The Scholarly Interest of the Estonians

The ethnic identity of Estonians is focussed on their language, possibly explaining why linguistic kinship is so important to many Estonians. The knowledge that one belongs to a larger Finno-Ugric family plays an essential role in the national self-consciousness of Estonians. Professional ethnography was established in Estonia in the early 1920s as a branch of Estonian studies and was considered an important national discipline. Ethnography continued to play this role throughout the Soviet decades, especially since the late 1950s.⁵ This small discipline tended to draw people who valued their ethnic roots, traditions and identity. Finno-Ugric studies could be seen as an extension of Estonian ethnography. Research into linguistic relatives was associated with Estonian national identity, and in a way promoted the Estonian cause. It had a certain counter-cultural connotation in Soviet-Estonian society (Kuutma 2005: 57).

During the latter part of the Soviet era, Estonian ethnographers visited all of the easternmost Finno-Ugric peoples, with an emphasis on the Veps in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Udmurt in the 1980s. It can be said that Peterson had two loves. He came from an Orthodox peasant family in South Estonia (hence his Orthodox first name). He studied history at Tartu State University and specialised in ethnography. Immediately after graduating, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1957 and was appointed director of the museum the following year. At the same time, he retained a nationalist inclination, which tended to deepen throughout his long career. For Peterson, party membership was a means to advance his professional career rather than a matter of conviction.

Peterson came to the study of the Finno-Ugric peoples somewhat by chance when he joined an expedition to the Veps that was being conducted by the Estonian SSR Academy of Sciences in 1965. Peterson discovered an archaic world for himself in these remote southern Veps villages. Recording and studying them became his mission. He saw himself as the continuer of the Finno-Ugric direction in Estonian ethnography, which had begun in the 1920s and was interrupted in the post-war years. He had no family ties with the Veps or Udmurts. Fully in line with the pre-war traditions of Estonian ethnography, Peterson and his colleagues were primarily interested in old peasant culture, which was studied in connection with ethnogenesis in the 1960s. In the 1970s, this subject gradually receded, and the primary goal was simply to collect items of rapidly disappearing folk culture for the museum – a classic case of salvage ethnography. Peterson believed in the common origin of the Finno-Ugric peoples and sought to find commonalities between their traditional material cultures (see Peterson 1997: 63; 2007: 109–110). As a rule, Peterson and his colleagues did not study the contemporary socialist life of the kindred peoples. They tried to avoid it, whenever possible in Estonia too, although this was requested and even demanded from above. This reluctance was common amongst Soviet-Estonian ethnographers and quite widespread in post-war Soviet ethnography in general (see Jääts 2019b: 9–10; Tishkov 2022: 523).

In 1977, Peterson noted in his Udmurt field diary that he had met with the renowned Soviet-Russian ethnographer Vladimir Pimenov, who was using sociological and statistical methods (mass questionnaires) to study the rapid changes of the Udmurt and their culture:

My conscience does not allow me to direct all my energies to modern research while the old is vanishing. At the moment, it is necessary to salvage the old material items – it must be the priority. (ENM TAp 700, 27 July 1977, 90; see also Peterson 2006: 12)

However, modernity was not something that the Estonians visiting the eastern Finno-Ugrians could completely ignore. Amongst other things, they were witnesses to the ethnic processes occurring there at the time. They did not like what was going on.

The populations of many eastern Finno-Ugric groups were decreasing, while the decline in the Finno-Ugric languages was even greater. The larger groups had territorial autonomy but as a rule were in the minority in their republics and okrugs due to the mass immigration of Russian-speaking people. Smaller peoples had no autonomy at all. The Finno-Ugric peoples were terrified by the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s. Their languages had been marginalised in public life and the education system. In the cities and district (rayon) centres, the Russian language dominated. The official rhetoric of the Soviet nationalities policy promulgated friendship between peoples, rapprochement, melting together and the forging of a new historical human community – a Soviet people (see Brezhnev 1972: 25; CPSU 1971: 76). People's efforts to defend their languages and cultures were often considered instances of anti-Soviet nationalism.

