A 1953 Memo of the Department of Science and Culture of the Central Committee of the CPSU on Measures for Improving the Work of the Journal Sovetskaia Etnografiia

In this article, I dive into examination of an archival document shedding light on the mid-twentieth century editorial politics of the journal Sovetskaia etnografiia and, more generally, on the changes in interpreting Soviet ethnography’s key subjects and themes during the period of ideological debates in the late Stalin era. This is a memo which was prepared by the Department of Science and Culture of the Central Committee of USSR’s Communist Party in 1953 as an outcome of the assessment of work and activities of the journal. That assessment was initiated by the Division of History and Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences after the decisions on national culture were issued at the 19th Congress of the Communist Party. It was also timed to the publication of Stalin’s writings on the economic problems of socialism and the place of Marxism in language studies. The very form of the memo and its specific omissions and misrepresentations let us better understand the currents of competition in Soviet academia in the 1950s. I argue that the memo’s target was Sergei Tolstov, then chief editor of the journal and director of the Institute of Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences.