A Sketch of Soviet Culture Theory Soviet government policy on minority indigenous peoples was part of a larger problem of nationality across the Union. Despite Marxist doctrine which might make cultural differences irrelevant, the Soviets promoted the rights of mino rity ethnic groups which had been oppressed under Tsarist Great Russian chauvinism. I only want to point out here that the theory of ethnogenesis assumes culture and then proceeds to explains its different manifestations. The idea of national rights, which conflated culture, language, and territory, was one of Lenin's most uncompromising positions. Tribes were relegated to Autonomous Provinces or Regions depending on population size.
Provinces are larger administrative units, and auton omous regions are a subunit of an province.
Soviet ethnographers made the individual the proper ethnic unit on a micro scale. This had serious ramifications for the execution of government policy, which treated members of various ethnic groups in the Far East as individuals, and not as socially constituted persons bound in a complex web of social relations and dependencies. For example, a head of a household would be fined a huge sum on the grounds that he was an exploiter of his extended family. Ethnic communities, according to this theory of culture, are not only bounded, homogeneous units, but they are located within a universal history. This history was structured by a Marxist-Leninist dialectic teleologically defined by the Soviet Union a s the end of the path.