Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2009
This essay reflects a year of field work in what was then the Soviet Union, in a study regarded as the first ethnographic research conducted by a Western anthropologist in a Russian city. The Russians are particularly important for anthropological study, not only because of recent historic events indicating changes in their political and economic structures but because they are one of several groups of northern people organized into urban industrial societies characterized by varying amounts of mass violence. This violence has been employed in subjugating minority peoples within their normal borders and outside of their borders, in absorbing those cultures, and has taken on the various forms of genocide, purges, propaganda and fear.