SUMMARY:

Varnaskii affirms that the Communist party made ethnicity and ethno-nations into a cornerstone of its policies. He explores the application of the concept of “friendship of peoples” to the historical writing in the Buriat Autonomous Republic as a means to create and promote supranational memory. In particular, class universalism was one of the elements in the construction of a supranational narrative of the past. This was reflected in the early 1950s in discussions of periodization of Buriat history and its specific (in the context of USSR) path. Varnavsky provides various examples of how Soviet historiography underscored growing solidarity of Russians and Buriats against their common exploiters within the empire. However, as ethnic identities became rooted, the Soviet discourse paid less and less attention to the notion of the friendship of peoples. Instead, it focused on the new entity, “the Soviet people”. Varnavskii argues that official definitions of the Soviet people ascribed to it the same qualities as to ethnic nations. The author sees the introduction of the concept and its subsequent use as a means of Soviet nation-building. The impossibility to put forward a concept of Soviet nation based on civic community prevented the Soviet authorities from formulating Soviet nationalism, while ideological (communist) contents of Soviet culture allowed the authorities to temper ethno-national identities.