Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia

For many decades, Soviet authorities encouraged intermarriage between ethnic groups as part of a social engineering project aimed at building a Soviet nation, one free of ethnic or racial biases. Edgar’s absorbing historical study of intermarriage is based on policy documents, Soviet ethnographic research, and over 80 in-depth interviews with members of mixed marriages and their adult children in the ethnically diverse Soviet republic of Kazakhstan and less diverse Tajikistan. During the last three decades of the Soviet Union, the policy on intermarriage backfired: instead of erasing national distinctions, it contributed to the rise of a racialized notion of nationality. Identity documents required all citizens to list their “nationality,” and “Soviet” was not an option. At the age of 16, the offspring of mixed marriages had to choose one of their parents’ ethnicities. This made young people keenly aware of their bloodlines and descent and promoted an increasingly primordial concept of nationality. As the Soviet Union collapsed, nationalism in the Central Asian republics was ascendant.