culture with a separate origin, but rather a culture of mankind with common
origin; cultural diversity derives from the variety of developmental stages, whose
characteristics have been partly retained by various peoples.35 Although his
logic was strange in many aspects, his rejection of primordialist views on ethnicity
was noteworthy even from the viewpoint of our time. A Kazakh Marxist
historian, Sanzhar Asfendiarov, summarized Marrs idea and noted interestingly,
referring to the anti-Bolshevik Kautsky that nation was a historical
category, transitory and not primordial (iznachalnyi).3