people has decided to take its fate into its own hands, no one can reverse this process, except by force." This thesis has no science in it, but it is pronounced as an official prescription in a society with universal literacy (the percentage of people with postsecondary education among Armenians in Armenia is one of the highest in the world and more then four times as high as among the population of the central districts of Russia) and political exaltation of citizens following their leaders. Declarations analogous in form and content are plenty for almost all of the leaders and ethnic activists, as well as for many academic and journalism texts on the territory of the former Soviet Union. Considered to be a high authority on ethnic issues and after spending a fellowship year in an enlightnening atmosphere of the U.S. Institute for International Peace, Galina Starovoitova shares her research findings with daily newspaper's readers on "established nine stages which every war for self-determination is destined to proceed through"(Nezavisimaia Gazeta, August 19, 1994). It was written by an academic who took position of the President Eltzin's advicer on nationality issues for a period of crucial two yers since the fall 1991.

I do not condemn political participation by scientists as well as a mass recruitment of academics into active politics, ethnic movements and government. I do not even cast serious doubts on the sencerity and good intentions of those who have "gone to power" or on the usefulness and perhaps even necessity of such a course of action. Furthermore, the fate of present-days intellectuals in ethnic politics is often dramatic and tragic. My evaluation of their activity is no so critisism of individuals, who are usually deserving of respect and sympathy, but analysis of the phenomenon of exclusively important role of post-Soviet intellectuals overloaded with the arrogance of obsolete knowledge and with a lack of relf-reflexivity. If my colleagues by discipline or in political activity were not so burdened by the Marxist tendency to put an accent on ontological substance - that is, on "real" groups, including ethnic ones, and their membership, boundaries, rights, and so forth - to the detriment of relationships in social space, they might rid themselves of the intellectualist illusion of looking at theoretically and politically constructed definitions and classifications as if they were groups of people acting in real life or laws of social evolution. Then they would show greater sensitivity and understanding in research and politics as well and would not be in such a hurry to translate the symbolic struggle into the language of state decrees, administrative borders, or military orders.

At the same time, post-Soviet social scientists, who have in many constructed the subject of their studies without being aware of their own "co-creation" of rebellious reality, are limiting their own opportunities to influence and participate in the process of change and innovation. An understanding of the fact that ethnicity is a social construction will, as M.P.Smith (1992:526) argues,   “bring greater capacity to mediate politically and socioculturally modify social relations within and among ethnic  groups by creative symbolic action than is acknowledged by those who conceive ethnicity either in naturalistic terms, regarding "ethnos" like "eros" and "thanatos" as a deep  structural dimension of consciousness, or in essentialistic terms as a component of personal identity so rooted in past historical memory that little can be done by human agency in the present to shape its character or temper the antagonistic posture of ethnic groups toward ethnic otherness and  difference”.                                                       

Such methodological approach could actually constitute a genuine breakthrough in a study of ethnic issues and conflicts on the territory of the former Soviet Union. This approach has never been seriously tempered, not regarding recent book by Ronald Suny (1993), in spite of its many intellectual roots lie in the Russia's social thought tradition (e.g., Bakhtin). If we would only recognize that ethnicity is constructed and reconstructed by particular verbal and political actions that reflect contemporary conditions, including power relations among social groups, and the meanings that people give to these conditions and refrain from regarding ethnicity as an extratemporal and primordial feature of human existence, the activity of leaders from among the political and cultural elites and social activists and the everyday interventions of rank-and-file citizens in ethnic discourse would take on new significance and a new awareness.

A deeper understanding of how variously social experience and historical data are interpreted in order to produce each person's own version of the "ideal present" would prevent from becoming adherents of simplistic Wilson-Lenin formula of self-determination in its narrowly ethnic variant. There would be less basis for conclusions, that after Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, South Ossetia, Nagorni Karabakh, and the Dnestr area "in the 21st century this problem (of self-determination) will arise in its full magnitude for the people of Africa, where postcolonial boundaries have artificially divided ethnic territories" (see the dialogue between Starovoitova and Kedrov in "Izvestia", August 10,1992). More than this, experts and politicians may share the opinion that "in the world system as it has been formed, formulae of sovereignty dating from the time of Suarez, Bodin, or even Rousseau are simply absurd" and that in the territory of the empire it is primarily the elites of the new political formations  that "determine themselves and redetermine  each other" (Filippov 1992:112). It is in this ability to distinguish between mythopoetic rhetoric and real interests and in the necessity to act in the sphere of everyday dogmatism that the drama of the scientist-politician's position lies. I experienced this drama and the result was my letter to President Boris Eltzin submitting my resignation. It gave a chance to complete this study and to present it to the reader.