Deadline: September 1, 2020
The Union of What? Soviet Internationalism Thirty Years After the Fall of the USSR
When the Soviet Union collapsed, contemporaries heralded the emergence of fifteen separate republics; yet nearly three decades on, it is still common to refer to the “post-Soviet space.” Important questions remain about what it was that knit the Soviet Union together and why connections across national boundaries forged in the Soviet period remain relevant within and beyond Eurasia a generation after the union’s demise.
Dismissed until recently as an ideological fig leaf concealing the USSR’s “true” regional and global ambitions, Soviet internationalism has received renewed attention among scholars who take it seriously as a conceptual framework and practice that ran through Soviet life and shaped engagement with the broader world. Recent scholarship has unearthed Soviet internationalism’s intellectual underpinnings and traced its influence in a wide range of areas, including foreign policy, education, art, literature, cinema, and everyday life. Scholars have also pointed to its legacies, both among the diverse populations of contemporary Russia and Eurasia and in Russia’s current relations with Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Soviet internationalism offers a way to connect the study of nationality, a subject that has received ample attention in our field, with the study of race, which has been comparatively neglected.
Continue reading “Call for Submissions to The Russian Review: Soviet Internationalism Thirty Years after the Fall of the USSR”
