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Working title: From Gafurov to Primakov: The Politicization of Academic Oriental Studies in Moscow and Leningrad / St Petersburg since 1950.

This PhD-research contributes to the larger N.W.O. project ‘The Legacy of Soviet Oriental Studies: Networks, Institutions, Discourses’ (2009-2013), which analyzes the development of the academic discipline of Oriental Studies in the post-war Soviet Union. Russian Oriental Studies were left out of Edward Said’s famous analysis of the institutions of ‘Orientalism’, and seem to constitute a special case.

Soviet orientalists harboured an explicitly anti-‘Orientalist’ self-image. The Soviets rejected the Western ‘bourgeois’ tradition of Oriental Studieswhich supported, in their view, an imperialist and neo-colonialist agenda. At the sametime, the academic sphere of the Soviet Union was heavily politicized and Soviet orientalists regarded Islam as a remnant of feudalism which had to be overcome through socialism. This contradiction influenced the construction of national cultures in the Muslim republics of the Soviet Union (in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Volga-Urals). Communists of Muslim background played an important part in the development of the academic discipline of Oriental Studies, and discourse of equality and ‘Friendship of the Peoples’ dominated the Soviet public space. Did Islam function here as an ‘Other’ in a similar way as it did in the West?

I will study the main centers of Soviet Oriental Studies; the Institute of Soviet Oriental Studies in Moscow and its Leningrad branch and specially the networks and discourses interlocking Orientalists with leading Party and state functionaries. The constant reorganizations of the Institute under the directorship of the ethnic Tajik Bobojan Gafurov (dir. 1956-1977) are studied with regard to Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s nation building priorities on the one hand, and demands of foreign affairs in an era of Cold War and globalisation on the other. Under Gafurov’s successor Evgenii Primakov (dir. 1977-85), academic focus shifted towards a reassessment of Marxist interpretations of culture and religion, especially of Islam. Primakov is known above all for his later political career as Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs (1996-1998) and Prime Minister (1998-1999). To what extent was his political ‘Eurasianism’ already developed during his directorship of the Oriental Institute?

Other contributing sub-projects:

- TheLegacy ofSoviet Oriental Studies in Kazakhstan by A. Bustanov;

- Soviet Oriental Studies and Azerbaijani Nationalism by S.G. Crombach;

- Academic Orientalists, Unionised Writers and Scholars of Islam in the Reassessment of Tradition (Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, since 1924) by dr. St. A. Dudoignon (EHESS, Paris);

- Soviet Oriental Studies in Moscow and Leniningrad: Discourses, Networks, Institutions (1917-1945) by prof. dr. M. Kemper.

Publications:

- Jansen, Hanna E., Michael Kemper, "Hijacking Islam: the search for a new Soviet interpretation of political Islam in 1980," in: Michael Kemper and Stephan Conermann (ed.) The Heritage of Soviet Oriental Studies (London: Routledge, 2011).