Intermarriage and Soviet Social Science

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the evolution of the official discourse of intermarriage in the Soviet Union from the 1920s to the 1980s. It draws on scholarly publications as well as interviews with ethnographers and sociologists active in the late Soviet era. It also traces the tensions between the biological and sociocultural understandings of ethnicity that helped to shape an increasingly primordial view of ethnic nationality in the late Soviet decades. The chapter describes the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras wherein intermarriage once again emerged as an important topic for Soviet social scientists and nationality theorists. It considers the interplay of biological and social in the making of ethnic communities as a recurrent theme in Soviet discussions of ethnic mixing and intermarriage.