In 1998 and 2001, I conducted a thorough examination of the papers of Lev Iakovlevich Shternberg (1861–1927) housed in the St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (PFA RAN). My goal was to locate the most pertinent documents for researching and writing an intellectual biography of this major figure of late imperial and early Soviet anthropology. In the course of this archival research, I came across a remarkable document, a nine-page handwritten manuscript in Russian that bears an English-language title “Anthropological Suggestions and Perspectives during the Revolutionary Years in Russia.”^[1] The document is in Shternberg’s handwriting and unfinished. A number of sentences are crossed out and some are added in the margins. Several words and sentences are difficult or impossible to decipher.^[2] The English title suggests that the author was planning to present this paper at a foreign academic conference or turn it into a paper to be published in a foreign journal.
In order to place the essay in proper historical perspective, I offer a biographical sketch of its author as well as a summary of his main anthropological views.^[3] Lev (Leib) Iakovlevich Shternberg belonged to a cohort of Russian revolutionary Narodniks who in the 1860s–1890s were exiled to Siberia and became ethnographers there. Born in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in 1861, he retained a lifelong concern for the well-being of his fellow-Jews and affection for many aspects of their traditional culture. In the wake of the pogroms of the 1900s, he joined several liberal Jewish organizations dedicated to the promotion of education and prosveshchenie and human as well as ethnic rights of the empire’s oppressed Jewish masses.^[4] While attending a Russian-language gimnaziia, he became exposed to the works of Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and other materialist natural scientists, philosophers, and sociologists, which were extremely popular among young Russian intellectuals in the 1860s–1870s. He also began reading books by the Russian “revolutionary democrats” of the previous generation who, being staunch materialists and progressivists, attacked Russia’s conservative political regime and its backward socioeconomic system. Many of these foreign and domestic works shared an evolutionist perspective, which in the Russian context provided a strong antidote to the government’s conservative nationalist ideology sanctioned by the Orthodox Church. The fact that in Russian intellectual circles, this optimistic evolutionist ideology played a progressive role for a much longer period of time than it did in Western Europe helps explain Shternberg’s lifelong devotion to it as well as the general persistence of evolutionism within Russian ethnology into the twentieth century.^[5]
During the late 1870s, inspired by Populist ideas, young members of the middle class and the intelligentsia began to drop out of universities to “go to the people.” Although Shternberg was too young to join this movement, he helped the Narodniks by running errands for them. Upon graduation from the gymnaziia, Shternberg enrolled in the natural sciences division of St. Petersburg University, where he attended lectures by prominent natural scientists who introduced him to the latest positivist, materialist, and evolutionist theories. He also joined the student branch of the Narodnaia Volia and was eventually banished from the capital for playing a major role in a confrontation between the students and the authorities. That same year, however, he was allowed to enroll in the law division of Novorossiisk University in Odessa. His education there, which included history, philosophy, sociology, and primitive law, was more directly related to his future scholarly work as an ethnographer. In Odessa, Shternberg continued his underground activities and was finally arrested in 1886 just as he was preparing for his graduation exams. After spending almost three years in solitary confinement (where he continued reading social philosophers and ethnologists), he was exiled to Sakhalin Island, Russia’s infamous penal colony.
It is not surprising that in his Sakhalin exile the young man turned to ethnography. The same happened to many other exiled Populists who saw their ethnographic work among Siberian natives as both an extension of their earlier interests in the social institutions of the Russian peasantry and as a “socially useful” activity, worthy of an intellectual, who could help these exploited inorodtsy.^[6]
Soon after arriving on Sakhalin, Shternberg became interested in the island’s main indigenous group, the Gilyak (Nivkh, in modern nomenclature). In 1890, having been punished for insubordination and sent to a remote military station periodically visited by the Gilyak, he began a more systematic investigation of their culture. When the local administration found out about his work, he was asked to compile a census of all the Gilyak families in the northwestern part of the island. Eventually he was allowed to visit the rest of Sakhalin and the lower Amur region to study the Gilyak and their neighbors – the Oroch, the Ainu, the Gol’d (Nanai), and several others. Shternberg’s intermittent ethnographic research lasted until 1897, when he was pardoned by the government and allowed to return to Russia.
