Reply to Zil'berman

Abstract

Our work has rarely been reviewed by any? one who knows more about the subject than we do; therefore I thafrk David Zilberman for his attention. I can hardly be expected, how? ever, to be as grateful for the imputation of naivete. In what follows, the reader should know that from childhood through graduate school I thought of myself as an historian. I did my graduate work in the Russian Institute at Columbia University, and in those days the rare scholar with whom I came in Contact who had any concern for the concept of culture suggested that the Russian Institute should really have been called the Soviet Institute. I am not aware that the reality inherent in this aphorism has altered much in the fifteen years or so in which I have been trying to explain the course of Soviet history with ethnographic data. I agree completely with Zilberman that out knowledge of Soviet ethnography is hindered by our limited understanding of its pre-revolutionary antecedents and that our account reflects personal prejudices. As the Exeuctive Secretary of the only institution in the United States and possibly the Western world devoted exclusively to a study of Soviet ethnography, I am bound to say that Zilberman's review of Introduction to Soviet Ethnography is hardly likely to stimulate the study of Russian-Soviet ethno? graphy in greater depth. Moreover, I am, as a social scientist, profoundly disturbed by some of the positions Zilberman adopts. Let me first dispose of two relatively minor points. Zilberman says that the mass of Soviet ethnographers hold the degree of Candidate of Geographical Sciences, and not of Historical Sciences as we think. I would like to see docu? mentation of that point. Not only is the Insti? tute of Ethnography in Moscow physically next door to the Institute of History, but most of the criticism of ethnographic work that I have seen came out of meetings of the historical section of the Academy of Sciences, U.S.S.R., and most of the ethnographers publishing in Sovetskaia etnografiia appear to hold the degree of Candidate or Doctor of Historical Sciences. Secondly, Zilberman is quite right in saying that the major migration of Russians into Siberia and Central Asia occurred in the twentieth century (and, one might add, after 1959 at that). However, in his list of pre-revo lutionary migrants, he fails to mention peasants, among whom non-Orthodox sectarians were a very large part. This is a somewhat more serious point, and one which casts some doubt upon Zilberman's frame of reference. Since I have had occasion to thumb through Russkaia starina, I am not as certain as he that pre-revo? lutionary ethnography did not study individual communities as well as broadly economic prob? lems centering around the peasant family as an economic unit. Soviet rural sociology of the 1920s, in my very imperfect understanding of it, based on fragmentary sources and abstracts, studied precisely the class composition of the peasantry (because the politics of the day dictated this task). At the same time, there were ethnographic investigations in the true sense. If what Zilberman says is accurate, it would seem that the Bolshevik bias against the peasantry had some support in "traditional" Russian social science, and that it might