A New Cultural History of the Soviet Century?

This presentation begins with a question about a longstanding convention, in and outside academia, that has allowed scholars to view the Soviet experiment in alternative modernity through the lens of a stubborn and seemingly indivisible Bolshevik constellation of characteristics such as anti-capitalist, anti-individualist, anti-liberal. In the field of Modern Russian history, they are also known as "fixed ideas" or "basic tenets." As a result, the Soviet non-market industrial experiment is held to be a priori collectivist and antithetical to individualizing discourses of modernity.  The very discourse on the individual as a non-subversive cultural practice is de-facto reserved to market experiences with the modern.  At the even deeper level of this illiberal construct of Soviet modernity there thus lies a strikingly reductionist approach to the Soviet Union's conceptual other – twentieth century Western liberalism which has been de facto reduced to its neo-liberal variation and indentified exclusively with "individualism." The presentation questions these founding assumptions of the US Soviet Studies. Expanding the analytics beyond such formulaic binaries and calling for a new cultural history of the Soviet century, the presentation argues that Russia's encounter with socialism is best accounted for in terms of evolving plurality of normative discourses of socialism, socialist subjectivity, and social responsibility that accompanied the rise of Soviet industrial (even if non-market) modernity.