ABSTRACT

The weakening of the Soviet leadership’s grip on power and the subsequent demise of the Soviet Union stimulated a reevaluation of the last seventy years of history and thus reawakened centuries-old identity disputes. A revival of pre-revolutionary values was led by the Soviet scholars of the humanities who had been regarded until then as the backbone of Communist ideology. Repeating the experience of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, post-independence social scientists – including many Orientalists – were able to overcome their position of relative compromise during Soviet rule and replaced, however temporarily, the old Communist Party nomenklatura as a ruling elite.