Disentangling Eurasia

The enrollment for the summer school is closed. Acceptance letters have been sent.

Tallinn University invites graduate students and scholars of Soviet and post-Soviet history for a week-long summer school, offering a unique opportunity to reassess and critically examine the field at a time of great upheaval in the region. Through keynotes, workshops, and a stimulating cultural program, participants will gather to question the conventional approach to Soviet multinationality and disentangle the various trajectories of the nations and groups belonging to the erstwhile Soviet realm.

The summer school will be held at Tallinn University in Estonia from 28 July–4 August 2023. It is designed for Ph.D. students in the Humanities and Social Sciences;  however, motivated MA students and non-degree scholars are also welcome to apply. The working language of the summer school is English. 

At the 2023 Tallinn Summer School, we aim to bring together leading scholars and Ph.D. students of Soviet society and culture to discuss and scrutinize the fundamentals of the field. This time of rapid developments in the region and singular events of potential world-historical significance calls for a broader look at the historical trajectories of the realm that was once imperial Russia. It is time to revisit the big questions in Soviet studies and review the future of the field. We will do so by expanding the focus beyond the confines of the short 20th century and outside the boundaries of today’s Russian Federation. The war with Ukraine has brought Russia’s relationship with its former imperial realm (as well as its own internal minorities) into sharp focus, prompting the scholarly community to examine our prior biases and prejudices. Scholars of Ukraine, the Baltics, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, among many others, have called to reappraise prior historiography’s Russo-centrism and the often-neglected implications of Soviet nationality policies. We will take a critical and nuanced look at Soviet multinationality (including its “Russia”-question) while also examining other continuities in politics and culture across the 1917, 1940, and 1989 revolutionary divides.

The summer school will feature keynote lectures by Joshua Sanborn (Lafayette College), Sofia Dyak (Center for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv), and Juliane Fürst (Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History). 

Other faculty include Zbigniew Wojnowski (Oxford University), Diana T. Kudaibergen (University of Cambridge), Victoria Smolkin (Wesleyan University), Aro Velmet (University of Southern California), Eglė Rindzevičiūtė (Kingston University), Madina Tlostanova (Linköping University), David Beecher (University of Tartu), Mischa Gabowitsch (University of Vienna), and other local and international scholars working on Soviet interethnic relations, heritage and memory studies, environmental history, urban studies, cultural studies, history of science and technology, gender studies, and other related fields. The faculty will run workshops and engage in roundtable discussions, which will include ample time for questions and exchange with students.

Organizing Committee: Epp Annus, Karsten Brüggemann, Linda Kaljundi, Andres Kurg, Uku Lember, Kristo Nurmis

Course Director: Kristo Nurmis

The summer school aims to address the following questions, among many others:

• How to discern the distinct features of Russian and Eurasian history while avoiding the pitfalls of essentialism, methodological nationalism, and Sonderweg? How does one investigate historical continuities of a country with an “unpredictable past”?

• Russia’s aggression has intensified calls for a decolonization of our thinking, writing, and teaching about the former Soviet space. What would be its desired impact on the scholarly community, research agendas, methodologies, and the role knowledge-making institutions play in politics and society?

• During the past decades, late socialism has been reassessed as a period of dynamic entanglements between state and society. This approach challenges the standard picture of the “stagnation” period with strict top-down relations between the rulers and the ruled. Is this direction still legitimate? Does it neglect the authoritarian character of the regime?   

• Where do we study Soviet history in the future if Russian archives are closed? How can we effectively use archives in non-Russian former Soviet republics taking into account language barriers? How can a research agenda look like that uses peripheral archives in order to search for the common “Soviet”?

• Soviet society was extremely diverse in terms of ethnic composition, cultural traditions, living standards, social hierarchies, education, climate, etc. Is it possible to theorize this radical diversity? How does a multiperspective view from the non-Russian borderlands change our understanding of the Soviet project? 

• Already Sheila Fitzpatrick called the post-revolutionary civil war a “formative experience” for the Soviet state. How formative was this event for the century to come, including for Putin’s regime? Do we need to reassess the common understanding of the socialist sixties and seventies as a period of normalization? Were they rather an exception? 

• How has the war in Ukraine forced us to rethink public space and memory politics in Eastern Europe and beyond? How effectively have issues with Soviet memorabilia been handled in different countries?

• What is the value of transdisciplinary dialogues for rethinking Soviet studies? What can we learn from the methodologies and source materials used in different disciplines, especially the ones with a strong transnational element such as environmental history, heritage, and visual studies?

STUDENT PRESENTATION DAY PROGRAM (coming soon)

Contact: kristo [dot] nurmis [at] tlu [dot] ee