This was the situation informing the ethnographers who arrived in the Veps and Udmurt villages from the Estonian SSR. They came just because these villages spoke a language similar to their own. They were interested in traditional folk culture, which tended to be seen as a useless survival of the past in Soviet society (Bromlei and Kozlov 1975: 535–536). Estonian ethnographers valued all kinds of ancient things and studied their names in one local language or another. Without doubt, their visits helped invigorate the suppressed and weak ethnic identity of the villagers, although such a phenomenon is difficult to measure.

The Veps

The Veps are a small ethnic minority in north-western Russia. Their language belongs to the Balto-Finnic group and is quite close to Estonian. The Veps’ situation was particularly worrisome in the late Soviet decades, as according to the 1979 census only 7,550 of them remained in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (SFSR), despite a count of 31,449 individuals in 1939. The proportion of Veps who considered Veps their mother tongue fell from 92.5 per cent to 36.1 per cent during the same period (Strogalshchikova 2006: 384). The small population was administratively fragmented, with the inhabitants living in the outlying areas of the Leningrad and Vologda oblasts and the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR). They had no autonomy. The administrations of the Leningrad and Vologda oblasts and of the districts where the Veps lived even tended to deny their existence as a distinct ethnic group (natsional'nost’) and registered them en masse as Russian, both when issuing internal passports and in censuses (for more details, see Jääts 2017). The Veps language had been entirely excluded from local public life and schools, and was only spoken in villages between the Veps. In many cases, it was no longer passed on to the younger generation. The situation in northern Veps villages in the southern part of the Karelian ASSR was slightly better, as their existence was at least acknowledged there. The Veps intelligentsia was very small and scattered due to the lack of an autonomous territory and concomitant national institutions.

In the second half of the 1980s, however, things started to change in Vepsia. Many Veps were angered at what was happening, and some of them, under the new conditions of glasnost, dared to speak openly about the situation in letters to local party committees (see Joalaid and Vaan 1988; Strogalshchikova 2014). The Leningrad oblast authorities found that in this new political climate something had to be done. At the beginning of the summer of 1987, they organised a Veps Culture Festival. On 14 June, the Elon Pu,⁶ a celebration of the Veps people, was held in Vidla (Vinnitsy).⁷ On the following day, a scientific conference on problems related to preserving the Veps language and culture took place in the nearby village of Järved (Ozera). The events were attended by representatives of the Veps intelligentsia, as well as by scholars and writers from Leningrad, Petrozavodsk, Vologda and Estonia (Joalaid and Vaan 1988; Leontev 1987; Strogalshchikova 2014).

Estonian ethnographers had completed their fieldwork in Vepsia in 1983, but they were still well remembered there and were invited to the festival. The Veps ethnographer Zinaida Strogalshchikova, born in 1948 in a Veps village of Leningrad oblast, one of the leading figures of Veps ethnic activism at the time, had participated in Estonian ethnographers’ Veps fieldwork as a student of Leningrad State University in the summer of 1972. Her connection with the State Ethnographic Museum in Tartu continued over the following years.⁸ It could have been Peterson's personal sympathy for Strogalshchikova, which began during their joint fieldwork, that inspired him to take a more active role in the Veps ethnic revival movement. Peterson went to Vidla in 1987 as a representative of the State Ethnographic Museum in Tartu and took the museum's photographer with him. There were also other Estonians at the event: the folklorists Kristi Salve, Marje Joalaid and Aavo Vaan, as well as the folklore ensemble Hellero.

