traditional and modern forces that changed the nature of the Ethiopian state. The last fourteen years of Haile Selassie’s reign (1960-1974) witnessed growing opposition to his regime. Ethiopians demanded better living conditions for the poor and an end to government corruption. In 1972 and 1973, severe drought led to famine in the northeastern part of Ethiopia. Haile Selassie’s critics claimed that the government ignored victims of the famine. In 1974 Ethiopian military leaders under Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Haile-Mariam seized the government and removed Haile Selassie from power.
The Ogaden region of southeastern Ethiopia also became a trouble spot, beginning in the 1960s. The government of neighboring Somalia claimed the region, which the Ethiopian Emperor Menelik had conquered in the 1890s. Many Somali people had always lived there, and they revolted against Ethiopian rule. In the 1970s fighting broke out between Ethiopia and Somalia over the Ogaden region.
Until then, Ethiopia had enjoyed U.S. support, while the Soviet Union had sided with its rival, Somalia. In fact, in the space of just four years (1974-1978), the USSR concluded a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with Somalia, Ethiopia experienced a revolution in 1974, and the Soviet Union dramatically shifted massive support from Somalia to Ethiopia and then played a key part in
ETHNOGRAPHY, RUSSIAN AND SOVIET
the military defeat of its former ally in the Ogaden conflict of 1977-1978. During the conflict, about fifty Soviet ships passed through the Suez Canal to the port of Assab to unload fighter aircraft, tanks, artillery, and munitions- an estimated 60,000 tons of hardware-for delivery to Mengistu’s regime.
After the 1974 revolution, the new military government under Mengistu adopted socialist policies and established close relations with the Soviet Union. The government began large-scale land reform, breaking up huge estates of the former nobility. The government claimed ownership of this land and turned it into farmland. But the military leaders also killed many of their Ethiopian opponents, further alienating former U.S. supporters who opposed the human rights abuses.
Eritrean rebels stepped up their separatist efforts after the 1974 revolution. Mengistu’s regime invaded rebel-held Eritrea several times, but failed to regain control. Ethiopia’s conflict with Eritrea also had a strong East-West dimension. The Soviet Union, along with some Arab states, advocated complete independence for Eritrea. In a speech to the United Nations, the Soviet delegate rejected the federalist compromise solution advocated by the United States, claiming that the Eritrean people had not given their consent. Soviet scholars also backed Ethiopia’s claim to Eritrea on both historical and economic grounds. They noted that the Soviet Union had favored Ethiopian access to the Eritrean port of Assab as early as 1946. Despite an influx of Soviet military aid after 1977, Mengistu’s coun-terinsurgency effort in Eritrea progressed slowly. Talks between the two sides continued well into the 1980s. The war ended in 1991 with Eritrea’s independence; however, conflict between the two countries persisted for more than a decade. In June 2000, the two countries signed a cessation of hostilities agreement, and a United Nations peacekeeping force of more than 4,300 military personnel was dispatched later that year.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Albright, David E. (1980). Communism in Africa. Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press. Feuchtwanger, E. J., and Nailor, Peter. (1981). The Soviet Union and the Third World. New York: St. Martin’s-Press. Human Rights Watch Organization. (2003). Eritrea and Ethiopia: The Horn of Africa War: Mass Expulsions and the Nationality Issue, June 1998-April 2002. New York: Human Rights Watch. Korn, David A. (1986). Ethiopia, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Russian ethnography took shape as a distinct field of scholarship in the mid-nineteenth century, but the creation of ethnographic knowledge in Russia dates back at least to Kievan Rus. The Russian Primary Chronicle abounds with information about Slavic tribes and neighboring peoples, while later medieval and early modern Russian writings provide accounts of the peoples of Siberia and the Far North. It was only in the period following the reforms of Peter the Great (d. 1725), however, that the population of the empire was studied using explicitly scientific methods. In the 1730s Vasily Tatishchev disseminated Russia’s first ethnographic survey, thereby legitimizing the notion of peoples and their cultures as objects of systematic scientific inquiry. From the 1730s to the 1770s the Russian Academy of Sciences sponsored two major expeditions dedicated to the study of the empire. Led by Gerhard Friedrich Miller and Peter Pallas, the academic expeditions covered a vast expanse from Siberia to the Caucasus to the Far North and, drawing on the talents of numerous dedicated scholars, amassed an enormous amount of ethnographic information and physical artifacts. But for all their achievements as ethnographers, eighteenth-century scholars viewed the study of cultural diversity as merely one component of a broadly defined natural science.
