HU51432

SoSe 23: The wild 1990s in the (post-)Soviet space

Juliane Fürst

Comments

This seminar takes a look at a decade that was legendary at the time and has become infamous now: the Soviet and post-Soviet 1990s. After the sudden collapse of communist rule in the early part of the decade, the remaining years became a dramatic political, economic and cultural struggle to define what kind of countries and societies the ex-Soviet Union should become. It was a time of excruciating personal financial hardship for many and stunning gain of wealth for some. It was years saturated with crime, corruption and insecurity yet also artistic curiosity and unprecedented internationalisation. Despite Putin’s repeated invocation of this era as justification of his repressive policies, the 1990s are gradually being rediscovered as an era of possibility as well as failure, resilience as well as collapse. This course will take a quizzical and critical multi-media look at an epoch that has turned out to be crucial in setting the stage of war. close

Suggested reading

White, Stephen, Graeme J. Gill, and Darrell. Slider. The Politics of Transition: Shaping a Post-Soviet Future. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Huxtable, Simon. "Remembering a Problematic Past: TV Mystics, Perestroika and the 1990s in Post-Soviet Media and Memory." European Journal of Cultural Studies 20.3 (2017): 307-23 Novikova, L. "The Last Lenin: Soviet Toponomy And Symbolic Transformatio In Arkhangelsk in the 1990S." Ab Imperio 2 (2020): 137-69. Hughes, James. Chechnya. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania, 2011 Fenghi, Fabrizio. It Will Be Fun and Terrifying : Nationalism and Protest in Post-Soviet Russia. Madison, Wisconsin ; London, 2020 Kristensen, Lars Lyngsgaard Fjord. "‘Russia and Postcolonialism?’ Surely, It Should Have Read Neo-colonialism." From Orientalism to Postcoloniality. 2008 Buckley, Mary. Post-Soviet Women : From the Baltic to Central Asia. Cambridge, 1997 Stephenson, Svetlana. Gangs of Russia : From the Streets to the Corridors of Power. Ithaca, NY, 2015 close