This research shared several key characteristics with the work carried out by Franz Boas and his students in North America as well as Shternberg’s fellow exiles and Jesup Expedition participants, Vladimir Bogoraz and Vladimir Jochelson in Siberia.^[7] To begin with, all of them insisted that an ethnographer had to be competent in the language of the people being studied and that he use that language in interviewing and collecting native texts. Shternberg himself became a rather accomplished linguist and left behind a substantial body of linguistic analyses, vocabularies, and bilingual texts.^[8] Like the best of the American anthropologists of that era, Russian political exiles-turned-ethnographers emphasized the importance of spending a great deal of time among the native people and developing friendly and trusting relationships with them.
At the same time, there were limits to Shternberg’s exposure to the local native cultures. Much of his research involved conducting surveys, which meant traveling from one community to the next and spending only a few days in each village. While useful for collecting kinship terms and demographic data, this method was not particular conducive to in-depth observations of native religious ceremonies or the minutia of daily life. At the same time, in a typical Boasian manner, he did work for long periods of time with individual informants – collecting linguistic data, recording native texts, and gathering a variety of ethnographic facts. However, in contrast to that of many of his colleagues in Russia and abroad, Shternberg’s ethnographic research, from its early stages, had a strong topical and theoretical focus, with social organization and religion being clearly his main interests. Hence, while admiring the research conducted by Boas and the Boasians, Shternberg felt that their interpretations of ethnographic data lacked theoretical grounding and boldness. His own theory had always remained the classic evolutionism of Lewis Henry Morgan and Edward B. Tylor, even though he did modify and update a number of its postulates.
Upon his return from exile, Shternberg became a professional anthropologist. In 1901, with the help of several members of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who had been impressed with his linguistic and folkloristic work, he obtained a position at the St. Petersburg Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (MAE) and eventually became its senior curator.^[9] In the summer of 1910 he conducted his only post-exile ethnographic expedition, visiting the Gilyak and several other indigenous groups of the Amur River region to collect additional ethnographic data and museum specimens.
In addition to his museum duties, Shternberg became the anthropology editor of the prestigious Encyclopedia of Brockhaus and Efron, for which he also wrote numerous articles on subjects ranging from “animism” to “theories of primitive social organization.” These articles, as well as his relatively small monograph “The Gilyak,” (1904), which bore a resemblance to his very first ethnographic publication, an 1893 essay on the Gilyak, but contained a more detailed description of their social organization and religion. It demonstrated his devotion to evolutionist speculation (though tempered by his admission of the limitations of classical evolutionism), an excellent command of the latest foreign and domestic anthropological literature, and an ability to present compassionately and insightfully the social and spiritual culture of an indigenous people.
In the 1900s the MAE’s senior curator began attending the meetings of the International Congress of Americanists, where he met Boas and other prominent European and American anthropologists and museum curators. Throughout the 1900s–1910s he published several articles on the Gilyak and Ainu systems of belief as well as essays on comparative religion and social organization.^[10] However, his major work – a monograph on the Gilyak, commissioned by Boas for the Jesup Expedition series, which he had almost completed by the time World War I broke out, did not see the light of day until 1999.^[11]
Although no longer actively engaged in revolutionary work, he remained a democratic socialist, and continued writing in liberal and leftist Russian and Jewish periodicals on various political issues of the day, including the struggle for self-determination by Russia’s ethnic minorities, which he strongly supported.
Compared to the work of most other Russian ethnographers of his era, his 1893 and especially 1904 ethnographies of the Gilyak as well as his unpublished monograph clearly stand out – they are vividly written, topically organized, and reveal his admiration and respect for the people whose culture he was describing. At the same time, his work shares many of the weaknesses of the majority of his contemporaries’ writing. In addition to being marked by a tension between evolutionist speculation and primitivist rhetoric, on the one hand, and a sympathetic (if somewhat romanticized) portrayal of the Gilyak clan as a smoothly functioning social institution (a la Durkheim), on the other, Shternberg’s account is largely ahistorical, since it ignores the Gilyaks’ long-standing contacts with the neighboring Manchurians, Chinese, and Japanese traders, and more recently, Russian colonial officials, criminal exiles, and other agents of change. Thus, while Shternberg’s journalistic pieces, which appeared in the local liberal press during his exile (e.g., the newspaper Vladivostok), contained some strong criticism of the Russians’ mistreatment of the area’s indigenous population, these issues were barely touched upon in his ethnographic writing. Like his fellow Populist exiles, Shternberg the observer and social critic could not ignore the impact of the Gilyaks’ more powerful neighbors and colonial masters on their culture. However, Shternberg the evolutionist anthropologist preferred to see them as a relatively pristine relic of an ancient culture.
