Abstract: This article surveys studies of postwar Soviet economic reform that have emerged since the 2008 global financial crisis, which prompted a renewed interest in the economy among historians. This scholarship charts the rise of Soviet economic experts, debates among them, and their influence upon the reform strategies chosen—or rejected—by Soviet leaders. It looks at how reforms played out outside Moscow and the industrial heartland. It also looks at outside influences upon Soviet economic reforms and their convergence with international models, not all of them Western or market based. Though real economic reforms have often been portrayed as occurring only during the overtly reformist leaderships of Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev, the article shows that reform discussions and genuine attempts occurred for the entire 1945–91 period, even in the more ideologically rigid Stalin years and “stagnant” Brezhnev years. Finally, it points to new avenues of research on Soviet economic reforms in light of the difficulties involved in conducting archival research in central state archives in Moscow since 2022.
This article explores the formation of East Anatolia as a modern borderland. It traces the history of joint water management along Soviet Armenia's border with the Turkish Republic from the 1920s into the twenty-first century. Chief among these infrastructures was the Akhurian Reservoir Dam, whose construction straddled- and flooded-that border in the 1970s and 1980s. The Akhurian Dam (Arpa & ccedil;ay in Turkish) and its predecessors are noteworthy not only for spanning an international boundary but for doing so in a region often associated with imperial conflict. Indeed, except for Norway, Turkey was the only NATO member that directly abutted Soviet territory. What enabled water cooperation in East Anatolia to cross borderlines, socioeconomic regimes, and Cold War blocs? This article argues that the border zone developed patterns of engagement that reflected, but were not in lockstep with, official relations between Moscow and Ankara. These local patterns deepened over time, such that they survived even the Soviet collapse and reignition of Armenian-Turkish rivalry in the 1990s. Three continuities sustained water diplomacy in the Aras River Basin. The first was a transborder commitment to statist agricultural development. Despite their differences, Soviet Armenia and Turkey adopted similar approaches to irrigating East Anatolia's arid plainlands. The second was a tension between the economic benefits of cooperation and the border's chief purpose: security. These conflicting priorities partially insulated borderland interactions from ruptures in metropole diplomacy. And the third continuity was a set of ground-level institutions and infrastructures that empowered water managers to shape their countries' foreign policies while pursuing their own local agendas.
This article showcases the creative, controversial, and unexpected ways that the post-Stalin cultural front navigated a reimagined cultural policy that made it responsible for increasing agricultural production with virtually no guidance on how to do so. First, it shows that many cultural workers adopted a trial-and-error approach to find successful strategies to boost agricultural output, leading them to develop what were, in effect, agricultural training initiatives. Second, while time spent out in the fields came at the expense of the tasks that fit their actual job titles, cultural workers attempted to leverage the state's agricultural prerogative to advocate for themselves and their local institutions. Third, the state's shift in cultural policy opened up opportunities for successful collective farms to undertake cultural development in a way that had not been previously possible. This article takes as a case study a mutually beneficial relationship between cultural officials and kolkhozniks on one such farm in northern Kazakhstan to show how cultural construction thrived despite contradictory ideological mandates and a lack of material resources. Deprived of the purported benefits of the cultural "Thaw" of these years, cultural workers outside of the urban centers demonstrated that Soviet culture was not something that was crafted in Moscow and deposited across the countryside. As they navigated rapidly changing political and ideological conditions, these workers shaped and asserted their own new conceptions and understandings of Soviet culture and ideology and how to build socialism from within the cultural sphere.
This article is the first comprehensive reconstruction of arguably the most renowned wartime Soviet adoption story of the Uzbek adoptive parents (Sha)Akhmed Shamakhmudov and Bakhri Akramova and their multiethnic adopted children. Although based on a true story, this family's saga underwent many iterations and interpretations from the 1940s onward. The article thus pursues two main goals: biographical and conceptual. It reconstructs the family's history by tracing and analyzing an extensive corpus of documents. Furthermore, critical analysis of this multilingual data set-comprising materials in Uzbek, Russian, and English-suggests that the Shamakhmudov family played an important role in competing interpretations of national Uzbek and hybrid Soviet identities.
Scenarios of Power made waves when it first appeared three decades ago, and it continues to influence the field of Imperial Russian and Soviet history today. It offers a theory of how Russia's autocrats signaled their priorities, conceptions of power, and power itself to their entourage, by staging rituals and ceremonies. Controversy surrounded the question of how many people-and who exactly-partici-pated in the theater of power. This essay looks back at the reception of both volumes, finding that numerous readers misinterpreted Wortman's claims. It seeks clarity by revisiting the historical and anthropological literature that inspired Wortman and by excavating his key concepts, notably "scenario" and "myth."