FOLKLORE AND THE SEARCH FOR NATIONAL IDENTITY
During the last decades of the eighteenth century Russian scholars began to turn their attention to folklore. Publishers of folk songs in the 1790s, such as Mikhail Popov and Nikolai Lvov, claimed that their collections were of value not only for entertainment but also as relics of ancient times and as sources of insight into the national spirit. By 1820 several significant folklore collections had appeared, including the Kirsha Danilov collection of folk epics, and the first efforts to collect folklore among the common people had begun under the patronage of Count Nikolai Rumiantsev. As Russian intellectuals struggled in the 1820s to define narodnost, the
The Caucasus region is one of the most ethnically diverse areas in the former Russian empire. © MAPS.COM/CORBIS national spirit, they turned increasingly to folklore for inspiration. Peter Kireyevsky assembled the largest folk song collection, drawing on an extensive network of contributors, including Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, and other prominent writers. While Kireyevsky’s songs were not published during his lifetime, other folklorists in the 1830s and 1840s, such as Ivan Snegarev, Ivan Sakharov, Vladimir Dal, and Alexander Tereshchenko, put out collections that enjoyed considerable success with the reading public despite their often dubious authenticity.
ETHNOGRAPHY AS A DISCIPLINE
Geographic exploration and folklore, the two main branches of ethnographic research up to this point, came together in the Ethnographic Division of the Russian Geographical Society, the founding of which in 1845 marks the emergence of ethnography as a distinct academic field. In its first years the society considered two well-developed conceptions of ethnography as a scholarly discipline. The eminent scientist Karl Ernst von Baer proposed that the Ethnographic Division study primarily the smaller and less-developed populations of the emETHNOGRAPHY, RUSSIAN AND SOVIET pire, paying particular attention to the role of environment and heredity. In contrast, Nikolai Nadezhdin, a well-known editor, literary critic, and historian, advocated a science of nationality dedicated to describing the full range of cultural, intellectual, and physical features that make up national identity. First priority, he felt, should go to the study of the Russian people. After replacing Baer as chair of the Ethnographic Division in 1847, Nadezhdin launched a major survey of the Russian provinces based on a specially designed questionnaire. The materials generated were published by the Ethnographic Division in its journal Ethnographic Anthology (Etnografichesky sbornik), the first periodical in Russian specifically devoted to ethnography, and were used for several major collections of Russian folklore.
In the 1860s a second major center of ethnographic study arose in Moscow with the founding of the Society of Friends of Natural History, Anthropology, and Ethnography (known by its Russian initials, OLEAE). Dedicated explicitly to the popularization of science, the society inaugurated its ethnographic endeavors in 1867 with a major exhibition representing most of the peoples of the Russian Empire as well as neighboring Slavic nationalities.
During the 1860s and 1870s ethnographic studies in Russia flourished and diversified. The Russian Geographical Society in St. Petersburg and OLEAE in Moscow sponsored expeditions, subsidized the work of provincial scholars, and published major ethnographic works. At the same time regional schools began to take root, particularly in Siberia and Ukraine. Landmark collections appeared in folklore studies, such as Alexander Afanasev’s folktales, Vladimir Dal’s proverbs and dictionary, Kireevsky’s folksongs, and Pavel Rybnikov’s folk epics (byliny). As new texts accumulated, scholars such as Fedor Buslaev, Alexander Veselovsky, Vsevolod Miller, and Alexander Pypin developed sophisticated methods of analysis that drew on European comparative philology, setting in place a
