Anatoly Khazanov

• 1. Introduction

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  Anatoly Mikhailovich Khazanov was born on the 13th of December 1937 in Moscow, into a world where official history was a controlled substance. The Soviet state had its own version of how civilizations rise and fall, and that version was Marxist, approved, and mandatory. Khazanov spent the first half of his career quietly dismantling it from the inside.

  He began as an archaeologist, digging through the traces of nomadic peoples from the Early Iron Age. Then he pivoted to anthropology, asking a question that Soviet doctrine had already answered to its own satisfaction: what drives history? His answer was different, and the difference mattered. He argued that nomads were never self-sufficient islands, that they depended on the settled world around them as much as the settled world depended on them. That sounds mild. Under Soviet censorship, it was subversive.

  By the time he left the Soviet Union in 1985, Khazanov had spent nearly two decades probing the edges of what could be said. What he did after he left, and what he built at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, raises a deeper question: what happens when a scholar trained under one of history's most controlled intellectual environments finally gets to say exactly what he thinks?

• 2. The Archaeologist's Foundation

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  Khazanov completed his M.A. at Moscow State University in 1960, and the subject he chose to specialize in was the nomadic cultures of the Early Iron Age. These were peoples who left few written records, whose lives had to be reconstructed from burial mounds, metalwork, and animal remains. Archaeology suited a scholar who wanted to speak about the past through evidence rather than ideology.

  His Ph.D. came in 1966 from the USSR Academy of Sciences, and his Dr.Sc. followed in 1976 from the same institution. Those credentials placed him firmly within the Soviet academic structure, yet the questions he was developing during those years pulled against its grain. From 1966 to 1985, pastoral nomads and the origins of complex societies were his main fields of research.

  The central claim he built during this period was direct: nomads were never autarkic. They could not sustain themselves in isolation. Economically, culturally, and politically, they were bound up with the sedentary civilizations around them. This was not the Soviet picture of a linear march from primitive to advanced, from nomad to settled farmer to industrial worker. It was a picture of interdependence, which left no room for a tidy hierarchy of historical stages. The majority of experts in the field eventually came to share his argument, but reaching that consensus required first getting the argument out past the censors.

• 3. Writing Against the Grain

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  Soviet Marxist theory held a firm view of how history worked: societies passed through fixed stages, and the nomad belonged to an earlier, lesser one. Khazanov disagreed, and he tried, in his own words and within the limits Soviet censorship allowed, to demonstrate the fallacy of that concept. The phrase "as much as was possible" captures the bind he was in for nearly two decades.

  His book Nomads and the Outside World was published by Cambridge University Press in 1984, a year before he emigrated. That timing is significant. The book appeared while he was still a Soviet citizen, still subject to the constraints of that system, yet it reached an international audience that could read it without those constraints. It was later translated into several languages and reissued in a second edition by the University of Wisconsin Press in 1994, a decade after its first appearance.

  What the book argued, at its core, was that the nomad and the settled city-dweller were not opposites at different points on a single timeline. They were partners in a long, unequal, and complicated relationship. Separating that claim from the ideological implications it carried in a Soviet context required care. Khazanov exercised that care for years, threading his scholarship between what the evidence showed and what the state was willing to permit.

• 4. Emigration and New Questions

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  Khazanov left the Soviet Union in 1985, and the research agenda he carried out with him expanded almost immediately. He continued to study mobile pastoralists, but he added a new angle: the modernization projects that various governments had imposed on nomadic peoples, and the reasons those projects so consistently failed.

  His argument was pointed. Modernization failed because it did not give pastoralists room to develop on their own terms, and because it shut them out of decisions that directly affected their lives. That was not a technical critique of planning methods. It was a critique of the assumptions behind those plans, namely that the people being modernized had nothing useful to contribute to the process.

  After joining the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1990, he held the position that would eventually become the Ernest Gellner Professor of Anthropology, a chair he now holds as Emeritus. The Gellner name in that title is not incidental. Ernest Gellner was one of the twentieth century's leading theorists of nationalism, and the chair connecting his name to Khazanov's work signals something about the direction Khazanov's scholarship took once he was free to follow it wherever the evidence led. The study of pastoral nomads and the study of nationalism turned out to share a common thread: both were about how groups define themselves against, and through, their relationships with others.

• 5. Nationalism, Transition, and Memory

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  From the beginning of the 1990s, Khazanov turned his attention to ethnicity and nationalism, and to the transitions unfolding across the former Soviet bloc. He was among the first scholars to make an argument that ran against the optimism of the moment: the collapse of communist rule did not guarantee the emergence of a liberal democratic order. Many countries would follow a different path.

  He also challenged a widespread assumption about globalization. The prevailing view held that as economies and cultures became more interconnected, nationalist feeling and ethnic conflict would naturally diminish. Khazanov disagreed. Globalization, he argued, is not by itself capable of reducing nationalism or ethnic strife, and those forces would remain a significant presence for the foreseeable future. His books Soviet Nationality Policy During Perestroika, published by Delphic in 1991, and After the U.S.S.R.: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Politics in the Commonwealth of Independent States, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 1995, laid out these arguments in sustained form.

  In the 2000s, he moved into the study of collective memory and collective representation, focusing on how communities use shared narratives to define and reshape their national and ethnic identities. One of the edited volumes he produced in this period, Perpetrators, Accomplices, and Victims in Twentieth Century Politics: Reckoning with the Past, co-edited with Stanley Payne and published by Routledge in 2009, brought together scholarship on how societies confront, or avoid confronting, their own histories of violence.

• 6. A Body of Work

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  Six monographs and around two hundred articles span Khazanov's career. That count places him among the more prolific scholars in his fields, but the range of topics covered in those works is as notable as the quantity. He has co-edited ten volumes with collaborators including Ofer Bar-Yosef, Joseph Ginat, Andre Wink, Stanley Payne, and Gunther Schlee, each volume drawing together researchers from different disciplines around a shared question.

  The edited volume Who Owns the Stock? Collective and Property Rights in Animals, co-edited with Gunther Schlee and published by Berghahn in 2012, illustrates how far his interests had traveled from their starting point in Early Iron Age archaeology. Property rights in animals is a legal and anthropological question with deep implications for how pastoral communities organize their lives. It connects directly to the argument about nomadic dependency and modernization failure that he had been developing since the 1960s, but it arrives there by a different route.

  Beyond his publications, Khazanov has been elected a Fellow of the British Academy, a Corresponding Member of the UNESCO International Institute for the Study of Nomadic Civilizations, and an Honorary Member of the Central Asian Studies Society. The breadth of those affiliations reflects a career that never settled into a single disciplinary corner, and the recognition from a British institution in particular points to the international reach of work that began under conditions designed to limit exactly that kind of reach.