ENDNOTES
1 Lydia Ginzburg, Notes from the Blockade (Vintage, 2016, originally published in 1989), pp. 24-25
A Short Introduction
1 Dissatisfaction with these limited national narratives is the reason why alternative names of each city are given as titles, after their current official names, as a reminder of the non-“national” people that made – and in some places still make – these places home.
2 I have tried to avoid any repetition of locations from the more personal and taxonomic account of “socialist architecture” in Landscapes of Communism (Allen Lane, 2015). Only some of the capital cities – Moscow, Kyiv, Petersburg, Tbilisi – and one industrial city, Nizhny Novgorod, appear in both, and here I’ve deliberately left out places covered in the earlier book. I’ve tried to indicate where a relevant place is covered there in footnotes, rather than reprising them, so as not to bore anyone who has read the earlier volume, but to indicate said information to those who have not.
Microcosmos: Slavutych
1 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1921-1939 (Cornell, 2001)
2 Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl – the Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (Picador, 2006), p. 51
3 Ibid, p. 199
4 Ibid, p. 163
5 Ievgeniia Gubkina, Slavutych Architectural Guide (Dom, 2016), p. 26
6 Much of the fun of the event was programming speakers into unexpected parts of the town, as a means of exploring it. I delivered a lecture about British new towns in the drained municipal swimming pool.
7 Gubkina, Slavutych Architectural Guide, p. 19
8 Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl, p. 42
Part One: The Western Periphery
Forgotten Capital: Kaunas, Kowno, Kovno
1 On the fascist aspects of the Smetona regime in the 1930s, see Anatol Lieven, The Baltic Revolutions – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and the Path to Independence (Yale, 1997), pp. 66-69
2 Note the account of these two buildings in the excellent Kaunas Architectural Guide, edited by Julija Reklaite (Lapas, 2016), pp. 60-61
3 Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders – The Jewish Catastrophe 1933–45 (Harper Perennial, 1993), pp. 98-99
A Guidebook of Revolutionary Relics:
Kuldīga, Goldingen
1 Joachim Becker, “Europe’s Other Periphery”, in New Left Review, Vol. 2, 99, May/June 2016, p. 55
2 Paul Krugman, “Response”, in Olivier J. Blanchard et al, Boom, Bust, Recovery – Forensics of the Latvian Crisis, (IMF, 2013)
3 Becker, “Europe’s Other Periphery”, p. 45
4 Will Mawhood describes it “Latvia’s most Latvian town” in a 2015 article for UpNorth, http://upnorth.eu/Kuldīga-jewel-of-ancient-latvia/
5 Anatol Lieven, The Baltic Revolutions (Yale, 1994), p. 51
6 Andrew Ezergailis, The 1917 Revolution in Latvia (East European Quarterly, 1971), p. 5
7 Ibid, p. 79
8 For a grim account of this exile milieu, with its traumatised revolutionaries, generally unable to speak English, and many of them left scarred physically and psychologically by torture from the Tsarist authorities (including Peeters, whose fingernails were ripped out), see Donald Rumbelow, The Houndsditch Murders and the Siege of Sidney Street (Macmillan, 1988)
9 A useful example here is Mara Kalnins’s recent Latvia – A Short History (Hurst, 2015); or the account in the exhibition catalogue The Motherland Calls! (Maksla. Mits. Dokuments, 2011), which explains away both the Latvian Riflemen and the Latvian SS legion as misguided “fighters for their country”; curious given that neither the Bolsheviks in 1917, nor, by even the wildest stretch of the imagination, the Third Reich in 1944, promised any kind of independence to Latvia. The latter didn’t even promise the sort of deeply circumscribed autonomy Latvia had under the USSR. It’s evidently too disturbing to imagine that at any point large groups of people could have believed in socialism, or for that matter believed in Nazism.
10 Liliana Riga’s recent The Bolsheviks and the Russian Empire (Cambridge, 2014) finds Latvians disproportionately represented in the Bolshevik leadership, the Latvian Social Democrats disproportionately large as a Party – larger, at one point than the Russian Bolsheviks and Mensheviks put together – and also, most interestingly for Kuldīga, argues that Latvia was the only place in the Russian Empire where there was significant rural support for the Bolsheviks.
