ABSTRACT
Russia’s ethnic mosaic has grown in complexity because of newly acquired territories, movements of people from outside as well as internal migrations. This chapter addresses the situation in the domain of cultural and ethnic diversity, analysing how this field has been interpreted in Soviet and Russian academic research. The Soviet and post-Soviet experience show that obsessions with establishing cultural differences and sponsoring ethnic groupings, as well as denial or violent suppression of the same, impede scientific penetration as well as good governance of culturally complex societies. Michael Gorbachev’s perestroika, which legitimized an ‘ethnic revival’ as well as increased academic freedom, did not facilitate rethinking towards an innovative interpretation of ethnicity. The potential polarization regarding the nature of ethnicity and its social implications resembles what has happened with a category of ‘race’ when US anthropologists managed to persuade the academic world that race was a social construction, yet failing to remove this category from the ‘iron cages’ of the US census.
