This article examines the history of the Soviet export of art, which was a commercial initiative launched by the Soviet government in the mid-1960s to increase hard-currency revenue. For Soviet art institutions, this was a challenging undertaking because it required revising their isolationist policies, as well as engaging with foreign customers and responding to their diverse demands. Drawing on the archival records of the Soviet organisations that were involved in art exports, the article demonstrates that the drive to expand the art market was accompanied by anxieties about losing political ground to capitalist states and by a reluctance to disrupt the established economic and administrative order of socialist realism. The article shows how the various art organisations involved in exporting art navigated tensions between the commercial opportunities that were encouraged by the economic reforms of the mid-1960s and the conservative political agenda. It argues that the practice and outcomes of Soviet art exports were shaped by these competing pressures, rather than by aesthetic contradictions between socialist realism and modernism.
The article interrogates the development of planning in the European Union since the 1990s by examining the case of the new Lyon–Turin line (NLTL), a major infrastructural project in the Trans-European Network of transport corridors. It focuses on the process of infrastructural territorialisation through which the project of European integration became embedded at the national and local scales. Drawing on ethnographic field research in Valsusa, an Alpine valley in Northwestern Italy that has been significantly affected by the NLTL’s development, the article shows how the territorialisation of an infrastructure megaproject has also coincided with the territorialisation of a distinctly contemporary form of neoliberal rule. Through a discussion of the concept of neoliberal planning, the article shows how megaproject development has been pursued in such a way as to allow economic interests to be shielded from democratic accountability. Such developments trouble linear conceptions of state sovereignty and have become concrete arenas for contemporary entanglements of sovereign power that recast relations among nation-states and between national and supranational actors. Ultimately, the case of the NLTL shows how megaprojects have the potential to become de facto guarantors of territorial development writ large far beyond the actual purpose of the infrastructure itself, subsuming local public actors to the emergent rule of cross-border partnerships in the process. This case study provides a worm’s-eye view on the politics of European governance, a perspective from the margins of Europe that provincialises European neoliberalism and highlights the sovereign entanglements through which contemporary planning occurs in practice.
How can historians teach about Nazi Germany, fascism and resurgent far-right politics without allowing contemporary analogies to dominate the classroom? Rather than emphasising comparisons between interwar European fascism and the contemporary United States, this article argues for a pedagogical approach to teaching the history of fascism that highlights transatlantic entanglements, mutual influences and local connections. The article draws on the author's experiences teaching an undergraduate course on ‘Nazi Germany and Fascism’ in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy. Encouraging students to historicise transatlantic far-right connections, and to explore how the local communities near their campuses grappled with European fascist movements, can help them engage more deeply with a history that feels simultaneously too distant and too urgent.
This essay reflects on over two decades of teaching the undergraduate History seminar ‘Varieties of Fascism’ at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). It develops some strategies for making the study of fascism both analytically rigorous and still useful for understanding postwar world politics, including Trump-age America.
