Marksistskaia etnografiia za sem' dnei: soveshchanie etnografov Moskvy i Leningrada i diskussii v sovetskikh sotsial'nykh naukakh v 1920-30-e gg.

The meeting of ethnographers from Moscow and Leningrad, which took place April 5–11, 1929, as well as the entire process of “Sovietization” or “Marxization” of ethnography, has an infamous reputation in the historiography of recent decades. Yuri Slezkine linked its implementation with the beginning of a revolution in ethnography, through which “young Bolshevik ethnographers” sought to “overthrow their bourgeois leaders and destroy the inhospitable academic world” [Slezkine 1993: 116]. According to T. D. Solovey, the conference was not so much the beginning of this revolution, but rather a turning point in the discussion of the subject and method of ethnography, which squeezed them into the “Procrustean bed of vulgarized Marxism” and deprived domestic science of its previously inherent theoretical pluralism [Solovey 2001]. By placing the events “on the ethnographic front” in the context of the “great turning point” and the cultural revolution of the 1920s–1930s, the historiography of the first post-Soviet decade emphasized the pragmatic aspect of these events...