ASEES, 2020

Ekaterina Emeliantseva Koller and Ekaterina Knoblauch participated in the 52nd Annual Convention of ASEES 2020 – Ekaterina Emeliantseva Koller organized the panel Late Soviet Village II: Things and infrastructures between rural and urban and presented her paper Berries in Trade for a Tape Recorder: Fartsovka between the City and the Village; Ekaterina Knoblauch (Kurilova) participated in the preparation of the panel Pictures of Villagers in Motion: Technologies of Rural Mobility and Self-Imagination after Stalin and presentet her paper Village on Celluloid: Filmmaking as Folk Art in the Late Soviet Village.

The panel desciptions and abstract of the panels and papers below can be found on the homepage of the ASEEES 2020.

Panel: Late Soviet Village II: Things and Infrastructures between Rural and Urban

Sunday, November 8, 2020, 12:00 to 1:30pm, Virtual Convention Platform, Room 2

Papers: Tyler Adkins, Princeton U: A Good Barrel is Hard to Find: Infrastructures of Fermentation in a Siberian Village
Ekaterina Emeliantseva Koller, U of Zurich: Berries in Trade for a Tape Recorder: Fartsovka between the City and the Village
Alla Bolotova, Aleksanteri Institute, U of Helsinki: Soviet Mining Villages and Their Afterlife: From Rural to Urban and Back

Discussiant: Alexey Golubev, U of Houston

Panel Description

Dynamics of rural society during the last Soviet decades have hitherto been largely neglected, yet they are crucial for understanding the late Soviet Union. The aim of the panel is to look at the fabric of Late Soviet society beyond traditional models of social space organization (private vs official), familiar conceptualization of politics (they vs us), or the usual schemes of ideological participation (cynicism vs sincerity), through the lense of things and infrastructures that allow for, encourage people to act, e.g. produce “performative reorganization” of space and/or narrative (Butler and Atanasiou).

Tyler Adkins will focus on the social effects of fermentation equipment in the villages of the Altai Mountains and elaborate on how the infrastructure of dairy fermentation transgresses the binaries of domestic and non-domestic work and redefines social and economic boundaries of the household itself.
Ekaterina Emeliantseva Koller will discuss the contingency of late Soviet rurality/urbanity by focusing on rural fartsovka and the vibrancy of berries as actants in those networks.
Alla Bolotova’s paper will address the boundaries between rural and urban by focusing on mining villages in the Soviet Arctic (Murmansk region) and its residents’ sense of place.
Anna Sokolova will analyze the consequences of Stalinist environmentalism in late Soviet Karelian timber industry settlements and the modes of rearrangement of infrastructural gaps and frictions by various actors.

Abstract: Berries in Trade for a Tape Recorder: Fartsovka between the City and the Village

Late Soviet practice of fartsovka has been known as urban phenomenon yet it was a part of rural-urban continuum too. By discussing the trips of young musicians from the closed city of Severodvinsk to rural settlements of the Arkhangelsk region in order to trade berries and mushrooms in exchange for much demanded Western goods such as tape recorders made in Japan or down jackets made in Finland, I will argue that in the process the vibrancy of berries and other forest products affected the whole assemblage of actants and reshaped everyday practices. Actors engaged in the practice of village fartsovka experienced moments of situational rurality/urbanity that was symptomatic for the late Soviet period.

Late Soviet practice of fartsovka has been known as urban phenomenon yet it was a part of rural-urban continuum too. By discussing the trips of young musicians from the closed city of Severodvinsk to rural settlements of the Arkhangelsk region in order to trade berries and mushrooms in exchange for much demanded Western goods such as tape recorders made in Japan or down jackets made in Finland, I will argue that in the process the vibrancy of berries and other forest products affected the whole assemblage of actants and reshaped everyday practices. Actors engaged in the practice of village fartsovka experienced moments of situational rurality/urbanity that was symptomatic for the late Soviet period.

Panel: Pictures of Villagers in Motion: Technologies of Rural Mobility and Self-Imagination after Stalin

Sunday, November 8, 2020, 10:00 to 13:30am, Virtual Convention Platform, Room 2

Chair: Xenia A. Cherkaev, HSE University

Papers: Olha Martynyuk, Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute: Bike-Sharing, Soviet-Style: Cycling in Urban and Rural Areas after WWII
Simon Belokowsky, Georgetown U: ‚A Melody, the Bus Was Soaring’: Public Transportation and Urban-Rural Convergence after Stalin
Ekaterina Kurilova, U of Zurich (Switzerland): Village on Celluloid: Filmmaking as Folk Art in the Late Soviet Village

Discussiants: Xenia A. Cherkaev, HSE University and Erin Hutchinson, U of Colorado Boulder

Panel Description

As historians continue to think beyond stagnation as a frame of analysis for the latter decades of the Soviet period, a focus on the village is proving to be a particularly compelling vantage. State and collective farms were consolidated and enlarged, their central farmsteads developed rudimentary urban characteristics, and their youth ventured increasingly to local cities. Consequently, the Soviet village became increasingly intertwined with a common Soviet modernity, and villagers themselves were on the move, in space and time alike. Benefitting from the state’s significant investment in personal and public transportation, villagers were able – despite recurrent technological and logistical limitations – to traverse greater spaces both within and beyond the village and to produce and consume in ways more in line with other citizens. In doing so, rural citizens were forced to recurrently and continuously manage the frictions between the imagined and the actually existing. In creatively engaging the semiotic framework of modern Soviet life within its many practical constraints, villagers also produced themselves, and, in the case of amateur filmmaking, captured this production on film. Treating bicycling, bus-riding, and filmmaking, this panel asks where late-Soviet villagers were and imagined themselves to be going, in the narrowest and broadest senses.

Abstract: Village on Celluloid: Filmmaking as Folk Art in the Late Soviet Village

The introduction of new technologies along with the accompanying process of urban-rural convergence fostered new social activities and practices in the late Soviet village. Amateur filmmaking in the countryside (na sele) emerged as a result of these processes. Initiated as a part of Soviet “self-activity” (samodeiatel’nost’), amateur filmmaking in the village as well as in urban centres was sponsored by the state. All technical equipment and film production materials (cameras, celluloid film, chemical kits, editing tables and film projectors) were distributed to more than 4,000 local film studios all around the Soviet Union. In villagers’ hands, the camera functioned as a tool for artistic self-expression, allowing the filmmakers to showcase a distinct vision of the rural everyday and themselves. Through various amateur clubs, the practice of amateur filmmaking opened the doors to education and self-development for many villagers. This paper investigates amateur filmmaking in the late Soviet “hinterland” (glubinka) as a cultural phenomenon. Using oral interviews with the filmmakers, archival film material as well as Soviet periodicals, it examines how new technologies impacted the life of late Soviet rural society, and which role these technologies played in the rural-urban continuum of that time.