2014-06-03-sloskineNatalia Laas: Could we start with a short introduction? How did you get involved in the studying of Russian and Soviet history?

 

     Yuri Slezkine: By accident. I was living in Portugal and I wanted to go to somewhere else. America was one of my options. I found out that the best way for me to get to the States was to apply to graduate school. So, I did. I got into the University of Texas. Actually, it was the only school I applied to because they told me they needed native speakers in their Russian program. So, I got in.

 

     I got to Texas in 1983 and got a job teaching Russian, but I had to be a graduate student in the Slavic Department in order to get the job. I did not want to be in Slavic Department. I managed to transfer to History and then I decided, since I had spent a year in Mozambique, that I wanted to do African history. But then it turned out that I couldn’t do African history as my main field. I said: okay, I will do Russian history. Eventually, I came up with the topic in Russian history that was closely connected to my African history interests. That became my dissertation on the small peoples of the North.

 

     Natalia Laas: What did you know about America before your graduate school? Maybe, you had some expectations or specific notions about it because as far as I know your father was американист in the Soviet Union.

 

     Yuri Slezkine: Oh, I knew something in the way we all did. I read some fiction, saw some movies. I spoke decent English, what I thought was British English at that time. But I was not academically interested in the United States. I was just curious in the way we all were. And I certainly did not know anything about the study of the Soviet Union in America. I found Sheila Fitzpatrick there by accident[1]. I arrived at Texas not knowing who she was, not planning on working with her. At MGU (Московский государственный университет) I had studied Russian Philology, but I didn’t want to do that again in the US. So, when I finally managed to transfer from Slavic to History, I met Sheila Fitzpatrick there.

 

     Natalia Laas: But you wrote some kind of a textbook on Russian language in English [2].

 

     Yuri Slezkine: Well, I didn’t write much of it. My wife did. My wife was a graduate student in the Slavic Department. She was teaching Russian, she and a friend of hers. And I just wrote some texts for that textbook. They came up with all the exercises; they were responsible for the methodology and so on.

 

     Natalia Laas: How about Sheila Fitzpatrick, her works, her students, the milieu around her? How did she influence on you? Actually, you got acquainted with her before she wrote that provocative article New Perspectives on Stalinism in The Russian Review in 1986 [3].

 

     Yuri Slezkine: She was already quite controversial. She did a lot of writing at Texas.

 

     I was one of three graduate students in Russian history. One was Roger Reese. Now he teaches in College Station, Texas, at Texas A&M University. He is a Texas guy. He became a Soviet military historian. And there was another woman who did her Master’s and then left.

 

     There wasn’t much of a graduate program because people who wanted to do Soviet history would go to Columbia or Berkeley. Anyway, there I was and there she was. So, that’s how we met.

 

     Natalia Laas: Do you agree that there is some sort of Sheila Fitzpatrick’s school in Soviet history, at that time and/or now?

 

     Yuri Slezkine: No, at that time there was no such a thing, but she was already seen (that was in the mid-1980s) as the leader of the Revisionists. But she did not necessarily see herself that way. She didn’t have her own school; she just had followers and admirers.

 

     Then, when she went to Chicago, she did form a school. It was a large program and she had a lot of graduate students. Her retirement was celebrated in her native town of Melbourne, Australia, and one of the panels was entitled Is there such a thing as the Sheila Fitzpatrick school of historiography? They ended up publishing a book [4]. If you turn around you will see it. Do you have a copy? You are welcome to one.

 

     Natalia Laas: Thank you! I have learned this book got published, but I haven’t read it. Did you contribute to it?

 

     Yuri Slezkine: I did a little essay [5].

 

     Natalia Laas: Could we suppose that all those people listed in the book constitute Fitzpatrick’s school?

 

     Yuri Slezkine: I don’t know if it is a school, but they are all her students, except for Ron Suny, who was a colleague of hers at Chicago for many years. All the others were her students: Roger and I from her Texas’ years and everyone else from Chicago.

 

     Natalia Laas: What was the reaction of people after Sheila Fitzpatrick had published her New Perspectives on Stalinism?

 

     Yuri Slezkine: I don’t remember when New Perspectives on Stalinism came out. She became well known much earlier. When we met in 1983, she was already quite famous. As soon as I started meeting people and figuring out what the field was about and who was who, I discovered that she was not any old Soviet historian. She was a figure of considerable controversy. Shortly after she came to Texas, she published her The Russian Revolution [6] and two other books [7].