This article goes behind the scenes of the first Miss USSR pageant in May 1989 to showcase the USSR's shift toward legal entrepreneurial capitalism. The beauty contest was made possible by perestroika reforms that expanded opportunities for cooperatives, joint-stock companies, individual ownership, foreign travel, and international trade. Both the businessmen who organized Miss USSR-89 and the women who starred in it approached the pageant in an entrepreneurial way as an avenue for financial growth, international connection, and travel abroad. The contestants leveraged their bodily and sexual capital in search of a new life far away from the shrinking labor market and acute shortages of the late Soviet Union. Producers of their own commodification, the contestants stood on stage at the nexus of empowerment, entrepreneurship, and exploitation. The story of the USSR's collapse and transition to capitalism is typically told as a drama starring men, but women's experiences are equally critical to unlocking the turmoil and transformation wrought by perestroika. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, women constituted nearly 80 percent of the country's unemployed, and both Gorbachev's supporters and opponents blamed women for many of society's ills-from declining birthrates to rising alcoholism. Female sexuality was also thrust to the forefront of debates about cultural liberalization and westernization. Beauty pageants were a glitzy, glamorous emblem of this upheaval. This article seeks to broaden our understanding of late Soviet entrepreneurship by shining a spotlight on women and the business of beauty.
Some sort of closeness, a link, seems required between a historian and her subject, but how much and what does the closeness provide? Is looking for closeness good historical practice? Willard Sunderland's essay engages these questions through the story of his retracing of John Quincy Adams's 1809 sea voyage to St. Petersburg as America's first ambassador to Russia. Drawing on records of the journey, Sunderland sailed after Adams in his own sailboat in 2023, following the same route and reading the same books along the way, including Plutarch's Lives. The result, Sunderland argues, was indeed a sense of unexpected historical connection that gave him a new and meaningful view of early US-Russian relations.
This article argues that historical source criticism has traditionally been myopic to one important factor in the historical production process: the authorial self. The exploration of the author's personal history, socialization processes, and particular positionality has hitherto been considered as detrimental to the authoritative voice of the historian and as detracting from the "proper" writing of history. Recently, the contemporary preoccupation with identity and subjectivity has fostered cracks in this taboo, with a few voices within the profession giving more room to the "I" of the historian. The author of this article speculates on the ways her own life experiences shaped her decision to write Soviet history and how her own historical "baggage" influenced her analyses and conclusions, making the case for a more radical transparency of the authorial self.
Challenging scholarly accounts that stress the Jewish national movement's isolation from the broader galvanization of ethnonational politics in the post-Stalin USSR, this article shows how Jewish activists rallied around the Ukrainian issue to universalize their struggle against Soviet power. As the Soviet crackdown on nationalist dissent intensified in the early 1970s, growing numbers of Jewish dissidents were sent to labor camps, where they encountered Ukrainian nationalists spanning generations. In prison memoirs and other samizdat and tamizdat texts, they drew on reconciliatory-if highly selective-exchanges with Ukrainian coprisoners over the history of Jewish-Ukrainian relations to link Jewish and Ukrainian suffering and promote solidarity and joint action. At the same time, carceral encounters with Ukrainians prompted some activists to recast Jewish national mobilization as collective atonement for the previous generation's iniquitous enthusiasm for Soviet socialism. The Jewish-Ukrainian encounter in late Soviet prison camps thus illustrates how state repression paradoxically fueled interethnic exchange, which in turn shaped nationalist political thought and memory construction in multidirectional ways.
In this article, I examine how broken, degraded, or faded photographic images can open new ways of writing the authorial self in historical and ethnographic inquiry. Starting from a worn-out photograph of my Muslim great-grandfather, executed during Stalin's Great Terror in Adjara, Georgia, I explore how compromised family images invite a more imaginative engagement with the past and present, decentering the official imperial archives and narratives. Reflecting on my grandmother's practices of preserving and remaking photos, alongside my own experiments with analog and AI-generated imagery, I trace how authorship moves across generations and media, shaped by shifting political and technological conditions. I argue that placing the authorial self at the center of such visual and narrative work allows for an imagistic mode of interpretation that holds affect, repair, and imagination as essential components of knowledge production. This approach enables forms of historical and ethnographic analysis that open alternative ways of engaging violent pasts and their lingering presence in times of renewed authoritarianism.
Conventional accounts of the Soviet politics of time foreground the "utopian" campaigning of the revolutionary, Bolshevik years, and their substitution by a strategy focused on "stability" under Stalin. This antinomy is then transposed to the late Soviet period: Khrushchev's Thaw figuring as a period of utopian revival and the Brezhnev years as one of neo-Stalinist stabilization. Altogether, this yields an elegant, if reductive, metanarrative of Soviet history. By contrast, this article profiles more recent work on Soviet chronopolitics, which is sensitive to contests between multiple copresent imaginaries of time. I argue that such scholarship spearheads the ongoing trend of breaking Soviet history out of an imminent, self-contained frame, spatially and chronologically. These contributions are especially apparent in the way scholarship on the politics of time advances the "Soviet modernity" debate and decenters the 1989/1991 historical divide.
Ethnographic inquiry requires first-person narration, even when it studies the past. This article explores two distinct ways of using "I" in historical writing: one, that which Enzo Traverso names the "singular past," speaks of the author's own story, memory, and family history; the other, that of historical ethnography, speaks through the author's grappling with ethnographic fact, about social formations that are otherwise hard to see. My argument proceeds in four parts. First, I show how the "I" of ethnography was utilized in the traditions of francophone, anglophone, and Soviet ethnography; next I explain why this narrative voice is a necessary part of the historical ethnographer's method; I then show how "singular pasts" structured Soviet and post-Soviet Russian public memory; finally, I explain how I myself used the ethnographic first person to understand Soviet history through and beyond Russian "singular pasts."
