SUMMARY:

The article by Adrienne Lynn Edgar is a direct attempt to respond to a recent challenge by leading scholars in colonial studies and include the Soviet Union in a comparative discussion of interethnic and interracial intimacy. The article takes its inspiration from the fact that while the terminology used in Soviet intermarriage discourse differed significantly from that of both European colonizers and U.S. racial theorists (to cite just one example, the Soviets tended to speak of “nationality” rather than “race,” especially after the early 1930s), the issue was clearly of central importance for Soviet nationality theorists. The article reconstructs the genealogy of Russian and Soviet discourse on interethnic marriage which is highly revealing about the form of modernity Soviet authorities envisioned for the Muslim periphery, and in particular about the role women and the family were expected to play in the transformation of Central Asia. The author suggests that the closest comparative model for Soviet inter-marriage discourse is the Latin American discourse of mestizaje. Soviet intermarriage ideology shared certain features with mestizaje: both involved a celebration of diversity and hybridity and an explicit rejection of European and U.S. racial ideology; both ideologies viewed intermarriage and ethnic mixing as the wave of the future and a harbinger of modernity; both also obscured the existence of entrenched ethnic and racial hierarchies. The most important difference between mestizaje and Soviet assimilationism is, according to the article, that the former was an ideology devised to attach a positive evaluation to an existing reality – the fact that large numbers of Latin Americans were racially mixed. Soviet intermarriage ideology, by contrast, was aspirational, describing a desirable situation in which all Soviet citizens would choose spouses without regard to nationality and lead an “internationalist, all-Soviet” lifestyle free of traditional practices and superstitions. Thus, Soviet intermarriage ideology was utopian in a way that mestizaje was not. The author concludes that, in reality, the prospect of creating a Soviet people through intermarriage became more remote in the Brezhnev era as titular nationalities became more entrenched within their republics. Thus the ideology of ethnic mixing tells a great deal about the relationship between national identities and a broader sense of “Sovietness.” Edgar suggests that close examination of intimate relationships may help us to understand one of the largest problems in Soviet history – the failure to create a Soviet identity capable of competing with national identities and withstanding the centrifugal pressures of the perestroika period.