Reading between the lines: Frederick Rose and Soviet ethnography during the Cold War: A micro-­history

Abstract

This paper revisits the academic life-world of the communist anthropologist Frederick G. G. Rose (1915–1991) whose biography was published in 2015. It is in the form of a micro-­history of the academic milieu Rose occupied within the former Soviet bloc in the Cold War years 1956–1989. In light of recent publications in Russia, the directions that Soviet ethnography was taking at the time have become clearer, raising new questions about certain archival gaps and omissions in Rose’s documents. Distrust and surveillance were omnipresent in Soviet academic institutions, so as an outsider from the West, Rose employed a «tactical» approach to both manage his academic existence and pursue an individual Marxist path under a communist dictatorship where the official state ideology was the doctrine known as «Marxism — Leninism»