Soviet Literatures, Perestroika, and Global Imagination

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Decolonization and Geopolitics I: Geopolitical and Class Agendas among Post-Stalin-Era Multinational Soviet Writers and National Intelligentsias

Abstract

From 1985 onwards, representatives of the multinational Soviet literature and national "gumanitarnaia intelligentsiia" began to negotiate between Socialist and other versions of globality – now as speakers of civil rights of peripheral ethnical groups, of the threatened indigenous cultures, and of the environmental ethos. However, as early as the 1970s, national literatures began to serve as a key medium and institution for political activism. In my paper, I show how (post-)Soviet national writers and local intellectuals tried to reconcile the Soviet ideology of decolonization with the global and Western decolonial and postcolonial narratives. I argue that, although their intervention into politics went in a dialogue with global cultural movements, they also acted in the name of the Soviet transnational modernity. What is more, the activities launched by the Soviet national writers in the spirit of decolonization during perestroika and in the 1990s significantly contributed to the emergence of later cultural ideologies of globalization, such as the concepts of Pan-Turkism, Pan-Asianism, and Pan-Arctic worldviews. In my paper, I discern the concept of 'long perestroika' – a period of time that began in the 1970s and concluded in the 1990s.

Author

• Klavdia Smola, U of Dresden (Germany)