The Trouble with 'Moving On': Paradoxes of Simultaneity and Succession in Khrushchev and Brezhnev-Era Bratsk

• In Event: Time Warp: The Metamorphosis of Modernity Projects in the (Post-)Soviet Space

Abstract

From its very inception, the Soviet project explicitly and self-consciously framed itself as an emancipatory one, premised on a distinct break with its pre-revolutionary past. Yet in order to evince a sense of succession, a sense of “forward” movement or progress, two opposites—“before” and “after”—must be understood in juxtaposition, simultaneously. Through the example of the Bratsk hydroelectric construction project (1954-67), in which the creation of a new, electrified city of Bratsk required permanently flooding an “old” one, I examine how the Soviet state’s various approaches to rejecting the past complicated these aspirations, paradoxically hindering a sense of forward movement for people on the ground. In the case of Old Bratsk, the recent past was rendered invisible, literally submerged underwater; in the broader historical context of the “Thaw” and “de-Stalinization,” this rejection also involved reappraisal. As one of the first Soviet megaprojects to be constructed without forced labor (in accordance with the de-Stalinizing impulse), I explore what it meant to live and think these layered tensions together in Bratsk, and with what implications for historical consciousness.

Author

• Jenny Tsundu