Советское кавказоведение 1920–1930-х годов: от краеведения к научно-исследовательским институтам

Этнография. 2026. № 1. С. 6–29.

Манышев С. Б.

The article considers the history of the institutionalization of Soviet Caucasian studies in the 1920s and 1930s based on archival documents, published materials and literary sources. The author analyzes the transition from local history organizations emerging at the dawn of Soviet power to more serious research institutes. The origins of the local history movement in the North Caucasus date back to the first half of the 1920s, when local history institutions began to emerge en masse in a wide variety of fields. Their members included enthusiasts with varying levels of education who believed that the national outlying areas had received undeservedly little attention during the imperial period. At the same time the first periodicals accumulating regional expertise emerged, also individual figures in the local history movement turned to pre-revolutionary experience, attempting to revive the «Dagestan Collection» and the «Collection of Information for the Description of the Localities and Tribes of the Caucasus». The gradual decline of the regional studies movement coupled with the increasing number of professional scholars led to the establishment of a network of research institutes in the North Caucasus by the 1930s, which set themselves the comprehensive task to study various administrative-territorial units. The work of these institutions was significantly more deliberate: there were attempts to locate archival materials outside the region, and the first systematic essays on the history of the peoples of the North Caucasus were written during this period. The scholars from major university centers – Moscow and Leningrad – also began to study the region during the same period.

Keywords: история науки, Северный Кавказ, history of science, North Caucasus, краеведение, regional studies, кавказоведение, научно-исследовательский институт, Caucasus studies, Research institutes

Publication based on the results of: War and Post-War Peace in the Russian Empire and the USSR (2025)