The Soviet Union was a paradoxical space of both liberation and repression. Bolshevist radical policies opened opportunities for emancipation through enfranchisement, access to education, social mobility and mass welfare. At the same time, Soviet campaigns of political persecution, forced collectivization, and the Gulag silenced or eliminated the very subjects of emancipation.
Titled “Combined and Uneven Emancipation: Exploring Benefits and Pitfalls of Soviet Modernity,” an October 17-18 conference at Princeton University convened experts across social science and humanities disciplines to examine Soviet emancipation projects against the backdrop of the multiple contradictions engendered by the promises and limits of Soviet modernity in the 20th century.
“Combined and Uneven Emancipation” was the second installment of a three-year-long Collaborative Humanities Project supported by the Princeton University Humanities Council, “SovMode: Reconsidering Modernity and Socialism,” whose goal is two-fold: to renew and reframe understandings of Soviet modernity and how its legacies reverberate in post-Soviet societies and elsewhere, and to create a platform and for a new generation of scholars.
“SovMode is a theoretical and conceptual attempt to rethink what the Soviet experiment was, and what it is now,” said Serguei Oushakine (Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures), co-organizer of Sov-Mode.
“Our ambition is to reignite conversations about modernity that were brushed aside following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the full-scale war,” added co-organizer Alexey Golubev (University of Houston). “We believe that those conversations matter professionally, socially and culturally. Looking at the Soviet historical experience helps us understand the global present-day experience.”
Read the full story on the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies website.
