This intellectual biography of Lev Shternberg (1861 1927) illuminates the development of professional anthropology in late imperial and early Soviet Russia. Shortly after the formation of the Soviet Union the government initiated a detailed ethnographic survey of the country s peoples. Lev Shternberg, who as a political exile during the late tsarist period had conducted ethnographic research in northeastern Siberia, was one of the anthropologists who directed this survey and consequently played a major role in influencing the professionalization of anthropology in the Soviet Union. But Shternberg was much more than a government anthropologist. Under the new regime he continued his work as the senior curator of the St. Petersburg Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, which began in the early 1900s. In the last decade of his life Shternberg also played a leading role in establishing a new Soviet school of cultural anthropology and in training a cohort of professional anthropologists. True to the ideals of his youth, he also continued an active involvement in the intellectual life of the Jewish community, even though the new regime was making it increasingly difficult. This in-depth biography explores the scholarly and political aspects of Shternberg s life and how they influenced each other. It also places his career in both national and international perspectives, showing the context in which he lived and worked and revealing the important developments in Russian anthropology during these tumultuous years.

The forgotten story of a surprising anti-imperial, nationalist project at the turn of the twentieth century: a grassroots movement of Russian Jews to racialize themselves. In the rapidly nationalizing Russian Empire of the late nineteenth century, Russian Jews grew increasingly concerned about their future. Jews spoke different languages and practiced different traditions. They had complex identities and no territorial homeland. Their inability to easily conform to new standards of nationality meant a future of inevitable assimilation or second-class minority citizenship. The solution proposed by Russian Jewish intellectuals was to ground Jewish nationhood in a structure deeper than culture or territory—biology. Marina Mogilner examines three leading Russian Jewish race scientists— Samuel Weissenberg, Alexander El’kind, and Lev Shternberg—and the movement they inspired. Through networks of race scientists and political activists, Jewish medical societies, and imperial organizations like the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish Population, they aimed to produce “authentic” knowledge about the Jewish body, which would motivate an empowering sense of racially grounded identity and guide national biopolitics. Activists vigorously debated eugenic and medical practices, Jews’ status as Semites, Europeans, and moderns, and whether the Jews of the Caucasus and Central Asia were inferior. The national science, and the biopolitics it generated, became a form of anticolonial resistance, and survived into the early Soviet period, influencing population policies in the new state. Comprehensive and meticulously researched, A Race for the Future reminds us of the need to historically contextualize racial ideology and politics and makes clear that we cannot fully grasp the biopolitics of the twentieth century without accounting for the imperial breakdown in which those politics thrived.

In this volume the authors discuss the fascinating and eventful biographies as well as the significant scientific work of Waldemar Jochelson, Waldemar Bogoras and Lev Shternberg. They investigate the question of how these men became involved in ethnography towards the end of the 19th century, when they had to spend many years as political exiles in remote parts of northeastern Siberia. This early revolutionary commitment shed light on their empathetic and pioneering methods during their later fieldwork with local people. At the same time they incorporated important ideas from American cultural anthropology gained from their close collaboration with Franz Boas. Their initial aims and methods were also reflected in the ambitious community-oriented research programs that they later had conceptualized and launched together with other colleagues at Leningrad University.

At the turn of the twentieth century, over forty percent of the world’s Jews lived within the Russian Empire, almost all in the Pale of Settlement. From the Baltic to the Black Sea, the Jews of the Pale created a distinctive way of life little known beyond its borders. This led the historian Simon Dubnow to label the territory a Jewish “Dark Continent.” Just before World War I, a socialist revolutionary and aspiring ethnographer named An-sky pledged to explore the Pale. He dreamed of leading an ethnographic expedition that would produce an archive—what he called an Oral Torah of the common people rather than the rabbinic elite—which would preserve Jewish traditions and transform them into the seeds of a modern Jewish culture. Between 1912 and 1914, An-sky and his team collected jokes, recorded songs, took thousands of photographs, and created a massive ethnographic questionnaire. Consisting of 2,087 questions in Yiddish—exploring the gamut of Jewish folk beliefs and traditions, from everyday activities to spiritual exercises to marital intimacies—the Jewish Ethnographic Program constitutes an invaluable portrait of Eastern European Jewish life on the brink of destruction. Nathaniel Deutsch offers the first complete translation of the questionnaire, as well as the riveting story of An-sky’s almost messianic efforts to create a Jewish ethnography in an era of revolutionary change. An-sky’s project was halted by World War I, and within a few years the Pale of Settlement would no longer exist. These survey questions revive and reveal shtetl life in all its wonder and complexity.

The remarkable opening of Siberia and the Russian Arctic to international social science research, starting in the early 1990s, has given rise to the spirit of cooperation, innova- tive partnerships, and the co-production of knowledge across boundaries and academic cultures. These interactions and the heartfelt relationships built by years of collabora- tions are now suspended or at least highly constrained after February 2022. This volume's essays explore various dimensions of the newly fractured North and of the war's impact that poses dilemmas to field practitioners. In this three-part volume, the first in the "Fractured North" series, scholars with decades-long experience in northern Russia document the breakdown of collegial relationships as state control has intensified. Early career professionals consider the ruinous impacts on their planned research trajectories and the new methods of "distant" anthropology. The volume includes several historical essays about the dilemmas that scholars encountered in the face of past repressive regimes and connection breakdowns, and what we might learn from how they dealt with these challenges.

