Seminars

Before the Sovietization of Georgia, the medieval Georgian epic poem vepkhist’q’aosani was little known to people outside Georgia. By the mid-1960s, the supposed author of the poem Shota Rustaveli had become a household name across the Soviet Union, and his work was widely read and celebrated. Besides the literary prowess and the philosophical depth of the work itself, the celebration of vepkhist'q'aosani and its biographically obscure author had much to do with the cultural, educational, and literary policies of the Soviet government. Moreover, the promotion of Rustaveli was part and parcel of the Soviet government’s efforts to mainstream Georgian literature as a bastion of philosophical ideals, moral ethics, and literary genius for the non-European peoples inhabiting the multi-ethnic state and beyond. In this chapter, I look into the Soviet government’s promotion and celebration of the trans-regional and cross-civilizational characteristics of Georgia that were achieved through the promulgation and appropriation of vepkhist'q'aosani within the state’s ideological confines. Subsequently, I analyze the historical significance and literary content of the work, its translations commissioned by the Soviet government, and the celebration of the life of its author. Building on this, I illustrate the role of epic poetry in Soviet nationality policy by looking into some of the cultural and literary characteristics of vepkhist'q'aosani and situating them within the ideological confines of the Soviet regime.

Soviet documentary director Esfir Shub has firmly become part of the documentary film canon as well as the canon of women’s film history. She was a pioneer of the found footage compilation film and a rare woman to successfully transition from the editing department and into a director’s chair. Yet, despite her fame and distinction, Shub has not received the same kind of scholarly attention as fellow Soviet cinema revolutionaries Sergei Eisenstein, Olexander Dovzhenko, and Dziga Vertov. While recent years saw several exciting interventions into Shub’s work, very few of them engaged with her extensive personal archive. Drawing on a voluminous archival material, including Shub’s archive housed at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts; Shub’s films and supplemental documentation preserved at the Russian State Film and Photo Archive and Gosfilmofond, and the substantial collection on Shub possessed by the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, this talk revisits Shub’s famous compilation trilogy of the late 1920s and her films of the early ‘30s to undo the myth of “the fairy of the editing table”, as film director turned scholar Sergei Iutkevitch once called her. Combining close analyses of Shub’s films with archival research into their production and critical reception, the talk reconceptualizes Shub's oeuvre, and highlights her contribution to the domain of documentary cinema.

This talk will examine Maxim Gorky’s responses to the All-Russia Industrial and Artistic Exhibition of 1896, following the writer as he identified moments of rupture in the exhibitionary formulations of Russia’s industrial capitalism. Gorky criticized the capitalist aesthetics of the exhibition for its attempts to disembody labor power and limit the participation of the worker in the new economy. In his post-1896 fiction, the writer embarked on developing alternative depictions of workers and labor, and it is in theater, I argue, that he finally formulated his counter-capitalist aesthetics. Gorky’s plays reimagined labor power as a necessarily embodied force, valorizing the workers as political and economic agents and eschewing the representational alienation of industrial capitalism.

This talk uncovers the parallels between New York and Odesa, two world cities on the path of upward development around 1800. It will focus on the Russian author and diplomat Pavel Petrovich Svinin (1787-1839), whose textual and iconographical testimonies are both remarkable and peculiar. Svinin was the first Russian to publish a book on the United States (1814), as well as the first to publish an article about Odesa (1817). The authorship of the latter, published anonymously, appears to be questionable, as this talk will suggest. Svinin must definitively be considered more as a compiler than a true author. Moreover, this talk will consider how these publications were crucial in disseminating some of the most iconic views of the North American cities as well as of Odesa. It will also show how Svinin’s description of Odesa resonated with his writings on North American towns, primarily New York. To conclude, this talk will reflect on how my project offers a new perspective for the study of the Ukrainian urban landscape, the subject of my current research project at the Archivio del Moderno/Università della Svizzera Italiana, Switzerland.

This talk will trace the Black Sea’s rise and fall as a global catastrophe. From the mid-1980s, regional and international observers concluded that the sea was not only dirty—it was dying. Moreover, they warned, the Black Sea’s fate foretold a planetary crisis of marine pollution and biodiversity loss. The Black Sea’s newfound notoriety broke with two traditions. First, for much of its human history, the region was an Other, not a harbinger. Second, by the mid-2000s, the worst predictions about the sea’s death largely faded. What happened? How to explain these shifts—culturally, scientifically, and ecologically? This talk will argue that catastrophic thinking about the Black Sea was the product of three events, or “accidents” in the 1980s: the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, an invasion by nonnative comb jellies, and communism’s collapse. The first two shined a spotlight on the Black Sea’s long-running ecological troubles. The third—the Cold War’s end—made international environmental cooperation seem both possible and fashionable. Yet from the mid-2000s, Kremlin revanchism disrupted this regionalist optimism and with it, the Black Sea ecosystem’s utility as a mobilizing cause. In this way, the talk will consider the relationships among geopolitics, ecology, and science, while introducing the presenters’ larger book project: an environmental history of the Black Sea region, from 1930 to today.

In August 1991, in their successful standoff against an abortive military coup by the Soviet Communist Party, Russian liberals somehow came to believe that the archetypal conflict of the enlightened few versus the teeming masses did not have to remain perennially true for Russia. By 1993, such hopes felt crushed, and for thirty subsequent years the fear of an illiberal nation has motivated many in the liberal camp to turn a blind eye to, or even help erect modern Russian authoritarianism. Despite this outcome and its brutal consequences for Russia and Eastern Europe, where did the hopes of 1991 originate? Did the liberals squander the potential of post-Soviet Russia’s founding event because they poorly understood its late Soviet origins? My talk will broach these questions by considering the case of the popular Perestroika-era television show A Look (Vzgliad) and its successor media conglomerate ViD, which played an outsized role in Russia’s public sphere from the late 1980s through the 1990s. I will argue that A Look and ViD articulated a political imaginary of an industrialized, urbanized, educated “new narod,” which they understood as a majoritarian collective committed to values like spontaneity, discursive pluralism, and private ad hoc association for open-ended mutual gain. I will highlight the late Soviet origins of ViD’s political belief in reformist popular will. Finally, I will try to explain why from the vantage point of the team at A Look and ViD, the triumph against GKChP forces in August 1991 looked like the triumph of the “new narod,” and why that feeling of triumph dissipated so soon after this inaugural event of post-Soviet history.

This paper examines the history of the Russian North through the lens of human interactions with other species inhabiting the marine environment. The colonization of this region was closely connected with a search for marine resources in the White and Barents Seas: salmon, cod, herring, seal, or walrus among others. I analyze the role of these species in the economy and culture of the area in periods of environmental and climactic change. Drawing on examples from the history of the Solovki Islands, I trace the process of ‘environing’ – transforming ‘nature’ into ‘environment’ and consider how this process has been reflected in different economic, political and cultural encounters. The multispecies perspective provides a particularly valuable framework for discussing the phenomenon of climate change, specifically the ‘warming of the Arctic’ in the 1920s-1930s. This significant warming trend showed convincingly that climate could undergo rapid change. The shift posed a challenge not only for scientists but also for Soviet political and economic leaders. However, it was non-human oceanic species who, by the considerable alterations in migration patterns, provided the most obvious proof of the significance of this warming. This case allows us to observe the agency of marine species as well as the rhetoric that was used to describe human-animal interactions. By examining such cases, we can envision more clearly the meaning and impact of environmental change and human disruptions such as the introduction of invasive species, not only for people but also for non-human species. I hope through my work to show how environmental historians can interpret these changes within the framework of multispecies history.