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American Sovietology's Great Blunder: the Marginalization of the Nationality Issue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Extract
Sovietology's gross neglect of the nationality issue is now embarrassingly evident. It was, indeed, a blunder of vast proportions, one that raised doubts about the basic assumptions that dominated the field and the sound judgement of many of its leaders. By analyzing the Soviet past and present, Sovietologists attempted to predict Soviet behavior in the future. For this purpose they produced a variety of models, approaches and scenarios. But if there was one scenario or prognosis which they regularly discounted, it was the one that actually occurred: the disintegration of the multinationalist USSR due to the forces of nationalism.
- Type
- II The USSR and Beyond
- Information
- Nationalities Papers , Volume 22 , Issue 1: Special Issue - Ethnopolitics in Poland , Spring 1994 , pp. 141 - 155
- Copyright
- Copyright © 1994 Association for the Study of Nationalities of Eastern Europe and ex-USSR
Footnotes
This article is based on a paper presented at the Conference on Soviet Union and Disunion held at the University of Toronto in November 1991.
References
Note
1. See the lists of Ph.D. dissertations compiled by Jesse S. Dossick and published annually in the Slavic Review. For more data dealing with the Russocentric bias in the field see Stephan M. Horak, Soviet Nationality Studies in North America (Littleton, 1982):20–21. Also see Alexander Motyl, “Sovietology in One Country or Comparative Nationality Studies,” Slavic Review 1 (1989):83–88; James Critchlow, “Nationality Studies: Where did They Go Wrong?” Journal of Soviet Nationalities, 3 (1990):23–32; Gregory Gleason, “The ‘National Factor’ and the Logic of Sovietology,” and Alexander Motyl, “The End of Sovietology: From Soviet Studies to Post-Soviet Studies,” in Alexander Motyl, ed., The Post-Soviet Nations (New York, 1992): 1–29 and 302–316. See also the forthcoming article by Ronald Suny in Slavic Review.Google Scholar
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