SUMMARY:

The archival publication and the introductory article prepared by two Kazan sociologists present the findings of a research project on a local community of experts on “ethno-cultural politics.” This community includes state officials from the Ministries of Culture and Education of the Republic of Tatarstan (RT); leaders of national and cultural societies officially registered in the RT; members of artistic unions and leading cultural organizations of the RT; and journalists writing about national relations and cultural politics in the RT. Representatives of these four major groups are involved (professionally and institutionally) in the cultural production and implementation of “ethno-cultural” politics at the federal as well as republican level. The discourse of the Tatarstan “expert community” is deconstructed on the basis of 25 semi-formal interviews, extracts from which are published here. The authors point to the absence of any professional language of “nationality politics” and to the defining role of initial professional or bureaucratic discourses for this group. The only common language they have is the language of Soviet ethnicity, which – in the tradition of late Soviet ethnography – strips the concept of “ethnos” of its political connotations and reduces it to tradition and culture. Nationalism in this logic is not connected with the political or territorial claims of some ethnic group, but is seen as a distortion of some “true” ethnic consciousness or as an “ethno-cultural isolationism.” The state remains the major and the only legitimate political subject vis-à-vis the ethnos. The Western concept of multiculturalism and its language and practices are alien to the discourse of this particular “expert community.” The Soviet experience still provides the major frame of reference for them, and Soviet nationalities policies are regarded as multifaceted, containing many positive elements (connected mostly with the role of the state). Thus an uncompromising rejection of the Soviet past is not utilized as a resource for constructing a new “post-imperial” expert identity. The post-Soviet problem of migrants’ integration is rationalized outside the dominant group discourse. The idea of civic citizenship is alien to this group of experts, as they lack the very language to express the concept. They see the major mechanism of “ethno-cultural politics” in the centralized redistribution of state resources and are divided on the issue of the criteria for redistribution. The authors conclude that, in fact, in Tatarstan there is no expert community whose discourse of national politics can be called “professional” and distinguished from other professional or popular discourses. Regional “experts” do not use the symbolic capital that they received by virtue of their institutionalization in the new post-Soviet regional hierarchy. Despite their particular historical circumstances, they do not oppose themselves to any “empire,” and they have not developed anti-imperial (anti-Soviet, anti-colonial) or any other mobilizing “anti-” discourse.