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It Takes a Village

2024; Wiley; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/russ.12726

1467-9434

Erin Hutchinson,

Over the years, I have often been asked why I study Moldova. Some are simply curious. Others seem incredulous that this small and relatively impoverished corner of the former Soviet empire is worthy of the same attention as, say, Moscow. But some of my best ideas have come from Moldova. In the summer of 2012, I was living in the town of Comrat, the capital of the Autonomous Territorial Unit of Gagauzia in southern Moldova. I was staying with a host family while conducting research for my master's thesis on language and education in Gagauzia (FIGURE 1). At dinner, I happened to mention that I was planning a trip to the village of Beșalma to visit a museum dedicated to the history and ethnography of the Gagauz people. My host dad Grigorii immediately lit up. As a native of Beșalma, he remembered the founder of the museum, Dmitri Kara Choban, very well. He told me how Kara Choban used to ride his bicycle through the village and recite Gagauz poetry. At a time when the culture of this small ethnic group received little support or resources from the Soviet state, Kara Choban sought to keep Gagauz culture alive. Getting to Beșalma from Comrat required a bumpy, sweaty ride in a marshrutka (minibus), but it was worth it. The museum was fascinating, a window to another time. The displays, painstakingly arranged by Kara Choban and other museum workers, included traditional village farming implements, Gagauz language textbooks, and a pair of shoes worn by a local resident who had walked home to Beșalma after being held in a Nazi concentration camp (FIGURE 2). I remember sitting in the dark to watch a black-and-white film of a traditional Gagauz marriage ceremony that Kara Choban had recorded in the 1960s. After returning from the museum, I connected to the Internet (using a special USB stick from MoldCell, as my homestay did not have an Internet hook-up) and Googled Dmitri Kara Choban. To my surprise I discovered that he had attended the prestigious Gorky Literary Institute. It struck me as remarkable that a young man from the dusty village of Beșalma had made it all the way to a top educational institution in Moscow. Kara Choban was not just a village savant, but a person with connections to the Soviet capital as well. I filed Kara Choban's story away in my head, ultimately including it in a seminar paper. Later on, when I was conducting dissertation research in Moscow in 2015, I managed to arrange a meeting with a Gagauz scholar at the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAN), Mikhail Guboglo. RAN, for those who have not had the pleasure of visiting, is located in a massive edifice that would not look out of place in a science fiction movie (FIGURE 3). High up in one of the building's towers, Guboglo graciously talked with me about Kara Choban, who occasionally visited Guboglo in his dormitory at Moscow State University when Guboglo was studying there in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Kara Choban was in the correspondence division of the Gorky Literary Institute at the time and traveled periodically to Moscow to attend seminars. While other students from villages had quickly donned suits and ties to fit in better in the Soviet capital, Kara Choban proudly continued to wear the same clothes he wore in the village. Guboglo suggested that Kara Choban was influenced by the writings of the Russian Village Prose writer Vladimir Soloukhin. He also directed me toward his memoirs, which contextualized Kara Choban within what Guboglo called the dvizhenie sobiratel'stva, or collecting movement, spearheaded by Soloukhin.1 The idea for the dissertation chapter that ultimately became my article "Gathering the Nation in the Village" really began to gel in 2017. Sitting in the sunny reading room of the Central State Archive of Public Organizations of Ukraine (TsDAHOU) in Kyiv, I came across a collection of documents from the late 1960s and early 1970s on the suppression of the artist Ivan Honchar's museum of folk art. I quickly realized that with the addition of Honchar's museum, I could make the case that DIY collections of folk culture were a real phenomenon in the USSR in the 1960s. Over the years, I collected more information on Kara Choban, Soloukhin, and Honchar in libraries and in the archives. I interviewed Liudmila Marin, Kara Choban's daughter and the current director of his museum. She helped me understand her father and his life and gave me a collection of articles on him from the Soviet and post-Soviet press. I read Soloukhin's fascinating account of collecting icons in his native Vladimir region, translated into English as Searching for Icons in Russia.2 I also worked in Ivan Honchar's archive in his museum in Kyiv, spoke with his son Petro, and read his memoir.3 By the time I had written up a draft of the dissertation chapter, I knew this was a good story, but I was not quite sure why. I workshopped the chapter at Brown University, where the participants helped me make the connection to Romanticism, which became a key element of the article. A conversation with Zukhra Kasimova of Bucknell University, then a Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois Chicago, alerted me to the existence of a DIY ethnographic museum dedicated to the Karakalpak people in Nukus, Uzbekistan. (The museum is perhaps more famous for its outstanding collection of avant garde Soviet art.) Citing Kasimova's article on the Nukus museum, I could truly make the case that intellectuals across the vast territory of the USSR were engaging in from-below initiatives to supplement inadequate representations of their national cultures in museums.4 After defending my dissertation in May 2020, I realized the chapter did not quite fit into my book manuscript, so I decided to spin it off into an article. University of Illinois professor Anna Whittington, at the time a postdoctoral fellow, read my first article draft and gently broke it to me that the article still did not have an incisive argument. Discussions with my Ph.D. advisor Terry Martin helped me appreciate how my story about Soviet cultural policy in the 1960s and 1970s differed from what he had studied in the Stalin era. Out of these exchanges came the main theoretical intervention of the article. In the early Soviet period, nationality policy was explicitly theorized and implemented with great fanfare. But in the era I studied, it was more appropriate to speak of a nationality process in which intellectuals and party bureaucrats in republican capitals and Moscow all played a role in determining the outcome. During the publication process, peer reviewers challenged me on several points, making the article stronger. At The Russian Review, editor Serguei Oushakine suggested a connection to the phenomenon of Sotsromantizm, or socialist Romanticism, that he and several scholars had explored in depth. the historian needs the direct experience of another culture through systematic fieldwork. It is not just the idea of the exotic, but the sense one gets that other systems work, that there are such things as cultural logics, that there is as much rationality in other societies as in our own, even though they flow from other principles. The experiences of having to use another language and seeing how meanings are contextualized are crucial to a true understanding of history.5 Based on my own experiences in Moldova and other former Soviet republics, I cannot help but agree with Cohn. I can only add that historians ought to discuss their research topics with as many people as possible. The final version of my article, published in The Russian Review in 2023, was the product of dozens of conversations with a broad range of interlocutors over the course of a decade. Local people and scholars in Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine, as well as U.S.-based historians and anthropologists, helped me understand my primary materials and the Soviet experience, and to make connections across time and space. Accepting the 2023 Levin Article Prize, I would like to thank the members of the prize committee who carefully read so many articles, as well as everyone who took the time to talk with me about Soviet collectors.