11 Ezergailis, The 1917 Revolution in Latvia, p. 21
12 Ibid, p. 103
13 Ibid, p. 52
14 Ibid, p. 138
15 Ibid, p. 139
16 Quoted in Otto Lacis, “Farewell to the Communist Party of Latvia”, New Left Review, 182, July-August 1990
17 David Mitchell, 1919 – Red Mirage (Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 88
18 Ibid, p. 89
19 The incident, deriving from an account by a Freikorps officer, is cited in Jean-Paul Kauffmann, A Journey to Nowhere (Quercus, 2013), p. 14
20 See Lieven, The Baltic Revolutions, p. 390
21 The Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic (Novosti, 1972), pp. 30-1
22 In The Holocaust in Latvia (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1996), Andrew Ezergailis points out that actual spontaneity was anathema to Vyshinsky, and the “welcoming” of the Red Army was tightly controlled and organised.
23 According to Ezergailis, there is no evidence Jews were either prominent in the 1940-1 Latvian Soviet Republic, in the NKVD or otherwise, or that they were disproportionately represented in the occupying regime in general.
24 Unpaginated English text appended to A. Volanska, Livijas Rezevskas: Darbu Katalogs Izstazu Zale (Darbnica a Projekti, 2004)
25 This is the argument of Ivan Szelenyi, Urban Inequalities Under State Socialism (Oxford, 1983)
26 On the puzzling nature of Soviet concrete construction in areas with a lot of high-quality wood that could be used more easily and cheaply, see Adrian Forty’s notes on Estonia in Concrete and Culture (Reaktion, 2012)
27 See Dimitrij Zadorin and Philipp Meuser, Towards a Typology of Mass Housing in the USSR (Dom, 2015)
28 Quoted from “Grand-land’s Museum” leaflet, given out at the Kuldīga Art House.
A Tour with the City Architect:
Ventspils, Windau, Vindava
1 Ventspils 700+25 (Ventspili Turismsa, 2015), p. 10
2 Ibid, p. 25
3 See Part Three of this book.
4 For example: http://www.archilovers.com/projects/141880/parventa-library.html
5 Ventspils 700+25, p. 5
6 Ibid, p. 100
Nuclear Model Village:
Sillamäe, Sillamäggi, Narva 2, Leningrad 5
1 Maros Krivy, “From Mining to Data-Mining” in Karlis Berzins, Jurga Daubaraite, Petras Isora, Ona Lozuraityte, Niklavs Paegle, Dagnija Smilga, Johan Tali, Laila Zarina, Jonas Zakauskas (eds), The Baltic Atlas (Sternberg Press, 2016), p. 193
2 These interviews were originally in my “Baltic Interplay”, TANK, Autumn 2016
3 Aleksandra Zavjalova, “Small Voices, Big Narratives – Problems of Remembering and Identifying the Post-Soviet Space: The Case of the Stalinist Architectural Ensemble in Sillamäe, Estonia”, (Kingston University, 2013)
4 Ibid, p. 8
5 Ibid, p. 15
6 Ibid, p. 21
The Cradle of Three Revolutions:
St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad
1 The book to read is Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power (Pluto, 2017)
2 All the information here come from Ilya Orlov’s 2014 article “On The Field of Mars”, translated by Thomas Campbell at his blog The Russian Reader, at https://therussianreader.com/2014/11/13/ilya-orlov-field-of-mars/
3 A big question in Petersburg, as this city, perhaps closest in its population and scale to Berlin, has 69 Metro stations. Berlin has 173, and another 166 on the S-Bahn.
