Nested Nationalism by Krista A. Goff

Author:Krista A. Goff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press

The Debate about Nontitular Assimilation

Assimilation narratives were crafted around the erasure of minorities like Talyshes, but they emerged from contestation rather than from consensus. These debates show that the theory or policy of double assimilation could be invoked to support policies and arguments both for and against narratives of nontitular assimilation. A number of scholars challenged the notion that stark population declines in minority communities accurately documented historical progress among Soviet peoples. At a 1959 conference on building communism, ethnographer and statistician P. E. Terletskii took aim at republican officials over this issue. He was particularly frustrated that Pamiri peoples had been grouped with Tajiks and Mingrelians with Georgians in the 1959 census against the recommendation of ethnographers. Speaking directly to Tolstov, who was in the audience and had lobbied for a separate Pamiri category in the census, Terletskii ridiculed the idea that all Pamiris identified themselves as Tajiks and implied that local officials falsified these census results. As for the Georgian case, he argued that the Mingrelian population had declined drastically between the 1920s and 1959 (they were not delineated in the 1939 census) because of “high powered pressure” placed on statistical bodies, and concluded by saying: “I, as a statistician and ethnographer, ask myself this question: what sort of process is occurring, can this process be subsumed under the concept of the assimilation of Mingrelians with Georgians or under the concept of the consolidation of the Georgian nation? It seems to me that this process is nonexistent … I cannot imagine that the number of Mingrelians has declined like this.”82

Terletskii, Tolstov, and others who lodged complaints about the census and the assimilation narratives that started to coalesce after its completion were equally committed to the idea of ethnohistorical advancement but disagreed about what it looked like, the pace at which it was proceeding, and how it could be measured. Although most of Izmailova’s examiners pressured her to deepen the case for Talysh assimilation, one of the ethnographers at the defense, Iakov Romanovich Vinnikov, who specialized in Turkmen studies, challenged Izmailova’s observation that Talyshes had merged with Turkic Azerbaijanis despite still being oriented toward the Iranian language group.83 Gardanov, who was fascinated by exactly this aspect of Izmailova’s work, rebuked Vinnikov’s criticism. Echoing Guliev’s earlier point about Azerbaijani ethnogenesis, Gardanov reiterated that some ancient Azerbaijanis were also Iranian-speaking (the Media-Atropatene theory of Azerbaijani ethnogenesis) so ongoing Talysh language use in Talysh communities did not undermine the case for their assimilation into the Turkic Azerbaijani nationality.84

While Vinnikov was something of an outlier at Izmailova’s defense, some of his other colleagues were also skeptical about the narratives coalescing around the Talysh case. Solomon Ilʹich Bruk and Viktor Ivanovich Kozlov raised similar theoretical concerns a few years later when they criticized Talysh assimilation in a 1967 article in Sovetskaia etnografiia (Soviet Ethnography) about the upcoming 1970 census. Bruk and Kozlov regularly consulted with the Central Statistical Administration on census design and the national composition of the Soviet Union. Just after Bruk became

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