Participants

Moritz Florin⁵; Masha Cerovic²; Sofia Dyak³; David Jishkariani⁵; Gintarė Malinauskaitė¹; Walter Sperling⁴;  ¹ Lithuanian Institute of History, Lithuania;  ² School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) and Center for Russian, Caucasian, East-European and Central Asian Studies (CERCEC), France;  ³ Center for Urban History, Ukraine;  ⁴ Max Weber Network Eastern Europe/University of Bremen, Georgia;  ⁵ Max Weber Network Eastern Europe, Georgia, Georgia

Discussion

With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, decolonization has finally become an impera-tive in our discipline of Eastern European and Eurasian history. The urgency with which the decolonization of the Tsarist Empire, the Soviet Union, and post-Soviet Russia has recently been called for may reflect the discipline’s previous focus on Eu-ropean Russia, leaving empire’s former peripheries to a growing but still small number of scholars. Rather than offering answers to the question of “what is to be done”, this roundtable invites to reflect on the epistemology of archives that allows us to recon-struct historical narratives of colonialism and resistance, of civilization and emancipa-tion, of cultural hegemony, its hybridization and subversion. If, as Madina Tlostanova polemically asserts, historians tend to universalize the facts they find in the archives during their brief research trips to the former peripheries, thereby negating local knowledge, hierarchies, and subjectivities, then one must ask why “local” repositories (archives, libraries, museums) contain knowledge that easily translates into Russian or Soviet, into European or global narratives. How did researchers challenge the docu-mentary evidence produced by imperial or Soviet institutions, biased by their dis-courses, in the decades after the fall of the USSR – the decolonial historiography avant la lettre? How might the “archival turn”, its focus on contextualizing knowledge, historicizing its production, help expose the hierarchies embedded in repositories and collections, revealing both their colonizing nature and the limits of their discursive power?

This roundtable aims to bring together scholars working on the former Soviet repub-lics (the Baltic States, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia), which differ in their histories as part of the Russian Empire and the USSR. At the same time, they share the Soviet archival system that was created after the October Revolution of 1917 and sub-sequently imposed on the peripheries.