Who Gets the Past?
Subtitle: Competition for Ancestors among Non-Russian Intellectuals in Russia (Woodrow Wilson Center Press)
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: February 1, 1996
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 112
ISBN-13: 9780801852213
Subjects: Anthropology; POLITICS & GOVERNMENT; Social classes; Tatars; Ethnology And Ethnography; Politics / Current Events; International Relations - General; Politics/International Relations; Russia; Europe - Russia & the Former Soviet Union; International - General; Business & Economics / Economic Development; Ethnic identity; Bulgars (Turkic people); Chuvash (Turkic people); History
Description: The diversion of scholarship on ethnicity by political forces has been studied in Nazi Germany, where folklore became central to national self-perception and consequently suffered from uncritical enthusiasms. Who Gets the Past? is one of the first studies of this phenomenon in another arena.

In the Middle Volga region of Russia, the intellectuals of two ethnic groups are engaged in a protracted competition for the right to claim descent from various ancestries, most dating to the first millennium A.D. Archaeologists from the Chuvash and the Tatar ethnic groups are attempting to present evidence connecting the groups with Turkic-speakers, Finnish-Ugric groups, Bulgars, or Sarmatians. At stake are territorial and political advantages, according to Victor Shnirelman.

Who Gets the Past? tells how and why, from the Stalinist period to the present, these intellectuals have made different, sometimes self-contradictory, claims on the past. The Soviet legacy of reinforcing and politicizing ethnic identities is largely responsible for the original extent of the competition, according to Shnirelman. But the importance of ethnic claims since the Soviet breakup has only contributed to its persistence.