Burnt by the Sun examines the history of the first Korean diaspora in a Western society during the highly tense geopolitical atmosphere of the Soviet Union in the late 1930s. Author Jon K. Chang demonstrates that the Koreans of the Russian Far East were continually viewed as a problematic and maligned nationality (ethnic community) during the Tsarist and Soviet periods. He argues that Tsarist influences and the various forms of Russian nationalism(s) and worldviews blinded the Stalinist regime from seeing the Koreans as loyal Soviet citizens. Instead, these influences portrayed them as a colonizing element (labor force) with unknown and unknowable political loyalties. One of the major findings of Chang’s research was the depth that the Soviet state was able to influence, penetrate, and control the Koreans through not only state propaganda and media, but also their selection and placement of Soviet Korean leaders, informants, and secret police within the populace. From his interviews with relatives of former Korean OGPU/NKVD (the predecessor to the KGB) officers, he learned of Korean NKVD who helped deport their own community. Given these facts, one would think the Koreans should have been considered a loyal Soviet people. But this was not the case, mainly due to how the Russian empire and, later, the Soviet state linked political loyalty with race or ethnic community. During his six years of fieldwork in Central Asia and Russia, Chang interviewed approximately sixty elderly Koreans who lived in the Russian Far East prior to their deportation in 1937. This oral history along with digital technology allowed him to piece together Soviet Korean life as well as their experiences working with and living beside Siberian natives, Chinese, Russians, and the Central Asian peoples. Chang also discovered that some two thousand Soviet Koreans remained on North Sakhalin island after the Korean deportation was carried out, working on Japanese-Soviet joint ventures extracting coal, gas, petroleum, timber, and other resources. This showed that Soviet socialism was not ideologically pure and was certainly swayed by Japanese capitalism and the monetary benefits of projects that paid the Stalinist regime hard currency for its resources.

At the outset of the twentieth century, the Nivkhi of Sakhalin Island were a small population of fishermen under Russian dominion and an Asian cultural sway. The turbulence of the decades that followed would transform them dramatically. While Russian missionaries hounded them for their pagan ways, Lenin praised them; while Stalin routed them in purges, Khrushchev gave them respite; and while Brezhnev organized complex resettlement campaigns, Gorbachev pronounced that they were free to resume a traditional life. But what is tradition after seven decades of building a Soviet world? Based on years of research in the former Soviet Union, Bruce Grant's book draws upon Nivkh interviews, newly opened archives, and rarely translated Soviet ethnographic texts to examine the effects of this remarkable state venture in the construction of identity. With a keen sensitivity, Grant explores the often paradoxical participation by Nivkhi in these shifting waves of Sovietization and poses questions about how cultural identity is constituted and reconstituted, restructured and dismantled. Part chronicle of modernization, part saga of memory and forgetting, In the Soviet House of Culture is an interpretive ethnography of one people's attempts to recapture the past as they look toward the future. This is a book that will appeal to anthropologists and historians alike, as well as to anyone who is interested in the people and politics of the former Soviet Union.

It is widely assumed that the “nonclassical” nature of the Russian empire and its equally “nonclassical” modernity made Russian intellectuals immune to the racial obsessions of Western Europe and the United States. Homo Imperii corrects this perception by offering the first scholarly history of racial science in prerevolutionary Russia and the early Soviet Union. Marina Mogilner places this story in the context of imperial self-modernization, political and cultural debates of the epoch, different reformist and revolutionary trends, and the growing challenge of modern nationalism. By focusing on the competing centers of race science in different cities and regions of the empire, Homo Imperii introduces to English-language scholars the institutional nexus of racial science in Russia that exhibits the influence of imperial strategic relativism. Reminiscent of the work of anthropologists of empire such as Ann Stoler and Benedict Anderson, Homo Imperii reveals the complex imperial dynamics of Russian physical anthropology and contributes an important comparative perspective from which to understand the emergence of racial science in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and America.

Russia's own Orient examines how intellectuals in early twentieth-century Russia offered a new and radical critique of the ways in which Oriental cultures were understood at the time. Out of the ferment of revolution and war, a group of scholars in St. Petersburg articulated fresh ideas about the relationship between power and knowledge, and about Europe and Asia as mere political and cultural constructs. Their ideas anticipated the work of Edward Said and post-colonial scholarship by half a century. The similarities between the two groups were, in fact, genealogical. Said was indebted, via Arab intellectuals of the 1960s who studied in the Soviet Union, to the revisionist ideas of Russian Orientologists of the fin de siècle. But why did this body of Russian scholarship of the early twentieth century turn out to be so innovative? Should we agree with a popular claim of the Russian elites about their country's particular affinity with the 'Orient'? There is no single answer to this question. The early twentieth century was a period when all over Europe a fascination with things 'Oriental' engendered the questioning of many nineteenth-century assumptions and prejudices. In that sense, the revisionism of Russian Orientologists was part of a pan-European trend. And yet, Tolz also argues that a set of political, social, and cultural factors, which were specific to Russia, allowed its imperial scholars to engage in an unusual dialogue with representatives of the empire's non-European minorities. It is together that they were able to articulate a powerful long-lasting critique of modern imperialism and colonialism, and to shape ethnic politics in Russia across the divide of the 1917 revolutions.

Ethnographers helped to perceive, to understand and also to shape imperial as well as Soviet Russia's cultural diversity. This volume focuses on the contexts in which ethnographic knowledge was created. Usually, ethnographic findings were superseded by imperial discourse: Defining regions, connecting them with ethnic origins and conceiving national entities necessarily implied the mapping of political and historical hierarchies. But beyond these spatial conceptualizations the essays particularly address the specific conditions in which ethnographic knowledge appeared and changed. On the one hand, they turn to the several fields into which ethnographic knowledge poured and materialized, i.e., history, historiography, anthropology or ideology. On the other, they equally consider the impact of the specific formats, i.e., pictures, maps, atlases, lectures, songs, museums, and exhibitions, on academic as well as non-academic manifestations.