National Identity in Russia from 1961: Traditions and Deterritorialisation

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The rise of nationalism is one of the most prominent and worrying phenomena in modem Russian culture. The proposed project moves beyond ideology, political programmes, and voting patterns in order to examine views of the nation and Russianness among ordinary Russians, and to explore how far these may be traced back to the late Soviet era. The sources include previously unexplored archival material, questionnaires, and interviewing/oral history. The central themes are 'tradition', by which we mean cultural memory, a self-consciously recognised relationship with the past, and 'deterritorialisation', which refers to the stresses placed on national and personal identity by migrancy, travel, and emigration. The period chosen for close study includes the post-Stalin and transition years, which witnessed a thoroughgoing attempt by the Party authorities to revive what were seen as 'positive' traditions, yet at the same time an officially-sponsored depopulation of the Russian village, conventionally seen as the bedrock of national identity, and the granting of mobility rights (albeit in a restricted sense) to ever larger sections of the population. Working in collaboration with Russians so that we can explore national identity from the inside, as well as writing about it from a distance, we plan to publish a number of pathbreaking studies on subjects such as the cultural history of identity documents, St Petersburg as the city of 'living history', Russian food as an expression of national identity, the role of museums in fostering cultural memory, the representation of the nation in the Russian media, patriotism and attitudes to 'foreigners' among skinheads In St Petersburg and Vorkuta, and the lives of Russians living in Britain. We are also planning to set up a broader research network that will exchange views in order to place Russian nationalism of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in national and international context Russia is often, but perhaps wrongly, considered a 'special case', so we propose to investigate similarities and differences between Russian views of the nation and those in other countries that till recently had a large peasant population and have a history of authoritarian rule, such as Ireland, Hungary, Greece, and Italy, as well as comparing the situation in the Russian Federation with that in other parts of the former Soviet Union. The structure of the project involves a network of 40 scholars, including a core group of 4 Russian and 5 British academics, each of whom will work on a particular aspect of our general theme. Anticipated output includes research monographs (Baiburin, KeIly, Omelchenko/Pilkington), sections of books (Beumers, Lovell), and articles (Baranov, Byford, Kushkova}. A discussion of theories/methodologies of research in national identify will be organised in Antropologicheskii forum/Forum for Anthropology and Culture, published by the Russian Academy of Sciences/Kunstkamera in St Petersburg. Alongside academic: books and articles, we plan to organise two workshops and a major international conference, and to create a website that will be exploitable as a research resource, with an annotated international database of research on Russian nationalism. We will also set up a searchable online database of life history interviews which will form part of the Archive of Russian Personal History and Everyday Life at the University of Oxford, and which will be accessible by other scholars researching twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russian culture. The involvement of Russian participants will smooth access to archival holdings not generally accessible to Western scholars, facilitate contact with informants, and ensure that work done for the project attains a high profile in Russia (we will be pre-publishing material from the monographs in leading Russian journals, e.g. Neprikosnovennyi zapas and NLO, as well as US/UK refereed journals).