Monthly Archives: February 2018

Matt Payne and Viktor Turin both provide context on the creation of the Turksib railway. Payne’s piece exists in conversation with many of the forces we have been discussing recently in Central Asian modernization efforts by the Soviet state. Much … Continue reading →

Because my “questions” are a little ambiguous, I’ve underlined what topics I think discussion in class could address. Khalid This reading did a fantastic job of demonstrating the complex interrelated and competing ideas before and after revolution that shaped Central … Continue reading →

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot in this course (particularly during the unit on ethnographers), but also more concretely with respect to tonight’s reading, is the Soviet relationship to facts. While it makes sense that the local party leaders … Continue reading →

Northrop’s reading portrays a failure of the Bolshevik indigenization and sovietization politics in Uzbekistan in 1920s. It gives us a quite clear idea that onе of the most crucial reasons of this failure was the inconsistency of the Soviet government … Continue reading →

In this reading O’Keeffe centers a history of Romani people in the Soviet Union in the 1930s largely on the concepts of performance and ethnography. The concluding chapter does a great job of summing up these concepts with a focus … Continue reading →

I saw three main reasons, according to Weinberg, that Soviet leaders planned the settlement of the Jewish Autonomous Region. First, they hoped it would produce a non-religious Jewish cultural identity rooted in the Yiddish language and in socialism; second, they … Continue reading →

The Weinberg reading speaks to the economic situation of Jews before the 1917 Revolution, stating that — excluded from owning land, most Jews of the Russian Empire were resigned to the petty trades, or to abject poverty. This pre-revolutionary status … Continue reading →

(Apologies for the late post as well! Edited for embarrassing typos.) Chapters 3, 4, and 5 cover the effects of the Stalinist 1930s in the kresy – of collectivisation, purges, deportations, of the Stalinist security apparatus, of Soviet industralisation fed … Continue reading →

I’ve been enjoying A Biography of No Place so far. The hybrid writing style of a fairly standard historical voice with a more personal voice still seems to me to be pretty captivating. However, I also noticed a couple of … Continue reading →

In reflecting upon the Introduction, Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of “A Biography of No Place”, 3 big themes stood out: the way in which Brown gives us a history, the frame she uses to describe Soviet Union nationalization attempts … Continue reading →