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

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Our interdisciplinary and transregional panel compares Soviet and post-Soviet projects of political and societal transformation. Going beyond the ideational dimension, the panel explores how these visions of modernity were envisaged and realized in infrastructural, industrial, and state-development projects. Looking at examples from Soviet Siberia, Western Georgia, and contemporary Russia, we are interested in exploring how such projects of transformation were internalized and enacted by people on the ground. While the realization of such projects remains by definition incomplete and controversial, inquiring into their premises can reveal the different political and ideological logics by which they operate. Jenny Tsundu’s paper will examine how the Soviet state's insistence on erasing a past (both literally and figuratively) in Bratsk paradoxically hindered a sense of forward movement for people on the ground. Tamar Keburia will speak on the decline of industrial triumphalism in pre-Perestroika Georgia, through the example of the ferro-alloy factory town of Zestafoni and its emergent vocabulary of change. And Volha Biziukva will speak on Russia's current ideological vision of state-development, comparing and contrasting it with the Soviet project, in order to better understand today’s political dynamics. By tracing the ways in which these projects evolve over time and juxtaposing them with one another, we are particularly interested in laying bare the tensions that emerge in visions of the past and the future, the routes and objectives of transformation, and their envisaged possibilities of emancipation. How do such tensions condition different forms of politics, including possibilities for critique and contestation?

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Elizaveta Dvortsova, U of Southern California

Papers

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

• From Industrial Downturn to New Regimes of Accumulation: Exploring the Vocabulary of Change in an Industry-bound Town of Soviet Georgia - Tamar Qeburia, Ilia State U (Georgia) / U of Goettingen (Germany)

• The Cause of 'State-Civilization': Multiplying Modernities and Reshaping Politics in Contemporary Russia - Volha Biziukova, Brown U

Discussant

• Michael James Coates, Independent Scholar