The first Elon Pu played a very important role in the Veps ethnic revival. It was a major event for the remote region. The oblast and district authorities acknowledged the Veps as a distinct ethnic group again when organising this festival. Veps was once again spoken in public for the first time in decades. Folklorist Kristi Salve, who had visited the area many times and knew it well, recalls:

The memory that stays with me is seeing Vidla more crowded than I had ever seen before. The image of people streaming down the hill towards the bus stop and the shops come to mind. Veps was being spoken openly. I remember particularly a group of young men. Normally they would only speak Veps to their parents at home, but now they did so openly, almost demonstratively, to their peers. Because it was that kind of day! (Salve 2020)

Peterson took an active part in the events. He was well-known amongst both the intellectuals and the common people. He had authority. According to Salve (2020), Peterson was ‘a very welcome speaker. . . . His words had an influence’. On the evening of 14 June, an ethnographic documentary made by Peterson and his colleagues, Vepsians at the Beginning of the 20th Century (1981), was screened in the Vidla Culture House.⁹ The audience was enthusiastic, and the reception was warm. Salve remembers the screening well:

Since I had already seen it several times, I started watching the audience. Older people were staring at the screen and kept commenting, ‘Mustan sen ice’, (‘I remember that myself . . . ’), ‘Miiden derounas möst’ (‘In our village again . . . ’), ‘Muga radoiba, muga!’ (‘Look how he works!’). (Salve 2020)

The film was based on footage recorded during the museum's fieldwork trips to the Veps area and shows the traditional Veps peasant culture. Many of the old cultural phenomena which still existed in the 1960s and 1970s and which were familiar to most viewers were depicted as if they were occurring in the early twentieth century, since such archaic phenomena should have had no place in the era of ‘advanced socialism’.

During the conference held in Järved the next day, several research papers were read out (by Peterson, Salve, Joalaid, amongst others) and concerns were expressed about the situation of the Veps. In the evening, there was a party. The resolution of the conference stated that the Veps should be granted the status of the ‘small-numbered peoples of the North’, be administratively united and have an autonomous Veps okrug or national district. There was also talk of the revival of traditional livelihoods and the teaching of the mother tongue and folk culture in local schools. In order to strengthen the ethnic identity of the Veps, it was deemed necessary to create a Veps ethnographic museum and publish books dedicated to traditional folk culture (Vepsy 2007: 72; see also Joalaid and Vaan 1988). These decisions show the influence of ethnographers and folklorists. Historically, the Veps were, after all, a ‘peasant people’ whose distinctiveness was mainly expressed in language, folklore and traditional material culture. Unless these aspects were evaluated and revitalised, the revival of the Veps would not be possible, at least according to Veps and Estonian ethnographers and folklorists.

Only a couple of weeks later, Peterson spoke about these matters at the ethnography and folk-art section of the 17th Soviet Conference of Finno-Ugrists in Izhevsk, the capital of the Udmurt ASSR. He wrote the following in his field diary:

I take the floor on the first day and make a few suggestions about the final resolution. I propose the formation of a national district of Veps in Leningrad Oblast. This goes to the final resolution as ‘a proposal made by the Estonian delegation’ concerning the establishment of a national territory for the Veps, Sami and several other small peoples. Thus, in broader terms. The Veps problem came up somewhere on the 13th–14th [June] at the Veps folk culture festival in Järved. There I had a presentation. So, the proposal was made. (ENM Tap 826, 26 June 1987, 6)

On 27–28 October 1988, a regional meeting, titled ‘The Veps: Problems of Economic and Cultural Development under Perestroika’, was held in Petrozavodsk, the capital of the Karelian ASSR. The meeting was attended by representatives of the Council of Ministers of the Russian SFSR, the Department of Ethnic Relations of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, the Soviet Cultural Foundation, the authorities of the Karelia, Leningrad and Vologda Oblasts and Veps representatives from several regions. Peterson was amongst the participants. Salve (2020) remembers him as an active speaker: ‘There was always a crowd around him’. The recommendations that were drafted were published as a separate booklet, which was perceived to be a programme for a Veps renaissance (Rekomendatsii 1988; see also Strogalshchikova 2006: 398–399; Vepsy 2007: 80–85).

Peterson published a short piece about the conference in the Estonian newspaper Edasi under the headline ‘The Veps Rebirth!’. He informed Estonian readers that in his speech he had stressed the necessity of creating a national territory for the Veps, establishing a Veps society and introducing Veps-language schooling (Peterson 1988). As far as we know, Peterson did not participate directly in any other activities related to the Veps ethnic revival.

