2. "My Old Friend in a Dead-end of Empiricism and Skepticism": Bogoras, Boas, and the Politics of Soviet Anthropology of the Late 1920s–Early 1930s

In 1933 the journal Sovetskaia Etnografiia published a translation of Franz Boas's recent paper "The Aims of Anthropological Research." A commentary accompanying it contained the following passage:

The empiricist school of ethnography, headed by Boas and other American scholars, is, on the one hand, an apolitical one. . . . On the other hand, it prefers to retain its [political] liberalism. However, it has found itself in a dead end, helplessly lost in its own contradictions. These contradictions arise from class contradictions, even though Boas and his friends do not mention the word "classes."

In the most generous view, this empiricist and skeptical school is a kind of quantité negligible, something that plays almost no role in that fierce class struggle, which is beginning to burn very brightly in all spheres of social life, from the real battles on the barricades to the polemics in the calm and hefty scholarly periodicals.

[Bogoras 1933:193]

It is quite ironic that the author of this critique was not a die-hard Soviet Marxist but an old colleague and a close friend of Boas, Vladimir Bogoras.

In fact, in his comments, Bogoras tried very hard to find ideas that bore at least some resemblance to the ones that came to dominate Soviet anthropology. Moreover, the introductory editorial statement, most likely written by Nikolai Matorin, a relatively young head of a recently created Institute of Anthropology and Ethnography, a Communist Party member since 1919, and a dedicated Marxist, referred to Boas as "a respected friend of the Soviet Union and a famous American anthropologist" as well as a "courageous opponent of the imperialist war."¹ Yet at the same time, it warned Boas about following "a dangerous route, on which he finds himself probably against his own will." It went on to argue that the "treasures of factual data" collected by American anthropologists required a radically different analysis, that is, the kind advocated by Lewis Henry Morgan and Friedrich Engels. Both Matorin and Bogoras agreed that Boas and his followers were stuck in a "dead end of empiricism and skepticism" (Editorial Introduction to F. Boas's "Aims of Anthropological Research" 1933:176).

From Bogoras's correspondence with Boas, we know that the former was eager to publish what he saw as his American colleague's very important paper (APS, Bogoras to Boas, March 3, 1933).² To make this possible, however, he had to accompany it with this rather harsh criticism. Did Bogoras betray his old friend, whose brand of anthropology had had such a strong influence on his own earlier work? To answer this question, I explore the history of the relationship between the two men as well as the politics of Soviet anthropology, particularly during the turbulent era of the late 1920s–early 1930s.

Friendship and Scholarly Cooperation Prior to 1917

The history of Franz Boas's cooperation with Vladimir Bogoras, Vladimir Jochelson, and Lev Shternberg is well documented and hence will only be briefly summarized here.³ Arrested for radical Populist (Narodnik) activities in 1886, Bogoras spent a year and a half in solitary confinement and was then sentenced to ten years of exile in the Kolyma region of eastern Siberia.⁴ Like a number of other exiled Populists, including Jochelson and Shternberg, he began recoding data on the folklore and other aspects of the culture of the local Russian and aboriginal population (particularly the Chukchis). He also began writing fiction, using the life of the exiles and the local people as his subject matter. Instead of his last name, he used the alias "Tan." Later in life he began using a hyphenated name: "Tan-Bogoras." As Elena Mikhailova points out, "For Bogoras this hyphenated name has a special meaning: he saw it as a reflection of the different aspects of his work and, in a broader sense, as his two hypostases, his two different interests and goals in life" (2004:95).

After his first ethnographic publications appeared in the bulletin of the Eastern Siberian Division of the Russian Geographic Society...