ABSTRACT
“The Ethnic Scene” clearly suggested that Russians were the dominant ethnic element, the source of the unified national culture which the elite believed it required. To sum up, the typology presented in “The Ethnic Scene” and many of its practical implications have held up, whereas the broader theoretical underpinnings had to be discarded. Such paradoxes are not uncommon in the social sciences, where mistaken efforts to produce elegant systematic frameworks are often remedied by pragmatic diagnoses based on intimate knowledge of specific situations. The use of the single rational actor approach represented a lapse of judgment concerning the evolution of the Soviet system rather than conceptual confusion. Armenian institutions, including the Gregorian Church, occasionally acted as auxiliaries for Soviet policy at home and abroad. Yet there were hints that the customary insecurity of mobilized diasporas threatened even the Armenians.