 

     All of that preceded New Perspectives on Stalinism: her introduction to the book on the Cultural Revolution [8], her book on the Russian Revolution, her articles that would later become collected in The Cultural Front book [9].

 

     All of that was being done or had already been written. She was a lightning rod, so to speak. When I came to Berkeley, in 1992, Martin Malia thought she was a kind of Stalinist, even though he didn’t seem to hold it against me.

 

     Natalia Laas: What is your opinion about the totalitarian approach and revisionism with its attempts to deal with social history foremost?

 

     Yuri Slezkine: Like most Soviet émigrés at the time, I was not happy with some of the Revisionists’ work – Jerry Hough’s, for example. I thought the guy did not know how to read Soviet texts, did not understand anything, took things at face value, did not realize that there was a difference between rhetoric and social reality.

 

     But then things began to change. Studying with Sheila helped dispel some of my cruder generalizations. That does not mean I changed radically, or that I came to appreciate all of revisionism, but I did realize very early on that there was a lot she could teach me, and that my knowledge of Soviet past consisted mostly of blocks of conventional wisdom.

 

     After the fall of the Soviet Union, these controversies lost some of their emotional immediacy for me. I began to find more revisionist work useful, interesting, and stimulating. Some, I thought, was silly. Some of Hough’s articles, I thought, were silly and remain silly. Certain claims were silly. But the same is true of some of the “totalitarian school” stuff, for example, such as Friedrich’s and Brzezinski’s early books [10]. They were also pretty feeble intellectually.

 

     I did not identify myself with either. In that sense, I was not Sheila’s disciple. I was her student and we had a very close relationship, but we never saw eye to eye on everything. When she suggested that we publish a collection of women’s autobiographies together [11], I said: okay, I will translate some things. Then, okay, I will translate more.

 

     Her original idea was just to illustrate her thesis about выдвеженцы and выдвиженки, about upward mobility. She had discovered them and put them on the map, and there they were, in our collection: Паша Ангелина, Полина Виноградова, and the rest of them.

 

     And I remember a conversation we had at some point. I said: we either call this The Women Who Won the Revolution or The Women Who Benefited from the Revolution, and keep it as is, or we have to have a lot of other women. And so I added various anti-Bolshevik women and some victims of collectivization.

 

     She didn’t end up minding. In fact, it took some time, perhaps a year, to warm up to each other: for me, to overcome my contempt for various pro-Soviet Westerners and for her, to overcome her contempt for Soviet émigrés.

 

     Natalia Laas: It is now rather a common place that at that time in American academic milieu, the Soviet Union was associated with Russia foremost and the national question was neglected. Maybe, you were one of the first who distinguished national variations in your article The Soviet Union as a Communal Apartment [12], and actually, your dissertation on the small peoples of the North deals with that. What is your opinion about these national problems and the attitudes of the US academia toward them?

 

     Yuri Slezkine: First of all, there was a lot of work being done, when I started out, by émigrés from various non-Russian parts of the Soviet Union. Most of it, of course, was nationalist in orientation, but much of it was useful and interesting. There were good books by Richard Pipes about the formation of the Soviet Union [13] and by Walter Kolarz about the Soviet Union as a colonial empire [14]. Much of it, of course, was in the “captive nations” mode.

 

     Most scholars, I think, or, at least, many of the scholars working on nationalities only saw their own group. Whatever happened to their group was uniquely directed at that group. If you don’t look at the whole picture, whatever happens seems to be specifically designed to oppress the Ukrainians, the Jews, or whichever group you happen to be interested in. In American political terms, much of this literature was on the right. But there was also, of course, Ron Suny’s book on the Baku Commune [15].

 

     This interest was reinforced dramatically by what was happening in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s and, coincidentally, by certain changes in American political life.

 

     Ethnicity was everywhere in the United States at that time, with constant, endless conversations about ethnic identity, privileges, entitlements, schools, affirmative action, and so on. In the mid- to late 1980s, when I was in graduate school, I remember various student groups become increasingly ethnicized. And then there were fights over the canon, about how different ethnic groups should be represented in the curriculum.

 

     Again, though, I never saw myself as belonging to any camp.

 

     Natalia Laas: Even today?

 

     Yuri Slezkine: Right. I just do my own thing, so to speak. I was just mostly interested in the way the system worked.