The Udmurt

The Udmurt are a significantly larger ethnic group. Linguistically, they belong to the Permic branch of the Finno-Ugric family and are not so close to Estonians. During the period under review, the Udmurt population was still growing. In 1970, there were 678,000 Udmurt counted in the Russian SFSR; in 1979, 686,000; and in 1989, 715,000 (Fauzer 2011: 115). At the same time, the proportion of Udmurt who considered Udmurt their mother tongue declined from 83.5 per cent in 1970, to 77.6 per cent in 1979, to 70.8 per cent in 1989 (2011: 123). The Udmurt had their own ASSR but made up only a third of its population, and their share continued to decline (2011: 119). The Udmurt lived mainly in rural areas. In the cities and in public life throughout the republic, Russian dominated. The role of Udmurt as a language of education declined, but at the same time the Udmurt, thanks to the existence of their republic, had a number of academic and cultural institutions and a much larger intelligentsia than the Veps.

Expeditions to the Udmurt organised by Peterson began in 1977 and lasted until 1993. The fieldwork was carried out in close co-operation with the Udmurt Museum of Local History. Peterson's main contact in Udmurtia was Serafima Lebedeva, the head of the museum's Department of Pre-Revolutionary Studies (later Ethnography). Serafima was born in 1936 into an Udmurt peasant family. She studied history (and ethnography) at Kazan State University and worked as a schoolteacher in Izhevsk after graduating in 1965. From 1970, she worked as a researcher at the Udmurt Museum. Lebedeva and Peterson met at the Estonian Museum's conferences in Tartu (from 1973). Joint expeditions in Udmurtia were initiated by Lebedeva. Both museums were primarily interested in old traditional folk culture, and the collection work was carried out jointly. Lebedeva represented a new generation of Russia's Finno-Ugric ethnographers who came out in the late 1960s to replace scholars wiped out by the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s. They were keen to develop local ethnography (including museums), which had been neglected in previous decades, and were interested in professional collaboration with Estonian colleagues from whom they wished to learn (Grin'ko 2022: 497; Koosa and Karm 2022: 52–53; Lebedeva 2019).

The purpose of ethnographic fieldwork was not always clear to the Udmurt villagers and needed explaining. Meetings between ethnographers and villagers, probably initiated by Peterson, were a part of Estonian–Udmurt joint expeditions. Similar events were sometimes arranged in Vepsia too. In Udmurtia, the first meeting took place in the summer of 1980 in Kuzebaevo, Alnash district (Lebedeva 2001: 13). As a rule, Udmurt and Estonian ethnographers first talked about their work, its meaning and its significance. It was explained to the audience that the traditional culture of their ancestors, which was not valued by the progress-oriented official Soviet rhetoric, was in fact very important, and worthy of study and at least partial preservation. People were told that their ethnic origins and mother tongue were nothing to be ashamed of but rather something to be proud of. The talk was accompanied by a small exhibition of ethnographic artefacts. Often the programme included so-called ‘folk costume theatre’ invented during joint fieldwork. It meant that the expedition members introduced Udmurt regional folk costumes to the accompaniment of music and dance.¹⁰ Finally, Udmurt and Estonian songs were performed, followed by a dance party. Such events proved to be very popular (Karm 2001: 11), and people were happy to come and gather.

Ethnographers and museums are known to play a very important role in defining cultural heritage (Bendix 2000; Kuutma 2010: 698). These meetings are a perfect example of how ethnographers disseminate their understanding of ‘national heritage’ amongst the public. The Estonian Museum artist Lembit Lepp, who was a participant in many of the Finno-Ugric expeditions, recalls an evening in Udmurtia that probably took place in the early 1980s:

Once we had a meeting with the villagers in the Culture House. Of course, the local authorities had also come. We had to perform some songs. Aleksei Peterson gave a long speech. His Russian was a bit strange, but he was fluent. He shook his fist at the hall and scolded: ‘Smotrite, udmurtskii narod, chtoby ne zabyli svoi yazyk!’ [‘Listen, Udmurts, never forget your own language'], whereupon the officials nodded and admitted that, yes, their neighbours, the Tatars, had schools in their own language, but the Udmurt didn't. (Lepp 2001: 19)

