Summer School in Soviet History and Culture

Overview

What you will study

The Summer School in Soviet History and Culture offered by Tallinn University aims to address the following questions, among many others:

• How to discern the distinct features of Russian and Eurasian history while avoiding the pitfalls of essentialism, methodological nationalism, and Sonderweg? How does one investigate historical continuities of a country with an “unpredictable past”?

• Russia’s aggression has intensified calls for a decolonization of our thinking, writing, and teaching about the former Soviet space. What would be its desired impact on the scholarly community, research agendas, methodologies, and the role knowledge-making institutions play in politics and society?

• During the past decades, late socialism has been reassessed as a period of dynamic entanglements between state and society. This approach challenges the standard picture of the “stagnation” period with strict top-down relations between the rulers and the ruled. Is this direction still legitimate? Does it neglect the authoritarian character of the regime?   

• Where do we study Soviet history in the future if Russian archives are closed? How can we effectively use archives in non-Russian former Soviet republics taking into account language barriers? How can a research agenda look like that uses peripheral archives in order to search for the common “Soviet”?

• Soviet society was extremely diverse in terms of ethnic composition, cultural traditions, living standards, social hierarchies, education, climate, etc. Is it possible to theorize this radical diversity? How does a multiperspective view from the non-Russian borderlands change our understanding of the Soviet project? 

• Already Sheila Fitzpatrick called the post-revolutionary civil war a “formative experience” for the Soviet state. How formative was this event for the century to come, including for Putin’s regime? Do we need to reassess the common understanding of the socialist sixties and seventies as a period of normalization? Were they rather an exception? 

• How has the war in Ukraine forced us to rethink public space and memory politics in Eastern Europe and beyond? How effectively have issues with Soviet memorabilia been handled in different countries?

• What is the value of transdisciplinary dialogues for rethinking Soviet studies? What can we learn from the methodologies and source materials used in different disciplines, especially the ones with a strong transnational element such as environmental history, heritage, and visual studies?