Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples : : Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia / / Adrienne Edgar.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Complete eBook-Package 2022
• VerfasserIn: Edgar, Adrienne,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (300 p.)

Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples sheds light on the racialization of identities and its impact on mixed couples and families in the Soviet Union. In marked contrast to its Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union celebrated mixed marriages among its diverse ethnic groups as a sign of the unbreakable friendship of peoples and the imminent emergence of a single "Soviet people." Yet the official Soviet view of ethnic nationality became increasingly primordial and even racialized beginning in the 1960s, and in this context, Adrienne Edgar argues that mixed families and individuals found it impossible to transcend ethnicity, fully embrace their complex identities, and become simply "Soviet." Looking back on their lives in the Soviet Union, ethnically mixed people often reported that the "official" nationality in their identity documents did not match their subjective feelings of identity, that they were unable to speak "their own" native language, and that their ambiguous physical appearance prevented them from claiming the nationality with which they most identified. In all these ways, mixed couples and families were acutely and painfully affected by the growth of ethnic primordialism and by the tensions between the national and supranational projects in the Soviet Union. Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples is based on more than eighty in-depth oral history interviews with members of mixed families in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, along with published and unpublished Soviet documents, scholarly and popular articles from the Soviet press, memoirs and films, and interviews with Soviet-era sociologists and ethnographers.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Nationality, Race, and Mixed Marriage in the Soviet Union -- 1. Intermarriage and Soviet Social Science -- 2. Falling in Love across Ethnic Lines -- 3. Scenes from Happy (and Not So Happy) Mixed Marriages -- 4. Intermarriage and the “Eastern Woman” -- 5. Dilemmas of Identity and Belonging -- 6. Naming Mixed Children -- 7. Mixed Families and the Russian Language -- 8. Intermarriage after the Soviet Collapse -- Conclusion: Remembering Soviet Internationalism -- Appendix I: Oral History Methodology -- Appendix II: List of Interviews -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index