A History of Soviet Modernity in Neoliberal Times

“Socialist modernity” has long become a working category of historical analysis in Russian and Soviet Studies.  As an established category, it bears a history of its own, characterized by founding assumptions, conceptual possibilities and limitations. The main question that I examine in the paper is how a pioneering comparative approach to the study of Soviet socialist modernity that aimed at integrating the Soviet experience into transnational history and argued for the indispensability of this intellectual move for a better understanding of both Soviet and Western trajectories, ended up with a vision of the Soviet socialist modernity as the familiar radical other of the West: anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, anti-individualist.  To answer this question, I will first analyze the making of the notion of “fundamental tenets” that the field has assigned to the full duration of the Soviet experiment from the Russian revolution to Gorbachev’s Perestroika.  Second, I will investigate the resultant ahistorical presupposition i.e. that the Bolshevik-Marxist vision of socialist modernity that got formed between 1900s and 1920s in response to a particular set of socio-economic, cultural, and geopolitical problems faced by an underdeveloped and agrarian society such as Russia continued to carry its currency once a society underwent a profound transformation and acquired social structures and patterns of work, leisure, and private life typical of an industrial and urban society. And, third, I will questions whether the non-market industrial society that the Soviet Union became after World War II was indeed incompatible with individualizing discourses, as the field’s “fundamental tenets of socialism" suggest. I will situate my critique of the kind of modernity the field has assigned to twentieth century Russia in relation to preceding Cold War scholarship and the neoliberal turn of the 1980s and 1990s.