Soviet, communist and post-communist worlds

Revisiting imperialism and decolonisation
  • Sciences PoSciences Po

20th century world history would have been very different without the Soviet experience that arose from the destabilisation of the Russian Empire through war and revolution in the years 1905-1918. Conversely, the history of Russia in the 20th century cannot be told without featuring the communist idea, a product of the European workers’ movement. The Soviet and communist worlds dominated political, social, and cultural history at certain points in the 20th century, particularly after 1945. While they have since disappeared—defeated and discredited as a historical dead end—our seminar aims to chart the history of this geopolitical, ideological, and spatial alternative and its internal and external impact.

The seminar also marks the convergence of three historiographical moments: the opening of the archives of the former USSR and the European Socialist bloc; the renewal and decompartmentalization of research on the Russian and Soviet area, which necessitates a critical review of pre-1990s “sovietologies” and Cold War Studies; and the contributions of global, imperial, and connected history for rethinking the history of the Soviet and communist worlds.

This monthly seminar, in which doctoral students take an active part, is intended to be a forum to discuss recent publications and current individual or collective research. It aims to bring together historians of different generations, to open certain sessions to multidisciplinary reflection, and to consider reflexively the political and societal issues related to the current international situation in Russia and its European and Asian surroundings.


Provisional Calendar 2023- 2024

  1. 21/09/2023 
    Impérialismes et décolonisations. Discussion collective introductive
  2. 09/11/2023 
    L'identité d'une république frontalière et la fabrique du loyalisme, Carélie, années 1950-1980
    Zoé Allen Mercier (Université de Turku /CHSP)
  3. 23/11/2023
    What role did minorities play in the Soviet “affirmative action empire”? Lessons from interwar Ukraine.
    Olena Palko (Université de Bâle)
  4. 14/12/2023
    Russian imperial innocence ?
    Botakoz Kassymbekova (Université de Bâle)

  5. 01/02/2024
    L'épuration, à la fois outil et défi de la soviétisation en Lituanie.
    Emilia Koustova (Université de Strasbourg)

  6. 29/02/2024
    The cooptation and cultivation of ethnic minority political recruits in the People's Republic of China.
    Jérôme Doyon (CERI), Aaron Glassermann (Harvard University)

  7. 21/03/2024
    La colonisation en Sibérie : longue durée et enjeux contemporains
    Marie-Karine Schaub (Université de Paris Créteil)
    Dominique Samson Normand de Chambourg (INALCO)

  8. 25/04/2024
    A Civilizing Relay: The Concept of the “Civilizing Mission” as Cultural Transfer in East-Central Europe, 1815-1919.
    Elsbieta Kwiecinska (Université de Varsovie)

  9. 16/05/2024
    Les photographies du Turkestan colonial russe sur Facebook : nostalgies, nationalismes, identités
    Svetlana Gorshenina (CNRS - Euror'bem)
  10. 06/06/2024
    Confronting the Coloniality of Permafrost
    Pey-Yi Chu (Pomona College).

 

Calendar 2022-2023

Illustration captions top to bottom and left to right :
1/ Агитационный плакат «Женщина-татарка! Вступай в ряды всех тружениц Советской России. Об руку с русскими пролетарками ты разобьешь последние оковы». Казань: Каз. Отд. Госуд. Изд.; Лит. 2-й Гос. типографии, [1920]. Плакат Советского Востока. 1918-1940, с. 98. Affiche de propagande "Femme tatare ! Rejoignez les rangs de tous les travailleurs de la Russie soviétique. Avec les prolétaires russes, vous briserez les dernières entraves". Kazan : éditions d'Etat, 2e imprimerie d'État, [1920]. Affiches de l'Orient soviétique, 1918-1940 p.98.

2/Prague 1968. Picture 001 par Joseph Koudelka. Domaine public.https://flic.kr/p/YEyZru
3/ Samarkand. Le palais de Tamerlan. Carte postale des éditions "K.P." (1906-1911) copyright Open Central Asian Archive (coll. S. Gorschenina) 
4/ Le mur à Beijing :  In Beijing Niu Jie (Cow Street), across the street from the Niujie Mosque. An entire block - probably, a construction site - is fenced with a capital wall, decorated with a block-long poster wrapping around the block and depicting all 56 "recognized" ethnic groups of China (including Han) forming "The great united family of peoples" (民族团结大家庭). Vmenkov, CC3.0 (wikicommons) 
5/ Sovetskaia Litva, 3 février 1945, n°19, communiqué de la Commission extraordinaire d'Etat sur les crimes des Hitlériens en Lituanie (coll.Emilia Koustova) 
6/ "The illustration of the great European war", by Tanaka, 1914. Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

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