UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies

Convenors: Geoffrey Hosking (SSEES), Polly Jones (SSEES), Susan Morrissey (SSEES),
Miriam Dobson (Sheffield), Juliane Furst (Oxford)

This conference will examine the political, social, and cultural history of the late Stalinist and Khrushchev periods. Panels include:

1. The Long Recovery from the War
2. The Limits of Openness: Permitted Narratives
3. Science and Society from Stalin to Khrushchev
4. Promoting the Soviet Union abroad
5. The Gulag and identity
6. Maintaining Borders, Crossing Borders
7. Collective Identities, Alternative Identities
8. Habitats and Living Spaces

Keynote speakers are: Sheila Fitzpatrick, Amir Weiner, and Elena Zubkova

For more information, contact: sovietproject@gmail.com

See also: Project Website with overview, programme details and venue information.

The relaunch of the Soviet project, 1945-64

For two years now SSEES has been the forum for a study-group whose aim has been to promote the study of the USSR in the twenty years after the second world war. There are three main reasons for formulating our topic in the way we have done.

1. Much recent western research on the USSR, impelled by the availability of archive materials over the last fifteen years, has concentrated on the 1930s, with great benefit. It seems time now to move on to a later period, for which the archive resources are if anything even richer. Our experience suggests that younger scholars in the UK and elsewhere are doing this, and our study-group has endeavoured to give them a forum for presenting and discussing their work.

2. There are good substantive reasons for studying the period. Until recently the last Stalin years (1945-53) had figured in the literature as a kind of undigested epilogue to the 1930s. However, scholarship of the last years has suggested that the period can be conceptualised as one in which the Soviet project was relaunched, given fresh impetus by victory in the war, the absorption of all East Slavs and the establishment of a Soviet power bloc in Central and Eastern Europe.

3. Our formulation of the topic also challenges the dominant notion that Soviet history is best periodised in terms of the Communist Party leaders. We have deliberately placed Stalin’s death at the middle of our period, believing that it is worth investigating the hypothesis that the twenty years can profitably be examined as a single entity. Recent work by Russian scholars, based on detailed archive work, is especially persuasive in this respect. This is not to deny that Khrushchev conducted his own ‘relaunch’ in a distinctive fashion in 1953-64. But it seems important also to enquire whether his initiatives did not have roots in the late Stalin years and whether there were not important continuities which straddled 1953.

In April 2004 and April 2005 we held two study-days, both of which attracted a good number of young scholars from the UK and some from abroad. We also held a series of seminars under the auspices of the Centre for Russian Studies during the academic years 2003-4 and 2004-5: several more are planned for 2005-6. Our September 2006 conference builds on this experience. 27 papers will be given by scholars from Russia, the USA, Britain, France and Germany. It will generate a collective volume in which the best papers would be published.

Geoffrey Hosking