Intellectual strategies of sovietization as overcome of frontier, or how chuvash nationalists formed socialist canon of the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract

The article is focused on the problems of a history of Sovietization of Chuvash cultural and intellectual discourses. Sovietization of Chuvashia is among practically unstudied problems in contemporary Russian historiography. The author analyzes the cultural and intellectual tactics and strategies of Chuvash intellectuals in contexts of Sovietization they participated in. These problems are analyzed in the context of the modernist and constructivist approach. The author presumes that the mechanisms of the nationalist imagination and invention of traditions were systemic and central for the development of the Soviet form of Chuvash national and political identities. It is presumed that the Chuvash intellectuals tried to combine nationalist and communist discourses. The author believes that some of the Chuvash Communists were Chuvash nationalists and tried to form a Chuvash cultural space, based on a synthesis of the various forms of loyalties and identities. Chuvash intellectuals tried to combine communist loyalty with the ideas and principles of political nationalism. Chuvash nationalists believed that culture, literature and language are among the areas which needed to be integrated into Soviet intellectual canon. Sovietization of identity, its actual imagination and invention become universal strategies to overcome the peripheral cultural status, marginality and general uncertainty while preserving the Chuvash national identity.

Keywords

• Chuvash nationalism, identity, frontier, Sovietization, intellectual community, invention of tradition