Thank you for your great question. I must humbly admit that I do NOT base it on study of literature, but on my own education / upbringing as a choir musician / conductor, then film historian, in Russia. I am not a complete philistine, I have a PhD in art history (actually film history) from Gerasimov Film Institute, but of course I’m not in any way an authority on Russian Imperial or Soviet ethnic culture. I went off my general gestalt understanding that I sourced off older cultured people around me and literature and many, many fights and arguments in the Russian intellectual space. I have to admit, I’ve sang the “Birch” song as a choirboy for YEARS until I even had the thought to ask what the hell is it about. I found out definitively only today.
As I see it, the problem is when something is rigidly regulated, it tends to kill off actual nuanced knowledge. The onus moves to fulfilling the required needs, and fitting the very specific mold. It’s like if a Native American culture had to fit INSIDE a mental image that an average American has about Native American culture. It’s not so much racism as it is reductionism via ignorance and deadlines.
Imperial Russia pointedly did not place much emphasis on even finding out anything about local cultures (after all, all non-Russian citizens there were officially called “foreignborn”/“alienborn” - инородцы), it was thoroughly imperialistic in that regard (less so in others, since as OC mentioned its colonies were its integral territories). It was rather tolerant, except for jews - but it was uninterested. Royal/aristocratic Russian-centric culture was the norm.
So for example the question of which songs my Buryatian great-great-great-grandmother sang to her kids was absolutely irrelevant to any government official in the Imperial Russia. Hell, we were slaves for a long time under Russian governorship. In USSR, the mandated behaviour was to cherish ethnic culture, but of course you can’t just spring up mature ethnological practices or personnel out of the blue. Or appreciation for ethnic culture as it is, by a formerly imperial metropolitan audience. I think it was simply what they could do and bothered to do.
The problem is, when your ehtnographic activity is unmandated and unfinanced, it may be fledgling, but the only thing that hinders it is natural causes: urbanization, people dying off, bad memory, unfashionableness (sorry don’t know how to say it). Still, ethnographers can save the nuggets of raw data and organize it in their unpaid hours. But if there is a govt program to generate ethnic culture in an organized matter, there’s no place for ethnographic practice. Like in corporate, it has to be compiled, tidied up, collated, and brought up the chain for approval. As a person who had worked with corporate client, I can say that it tends to wash out things until they’re a shadow of themselves. Made by committee. Next article: 202005151930 Part 7 - Soviet union