LAUSR

In any case, the Marxist tradition required of the first generation of Soviet historians that they produce a history based on socioeconomic class analysis, even where this required significant adjustment of the facts to conform with the conceptual framework. The leading historian of that period, M.N. Pokrovskii, accordingly set the tone that other historians followed in the 1920s. He identified instances of peasant uprisings against Russian colonial rulers as signs of national awakening, be they Babak in Azerbaijan, Bohdan Khmel'nits'kyi in Ukraine, or the batyrs of the Kazakh steppe. When, in the mid-1930s, the Marxist approach was abandoned, the new generation of historians, many of them so-called vydvizhentsy (peasants and workers plucked out and trained as the new intelligentsia), elevated these local leaders to the status of heroes in the creation of a national narrative. In part, argues Yilmaz, this was in response to international developments involving in particular Soviet relations with Germany, Poland, Turkey, and Iran. A principal purpose of historical writing in the Soviet period was to demonstrate in each case a primordial connection between the population and the territory that it occupied, while also creating positive relations with Russia based on historical experiences and among the "fraternal" peoples of the Soviet Union. Stalin himself, regarded as an expert on national relations in the early years, supposedly served as the source of "scientific truth" in this regard (34). The author shows divergent approaches by well-trained historians from Moscow and first-generation local historians and their supervisors among the party apparatchiki, who added their influential contributions to the evolving arguments. Finally, so successful was this effort in establishing national narratives acceptable to the populations, that they have retained their evident authenticity in the post-Soviet period although some of the myths (such as that of the eternal friendship between the three Transcaucasian nations, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia) have not survived, and old animosities may again lead to conflict. This book is convincingly argued, and is based on an impressive reading of archival and published sources in multiple languages, including those of the three nations under investigation. The study demonstrates both the origins and the enduring impact of what one might regard as a more positive side of Stalin's influence. While no one seriously believed the official propaganda of the late Soviet period that the "nationalities question" had been "solved," the establishment of ethnically based republics, with all the paraphernalia of statehood that this implied, probably facilitated the relatively smooth disintegration of the country along lines that the peoples concerned and the world at large could understand.