4 For a straightforward description of what got built and why, see Andreas Trier Morch and Juri Nikitin, The Unknown St Petersburg – Architecture from 1917 to 1956 (Royal Danish Academy of Arts, 2003), pp. 64-87
5 B.M. Kirilikov, M.S Stieglitz, Leningrad Avant-Garde Architecture (Kolo, 2009), p. 101
6 See the Chto Delat “drift” of the district, at https://chtodelat.org/category/b7-art-projects/commisioned-works/b_4/
7 Philipp Meuser and Dmitrij Zadorin, Towards a Typology of Mass Housing – Prefabrication in the USSR, 1955-1991 (Dom, 2015), p. 297
8 See Richard Pare, The Lost Vanguard – Russian Modernist Architecture, 1922-1932 (Monacelli Press, 2007), pp. 308-315; for my “take”, ill-advisedly written two years before I’d actually visited Russia, see Militant Modernism (Zero, 2009), p. 49
9 From the recent catalogue Sergei Kirov Museum (SMHStP, undated), p. 4
10 The great literary depiction of this is Victor Serge’s Conquered City (NYRB, 2011)
Part Two: Debatable Lands
Art and Revolution:
Kyiv, Kiev, Kijów, קיעוו
1 She describes the event in the first part of Agata Pyzik, Poor but Sexy – Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (Zero, 2014)
2 On Viatrovych and his Institute of National Memory, a useful critical account from a by no means leftist source is Josh Cohen, “The Historian Whitewashing Ukraine’s Past”, Foreign Policy, May 2016
3 A pocket catalogue of the “art” side of the events is available as The School of Kyiv Guidebook (Huss, 2015); but the guide to the venues themselves is essential – The Book of Kyiv (Medusa, 2015)
4 There is a chapter on Lybidska Square in my Across the Plaza (Strelka, 2012)
5 From the booklet Monuments of Kiev (Mistestvo, 1963), unpaginated
6 At https://sovietmosaicsinukraine.org/
7 Boris Groys, “Communist Globalisation”, in Lukasz Ronduda, Alex Farquharson, Barbara Piwowarska (eds.), Star City – the Future under Communism (Mammal, 2013), p. 183
8 Yevgen Nikiforov, Decommunised – Ukrainian Soviet Mosaics (Dom, 2017), p. 8
Oligarchy in Rocket City:
Dnipro, Dnepropetrovsk, Ekaterinoslav
1 R.W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger – Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933 (Palgrave, 2009), p. 113. Davies and Wheatcroft note that Peterovsky, along with other Ukrainian Party leaders, publicly took a hard line, while privately begging the Politburo for famine relief.
2 There is a good analysis of this process and the limitations of “clan” analysis in Yuliya Yurchenko, Ukraine and the Empire of Capital (Pluto, 2018)
3 On this, see Oliver Carroll’s remarkably candid interview with the man, “Star Wars in Ukraine”, Politico, December 2015
Streets of Crocodiles: Chișinău, Kishinev, קעשענעוו
1 A useful analysis can be found in Alexander Moldovan’s “Social Unrest in Moldova: Expropriate the Mafia!”, LeftEast, February 2016, http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/social-unrest-in-moldova-expropiate-the-mafia/
2 Ivan Szelenyi, Urban Inequalities Under State Socialism (Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 109
Part Three: The Centre
Where the Gauges Change:
Brest, Brest-Litovsk, Brześć-nad-Bugiem, בריסק
1 One of many: “Edge of Europe, End of Europe”, New York Review of Books, July 2015
2 At the time of writing, you can enter Belarus visa-free if you get in at Minsk Airport, otherwise it’s a visit to the consulate and some intricate form-filling. As, of course, it is for Belarusians going the other way, harsher still.
3 Broadly, Andrew Wilson’s Belarus – the Last Dictatorship in Europe (Yale, 2011) is convincing on the means by which any meaningful democracy in the country was strangled at birth, though unreflective as to why.
4 There is an English language guide of the 1980s, which gives a flavour of the propaganda and the scale: Nikolai Kudryashov, The Brest Fortress: A Guide (Raduga, 1987)
Time, Backward!: Minsk, Miensk, מינסק
1 Again, Timothy Snyder is textbook here: “In Darkest Belarus”, New York Review of Books, October 2010
2 For an informed and dryly witty account of the city’s twentiethcentury architecture, see Dmitrij Zadorin, “Architecture of the BSSR – Texture of the Standardised”, in Katharina Ritter, et al (eds), Socialist Modernism – Unknown History (Park Books, 2012)
3 Barbara Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto – Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism (University of California Press, 2008), esp. pp. 40-76
4 Whether the renamings of the sister organisations in Russia and Ukraine, the FSB and SBU, has resulted in them being significantly nicer or nastier, or about the same, institutions is worth considering.
5 Artur Klinau, “Minsk: the Sun City of Dreams”, Herito Quarterly, 22–23, 2016
6 See Part Four of this book.
7 Nelly Bekus, “Ideological Recycling of the Socialist Legacy: Reading Townscapes of Minsk and Astana”, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 69, 2017
8 “We see here a model social state like the one we are trying to create”, said the great man. “Chávez Forges Ties with Belarus”, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/5209868.stm. For an outlandish account of Belarusian “socialism”, see Stewart Parker, The Last Soviet Republic – Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus (Trafford, 2007), though perhaps not more absurd than the “darkest Belarus” trope.
