Armed Defiance and Biblical Appropriation: Assimilation and the Transformation of Mordvin Resistance, 1740–1810*

Abstract

If until recently Western investigations of “the nationalities question” in Russia and the Soviet Union focused almost exclusively on the larger and more visible “nations” that enjoyed union-republic status in the Soviet period, scholars have now begun to devote more sustained collective attention to the history of smaller ethnic groups that received only “autonomous” units within the Russian republic itself. For many of these peoples, subjected to Russian imperial rule and cultural domination for the entirety of their modern history and endowed with fewer of the opportunities for national development available to titular nationalities in the union republics, the problem of maintaining their particularity and of articulating a vision of collective cohesion has been especially acute both historically and in more recent times. Yet the fact that some of these groups are now threatened with eventual disappearance as distinct linguistic and cultural communities should not blind us to the complex, contingent, and inherently messy nature of their assimilation. Indeed, close scrutiny reveals that the very processes of assimilation contain within themselves possibilities for the emergence of hybrid cultural configurations and the appropriation of dominant conceptions for the transformation of indigenous culture along new trajectories.