Republics at an Exhibition: Ethnicity in VDNKh Guest Books in Almaty and Minsk

• In Event: Renegotiating Soviet Ethnofederalism in Central Asia under Brezhnev

Abstract

This paper examines how Soviet citizens wrote about ethnicity in guest books at the republican economic exhibitions of Kazakhstan and Belarus in the 1960s and early 1970s. Similar to the national industrial fairs and world exhibitions that emerged in nineteenth-century Europe, the “Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy” (VDNKh) was a large public site for the Soviet state to propagandize its achievements to the toiling masses. After the reopening of the All-Union VDNKh in Moscow in 1958, many Union republics established their own version in republican capitals to showcase their economic development, including Kazakhstan in 1961 and Belarus in 1969. The guest books of these exhibitions reveal a remarkable range of responses both in form and in content: from short poetry to long polemics, from praise and pride to irony, cynicism, and frustration. In addition to voicing everyday concerns such as the availability of displayed consumer goods, visitors directly and indirectly negotiated questions of national identity in these pages, often interacting with comments other guests had left. Whose achievements were on display here? What should be the role of the national language in public? And whose republic was it? The answers to such questions varied considerably in Kazakhstan and Belarus, reflecting the diverging demographic and economic trajectories of these republics. This paper shows how Soviet citizens at different ends of the multiethnic Union appropriated the authoritative discourse on ethnicity in light of daily experiences.

Author

• Jonathan Raspe, U of Zurich (Switzerland)