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October 5, 2025

Study of the concept of national character in the USSR: discussions and problems

Key Points

The recognition of national character emerged as a significant national phenomenon in Soviet discussions.
Major debates in the 1960s, influenced by foreign policy and ethnic processes, focused on defining terms like nation and ethnos.
A methodological crisis in studying national character led to integrating ethnography and developing new psychological methods.
Critics of existing American methods complicated theoretical development, especially concerning Marxist ideologies.

Abstract

The article examines the Soviet experience of studying the concept of national character through the prism of three periods. The purpose of this study is to identify the specific features of the development of theoretical and metho-dological features of the concept of national character within the framework of Soviet science. The first period shows two views on the concept from the standpoint of Soviet scientists and Russian emigration. Significant work within the Soviet Union was done by G.G. Shpet, who proposed the term "ethnic psychology" and created the groundwork for the typological consideration of ethnic groups. The peculiarity of this period is that since the early 1930s, the development of the concept of national character within the USSR ceased for more than thirty years, but it was carried out by scien-tists in emigration (I.L. Solonevich, I.A. Ilyin, L.P. Karsavin). The first wave of discussions arose in the second half of the 1960s, caused by both foreign policy factors (decolonization processes) and ethnic processes occurring in the zone of Soviet influence. A distinctive feature of this period is the major debate on the existence of national character, initiated by I. Kon, as well as controversial issues related to the definition of the concepts of "nation", "ethnos" and "nationality" in the context of the development of the theory of ethnos. The result was the recognition of the existence of national character as a national phenomenon. The second stage of the discussions marked a major methodological crisis in the study of national character. To resolve this crisis, two solutions were put forward - the use of methodology from related disciplines with ethnography and the development of psychological methods for studying ethnic processes. Among the aspects that significantly complicated the development of the theoretical and methodological foundations of the con-cept were critics of American methods (modal personality, basic personality structure) and class theory, which required theoretical and ideological coordination with the postulates of K. Marx, V.I. Lenin, I.V. Stalin. One of the ways out of this situation was undertaken by A.Ya. Gurevich, who in the late 1980s began to develop the theory of mentalities.

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