Perpetual Strangers: Buriyad Citizenship in the Russia-Mongolia Borderlands, 1822-1939

This dissertation examines the politics and practice of citizenship in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Russia-Mongolia borderlands through the experiences of the Buriyads, a Mongolic, pastoral nomadic people. It traces transformations in the relationship between the individual, the collective, and the state in an age of imperial standardization, new conceptions of sovereignty, global imperial collapse, and the rise of the nation. Based on archival and published sources written in Russian, classical Mongolian, and Buriyad, this dissertation argues that Buriyads were strangers – collectives or individuals who were separated from the mainstream of political life – under every manifestation of citizenship between the 1822 advent of the Baikal region’s Steppe Dumas and the 1939 end of the Great Terror. Yet across this period, the meaning of Buriyads’ stranger status evolved from that of mediated participants in Romanov empire-building to that of alleged enemies of the state. By following Buriyads across borders as they transformed from an isolated community of Russian imperial subjects to a diaspora of Soviet and Mongolian citizens, this dissertation reveals similarities between imperial, national, and socialist citizenships. Across them, citizenship did not unfold as a fixed status extending rights to broader segments of the population. Rather, it became an unstable practice used by states to standardize and immobilize borderland populations. Citizenship was state-building. These arguments challenge an historiography that links citizenship with the extension of rights to broadening cultural, social, and racial groups in Eurasia and beyond by showing that in the Russia-Mongolia borderlands, citizenship became a means of expanding state authority, not a tool for empowering citizens. The broad trajectory of Buriyad citizenship moved from a nineteenth-century, thick citizenship characterized by extensive localized rights premised on Buriyad distinctiveness and inequality toward a thin citizenship that demanded loyalty to a single state and provided few rights to equal but increasingly marginalized Buriyads in exchange.

Author dc:creator

• Creech, Griffin, Bennett

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Holquist, Peter

• History
• Asian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
• Central Asian studies

Language dc:language.iso

en

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/62731

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.upenn.edu:20.500.14332/62731