“Mentality” has become a fashionable term among historians, as a supposedly neutral way of pointing to a pattern of beliefs that are typical of a particular group. “Mentality” seems to avoid the metaphysical mystery of phrases like “the spirit of Russia,” or the Marxist anger in the term “ideology,” which carries a charge of grandiose delusion, of self-interest disguised as universal truth. In deference to fashion and to the goal of irenic discourse, let us use the word “mentality,” though we know that new words do not remove old difficulties.

A central difficulty is the facile assumption that ideology and practicality are elemental contraries, that the conflict between them shapes the evolving mentality of communist regimes. This essay on Soviet history rests on a different assumption: that practicality is itself an ideological concept which can be understood only by reference to particular historical contexts. It is an illusion to imagine that practicality can be defined by reference to technics, a supposedly autonomous force that pulls all societies into a single anthill system. That technological fantasy has subverted the grand ideological theories of previous centuries and increasingly undermines even academic theorizing about human beings. Ideologists become servile functionaries — “public relations experts,” as we say in the West — while academics are reduced to other forms of technical expertise and to purely decorative functions. Soviet history presents an extreme version of that characteristic triumph of “pragmatism” in the twentieth century. To a large extent, I shall try to show, such “pragmatism” is mythic self-delusion, a way of avoiding dangerous threeway conflicts of forthright political rule, openly avowed ideological prophecy, and relentlessly quizzical higher learning.

As is well known, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which was founded on December 1,1918, did not achieve the success envisaged for it. It is generally assumed that the state was the direct product of Yugoslavism, a Croatian concept formulated in the nineteenth century, which found adherents among the Serbs and Slovenes. Although there is no consensus among scholars concerning the precise definition of Yugoslavism, in its basic terms the concept called for the union of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in one state. The proponents of Yugoslavism argued that as long as the three nations remained separate they were subject to domination by their stronger neighbors, whereas united they would be in a better position to determine their own future. These proponents never agreed on the exact political organization of the union, whether it should be a centralized or federalized state, but they assumed that the kingdom would have one army and a single foreign and trade policy, and that each nation would retain considerable local autonomy, for example, in education, religious affairs, and police jurisdiction. Yet the ultimate success of Yugoslavism was dependent on the acceptance by Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes of the basic premise that they were in essence one people, and that eventually they would no longer give primacy to their Serbianism, Croatianism, and Slovenianism but would offer their undivided loyalty to the larger Yugoslav concept.

To refer to Prince Andrei as a rational man seems to flout Tolstoian psychological theory. In a passage from the second (unpublished) part of Youth that Boris Eikhenbaum treats as autobiographical, Tolstoi explains that one of his earliest maxims arose from a refutation of Descartes's “I think, therefore I am.“

Tolstoi alters Descartes's maxim to make it consistent with the metaphysical underpinnings of science and psychology as he understands them. Life is self-propelled motion, while reason is the principle that defines it or, as he puts it in the second epilogue of War and Peace, gives it form. The essence of a living being, therefore, must be desire or impulse, not thought, which gives form to impulse but does not itself move. To live is to will, not to think.

Western discussion of Soviet nationality issues frequently centers on large national groups and their varying potential for dissent. The fate of smaller groups, particularly those within the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, is less often explored and is sometimes obscured by assumptions of forced acculturation. Rather than viewing the dominant Soviet Russian culture as a shark eating small fish cultures like the Siberian Khanty, it is more appropriate to decipher a range of acculturation options and experiences. Sharks can get indigestion, and all the economic and political changes introduced in small Siberian societies do not eliminate questions of ethnicity. Sometimes they exacerbate them.

This article focuses on the cultural survival and ethnic consciousness of the Khanty, a Ugrian speaking group who live predominantly in the Northern Ob River area of sub-arctic Siberia and who numbered 20,934 in 1979. They are traditionally hunters, fishers, and semi-nomadic reindeer breeders whose locale and trade over centuries have led them into contact with several ethnic groups, including the Russians. Within the Soviet political framework, the Ob-Ugrian Khanty and Mansi share an Autonomous District (Okrug). This places them midway between Siberian groups without a formal administrative unit based on nationality (for example, some Amur River peoples) and the two largest Siberian groups, the Buriat and the Yakut, each numbering over 325,000, with their own Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics (ASSRs) within the RSFSR.