9 The imprisonment and violence at worst and surveillance at best that dissidents have to face is of course real, just as the near-full employment and readily available mass housing are real. But for an example of unintentionally hilarious credulity, see the Guardian’s Lyn Gardener repeating as gospel the Belarus Free Theatre’s (tongue-in-cheek) claim that there is a set legal time limit in which people can look at each other in Minsk’s public spaces. “Minsk 2011 – Review”, Guardian, 24 October 2011
Life in the Twenty-First Century:
Moscow, Moskwa
1 For an account of this melancholy period in the VDNKh’s history and what it said of the society that made it and that it existed in, see Svetlana Stephenson and Elena Danilova, “Down to Earth”, Radical Philosophy, Issue 159, January/February 2010. For a “schizoanalysis” of the place, see Andrey Monastyrsky’s 1986, “VDNKh, Capital of the World”, in Elena Zaytseva and Alex Anikina (eds), Cosmic Shift – Russian Contemporary Art Writing (Zed, 2017)
2 I discuss the replanning of Moscow as an imperial capital in my Landscapes of Communism, but the best introduction is Karl Schlogel’s Moscow (Reaktion, 2005)
3 Invited to lecture at the Strelka Institute of Architecture in 2011, I asked if there was a route from the airport to the school I could take. They insisted on booking me a taxi. It took two hours. On my way back, I took the Metro and the Airport Express, and got there in 25 minutes.
4 The last chapter of Richard Anderson’s Russia – Modern Architectures in History (Reaktion, 2015), is useful on the post-Soviet career of the likes of Mosproekt-2 and Mikhail Posokhin.
5 This building and others like it are given a rather more forgiving assessment in Bart Goldhoorn and Philipp Meuser, Capitalist Realism – New Architecture in Russia (Dom, 2009)
6 Full disclosure: I published a book with Strelka’s press, Across the Plaza, on public space, in 2012.
7 For an excellent short critique of how the project has revealed the city’s Stalinist face, see Clementine Cecil, “The New Moscow: Clean n Mean”, October 2016, at her blog Onion Domes on Golden Lane http://clementinececil.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/the-new-moscow-clean-n-mean.html
8 “Russians Rebel Against Plans to Tear Down Their Homes”, Economist, May 2017 https://www.economist.com/news/europe/21721642-even-apolitical-muscovites-are-up-arms-russians-rebel-against-plans-tear-down-their-homes
9 M. Vassilev and S. Gouchev, Life in the Twenty-First Century (Penguin, 1961), pp. 162-3
10 Bee Flowers, “What’s Wrong With This Approach, Comrades?”, Architectural Design, No. 179, Vol. 76, No. 1, 2006
11 Philipp Meuser and Dimitrij Zadorin, Towards a Typology of Mass Housing in the USSR (Dom, 2016)
12 Kuba Snopek, Belyayevo Forever (Strelka, 2013), p. 13
13 Ibid, p. 77
14 Alexei Gutnov, et al, The Ideal Communist City (Braziller, 1968), p. 153
15 Ibid, p. 156
16 Ibid, p. 145
17 Ibid, p. 34
18 Ibid, p. 87
19 Ibid, p. 158
20 Lynne Attwood, Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia (Manchester, 2010), p. 170
21 Ibid, p. 155
22 Ibid, p. 157
23 Ibid, p. 207; and see Abel Aganbegyan, Challenge – The Economics of Perestroika (IB Tauris, 1988)
24 See Anna Bronovitskaya and Olga Kazakova, Leonid Pavlov (Electa, 2015), p. 198
25 Snopek, Belyayevo Forever, pp. 48-9
26 On this building, see Richard Anderson, Russia – Modern Architectures in History (Reaktion 2015), pp. 226-8
27 Meuser and Zadorin, Towards a Typology of Mass Housing in the USSR, pp. 434
28 Ibid, p. 345
29 For a comprehensive and rightly heavily critical analysis of this construction boom, largely reliant on the sweated labour of Central Asian migrants rather than automation (people are cheaper), see The Russian Reader, “A Home For Every Russian”, https://therussianreader.wordpress.com/2015/05/03/a-home-for-every-russian/
30 Flowers, “What’s Wrong With This Approach, Comrades?”
A Week in the Kremlin:
Nizhny Novgorod, Gorky
1 I discuss Avtozavod at some length in my Landscapes of Communism (Allen Lane, 2015)
The Architecture of Sovereignty:
Kazan, Qazan
1 On this and much else, Helen M Faller’s National, Language, Islam – Tatarstan’s Sovereignty Movement (Central European University, 2011) which makes fascinating reading.
