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This article raises questions about the relationship between theory and practice, legality and illegality in the late Soviet nationalities policy, and the role played by various branches of power. It focuses on the Veps, an indigenous ethnic minority in the northwest of Russia. In the Brezhnev era, quite a few officials and census takers refused to register the Veps nationality in personal identification documents and during censuses, claiming, incorrectly, that the Veps were not in the official list of nationalities or that they were a people (narodnost’), not a nationality (natsional’nost’), and hence could not be registered as one. The Veps were counted as Russians instead. These bureaucratic practices, widespread in Leningrad and Vologdaoblasti, but not in Karelia, contradicted official nationalities policy, passport regulations, and census instructions. It seemed that the Soviet state no longer recognized the Veps as an ethnic community. The article claims that the mass refusal to register the Veps nationality was intentional and directed by the regional authorities. The goal was to accelerate the assimilation of the Veps, a policy that worked well. The official number of Veps decreased extremely rapidly in the 1970 and 1979 censuses, only to recover in 1989, after the manipulations had ended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current literature on twentieth century Kurdish history overwhelmingly covers Kurdish populations and national movements within the borders of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. This article, hoin Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan,ever, focuses on Soviet Kurdistan and Kurdish policy in Azerbaijan between 1920 and 1937 through the broader question of national minorities within the republic. It is claimed here that the Soviet policy on Azerbaijani Kurds was part of a multilayered issue. First of vnall, the Kurds of Azerbaijan were semi-nomadic mountain dwellers transformed by the modernization policies implemented in Soviet territories. Azerbaijani Kurds were a national identity within the Soviet Union and thus subject to ethnophilic All-Union policies in those years. Finally, Kurds were one of the numerous national minorities in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan who were exposed to the national minority policies executed within the republic by the administration in Baku. The national minority policy in Azerbaijan was often contested and limited by local conditions and obstacles. Therefore, the granting of cultural rights in the 1920s to national minorities, which included the Kurds of Azerbaijan, the promotion of these rights in the 1920s and 1930s, and opposition to these policies can only be examined with regard to these three layers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This is an article on Bolshevik nationalities policy and ethnic engineering, asking who, in fact, decided which populations belonged together as ethnic groups (narodnost') and thus had the right of national self-determination, and how the level of autonomy was determined for each ethnic unit. Scholars have dealt with Russian and Soviet nationalities issues for decades already, but they have turned their attention mainly to the larger nationalities (at the level of SSR, and to a lesser degree the levels of ASSR and autonomous oblast). I argue that the lower levels of national territorial autonomy in the Soviet Union (national okrug, raion, volost', and selsovet) are worthy of greater academic attention, at least from the ethnological point of view. Having this kind of low-level territorial autonomy has often been a question of to be or not to be for the small ethnic groups concerned, and hence the subject is connected with the question of preservation of cultural and linguistic diversity in Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]