Moscow Ethnography Institute Elects First New Director Since Soviet Times

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 1 – For the first time since the end of the USSR, the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences has a new director: Marina Martynova, formerly first deputy director there and a longtime specialist on ethnic groups and conflicts in the Balkans.

            In a vote by the history section of the Academy’s Division of Historical and Philological Sciences of which the ethnography institute is a part, she defeated the only other candidate, Andrey Golovnyev by a vote of 105 to 35 (nazaccent.ru/content/16588-v-institute-antropologii-i-etnologii-ran.html).

            Martynova succeeds Valery Tishkov who is retiring. Tishkov, a full-member of the Academy of Sciences, a former minister for nationality affairs under Boris Yeltsin, and a frequent commentator on ethnic issues of all kinds, became the institute’s director in 1989 after the death of Yulian Bromley, who played a key role in transforming the discussion of ethnicity at the end of Soviet times.

On the Institute’s website, the incoming director lists her academic interests as being “the ethnology and history of the Balkans, inter-ethnic relations, poly-cultural education, youth policy, ethnic conflicts, socio-normative culture, inter-cultural communications and local groups” (http://iea-ras.ru/index.php?go=Structure&in=view&id=2).

A 1976 graduate of the historical factory of Moscow State University, she received her doctorate with a dissertation on “Ethnic Aspects of the Contemporary Balkan Crisis.” She has worked her entire career at the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR in 1981 and for the last 15 years, she has been the Institute’s deputy director for studies.