Sunday, December 22, 2013

More on racial discrimination in the USSR

Unlike US anthropologists who claim that the statement "Chechens and Ingush have a specific genotype" has no racial content what so ever, Russian anthropologists are well aware that natsional'nost was in fact often in the case of stigmatized peoples like the Chechens just a Soviet term for race. Marina Mogil'ner sums up how this worked succinctly in the following manner.
But, in reality these “differences” were not only not overcome in social practice, but were even implanted and strengthened on an official level – in part, through the obligatory fixing of  natstional’nost in the passport.  ’Natsional’nost’  in Soviet passports, was determined by father’s or mother’s ‘blood’, this was in essence not only racial, but ‘racist’ in that it was understood that these categories, were insurmountable stigmas or inherited advantages. It was not possible to choose or ‘construct’, one’s parentage.
US based anthropologists really are some special type of stupid to think there was no racial thinking what so ever involved in the deportation of the Chechens and that they could just change their nationality at will in the special settlements.

 Marina Mogil’ner, Homo Imperii: Istoriia fizicheskoi antropologii v Rossii (Konets XIX-Nachalo XX v.) (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe oborzenie, 2008, 494). Quotation translated from Russian to English by J. Otto Pohl.

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