ABSTRACT
During the period of transition to post-communism, the issue of national definition and ethnic identities was at the forefront of concerns of all sixteen of the former constituent republics of the Soviet Union. Ethnic heterogeneity within Russia had emerged as a critical issue in the prelude to the fragmentation of the Soviet Union, and Gorbachev's late Soviet reform period had been characterized predominantly by issues of freedom of national and ethnic self-determination, rather than by a loose concept of 'freedom of expression'. This chapter examines the writings of the Siberian-born author Nina Nikolaevna Sadur. Sadur's references to Russia's 'inner Asia' hark back to the period of polytheism in which, according to some sources, Christianity, Islam, and other forms of folk belief coexisted relatively peacefully, but have been replaced by fears of contamination and usurpation. Sadur's stories comprise a form of sustained exposure of the multiple, under-acknowledged components that comprise Russian cultural identity.