Even after 1917, when Shternberg chose to remain in Soviet Russia in order to continue working at his beloved MAE and also to cultivate the new discipline of ethnology (etnograqfiia), which the new regime looked upon favorably, his own scholarly work dealt almost exclusively with the same issues that had been of great interest to him in the previous decades.
Before turning to a brief discussion of Shternberg’s manuscript itself, I must situate it within the context of its author’s personal experience during the turbulent years of the February Revolution, the Bolshevik Coup, and the Civil War. Along with the majority of his country’s liberal and left-leaning intelligentsia, Lev Iakovlevich enthusiastically welcomed the overthrow of the tsarist regime and the establishment of the Provisional Government. Between February 1917 and the winter of 1918 he was deeply involved in politics. As an “old Narodnik” (a self-designation he always used proudly), Shternberg could now openly identify with that party’s heir – the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (PSR). In fact, his sympathies were definitely with the right wing of the PSR, which made him a staunch supporter of Kerenskii and an oboronets, as well as a harsh critic of the Left SRs and even the centrists led by Viktor Chernov.^[12] In 1917, his political activities included some pro-Provisional Government propaganda among the Russian soldiers at the front lines (whom he visited while investigating the plight of the Jewish war refugees), running (unsuccessfully) for a seat in the Constituent Assembly as a member of a right-wing splinter group of Petrograd SRs, and taking an active part in the PSR’s last national congress in November 1917. As in the past, he saw journalism as his most effective form of political action and for that purpose joined the staff of a right-wing SR newspaper Volia Naroda. Shternberg’s editorials and essays appeared in that paper until the Bolsheviks finally shut it down in February 1918. In addition, during this time, he contributed to Novyi Voskhod and other Russian-language Jewish publications that were opposed to the Soviet regime.^[13]
However, once it was no longer safe for this aging scholar with poor health to oppose the Bolsheviks, he curtailed his political activities and concentrated on his beloved museum.^[14] Like other research institutions, the MAE suffered greatly during the chaotic years of the Civil War. Along with the other museums administered by the Academy of Sciences, it received very little funding from the new regime, while its staff was often on the verge of starvation. To make matters worse, its long-time director, Vasilii V. Radlov, died in the spring 1918.^[15] Several of MAE’s staff members and collectors left the country and never returned; in fact, very little collecting took place during the Civil War years. Nonetheless, under Shternberg’s guidance, the remaining staff managed to protect the MAE’s rich collections and even to conduct some tours for the public.
While the work carried out by the MAE’s senior curator between 1918 and 1922 did not change qualitatively, a major new development did occur in another area of his professional life during that era. It was only after the overthrow of the tsarist regime that this Jewish scholar was able to teach anthropology at an institution of higher education and do so on a full-time basis. Moreover, in the first decade after the establishment of Bolshevik rule, when the ideological pressures on the young discipline of etnografiia were still fairly weak, he was not only able to teach more or less whatever he wished to but also, in his capacity as dean of the Ethnography Division of the Geography Institute, to strongly influence the shape and content of the new Soviet anthropology (particularly in its “Leningrad Ethnographic School” incarnation).^[16] Even after 1925, when the Geography Institute became the Geography Fakul’tet of Leningrad State University and its curriculum was saddled with a number of “ideologically correct” disciplines (e.g., history of the Bolshevik Party), Lev Iakovlevich continued to instill in his students the values of non-Marxist humanistic socialism and evolutionism. In fact, unlike the more dogmatic Marxist instructors of anthropologists of the next decade, in the 1920s Shternberg exposed his students to a variety of new developments in Western scholarship, including diffusionism, functionalism, and the culture and personality school. As a mater of fact, both the transcripts of his lectures and several major essays published during the last years of his life indicate that his own views, while remaining essentially evolutionist, were undergoing a shift in response to these new developments in European and American anthropology.^[17]
The manuscript being published here represents one very interesting example of this shift in Shternberg’s views on the evolution of human society. Faced with an obvious regress, which had occurred in many areas of the Russian economy and material culture during the years immediately following the revolution, Lev Iakovlevich was forced to at least fine-tune, if not radically rethink, his theoretical model. Moreover, a scholar who rarely discussed modern-day cultural phenomena, except as illustrations of “survivals” of some earlier stages of evolutionary development, felt compelled to address the dramatic developments in the lives of ordinary Russian people during the tumultuous era his country had only recently emerged from.^[18]
Of course, the privation suffered by the citizens of Bolshevik Russia in the first postrevolutionary years (including the urban intelligentsia) was something MAE’s senior curator experienced firsthand. Hence, for the first time in his scholarly career, he was acting both as a subject of his anthropological analyses and as the analyst. Moreover, Shternberg’s “Anthropological Suggestions and Perspectives during the Revolutionary Years” demonstrate his dedication to anthropology: Lev Iakovlevich simply could not pass up a golden opportunity to observe radical cultural changes, even under such difficult circumstances.
