Bloomsbury Academic
The Multiethnic Soviet Union and Its Demise
Key Metrics
- Brigid O'Keeffe
- Bloomsbury Academic
- Hardcover
- 9781350136786
- -
- -
- History > Russia & the Former Soviet Union
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
This book is the first to offer a concise, accessible overview of the evolution of the Soviet Union as a multiethnic empire. It reflects on how the Soviet Union was home to many ethnic minorities, and how their fates, and that of the USSR itself, were bound to the question of how the Soviet state responded variously throughout its existence to the fundamental question of ethnic difference across its vast and diverse territory. The book then examines how the Soviet collapse in 1991 fractured the Union along markedly national lines, leading to a variety of new nation-states - including the Russian Federation - being born.
Brigid O'Keeffe explains how and why the Bolsheviks inscribed ethnic difference into the bedrock of the Soviet Union and explores how minority peoples experienced the potential advantages and disadvantages of ethnic politics within the Soviet Union. Ukrainians and Georgians, Jews and Roma, Chechens and Poles, Kazakhs and Uzbeks - these and many other minority groups all distinctively shaped and were shaped by the Soviet and post-Soviet politics of ethnic difference. The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise gives you the historical context necessary to understand contemporary Russia's relationships and conflicts with its 'post-Soviet' neighbors and the wider world beyond.
Author Bio
Brigid O'Keeffe is a historian of imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. Her research has demonstrated commitment to showing how those whom historians tend to dismiss as "marginal" allow us to understand the past in new ways.
O'Keeffe is the author of Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia (2021) - a study of the Esperantists in late imperial and early Soviet Russia who deployed an international auxiliary language in their varied efforts to revolutionize themselves, Russia, and the world. O'Keeffe is also the author of New Soviet Gypsies: Nationality, Performance, and Selfhood in the Early Soviet Union (2013) - a book that examines how early Soviet nationality policy enabled Roma to fashion themselves as integrated Soviet citizens.
She is currently writing "The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise" for Bloomsbury's Russian Shorts Book Series. O'Keeffe has also published her research on the life of Ivy Litvinov and on race in Soviet history.
Source: Brooklyn College CUNY
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