After 1985, the meetings would include a showing of the ethnographic documentary The Southern Udmurt at the Beginning of the 20th Century (1983), made by Peterson and his colleagues,¹¹ which became a much-loved part of the event. The film was a collaboration between the Estonian and Udmurt Museums. The initiative came from Lebedeva, who had seen the aforementioned film about the Veps in Tartu. The Udmurt film was shot in a similar vein. Traditional Udmurt folk culture, partially still preserved in the villages, partially reconstructed for the film, was projected back to the early twentieth century, because, according to the official rhetoric, such archaic phenomena, especially religious (animist) rituals, had no place in the socialist present.

One of the most successful and memorable gatherings took place on 17 July 1987 in the same Kuzebaevo. Peterson recorded the event in his field diary:

Many people have gathered at the Culture House, especially children. The assembly hall is packed. The party secretary begins the meeting, but before starting to speak asks what language he should use. I say ‘definitely Udmurt’, and he says that he is not used to it but continues speaking only in Udmurt. Serafima [Lebedeva] speaks first, this time in Udmurt. Then they give the floor to me. Besides explaining the film, I also intend to communicate some thoughts: that even before the revolution, the Udmurt people lived, worked and rejoiced; our film speaks about the old times, culture was created then too, and our task is to preserve it, to perpetuate it. The [Soviet] idea of culture beginning only after the Revolution, and that there was nothing before, must be buried once and for all. Cultural monuments need to be protected, and there are two such important monuments here, the lud on the hill and the kuala in the forest.¹² We need to make a decisive change in our attitude towards the language – why aren't there any slogans in Udmurt here? Mothers who teach their children Russian instead of their mother tongue are being foolish. First, it is necessary to get to know the world through one's own language, and then, of course, through Russian – those were the thoughts I expressed. The film screening went smoothly, except for the fact that the second camera was not focussed, and the picture came out blurry. At the end, many people said ‘thank you’ as they left the hall. What more could a creator ask than seeing happiness in the eyes, in the face? What could be more rewarding than the feeling that you have done something good for someone, even for a moment? This kindness shone through the rustic, cosmeticless faces of many working people. (ENM TAp 826, 17 July 1987, 87–89)

Svetlana Karm, who took part in the expedition as a student, remembers that evening:

The screening of The Southern Udmurt in the summer of 1987 in the village of Kuzebaevo, in Alnash district, left a very deep impression on me. A lot of the film was shot in this village, and the people who appeared in the film lived there. The Culture House was packed with people; many had come from the neighbouring villages. It was not just a film viewing; the audience lived along with everything that was being shown on the screen: they commented on what was happening, happily discovered acquaintances and pointed them out to their children, and felt profound sadness at film characters who had passed away . . . The film gave the rural people a lot to experience; it raised their self-esteem more than a lecture about folk culture, or a call to preserve ethnic heritage ever could have. (Karm 2001: 11)

Aado Lintrop, a participant in many of the Udmurt expeditions, mainly as a camera operator, wrote about these evenings as well:

Well, to be honest, I don't really remember this particular film evening in Kuzebaevo in 1987. We had travelled there after a long period of work in northern Udmurtia. In general, the programme for such meetings was always the same: Serafima Lebedeva's speech, singing and Peterson's speech. Moreover, Aleksei would not have let anyone from the (Estonian) group speak except himself. However, we could sing. Earlier, for example, in 1980, when Heno Sarv and Lembit Lepp were in the group, the four of us would sometimes sing some raucous male songs. Later, we had to limit ourselves to a simpler repertoire. It was always my sacred duty to sing one or two of the more popular Udmurt songs, and then the people in the hall would start to sing along. I learnt Udmurt songs on my first expedition in 1980. Aleksei, of course, spoke as he always did. Mostly, he chastised the Udmurt for abandoning the mother tongue so easily. These were the kind of vehement Nikita Khrushchev-style speeches, only without taking off his shoe. In truth, it was the director's duty to represent us (and Estonia) everywhere. (Lintrop 2021)

