I apologize for the late post!
So, I found the power that ethnographers had in the formation and maintenance of different nationalities within the Soviet Union to be particularly interesting. Early on in her piece, Hirsch distinguishes herself from Ronald Suny by asserting that “a combination of new party officials and old regime specialists like the Petrograd ethnographers” as opposed to “the Soviet Empire” “made nations” (253). Additionally, she contends that the Soviet State progressed in the manner it during 1917 to 1939 due to the “endurance of certain ideas” (254). These ideas, as promoted by the ethnographers, cause me to question how Soviet nationalities might have been created differently, had there been a different census framework. For example, what if ethnographers held the idea that nationality was in fact biologically constructed and therefore had an objective basis, like Nazi Germany, to appease more dominant nationalities like the Ukraine? Such an idea seemingly runs counter to the theme of self determination, but it seems to me like the power imbued to ethnographers through use of their discretion perhaps already ran counter to the self determination of many nationalities. This was not always the case as Soviet officials ignored the advice from at times ethnographers on how to consolidate nationalities (265), but census takers could change their answers from respondents, frame the terminology used with respondents, and were not required to be neutral in any regard, among other things. As a result, I find Hirsch compelling when she states that “shifting circumstances and contingencies” “very much influenced” “the state building process” (254)
Taken together with Lenin and Stalin’s speeches, I wonder if the results of the Soviet State formation through the census approves their beliefs. Certainly one could view the self definition of nationality principle in regards to respondents as mirroring of the autonomy that Lenin highlights as necessary to keep Finland happy, for example. Though, if it is true that “proletarian culture” “assumes different forms and modes of expression among the different peoples,” as Stalin says while channeling Lenin, then isn’t his definition of nationalities flawed or at least too limited in scope to be practical for minority nationalities (or any nationality)?
The prominence of ethnographers and statisticians that the Soviet Union seemed to outsource was something that really interested me in the Hirsch reading, too. You raise a good question — would the Soviet Union have conducted nation building and consensus taking have been different had ethnographers not been involved? Ethnographers study people and cultures, so they definitely bring a different perspective than Soviet officials. On page 255, Hirsch writes, “Whereas the ethnographers had tried to include as many nationalities as possible, the government began to demand te consolidation of smaller peoples into larger conceptual (and later actual territorial) units.” Maybe the focus of the ethnographers on the nuances of culture, language, ethnicity, and nations was the force that drove the Soviet Union to be successful in nationalization. During the whole reading, I kept asking myself, do the ethnographers know better than the Soviet Union officials? I think some key things would have been overlooked had the role of the ethnographer been deemphasized – nations would follow lines of biology and territory rather tradition, culture, and ethnicity. This is only my sense though. Another passage that interested me on this topic was on pg 266: “The ethnographers performed a most important service for the state: they had provided the new regime with volumes of information about the union’s peoples and territories… Here we can make a comparison with the “modern” western European nation-states, whose governments also used information supplied by anthropologists to administer diverse populations at home and throughout the overseas empires in ways that the anthropologists themselves did not always agree with.” I am intrigued about the difference between ethnography and anthropology here and how they would lead to the creation of two very different goals and outcomes.