 

     Natalia Laas: How did others consider your article Communal Apartment and your book Arctic Mirrors here in the US [16]? They had been published before Terry Martin’s and Francine Hirsch’s works [17], which continued discussing extensively the idea that the Soviet power had encouraged somehow the development of non-Russian nationalities.

 

     Yuri Slezkine: Well, yes. That’s true. Francine took my seminar here, at Berkeley, when she was a visiting graduate student. Terry’s thesis is very similar to my argument in that article. But his book is much bigger, obviously. It is a very good book, I think.

 

     My article did become fairly popular. A lot of people read it. It is funny because it was not easy to publish it.

 

     Natalia Laas: Why?

 

     Yuri Slezkine: I don’t know. Because it seemed to go against a sort of received wisdom. I remember submitting it to The American Historical Review. One of the readers’ reports was very negative. What do you mean, “the Bolsheviks promoted ethnic particularism”? They were terrible, right? They oppressed the nationalities.

 

     Eventually, it got published, and now it is not controversial.

 

     Natalia Laas: But it was. It was extremely controversial at that time.

 

     Yuri Slezkine: It was, right.

 

     Natalia Laas: How about the transformation of terms which we use to name these studies on the region? Before, they were called Sovietology and Soviet studies. Now the name of your institute is the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies. What is the difference between Sovietology and Soviet studies?

 

     Yuri Slezkine: Oh, I don’t know. Sovietology tended to be associated with political science, a certain kind of political science. Our colleagues in the Slavic Department or, indeed, in the History Department, would not have referred to themselves as Sovietologists.

 

     I don’t remember all the names our institute has had over the years. Most of these names do not really reflect any particular consensus. They do reflect something, but they don’t have to be the result of much self-reflection. Slavic obviously is the holdover from the old philological approach to things. There are still Slavic Departments, and they are still struggling with some of the same questions. Should they have both literature and linguistics? If so, what do they have in common? And why, if the languages are related, should literatures be studied together?

 

     If you are a historian of Russian literature, it makes a lot more sense, for most topics, to learn about German and French literature than to learn about Czech and Polish literature.

 

     Eurasian became fashionable after the Soviet Union fell apart. There seemed to be a need for a word that would encompass the whole of the former Soviet Union without actually saying so.

 

     Now the Balts are moving into “European”, as opposed to “Eurasian”, studies. That makes them feel better about themselves and about their place on the map even though it may not be very good for funding and student interest.

 

     I was on the board at what was that called AAASS (The American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies) when the decision was made to change the name. So, it became ASEEES (The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies).

 

     Natalia Laas: There was the other solution. For example, the Kennan Institute refused from any explanations at all [18].

 

     Yuri Slezkine: Well, but you do have to know how to designate your area.

 

     Most American universities are organized around disciplines: history, sociology, anthropology, physics, and so on. In addition to departments, there are research centers, like our institute, and a lot of them are devoted to so-called “area studies”. There are a lot of people who feel very strongly that area studies should be well funded. There are people in Washington who agree.

 

     Those political conversations are still very much alive because, now, for example, the state is interested in the learning of Arabic and the study of Islam. So, whoever you are bombing you want to learn more about.

 

     As for names, it is like what they say about pornography: “I can’t define it but I know it when I see it”.

 

     We have a big institute here, it is called The East Asia Institute. Obviously, the name is questionable. “East Asia” does not include Vladivostok: everybody knows it is mostly China, Korea, and Japan. And then we have our Middle Eastern Studies Institute. They may extend their reach into Central Asia or they may not. In Russia, what used to be Средняя Азия for some reason became Центральная Азия. The region didn’t change, but it sounds better because it is a borrowing from the West. Or let’s take Latin American studies. They include the study of places that are not very Latin necessarily.

 

     So, I don’t have any problems with being Eurasian, Slavic, East European or whatever.

 

     Natalia Laas: I have some associations of Eurasia with George Vernadsky and his Eurasianism.

 

     Yuri Slezkine: Right, but I don’t think that many people here associate Eurasian studies with Eurasianism.

 

     Natalia Laas: How about your Russian colleagues? I guess, much more Russians know about Eurasianism.

 

     Yuri Slezkine: No one even mentioned a thing like that to me. So, I don’t know.

 

     Natalia Laas: What do you think about the Soviet Union as an empire? This is quite fashionable trend now to emphasize Soviet imperial features and many scholars use this empire term in their works, like Terry Martin’s affirmative action empire mentioned before?