In the second half of the 1980s, an ethnic movement began in Udmurtia. For Peterson, travelling to Udmurtia meant meetings with the republic's intellectuals, attending various conferences, and meetings in libraries, institutes, and museums, as well as interviews for local radio and television. He was quite well-known and popular in Udmurtia at the time (Vladykin 2001: 17–18). He had some authority there and could act as a messenger of perestroika. In his field diary, Peterson writes:

In the afternoon, there was a meeting with V. Vladykin¹³ at his place. The editor-in-chief of Molot (his name escapes me) was also there, and he interviewed me for the magazine. I have said many critical things here, and one can quietly resent that because the argument ‘what business is it of yours?’ applies here more than it does anywhere else. The thing is, people don't really have any great interest in anything that is beyond their noses – it's not their concern if the roads are in disarray, that the language is being replaced by Russian, etc. . . . In a word, if you have been taught to see everything only as ‘good’, if even the slightest critical thought or word has been scorned, even punished, what can you expect? Moreover, in dealings with each other, no one is brave enough to speak the truth to another's face – the past has shown very well that such truth-tellers have stumbled easily and very painfully. . . . After all, many were physically destroyed because some good man merely pointed a finger at them for being a kulak or an enemy of the people. . . . So naturally, they will be alarmed and hardly happy to see an outsider pointing at their manure pile.¹⁴ However, I am backed by the countrywide perestroika, a thing that most people here and elsewhere understand nothing about. (ENM TAp 826, 18 July 1987, 91–94)

At the aforementioned 17th Soviet Conference of Finno-Ugrists in Izhevsk, Peterson spoke about Udmurt issues alongside the problems of the Veps:

On the 28th, there was a regional folklore day in the park. It was a mess because the folk costumes were almost completely altered either by the artist or by the makers. I spoke out again . . . my idea was that consultation points on folk costumes should be set up in every ASSR so that no one would be allowed to palm off clothes inspired by folk costume themes as genuine folk costumes. . . . Unfortunately, this proposal did not make it into the final draft. Only my proposal that an open-air museum should be established in each ASSR and that ethnographers should participate in its creation was included. Now it is in the hands of architects everywhere (Syktyvkar, Ustinov, I think also Yoshkar-Ola).¹⁵ At the end of the session, I once again poked and prodded as to why Udmurt was not spoken or had not been represented at all – I suggested that the local language should be the second working language at future conferences. I also proposed that the Soviet Finno-Ugric Committee, which in my opinion is ineffective, should be reorganised and include an ethnographic section. Whether these proposals reached a final decision, I do not know. (ENM TAp 826, 1987, 6–8).

Thus, traditional folk culture was very important for Peterson. As an ethnographer, he believed that it had to be presented as authentically as possible rather than in a stylised way.

Back at home, Peterson was, in his own words, repeatedly summoned to report to the local KGB office:

Even before I returned to Tartu, I was informed that I had incited nationalist sentiment in Udmurtia. In particular, I remember 1987, when the White House¹⁶ demanded that the Ministry of Culture [of the Estonian SSR] dismiss me from my post as director. The report must have been ambiguous and incomplete, and time had passed, because the minister at that time, J. Lott, confined himself to another severe reprimand. (Peterson 2001: 41; see also Peterson 2000: 40)

On the one hand, Peterson's membership in the CPSU¹⁷ apparently protected him from the worst, while on the other hand he could rely on Gorbachev's perestroika rhetoric to justify himself.

As far as we know, Peterson's last major contribution to the Udmurt ethnic revival was his participation and speech at the First Udmurt Congress in Izhevsk in November 1991. In a speech that was somewhat linguistically confused, but highly emotional, Peterson again emphasised that Udmurt's history and culture did not begin with the October Revolution, as was reiterated during the Soviet period but had existed long before. He acknowledged that the Udmurt are a quiet people but said that the time had come for them to stand up for themselves and speak forcefully. He could not understand why even in rural areas of Udmurtia the district newspapers were still predominantly written in Russian. Why did the Udmurt intelligentsia not teach their children their mother tongue? (ENM V 41, 00:42:22 – 00:47:35).

