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Why do movements for cultural sovereignty and decolonization in Ukraine, Siberia and Central Asia often fall for extreme forms of ethnic nationalism, mirroring the very biological essentialism that the global decolonial thought originally opposed? This talk suggests an intellectual and institutional lineage from the laboratory of the Soviet state to the crises of the present.
Moving beyond critiques that focus on the crisis of the post-Soviet Left and the abandonment of class analysis as primary reasons for this failure, this presentation examines the origin of biological determinism present within most contemporary post-Soviet ethnic identities. From the imperial origins of Russian physical anthropology to Soviet anthropological science, this presentation will examine an ideological system that cataloged minorities into "anthropological types" and invented theories of their "autochthony." This presentation will discuss the enduring language of "blood," "type," and primordial "kinship" that arose within almost every ethnic group as a result.
In the late Soviet era, these biological schemas were inherited by national intelligentsias and elites, becoming the default framework for asserting historical legitimacy and establishing territorial claims after the breakup. Modern calls for "decolonization" across the former USSR become trapped within this logic, substituting economic and social transformation with symbolic battles for cultural identity that often lead to political radicalism and violence. By uncovering contemporary post-Soviet ideas on "racial" and "ethnic" identity alongside issues stemming from the abandonment of class analysis, we can find a path beyond symbolic politics of ethnic nationalism and toward truly transformative ideas of economic and political sovereignty.
Anna Gomboeva received her PhD in August 2025. Her academic interests include Siberian revolutionary literature, Indigenous socialist realism, and the historiography of the Russian conquest of Siberia. She writes about race and ethnicity in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia and published a two-part series on post-Soviet racism and the war in Ukraine on the Jordan Center Blog in 2023. She is involved in several Russian-speaking decolonial theory groups and is currently working on an article analyzing the peculiarities of post-Soviet decolonial thought, particularly in light of its anti-communism. The idea for this article emerged while she was writing one of the chapters of her dissertation on Sakha (Yakut) socialist realism, where she examined key differences between Leninist and Stalinist views on national self-determination and their influence on late-Soviet and post-Soviet interpretations of tsarism in Yakutia. She is currently working on turning her dissertation into a book.
