Mankurts and Moderns: Ethnicity and Authenticity in the Soviet Ethnoterritorial Federation

• In Event: Renegotiating Soviet Ethnofederalism in Central Asia under Brezhnev

Abstract

Inspired by the legend of the mankurt in Chingiz Aitmatov’s The Day Lasts Longer than a Hundred Years, this paper examines how the discourse of “roots” permeated the politics of the late Soviet ethnoterritorial federation. Stepping back to take a synthetic perspective, this paper combines intellectual and institutional history to develop our understanding of how ethnic authenticity functioned as a political resource that was equally valuable and volatile. Ethnic authenticity mediated complex relationships between bureaucratic and national cultural elites who both needed one another and needed to maintain some distance from one another.

Author

• Hilary Lynd, UC Berkeley