In fact, Shternberg spent all of those years in Petrograd, one of the cities worse hit by the shortages of food and fuel and by the excesses of the Red Terror. During the Civil War, due to high mortality and low birthrates as well as flight abroad and into the country’s provinces, the city’s population declined from 2.4 million to 722,000. Many of Shternberg’s friends and colleagues left the city (and some left the country) during this period and quite a few (particularly the older ones) died of disease and malnutrition. To make matters worse, a number of leading members of the academic community fell victim to the Red Terror without being guilty of any antigovernment activities. Thus, the intelligentsia’s very difficult living conditions were made worse by moral pressure. The students’ situation was equally dire. The closing of all of the opposition newspapers and many of the private bookstores, combined with the shortages of paper, which made publishing scholarly works extremely difficult, contributed to a spiritual hunger that for the intelligentsia was often just as painful as the physical one.
Another major source of frustration experienced by Russian scholars during those years was an isolation from Western scholarship, which began to be felt in the course of World War I, but became total during the Civil War years. For Shternberg, who had always been very interested in foreign anthropology, frequented European museums, and maintained extensive correspondence with colleagues around the world, this intellectual starvation was a source of enormous suffering. In a speech delivered to the faculty and students of the Geography Institute in 1921, he spoke of the interruption in Russian scholars’ communication with their Western colleagues as a “terrible thing.”^[19] He expressed the same sentiment in a letter to Boas written in the summer of 1922 (i.e., soon after their correspondence had resumed). As he put it, “one can sometimes live without sufficient food, warmth, and clothing, but without faith in man, without human sympathy, without any intercourse, especially scientific intercourse, it is too hard…”^[20]
While Shternberg remained an eternal optimist and continued to believe that, despite some temporary setbacks, the future of humanity remained bright, in the aftermath of the Great War and the revolutionary upheaval in his own country, he nevertheless warned his audiences on several occasions about the dangers of any major interruption in the universal process of the gradual accumulation of knowledge by the members of the human family. As he argued in a public lecture delivered at the Geography Institute in 1919, such interruptions occurred not only among the so-called primitive peoples but, as the four years of devastating world war had demonstrated, among the civilized West European ones as well. Shternberg expressed particular concern about the massive loss of life, including that of the creative young generation, which the war had brought about, and concluded with a warning that modern-day Europe could soon be facing a major break in the evolution of its culture.^[21]
What did Shternberg the anthropologist learn from the radical changes that the economy and daily life in Central Russia underwent in 1918–1921? First of all, his observations confirmed his firmly held belief in the psychic unity of humankind. Thus, when the “civilized” Russians were forced to live under primitive conditions, they quickly returned to an earlier level of material and socioeconomic culture. In fact, the less “advanced” rural Russians turned out to be better prepared for this temporary cultural regress than the urban folk and especially the most intellectually “advanced” intelligentsia. Finally, the essay being published here expresses Shternberg’s support for the Soviet government’s korenizatsiia policies of the 1920s. He speaks with approval of the new Soviet political-administrative system representing a federation of dozens of equal republics and autonomous regions, where even the small ethnic groups had been granted autonomy. He also praises the new regime’s efforts to create alphabets for the nonwritten languages of the country’s minority peoples and to educate them using the new system of literacy. These Soviet policies not only mirrored many of the ideas first proposed by Narodnik ethnographers and the PSR prior to 1917, but made the young discipline of anthropology a highly relevant one, to which the government was determined to offer fairly generous financial support.^[22]
Little did Shternberg know that in less than a decade following his death, Stalin’s regime would severely curtail the policy of korenizatsiia and begin a campaign against the “bourgeois nationalists” among the ethnic minorities of the USSR and the “anti-Marxist” “ideological enemies” among the country’s ethnologists (many of them Shternberg’s colleagues and former graduate students).^[23]