In the late-Soviet period, especially during perestroika, writers assumed a key role in the national movements of Russia and other republics. The Romantic association of writers and the nation was reinforced during the Soviet period, as was writers' cultural capital, and when open politics became possible in the late perestroika era, they were better positioned than almost anybody to speak for the nation and to convert their literary capital into political one (Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Communism, 2006). Subsequent scholarship on the national movements of that era has largely taken these writers at their word, adopting their largely primordialist language and understanding of the nation. By applying the class analysis of late socialist societies pioneered by Ivan Szelenyi (Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, 1974) and updated by his students (esp. Georgi Derluguian in Bourdieu's Admirer in the Caucasus, 2004) to the trajectories of a number of late- and post-Soviet writers such as Vasil' Bykau, Silva Kaputikyan, and Valentin Rasputin, I will advance a critical reading of the writers' role in the nationalist movements, namely, as a class project that massively increased its power in the republics during late perestroika by mobilizing nationalism only to be completely deflated when its enabling condition--a culture-centric, non-capitalist, authoritarian Soviet state--was no more.
