‘SovMode-2025’ examines Soviet emancipation projects

The Soviet Union was a paradoxical space of both liberation and repression. Bolshevist radical policies opened opportunities for emancipation through enfranchisement, access to education, social mobility and mass welfare. At the same time, Soviet campaigns of political persecution, forced collectivization, and the Gulag silenced or eliminated the very subjects of emancipation. 

Titled “Combined and Uneven Emancipation: Exploring Benefits and Pitfalls of Soviet Modernity,” an October 17-18 conference at Princeton University convened experts across social science and humanities disciplines to examine Soviet emancipation projects against the backdrop of the multiple contradictions engendered by the promises and limits of Soviet modernity in the 20th century. 

“Combined and Uneven Emancipation” was the second installment of a three-year-long Collaborative Humanities Project supported by the Princeton University Humanities Council, “SovMode: Reconsidering Modernity and Socialism,” whose goal is two-fold: to renew and reframe understandings of Soviet modernity and how its legacies reverberate in post-Soviet societies and elsewhere, and to create a platform and for a new generation of scholars.

“SovMode is a theoretical and conceptual attempt to rethink what the Soviet experiment was, and what it is now,” said Serguei Oushakine, Princeton professor of anthropology and Slavic languages and literatures and co-organizer of Sov-Mode.

“Our ambition is to reignite conversations about modernity that were brushed aside following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the full-scale war,” added co-organizer Alexey Golubev, associate professor of Russian history at the University of Houston. “We believe that those conversations matter professionally, socially and culturally. Looking at the Soviet historical experience helps us understand the global present-day experience.”

Changing Paradigms

The conference consisted of a series of workshops built around collective discussions of English and Russian historical and contemporary texts. 

The first day of the conference focused on emancipation of women in the Soviet Union, and how that emancipation created a spectrum of possibilities for women but also produced severe constraints on their lives. Participants responded to several texts by Alexandra Kollontai, a major feminist scholar and politician in early Soviet Union; “Only Among Women Philosophies of Community in the Russian and Soviet Imagination, 1860–1940,” a study of literary and cinematic depictions of women's community by Anne Eakin Moss, a literary scholar from the University of Chicago; and “Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front” by Anna Krylova, a historian from Duke University, who examines the history of Soviet women who served in combat roles during World War II; among other texts. 

Julia Mickenberg, professor of American studies at the University of Texas at Austin, closed the day’s discussions with her keynote address, “Writing American Girls Into Revolutionary Russia,” in which she explored American women’s fascination with Russian revolutionary ideals, efforts, and policies, and with female revolutionaries themselves, as foils for an evolving and often besieged feminist movement in the United States in the early 20th century. 

Day two considered Stalinist and Nazi Rule and Soviet and dissident movements. Discussants analyzed “Crucibles of Power: Smolensk under Stalinist and Nazi Rule” by Michael David-Fox, a historian from Georgetown University, in which he provides a detailed examination of the history of the western Soviet territories that swapped hands between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1943; Benjamin Nathans’ Pulitzer Prize-winning, “To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement,” which explores dissent in the Soviet Union from Stalin’s death to the collapse of communism; and a comprehensive study of Soviet hippy counterculture “Flowers Through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland” by Juliane Furst. 

“The full-scale invasion [of Ukraine] brought up all sorts of epistemological, methodological, and historiographical questions, particularly with regards to Soviet modernity, which been the dominant paradigm of looking at recent Soviet history,” said Juliane Fürst, Leibniz Professor of Contemporary History at Central European University Vienna, head of the Communism and Society department at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam, and author of “Flowers Through Concrete.” 

“Serguei and Alexey put people in conversation who’ve never had a conversation — there are no other platforms for this kind of transdisciplinary dialogue,” said Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, associate professor at the Department of History in the University of Hong Kong. 

The conference concluded with a screening of Ali Khamraev’s 1979 film, “Triptych,” a political drama in which the lives of three women intersect in a small town in northern Uzbekistan in 1946, introduced by Jason Cieple, assistant professor of Russian languages and literatures at Hamilton college. 

The Next Generation

SovMode-2025 also provided a model for academic dialogue among scholars in different stages of their careers. “It’s helpful [for junior scholars] to see how to respond to critique of their ideas — to absorb it, to not dismiss it, to not get defensive,” said Oushakine. 

“I found it helpful and generative to think with people, to be generously read, to have an author in the workshop, to be able interrogate concepts, as well as to learn how to respond to criticism, not only in writing, but also in a conversation,” said, Orla O’Sullivan, a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology.

Sofia Guerra, a graduate student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, also attended SovMode-2024. “Serguei and Alexey bring together discussions that produce generative frictions that we can go home and think about for a long time; I'm still thinking about all the things that happened last year,” she added. “SovMode has given me a sense of community with people with whom I share the most profound intellectual investments and commitment. It’s created a map of inspiration and resources.”

For established scholars like Fürst, SovMode is unique because of this exchange of ideas across seniority. “Becoming more senior and more alienated from the junior world, your own thoughts can calcify,” she said “Being challenged by a young person’s view, even if you disagree, you have to respond to it. I'm not going to write a book for the next few years, but when I do, I will think back of some of the comments I heard here.”

Looking Ahead

While SovMode-2024 explored the challenges that imperialism and socialism posed to each other in local and global contexts in modern era, Sov-Mode 2026 will address infrastructure in Soviet modernity. “A lot of people ignore the material dimension — power plants, bridges, railroads that sustained the ideologies that we’ve discussed [for two years],” said Oushakine. 

“The Soviet historical experience involved a large-scale rearrangement of the material world,” said Golubev. “Our description of the Soviet historical experience is fragmentary if we lose sight of that material reality.”

SovMode-2025 was sponsored by Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies; Princeton University Humanities Council, under a Collaborative Humanities Project grant; REEES; Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; Shelby Cullom Davis Center; University Center for Human Values; and Center for Collaborative History.