Ethnic History: Myth and the Search for Identity. About the New Book: Shnirelman V. A. In Pursuit of Ancestors: Ethnogenesis and Politics. Moscow; St. Petersburg: Nestor – Istoriya, 2024. 624 p. ISBN 978-5-4469-2321-2
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31168/2412-6446.2025.20.1-2.13Keywords:
Historiography, ethnology, archeology, ethnogenesis, Slavic studies, national relationsAbstract
The fundamental and largely final work of the historian, ethnographer and archaeologist V. A. Shnirelman is devoted to one of the eternal themes of social thought – the search for the foundations of the history of the peoples of Russia. The author maintains the necessary historical distance between the present, where the search for ancestors remains no less relevant than in previous eras, and his object – ethnogenetic studies of the times of "imperial Russia" and "Stalin's USSR". The primary interest of the reviewer is caused by the problems associated with the Slavic-Russian problems. In the pre-revolutionary period, "Russian nationalism" was used by the authorities to counter the revolutionary movement, in the Soviet period it was used in the interests of the party leaders, "Soviet patriotism" did not cancel the search for the great past of various peoples that were part of the USSR. In the Soviet period, the situation turned out to be paradoxical: official ideologists were forced to rush between outright chauvinism and "proletarian internationalism”, between the need to strengthen statehood and the national liberation movements. The relevance of the analysis proposed by V. A. Shnirelman is confirmed by the tendency that arose during the formation of various forms of Soviet (and post-Soviet) statehood to the maximum antiquity of its history within the borders of republics and autonomies.
Received 7 April 2025
Revised 1 May 2025
Accepted 15 May 2025
For citation: Petrukhin V. Ia., 2025. Ethnic History: Myth and the Search for Identity. About the New Book: Shnirelman V. A. In Pursuit of Ancestors: Ethnogenesis and Politics. Moscow; St. Petersburg: Nestor – Istoriya, 2024. 624 p. ISBN 978-5-4469-2321-2. Slavic World in the Third Millennium, 2025 (1–2), pp. 241–255. https://doi.org/10.31168/2412-6446.2025.20.1-2.13
