Soviet Cultural Entanglements During the Cold War

When “things” become the object of Cold War historical research, we can consider how objects (commodities, artworks, books) configured people’s relations with a world riven with conflict. This also involves looking at the significance of non-political actors and private spaces (usually considered marginal to politics) in the processes and practices of Cold War geopolitics. During this event, Sudha Rajagopalan will present findings from interviews conducted for her new book, and speak about Soviet books, decorative artefacts and household appliances in Indian and Cuban homes. Interlocutors’ accounts of their Soviet things underscore the importance of personal relationships and emotions, the appeal of select aspects of Soviet modernisation, but also eclectic political solidarities that undercut artificial East-West binaries of that period.

Furthermore, Susan E. Reid will draw on oral history interviews with ordinary people who moved into newly built “khrushchevki” apartments in the USSR during the 1960s, and ask how Cold War connections and disconnections shaped the late Soviet home. Next, Ksenia Robbe will focus on Cold-War solidarities between South Africa and parts of Western Europe as well as the Soviet Union, drawing upon her research on how memories of these connections are mediated in contemporary exhibitions and literature, and discussing the significance of these memories in understanding resistance against apartheid. Moderation: Josephine Hoegaerts.

About the speakers

Sudha Rajagopalan is Senior Lecturer in (East) European Studies at the University of Amsterdam, with publications in Soviet cultural history, focusing on cultural texts, media and transnational connections in the Cold War era. Her first book, Indian Films in Soviet Cinemas: the Culture of Moviegoing after Stalin, is considered a pioneering ethnohistory of Soviet moviegoing. She is also a scholar of digital media and has published on issues related to celebrity, identity, post-feminism and memory in Russian digital cultures.

Susan E. Reid is Honorary Professor of Transnational and Modern European History, Durham University and Visiting Professor of Cultural and Visual History, Loughborough University. She is author of numerous publications on visual and material culture, art, gender, consumption, and the everyday in Soviet Russia, with a focus on the Khrushchev era and Cold War cultural interactions. Her book Khrushchev Modern: Making Oneself at Home in the Soviet Sixties (working title) will be published next year in the “Fringe” series of UCL Press.

Ksenia Robbe is a Senior lecturer in European Culture and Literature at the University of Groningen. She works at the interfaces of postcolonial and postsocialist, memory and time, and gender and feminist studies, with the focus on Russian/East European and Southern African literature, film and visual art. Her current research explores modes of remembering the 1980-90s transitions in South African and Russian literature as well as strategies of voicing conflicting memories of transitions in East European museums.

Josephine Hoegaerts is Professor of European Culture after 1800 at the University of Amsterdam. Her work focuses on histories of vocal health and propriety as well as different modes of political speech in the nineteenth century. Recent publications include ‘Voices that Matter? Methods for Historians Attending to the Voices of the Past’ in Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques (2021), ‘Vocal recognition before recording: techniques of vocal documentation, classification and identification in the long nineteenth century’ Sound Studies (2023), and with Jan Schroeder, Ordinary Oralities. Everyday Voices in History (2023).