16th Annual Conference. “Constructing the ‘Soviet’?

June 3-4, 2022

16th Annual Conference

“Constructing the ‘Soviet’?

A Soviet Project in ‘Global Socialist Ecumene’”

In 2022, the History Department of the European University at Saint Petersburg will call the 16thAnnual Conference“Constructing the ‘Soviet’? ” for young scholars. This year our point of departure will be a category of the “global socialist ecumene”, which we apply to the Soviet and other socialist projects history. With this concept Katherine Clark defines a transnational community of people who were committed to common views and produced new meanings and discourses through horizontal interactions. Such interactionscould be viewed not as a form of “Soviet imperialism”, but as a dialogue of the equal actors within the ecumene (K. Clark, 2020). Although the author uses this category to study cultural history, we propose to expand the scope of its application and invite researchers to discuss various forms of socialism through the lens of social, political, economic and everyday life history.

Traditionally, our conference is devoted to the history of the USSR, hence we also invite researchers to comprehend the multiple phenomena of the “Soviet” in a comparative perspective, relying on the experience of Eastern European countries and the socialist countries of the “Third World”, as well as the capitalist world. We suggest to continue the discussion that has already begun in historiography on overcoming the paradigm of a deviated/alternative path of the Soviet experience. For instance, this refers to both social practices (A. Golubev, 2020) and revision of the economic model as autarky (O. Sanchez -Sibony, 2014), etc. We assume that such perspective will allow us to expand the conversation on the phenomena and forms of the “Soviet” that were initiated not only by the state and citizens, but were also part of the global modernity dynamics.

There are several possible perspectives that we suggest for discussion:

1. Production of knowledge in the fields of culture, education and science: Actors, institutions, practices;

2. Economic, technological and ecological history. Transnational transfers of industrial production, consumption practices, scientific technologies from the center to the periphery and vice versa;

3. (Non)State Social Welfare Practices: Between Care and Control;

4. Cultural memory and symbolic practices of rethinking the past, mechanisms of discourse formation and identity construction in socialist countries.

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