SovMode: A Series of Annual Workshops

Reconsidering Modernity & Socialism

From the end of the 1990s, the most compelling discussions in the field of Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian studies centered on the USSR’s place within global modernity. Scholars debated whether the Soviet historical experience fit within its limits or represented an alternative form of it, with some even proposing that modernity itself needed reevaluation in light of socialist experience and its global repercussions. 

Stimulated by these different positions and approaches, the field as a whole had been engaged in productive inquiries into the Soviet predicaments of modernity, a direction that was instrumental for creating a vibrant dialogue with other fields in social sciences and humanities at large.

Russia’s war on Ukraine stopped abruptly these transdisciplinary conversations and connections. Instead of placing this war in the global context of present-day imperialism and the failure of the international security system, a new dominant discourse emerged in Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian studies. This discourse is preoccupied with the production of teleological narratives that seek to establish linear cause-and-effect links between Soviet socialism and the current Russian-Ukrainian war and lead to new divisions of societies into “progressive” and “barbaric” under the disguise of decolonization. 

To counter this trend, we are organizing a three-year long project under the title SovMode: Reconsidering Modernity and Socialism. The goal is to renew and reframe our understanding of how Soviet modernity was imagined, practiced, embodied, and materialized throughout the twentieth century in the USSR, and how its legacies continue to impact post-Soviet societies and globally. 

The organizational framework of the project is a series of thematic annual workshops held at Princeton. These workshops bring together established and emerging scholars from the US and elsewhere working on practices of socialist modernity together with Princeton faculty and students specializing in socialist and post-socialist societies. We hope to reignite the debate on modernity in the Soviet Union, using our discussions as point of departure for reconfiguring the logic of the field itself.

Conference Organizers:

Alexey Golubev

Alexey Golubev is Associate Professor of Russian History at the University of Houston. His research has been supported by the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Aleksanteri Institute of Helsinki University, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Killam Trusts, Gerda Henkel Stiftung, German Historical Institute in Moscow, and the Russian Foundation for Humanities. He is the author of The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia (Cornell UP, 2020) and The Search for a Socialist El Dorado: Finnish Immigration from the United States and Canada to Soviet Karelia in the 1930s (Michigan State UP, 2014, with Irina Takala).

Serguei Alex. Oushakine

Serguei Alex. Oushakine is Professor of Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton. His research is concerned with transitional processes and situations: from the formation of newly independent national cultures after the collapse of the Soviet Union to post-traumatic identities and hybrid cultural forms. He was a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna), a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a recipient of the ACLS’ Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship, and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (School of Social Science).

Reconsidering Modernity & Socialism is 
a Collaborative Humanities Project 
from the Princeton University Humanities Council.

Image credits: 
the site uses photos by the Soviet photographer Max Penson

Born in a Western part of the Russian Empire, he spent most of his life visualizing the transformation of the Soviet East.