On the Soviet Ethnography of the Soviet Life: The Case of the "Village of Viriatino"

Among a number of turns that Western anthropology has taken over the recent decades, perhaps the most important one is historical. Having reconsidered the premises of the "ethnographic present," anthropologists now are more inclined to take stock of the historical record of societies that they study as well as of their own discipline. This has invigorated the practice of anthropological revisits, which proved to be a very congenial methodological tool for reflective anthropology. Soviet and Russian anthropology for its part has considered itself a historical discipline since the 1930s. It takes great pains to examine historical sources of various kinds, but the biggest moments of self-reflection in the discipline appear to have coincided with the great political upheavals of the early 1930s and 1990s, so the reflections they produced were more theoretical and political-ideological rather than methodological or historical in nature.

Political and ideological concerns remain central in the historiography of Soviet ethnography as well. Historians have produced a number of insightful works that place its history in the context of Soviet national and cultural policies (Slezkine 1994; Hirsch 2005). This exercise is absolutely essential, since the scholarship in the Soviet Union was openly politicized and subjected to the Communist Party's control. But we should not forget that however ideologically biased ethnographers could be, there was always a third side to this unequal dialogue: the studied peoples themselves. To contextualize the history of the discipline properly, one should look into fieldwork and details of footnotes as closely as into broad theoretical and ideological issues.

The focus of this article is on what probably were the most ideologically distorted fields of Soviet ethnographers' interests—the study of the Russian kolkhoz peasants and, more generally, Soviet modern life as opposed to ethnic traditions and customs. I will review the most significant trends in the development of ethnographers' approach to the contemporary realities throughout the Soviet period and concentrate on one of the most notable contributions to this tradition—the 1958 monographic study The Village of Viriatino in the Past and the Present. This study will be examined in multiple contexts. Apart from the historiographic context, I will provide the theoretical and ideological background of its authors, look into some details of the way the fieldwork and the final text of the monograph were composed, and also consider the past and present of Viriatino itself, using anthropological (the fieldwork that I conducted in the village during some three and a half summer months in 2006, 2007, and 2009) as well as historical methods (archival and other written sources). Using Michael Burawoy's classification of anthropological and sociological revisits, my own revisit is of the "constructivist" type, which focuses more on the construction of the "knowledge of the object" rather than the "object of the knowledge" itself (Burawoy 2003). I present a brief "realist" account of the village's history, but not to refute or criticize the monograph: some gaps and misrepresentation in it are fairly predictable given the censorship of the Soviet period. I believe that the task of the contemporary historiographer is rather to use the case of Viriatino to provide insights into the workings of Soviet politics of knowledge.

The first period of interrelations of ethnography and Soviet reality is saturated with enthusiasm and revolutionary romanticism. Anthropology, which after the 1917 October Revolution constituted itself as a university discipline, attracted the youth of working class and peasant origins. Its leaders, former revolutionary populists (narodniki) Lev Shternberg and Vladimir Bogoras, finally came to accept (or at least put up with) the new regime (Kan 2006, 2009). In the mid-1920s Bogoras managed to organize student "ethnographical excursions" (usually of several months) to various remote corners of the country, mainly in the northwest regions. Excursions were financed by the Bolshevik government (Sovnarkom), but the funding was so meager that students often had to work or even beg during fieldwork. Most of them were peasants' children who went to study their own regions, which Bogoras considered ideal conditions for work. The genre of the essays published by students in several...