Buryat intelligentsia: nationalism and ethnic question

The purpose of this article is the analysis of positions of the Buryat intellectuals on an ethnic question in Russia and the USSR since the end of 19th until the end of the 20th century. For achievement of this purpose the author needed to solve the following tasks: first, to decide on the concepts "ethnos", "nation", "nationalism"; secondly, using empirical material, to analyse some aspects of problems of the Buryat national intelligenzia; thirdly, to track process of national modernization and, at last, fourthly, to reveal features of the Buryat national movement. The article is based on materials of the published works of the Buryat national intellectuals and the analysis of works of the Russian and foreign researchers considering various aspects of nationalism. In the course of this research the author has come to the following conclusions. Nationalism and modernism belong to the number of cultural and political phenomena closely connected by stable relations. Nationalism has appeared thanks to modernization, destruction of traditionalism and antiquity. Nationalist modernization including institutional (creation of national administrative structures, development of cultural and scientific institutions), and spiritual aspects (creation of national literary language, birth of a national historiography) led to transformation of the Buryats into the nation. A number of historical conditions - disintegration of a religious, tribal, patrimonial community, development of modern mass medium, and also cultural and scientific institutions, influence of the European system of knowledge - promoted that people in different degree began to feel the social consciousness as national. The author emphasizes that nationalism of the beginning of the 20th century and a boundary of the 1980th - 1990th did not represent one general social movement. The losses incurred by the national intelligentsia in the 1930th and during the Great Patriotic War led to a gap of public tradition within national movement. Despite revival of nationalism in the Buryat society, its function cardinally changed during several decades. If originally it was the project of modernization, then in conditions of the 1980s - 1990s it performed only function of legitimation of political requirements and was not supported by the people.

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