 

     Yuri Slezkine: Generally, I don’t feel strongly about these things. It depends on what you want to argue, what your definitions are. I even wrote something about that, I don’t know if you saw [19]. There was a round table in The Russian Review some years ago.

 

     But I don’t care. Some people use the term just to say: it is really big and really bad. Some people have a more focused definition. But an empire is almost by definition unfocused.

 

     Certainly, the term can be applied to the Russian Empire because it referred to itself as an empire. Then, if you define an empire as a place that legally, rhetorically, and politically consists of a mother-country and dependencies that are subject to different sets of perceptions, laws, and so on, then obviously the imperial Russia was an empire.

 

     The Soviet Union is a little tricky, but I don’t care really. I may call the United States an empire, partly as a provocation, but by now people are used to the notion of an American Empire. But when I refer to the United States as an empire, I mean something different, because, in the American case, we are dealing with various definitions of so called informal empires.

 

     There are some old familiar arguments according to which it makes sense to refer to the British Empire as not being limited to the formal empire in India and parts of Africa, but include places like Argentina, where there was no formal legal control, but where the British dominated so much and in so many ways economically and otherwise. Today, for me, there is no doubt that, on that count, the United States is an aggressive, powerful, pretty uncompromising empire in terms of staking its claims and advancing them. Its interests by definition encompass the entire world.

 

     When people talk about the Soviet empire, they use the same definition to some degree, but, more importantly, they emphasize the fact of ethnic heterogeneity; particularly, ethnic heterogeneity that was institutionalized territorially. Because here, in the US, it is also institutionalized, but not territorially outside Indian reservations.

 

     Natalia Laas: I would like to talk a little bit about your books translated in Russian. My impression is that only after the translation of your very famous and provocative The Jewish Century [20], the other your works have been translated and you have become a very important actor in Russian academic discussions. Is it true?

 

     Yuri Slezkine: Well, they did translate a couple of my articles early on, the Communal Apartment and there was another one about Marr and the Soviet linguistics that was also translated for a journal [21]. But that was certainly not a very big thing. And The Jewish Century obviously was more interesting to more people [22].

 

     Natalia Laas: What was the reaction on Арктические зеркала[23]?

 

     Yuri Slezkine: It was not much. There was some, but not much.

 

     Here, it was entirely within the academic community, but it was interesting to some people because it had such a vast chronology and a certain point to make. It dealt with groups that most people knew nothing about and were curious to find out something about. It suggested certain comparative angles that some people found interesting. It bridged the 1917 divide without making too much of it.

 

     But in Russia, I don’t know. I think it is of interest only to those who are interested in the history of the North and ethnic studies, since poor малые народы Севера are really of no interest to anyone in the world of elite intellectual conversations. It is not something that many people would care about now. Jews are always of interest to people. Since many of the readers are themselves Jews or care deeply about them. So, that book provoked a lot of discussions, some of which were quite intense.

 

     Natalia Laas: Could we say that something like unique American academic milieu exist? Or is it better to say English-language or Western academic milieu? How to define them? How to put the limits?

 

     Yuri Slezkine: As you said, there is a language-based approach to limits. Obviously, English is the international lingua franca, and I am very happy that I don’t write in German, so I can be read by more people. And then, if you look at the English world, there are all kinds of Swiss, Dutch, Finnish and other scholars who write in English because it is the international language of scholarship.

 

     But there is also such a thing as American academic culture because the British academic system works a little differently and the universities work a little differently. Obviously, it is the same market, but there are some serious differences.

 

     Generally speaking, it is better to be at the center than on the periphery. There is also, as usual, the peculiar parochialism of the imperial center. If you are at the center of an empire you are particularly parochial. Because I remember when I was growing up, there I was a native speaker of Russian and wherever I would go – Estonia or Georgia – I would expect everyone to speak Russian, right? It is not that I thought that there was a specific entitlement. I just never thought about it. I addressed people in Russian and they answered in Russian, some well, some not so well. Talking about it now, I am obviously self-reflective about it.

 

     And, obviously, the German academic world is pretty rich and interesting, but Americans don’t learn German to read in German unless they are experts in German culture, because they just assume that, if it is interesting enough, it should be translated into English. That is obviously an indication of severe parochialism, but it is also a fact of life. This is why the word empire works for America.

 

     Natalia Laas: Like an American academic empire.

 

     Yuri Slezkine: Yes, that is what we were saying. You are studying an American academic empire because it is important, because it has so much money and so much interest in our part of the world.

