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Dmitry Gorenburg

Fellow

    Term

    September 1, 2003 — May 1, 2004

    Professional affiliation

    Senior Research Scientist, CNA Director of Russian and East European Programs, the CNA Corporation, Alexandria

    Wilson Center Projects

    "Soviet and Post-Soviet Nationalities Policy and Assimilation, 1953-2002"

    Full Biography

    My interest in ethnic conflict began with an undergraduate seminar on the political transition in South Africa that I took as an undergraduate at Princeton University. In conducting research for this seminar, I found that what observers see as inter-ethnic conflict is not necessarily caused by hostility between members of neighboring ethnic groups. In South Africa, so-called black-on-black violence was caused primarily by competition between rival political organizations, as well as directly by the white government, which sought to weaken the ANC, its major adversary. I continued my study of ethnicity as a graduate student at Harvard, this time with a focus on Russia, the country that I left as a child. I received my Ph.D. in political science at Harvard University in June 1999. My dissertation explained the mechanisms through which Soviet institutions unwittingly promoted nationalist movements among minorities inhabiting the Russian Federation. This dissertation, in much revised form, was published recently by Cambridge University Press (Minority Ethnic Mobilization in the Russian Federation, 2003). While conducting research on ethnic mobilization, I repeatedly came across situations where ethnic identity was much more fluid than one might have expected during a period of rising ethnic tensions. This observation led to my continuing work on the topic of assimilation and ethnic identity change, which began with an article on the variation in Tatar/Bashkir identity over time. My recent work on the conduct of the 2002 Russian census in Tatarstan focused on the politicization of identity choice at key moments such as the census. My project at the Wilson Center continues this line of work. This project will examine the extent to which the Soviet Union sought to assimilate members of minority ethnic groups in an effort to establish the Russian ethnic group as the dominant nationality in the Soviet Union and the Russian language as the primary means of communication throughout the country. The project will also examine the extent to which minority assimilation contributed to the formation and popular support for nationalist movements of the 1980s-90s by creating the perception that many Soviet minorities were losing their cultural identities because of Russification. I will also examine the impact of changes in language policies among the post-Soviet successor states, focusing particularly on the extent to which these states have been able to reverse Soviet-era Russification as part of their post-independence nationalization projects. From 1998 to 2000, I was a research associate at the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies, where I began an ongoing archivally based collaborative study on ethnic conflict and nationalist unrest in the Soviet Union during the Cold War that will also provide much of the source material for the project on assimilation in the Soviet Union. In 1999-2000, I held a post-doctoral fellowship from the Social Science Research Council concurrently with my position at the Cold War Studies Project. Since 2000, I have been a research analyst at the CNA Corporation, a private non-profit think tank in the Washington, D.C. area. My work at CNA has focused on U.S.-Russian relations and the political situation in the FSU and Eastern Europe.
     

    Education

    A.B. (1992) Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University; M.A. (1995) Political Science, Harvard University; Ph.D. (1999) Political Science, Harvard University
     

    Subjects

    Russia,Nationalism,U.S.-Russian Relations
     

    Experience

    • Director of Russian and East European Programs, The CNA Corporation, 2001-present
    • Research Analyst, The CNA Corporation, 2000-01
    • Research Associate, Harvard Cold War History Project, 1998-2000

     

     

     

     

    Expertise

     

     

     

     

    Ethnic conflict; Russian and Eurasian politics; U.S.-Russian relations

    Major Publications

    • Minority Ethnic Mobilization in the Russian Federation (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
    • "Nationalism for the Masses: Popular Support for Nationalism in Russia's Ethnic Republics," Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 53, no. 1, 2001
    • "Not with One Voice: An Explanation of Intragroup Variation in Nationalist Sentiment," World Politics, vol. 53, no. 1, 2000