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Negating the Negation: Russia, Not-Russia, and The West
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Extract
There is a savage irony at the core of Sovietology. Whereas the study of Soviet history and politics should have concerned itself with everything Soviet, it traditionally focused almost exclusively only on what was Russian. By ignoring the non-Russians as something not Russian and, thus, by implication, inconsequential, “Sovietology in one country” contradicted its own premises and, thereby, turned in upon, indeed even negated, itself. By setting the center over the periphery, by detaching the center from the periphery that defined the center as a center, Sovietology in effect emptied the center of its “centrality.” In so doing, Sovietology transformed itself into an inauthentic form of Russian studies—inauthentic in the sense of ostensibly being concerned with the Soviet Union, while, in reality, actually pursuing the study of something with which Sovietology was ostensibly unconcerned.
- Type
- II The USSR and Beyond
- Information
- Nationalities Papers , Volume 22 , Issue 1: Special Issue - Ethnopolitics in Poland , Spring 1994 , pp. 263 - 271
- Copyright
- Copyright © 1994 Association for the Study of Nationalities of Eastern Europe and ex-USSR
References
Note
1. See Alexander J. Motyl, ‘“Sovietology in One Country’ or Comparative Nationality Studies?” Slavic Review, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Spring 1989), pp. 83–88.Google Scholar
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8. Typical of this genre is Yevhen Sheremet, Ukrainians by Profession. (Kiev: Ukraina Society, 1981)Google Scholar
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