 

     And sometimes I feel funny about it because I don’t identify with it entirely. I go to Moscow to work in the archives and even though I have been living in America for thirty years and I am a part of this world, I feel funny in the company of my colleagues. Because I am also a native over there.

 

     That’s why I am a part of an empire, but also not a part of it, because I identify with the natives more than I identify with my American colleagues when I am there. When I am there, I try to spend as much time as possible with my old friends there, and not to be American, and forget about it.

 

     Natalia Laas: So, you have advantages from both sides.

 

     Yuri Slezkine: Or disadvantages from both sides, depending.

 

     Natalia Laas: Are you a cultural historian of the Soviet Union?

 

     Yuri Slezkine: Oh, no. I will send you a copy when I finish my book, I hope I will not forget, and then you decide. But I am not sure I can even describe for myself what I am doing right now [24]. I don’t know what it is, because it has bits of everything in it. It is intellectual to some degree, and cultural, has a lot of historical sociology, a lot of literary history, and a lot of social history, including family histories and histories of love and friendship, child rearing, and so on. I don’t know and I don’t care really.

 

     Natalia Laas: How about your colleagues? Do they incline to declare themselves within any particular approaches?

 

     Yuri Slezkine: Some of them, yes. Some of them feel strongly about advancing a particular approach, which is obviously a legitimate and praiseworthy pursuit. I do have certain preferences. There are some kinds of history I find more interesting than others and some I find too boring for words. Obviously, that is reflected in the work that my students do.

 

     You know, there are some scholars who think of scholarship as a collective enterprise, as something we do. They use first person plural a lot. What should we do? What is our agenda? I don’t feel that way. I think that’s great that people do that, but I tend to do my own things and expect you to do yours. Of course, what they say makes sense, because obviously we build upon each other’s work. You know what you know by reading other people’s work and finding what they find.

 

     But there are also all kinds of fashions, of which I am skeptical. The closer you are to the cutting edge of a particular fashion, the greater the likelihood that you will be completely forgotten tomorrow.

 

     There are some subfields I am not good at. For people who want to do economic history, there is probably no point in coming to Berkeley, because I don’t know very much about it, and they would be better served by someone else. But within the big world of intellectual, social, cultural, and political history, the important thing for me is whatever a particular person finds congenial. I don’t think there is something that should or must be studied.

 

     Natalia Laas: What would you recommend to be translated into Russian or Ukrainian among any works published recently in English?

 

     Yuri Slezkine: I don’t know. I am sure I’ll forget something.

 

     Oh, obviously, everything written by my students deserves to be translated and read widely.

 

     Natalia Laas: Like David Beecher’s dissertation.

 

     Yuri Slezkine: Yes. It will be a very sophisticated, smart work of history, for sure. There are some very good recent dissertations by some of our Berkeley graduate students that are going to be very good books in different fields.

 

     Natalia Laas: How did the American academia react on the collapse of the Soviet Union? Didn’t they blame themselves for not having predicted this? Didn’t they have doubts about their qualification and professionalism?

 

     Yuri Slezkine: It was more of an issue for political scientists. There were a lot of debates and panel discussions on what did we get wrong, who got it right, if anybody?

 

     For historians, the results were more muted but very important. Obviously, the first one was just the availability of archives. People rushed in to look for things. In some areas, it made a difference. In some areas, it made a lot of difference, for example, for the study of the history of the Gulag and the Great Terror.

 

     But the one big difference is here you are. It is still going to be asymmetrical because of where the imperial center is, but, al least, people are colleagues now. You and I are colleagues, and that didn’t used to be the case. I mean it used to be, but it was so difficult, and communication was so fraught. That is a big consequence. People come and go, and there is a dialogue and all kinds of exchanges. Work produced in Russia or Ukraine is work produced by colleagues.

 

     Natalia Laas: Did I miss anything important that you would like to add?

 

     Yuri Slezkine: No, I think you did a great job.

 

     Natalia Laas: Thanks!

 

    

 

     Berkeley, April 4, 2013

 

     Commented by Natalia Laas

 

    

 

     Yuri Slezkine (born in 1956) is Jane K. Sather Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Till 2013 he served as a Director of the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at this university. He received his PhD at the University of Texas, Austin in 1989. Professor Slezkine works on the history of the Soviet Union and Russia, nationalism and ethnic studies, intellectual history. He is the author of the books The Jewish Century (Princeton University Press, 2004), Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Cornell University Press, 1994); the co-editor of the books with Sheila Fitzpatrick In the Shadow of the Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War (Princeton University Press, 2000), and with Galya Diment Between Heaven and Hell: The Myth of Siberia in Russian Culture (St. Martin’s Press, 1993).

