My name is Nikolay Sarkisyan, a historian by profession, although my academic and professional journey has been anything but linear. I have actively pursued
research interests across a wide variety of disciplines, including nation and nationalism studies, Russian political governance, as well as the historical sociology of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. At present, my attention is focused on the history of Soviet historical-revolutionary museums. I hold the esteemed position of a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at the University of Oxford.
My academic journey began in 2012 when I graduated from the Faculty of History at the St. Petersburg State University. This was followed by my attainment of an MA in Sociology from the European University at St. Petersburg in 2014. Between 2014 and 2017, I served at the Smolny Museum (formerly the Leningrad branch of the Lenin Museum), subsequently moving to the State Museum of Political History of Russia (the former Leningrad branch of the Museum of the Revolution). In 2017, I embarked on a PhD at the University of Oslo, where I undertook a thesis exploring contemporary Russian nationalities policy.
Doctoral research
My doctoral research scrutinised the rise of the tolerance discourse in Russia during the 2000s, along with its implications for the governance of nationalities policy. This discourse was partially institutionalised through a series of federal and regional programmes, all aimed at “enhancing interethnic relations”. From 2000 to 2013, the concept of tolerance became embedded in official, predominantly presidential, rhetoric, thus becoming the semi-official objective of nationalities policy. The thesis dissected the Kremlin’s governance strategies and practices, discursive strategies, and street-level regional bureaucratic routines.
Although the public administration received an “injection” of tolerant discourse, it seemed to exacerbate confusion in terms of implementation. In fact, the Kremlin — or more accurately, a discursive coalition of liberal-minded academics successful in promoting their ideas to the President — “threw” this term into the public sphere, expecting it to somehow exert a positive influence. Tolerance became a synonym for “all things good”, utilised in foreign policy, nationalities policy, and other domestic political arenas, without any concrete definition of its meaning. The ambiguity associated with the term provided an avenue for the Kremlin to hint at liberal attitudes without firmly committing to them. This discursive intervention had stalling consequences for governance at lower levels. The already intricate, red-tape-infested practices of street-level bureaucracy, focused on generating quantifiable reports to demonstrate policy efficiency, were further complicated by the introduction of an additional index — tolerance.
The thesis concludes that Russian governance is persistently restless due to a fundamental flaw intrinsic to it — a propensity for symbolic policies and undefined buzzwords, perceived as potentially efficient solutions, while effectively escalating the difficulty of management.
Museum work
From 2014 to 2017, I was employed in two museums in St. Petersburg — “Smolny” and the State Museum of Political History of Russia (GMPIR). “Smolny”, formerly a branch of the Lenin Museum, houses Lenin’s 1917 office and the apartments where he lived before and during 1917. For several months, I managed one of Lenin’s apartments (located at 52 Lenin Street, St. Petersburg), followed by a similar tenure in the Smolny building, providing guided tours. The main exhibitions at Smolny centred around the 1917 October revolution and the first Soviet government.
My work also extended to the GMPIR, which was previously the city branch of the Soviet Museum of the Revolution. I served as a tour guide and museum educator, conducting tours on a wide array of topics regarding Russian and Soviet history for adults, and held classes for school-aged children. In 2016, I curated an exhibition on Nikolay Yassievich, a Leningrad artist from the 1930s.