We invite you to join CREES for a talk by Dr. Adrienne Edgar of UC Santa Barbara in the Alderson Room of the KU Union at 4pm on Tuesday April 4th. Dr. Edgar's talk is titled "Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia."

Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples is the first book to examine ethnic and racial mixing in the Soviet Union.  In marked contrast to its Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union celebrated mixed marriages among its diverse ethnic groups as a sign of the unbreakable friendship of peoples and the imminent emergence of a supra-ethnic “Soviet people.”  Yet the official view of ethnic nationality became increasingly primordial and even racialized in the final Soviet decades. In this context, mixed families and individuals found it impossible to transcend ethnicity, fully embrace their complex identities, and become simply “Soviet.”

Adrienne Edgar is professor of modern Russian and Central Asian history UC Santa Barbara.  She holds a B.A. in Russian from Oberlin College, an M.A. in international affairs and Middle East studies from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley.  Edgar’s first book was Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan, (Princeton, 2004).  She is co-editor, with Benjamin Frommer, of Intermarriage from Central Europe to Central Asia:  Mixed Families in the Age of Extremes (Nebraska, 2020).  Her second monograph, Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia, was published by Cornell University Press in 2022.