 

1. Sheila Fitzpatrick was Prof. Slezkine’s dissertation adviser.

 

       2. Fushille, Marisa, Little, Lisa, Slezkine, Yuri. Speak Russian! – University of Texas Press, 1990.

 

       3. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. New Perspectives on Stalinism // The Russian Review. – 1986. – Vol. 45, no. 4.

 

       4. Writing the Stalin era: Sheila Fitzpatrick and Soviet Historiography / Eds. by Golfo Alexopoulos, Julie Hessler, and Kiril Tomoff. – New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

 

       5. Slezkine, Yuri. The Two Faces of Tatiana Matveevna // Ibid. – pp. 37–42.

 

       6. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Russian Revolution, 1917–1932. – Oxford University Press, 1st ed., 1982/83.

 

       7. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Commissariat of Enlightenment. Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, 1917–1921. – Cambridge University Press, 1970; Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1932. – Cambridge University Press, 1979.

 

       8. Fitzpartick, Sheila. Editor’s Introduction // Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931. – Indiana University Press, 1978.

 

       9. Fitzpartick, Sheila. The Cultural Front. Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia. – Cornell University Press, 1992.

 

       10. Carl Joachim Friedrich (1901–1984) was a political scientist and professor of the science of government at Harvard University and professor of political science at the University of Heidelberg.

 

     Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski (born in 1928) is a political scientist, statesman, and professor of Harvard University, Columbia University, and Johns Hopkins University. He worked as a US National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter in 1977–1981.

 

     They are classics of the totalitarian approach and the authors of the book Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), which is considered to be one of the most influential in this field.

 

       11. In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War / Eds. by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine. – Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

 

       12. Slezkine, Yuri. The Soviet Union as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism // Slavic Review. – 1994. – Vol. 53, no. 2. – pp. 414–452.

 

       13. Pipes, Richard. The Formation of the Soviet Union, Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923. – Harvard University Press, 1954.

 

       14. Kolarz, Walter. Russia and Her Colonies. – New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1952.

 

       15. Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Baku Commune, 1917–1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution. – Princeton University Press, 1972.

 

       16. Slezkine, Yuri. Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. – Cornell University Press, 1994.

 

       17. Martin, Terry. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. – Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 2001; Hirsch, Francine. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. – Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2005.

 

       18. The Kennan Institute, founded at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in 1974, originally was named as The Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies.

 

       19. Slezkine, Yuri. Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Socialism // The Russian Review. – 2000. – Vol. 59, no. 2. – pp. 227–234.

 

       20. Slezkine, Yuri. The Jewish Century. – Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004. In Russian, Слёзкин Ю. Л. Эра Меркурия. Евреи в современном мире. – Москва: Новое литературное обозрение, 2007.

 

       21. Слёзкин Ю. Л. СССР как коммунальная квартира, или каким образом социалистическое государство продвигало этнический партикуляризм // Славянский обзор. – 1994. – Т. 53, № 2. – с. 414–452; Слёзкин Ю. Л. СССР как коммунальная квартира, или Каким образом социалистическое государство поощряло этническую обособленность // Американская русистика: вехи историографии последних лет. Советский период. – Самара, 2001; Слёзкин Ю. Л. Н. Я. Марр и национальные корни советской этногенетики // Новое литературное обозрение. – 1999. – № 36.

22. See, for example, the talk with Harry Kreisler, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_nhahTUFWo

 

 and with Andriy Portnov, http://net.abimperio.net/node/3053

 

       23. Слёзкин Ю. Л. Арктические зеркала. Россия и малые народы Севера. – Москва: Новое литературное обозрение, 2008.

 

       24. See, Andriy Portnov talks with Prof. Slezkine about his project on «Дом на Набережной», http://net.abimperio.net/node/3074. See, also an essay by Gerd Koenen with marvelous photos by Maurice Weiss

 http://www.wiko-berlin.de/en/no-cache/wikotheque/koepfe-und-ideen/?tx_ki_ki[article]=9&tx_ki_ki[issue]=17&tx_ki_ki[action]=show&tx_ki_ki[controller]=Article&cHash=e1a786c72eaba9d85361f607cf91f1d3.