In 1992, Peterson lost his status as museum director but continued his commitment to Udmurtia. His ventures and speeches, which have been described above, started to bear fruit throughout the 1990s. Lebedeva, for example, underscores the influence of the films¹⁸ made by Peterson and his colleagues on Udmurt crafts: if in the 1980s craftsmen were as rare as hen's teeth, then thanks to the films craft centres emerged in almost every district in Udmurtia in the 1990s (Lebedeva 2019). Crafting as a hobby was naturally intertwined with ethnic identity and supported it. According to Anetta Sidorova (2019), the then Minister of Culture of the Udmurt ASSR, Peterson's ideas also influenced the reform and renaming of the Udmurt Museum of Local History as the Udmurt National Museum in 1995, as well as the creation and reconstruction of Ludorvai, the Udmurt Open Air Museum. In 1996, Peterson was awarded the title of Honoured Cultural Worker of the Udmurt Republic.

Conclusion

Aleksei Peterson, although a member of the CPSU, was a man of some nationalist leanings. As an ethnographer, he was particularly interested in traditional peasant culture, which in many cases (including those of the Estonians, Veps and Udmurt) is associated with national identity. Peterson saw himself as a continuer of the Finno-Ugric direction of pre-war Estonian ethnography. When visiting the Finno-Ugric peoples of Russia, he did not confine himself to ethnographic research and the collection of artefacts, but sought also to contribute to the strengthening of their ethnic identity and to the retaining of their language and culture. To this end, ethnographers organised meetings with the people to promote traditional peasant culture as a national heritage. Ethnographic documentaries meant initially for academic audiences proved to be efficient tools of propaganda amongst the Veps and Udmurt villagers. Peterson also presented his views at academic events and in the local media.

The activities of Peterson and his Estonian colleagues were at odds with the official mainstream of Soviet ethnography (see, for example, XXVII s'ezd 1986). His research did not support Soviet policies (for example, the convergence of rural and urban life, the atheist struggle, the rapprochement and fusion of peoples and the increasing spread of the Russian language), but rather opposed and undermined them. Promoting elements of traditional folk culture as national cultural heritage he exported ‘nationalist sentiments’, as the KGB put it.

The Estonian SSR was one of the most socio-economically developed territories of the Soviet Union and a model for many other regions. In the perestroika times, Estonia became a model to follow for many ethnic movements in other regions, including the Finno-Ugric areas, and Peterson, with his memorable speeches and beard, was for many, a quintessential Estonian (Vladykin 2001: 18). Although his activities sometimes had an ‘elder brother’ attitude, Finno-Ugric ethnographers (and other intellectuals) were interested in co-operation. Peterson's professional as well as social contributions were welcomed.

In addition to being a scholar, an ethnographer may also be socially active. During the perestroika era, it was believed that ethnographers who had been studying peoples and their cultures for decades were experts in this field and were thus regarded as authorities on the so-called ‘nationalities question’, which became topical again (see Tishkov 2022: 535–538; Vinokurova 2022: 329). They had accumulated a certain social capital that they could use in social debates. They had the ability to influence ethnic processes to some extent, for example by contributing to the cultural and linguistic survival of the people they had studied for decades. Peterson took advantage of this opportunity and was quite successful in the short term.¹⁹

Aleksei Peterson's Udmurt Field Diaries at the Estonian National Museum

ENM TAp 700 (1977)

ENM TAp 750 (1980)

ENM TAp 826 (1987)

Video Recording of the First Udmurt Congress at the Estonian National Museum

ENM V 41 (1991)

Oral and Written Interviews

Lebedeva, S. 2019, Interview with Svetlana Karm, 6 June.

Lintrop, A. 2021, Letter to Indrek Jääts, 25 March.

Salve, K. 2020, Letter to Indrek Jääts, 20 May.

Sidorova, A. 2019, Interview with Svetlana Karm, 10 June.

Strogalshchikova, Z. 2014, Interview with Indrek Jääts, 2–3 April.