By Faith Harvey
At the dawn of the Cold War era, segregation, discrimination, and banning interracial marriages were all still legal in the United States. At the same time, the rival Soviet Union was encouraging blended families in books, movies, and politics, projecting itself as a “paradise of ethnic and racial harmony,” according to Adrienne Edgar, UC Santa Barbara history professor.
Edgar recently presented an on-campus talk about her book: The Intermarriage and Friendship of People: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia, sponsored by The Center for Cold War Studies and International History.
UCSB professor and author Adrienne Edgar during a talk on her book The Intermarriage and Friendship of People: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia.
Edgar became interested in the topic of intermarriage in the Soviet Union when she realized Soviet ethnographic journals were obsessed with the topic of ethnic mixing through marriage, as a significant cultural feature. She viewed this phenomenon as a Cold War artifact, but discovered that it dated further back, to the Soviet Union’s infancy in the early 20th century.
The “friendship of peoples'' was a slogan that referred to the close relationships of all ethnicities within the Soviet Union, encouraging a boom in mixed families throughout the Soviet era. These relationships were amplified in posters with phrases such as, “Long Live the Friendship of Soviet Kids!” and movies such as The Wild Dog Dingo or They Met in Moscow, that depicted characters of different Eurasian ethnicities forming romantic relationships. According to Edgar, the Communist push for ethnic unification was striving towards an eventual supra-ethnic Soviet people.
A poster showing Soviet children dancing hand in hand. The slogan text translates to “Long live the friendship of Soviet kids!”
Since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, tolerance and friendships have fallen. Edgar cites wars in former Soviet republics, heightened ethnic conflicts, and xenophobia, and said Russia has witnessed a surge in hostilities toward ethnic minorities, while also launching multiple attacks on Ukraine.
“Today, people of mixed ethnic backgrounds in former Soviet republics find themselves torn between different sides of their families,” Edgar said. “How did we go from friendships of Soviet people, to inter-ethnic hatred and war?” Edgar says her book offers a partial answer to this question by understanding the rise of racial thinking in the late Soviet period.
Her book focuses on what it meant to be Soviet, and the idea of nationality in the Soviet Union. “Being Soviet was not a nationality,” Edgar explained. “It was more like an ethnicity, and it was a singular attribute to every citizen.” Choosing one nationality posed challenges for diverse people.
Adrienne Edgar’s book The Intermarriage and Friendship of People: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia.
In a sort of rite of passage, 16-year-olds in the Soviet Union received passports for identity and travel, and were required to choose one nationality for the document — a huge moment for Soviet citizens, according to Edgar. But she discovered that a “subjective sense of identity did not correspond to passport nationality,” based on one’s city of origin, family ties, gender, or perceived looks. Edgar cited a mixed Russian-Azerbaijani woman who chose her Azerbaijani nationality due to her looks, though she only spoke Russian and lived in Russia with her Russian mother. “I feel my true identity is Russian, but if I claimed this nationality, I would have been a laughingstock,” the woman had said.
Under Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, biology was rejected as the key element of identity, and there was a “banning of genetics as a bourgeois pseudo-science,” Edgar said. The official Soviet view at this time was that nationalities were determined by historical ties, not common descent.
This view shifted post in the mid 1960s, as Ethnos, meaning a group of people, became more prevalent. Ethnos, closely studied by Russian anthropologist Yulian Bromley, emphasized“human communities that lasted for millennia and created distinct identities over time,” according to Edgar. After these studies, especially for places like Uzbekistan and Georgia, scholars began treating fundamental nationalities as primordial, rooted from the beginning of time, not something you could choose based on feelings and experience.
Soviet thinking about nationality developed a racialized undertone when the ability to choose one’s nationality shifted to it being viewed as innate. “Mixed families have been acutely affected by ethnic primordialism in the Soviet Union,” Edgar said.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, ethnic mixing contexts changed completely. In Tajikistan, genetic “purity” became a popular ideal, while in Kazakhstan, the Soviet-style celebration of multiethnic families remained—but opposing nationalist groups in Kazakhstan still exist now.
“Intermarriage families dreamed of a future for their children to transcend ethnicity,” said Edgar. “Unfortunately, this future never arrived.”
The multiethnic countries she researched have regressed to unwelcoming environments for mixed families in the post-Soviet era, and have become racially exclusive, she said.
As she wrote her book, Edgar became aware of one thing in particular: “History is not linear, and progress is not guaranteed.”
Faith Harvey is a third-year UCSB student, majoring in Communication studies and minoring in Professional Writing. She is a Web and Social Media intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.