Vainshtein Sevyan Izrailevich
12 April 1926, Moscow — 16 October 2008, Moscow
Biography, education, career:
In 1956 Sevyan Vainshtein defended his Candidate Dissertation, titled The Todsha-Tuvans: A Historical and Ethnographic Sketch. In 1969, at the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences, he defended his Doctoral Dissertation, titled The Origin and Historical Ethnography of the Tuvan People. In 1945‑1950 he was a student of the Department of Ethnography, Faculty of History, Moscow State University. In 1950‑1954 he occupied the positions of Director and senior researcher at Tuvan National Museum of local history. In 1954‑1959 he worked as a senior researcher at the Tuvan Institute for History, Language and Literature, Kyzyl. From 1959 he was junior, senior and then leading researcher at the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences, which was later renamed the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, RAS.
Areas of expertise: History and ethnography of Mongolian peoples; History and ethnography of nomadic peoples; Ethnic religious studies; Ethnogenesis; history and ethnography of the Tuvans; ethnic history; genesis of culture; nomadism