Presentations by Streams

This panel is part of a larger interdisciplinary collective project that uncovers and deconstructs invisible structures and repetitive patterns of Soviet and Russia's post-Soviet colonial modernities. Based on a series of case studies, it seeks to bring to the fore the lack of reflection on complex hierarchical sociocultural and political relations that empower Russia’s quest for restoring its “greatpowerness” today.

Starting with the Thaw and up to 1985 semi- and unofficial local grassroots structures and diverse voices, including those from the Soviet republics and the autonomous national republics of RSFSR, played a prominent role in inaugurating a parallel public sphere. They even took part in preparing perestroika and became one of its pillars. Paradoxically, one of the outcomes of the process of “democratisation” during Gorbachev’s and later Yeltsin’s times for Russia was the new centralisation of power and the re-emergence of imperial ideas. This process intensified during Putin’s 2000s and 2010s. Many of these local and translocal groups now have fewer rights than they had during Brezhnev's stagnation and behind the Iron Curtain.

The papers in this panel, with their topics as diverse as the ideas of development of Russia’s Far East from the late 1980s, the fate of the Institute of Experimental Aesthetics in Kazan, and trajectories of amateur photography groups from mid-1970s up to the present, are united by our wish to reflect on the concepts of periphery and centre.