A world-renowned anthropologist, Anatoly M. Khazanov offers a witty, insightful, and cautionary analysis of ethnic nationalism and its pivotal role in the collapse of the Soviet empire.
    “Khazanov’s encyclopedic knowledge of the history and culture of post-Soviet societies, combined with field research there since the 1960s, informs the case studies with a singular authoritative voice. This volume is destined to be an absolutely necessary reference for the understanding of ethnic relations and the politics of minorities in the ex-USSR into the next century.”—Leonard Plotnicov, editor of Ethnology

First Paperback Edition

Anatoly M. Khazanov is professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was formerly professor of social anthropology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a senior scholar at the Soviet Institute of Ethnography and Anthropology. A Fellow of the British Academy and a 1993–94 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author of Nomads and the Outside World, published by the University of Wisconsin Press, as well as nine other books.