Constructivist Capital:
Yekaterinburg, Sverdlovsk
1 It was finally demolished in 2018 in “preparation for the World Cup”, to much protest.
2 For an English-language piece on this, see Dmitry Lebedev, “Our City, Our Space”, openDemocracy, 26 April 2017, at https://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/our-city-our-space-ekaterinburg-residents-come-out-against-plans-to-construct-new-church
3 For a study with particular attention to public space, see Mikhail Ilchenko, “Green Utopia of the Uralmash – Institutional Effects and Symbolic Meaning”, Critical Housing Analysis, Vol. 3, Issue 2, 2016
Part Four: The Eastern Periphery
Brand Georgia:
Kutaisi, Kutais
1 Eric Lee, The Experiment – Georgia’s Forgotten Revolution, 1918-1921 (Zed, 2017). A more hostile, and in many ways more convincing, account of the Menshevik republic can be found in Alex Marshall, The Caucasus Under Soviet Rule (Routledge, 2010)
2 Quoted repeatedly in Leon Trotsky’s often questionable justification for the Georgian invasion, Social Democracy and the Wars of Intervention (New Park, 1975)
3 I owe this fact to a paper given by Nano Zazanashvili in Yerevan in October 2017.
4 Branko Milanović, “For Whom the Wall Fell?”, Globalist, 7 November 2014, https://www.theglobalist.com/for-whom-the-wall-fell-a-balance-sheet-of-the-transition-to-capitalism/
An Exhibition of Achievements:
Tbilisi, Tiflis
1 Joanna Warsza, Ministry of Highways – The Performative Architecture of Tbilisi (Sternberg Press, 2014), pp. 27-8
2 The romantic version: Joanna Warsza (ed.), Kamikaze Loggia – the Georgian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale (Ministry of Culture and Monument Protection of Georgia, 2013); the factual reasons behind it: Rusudan Mirzikashvili, “Everybody’s Favourite”, in Ritter, et al, Soviet Modernism (Park Books, 2012). Both are worth reading.
3 Among the many virtues of Georgi Derlugian’s wonderful Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus (University of Chicago, 2005) is its analysis of these under-investigated sides of the USSR and its collapse.
From the Purges to Paradise:
Sevan Writers’ Resort, Sevanavank
1 Osip Mandelstam, Journey to Armenia (Notting Hill Editions, 2011), pp. 45-47
2 Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned (Penguin, 1976), p. 610
3 Vasily Grossman, An Armenian Sketchbook (Maclehose Press, 2013), p. 8
4 I owe this reference to “The Mountains are Still Very Wild”, at the Chichikir blog, 22 April 2014, at https://chichikir.wordpress.com/2014/04/22/the-mountains-are-still-very-wild/
5 I owe these details to the exhibition, but an English language article touching on this: Ruben Arevshatyan, “An Architecture of Paradoxical Shifts”, in Ritter, et al, Soviet Modernism (Park Books, 2012).
Mysterious Cities of Pink and Gold:
Yerevan, Erevan, Erebuni
1 On the genocide, see Ronald Grigor Suny, They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else (Princeton 2015); on the Soviet takeover, Marshall, The Caucasus Under Soviet Rule (Routledge, 2010).
2 A good English source here: Karen Balian, “The City Overlooking Ararat”, Fabrikzeitung, 1 May 2017, at http://www.fabrikzeitung.ch/the-city-overlooking-ararat/
3 Zhanna Andreasyan and Georgi Derlugian, “Fuel Protests in Armenia”, New Left Review, September-October 2015
4 A terrific piece on this project: Ruben Arevshatyan, “Blank Zones in the Collective Memory, or the Transformation of Yerevan’s Urban Space in the 60s”, Red Thread, Issue 2, 2010, and at http://www.red-thread.org/en/article.asp?a=33
5 At the time of writing, this has just been followed by a vastly more impressive victory of the same civil movements – mass demonstrations have forced the resignation of Serzh Sargsyan, who was widely considered a potential Putin, Nazabayev or Lukashenka. It is too early to say what the upshot of this will be, but the protesters’ avoidance of geopolitics or invocations of ‘Europe’ suggests they learned some wise lessons from the aftermath of the overthrow of Yanukovych in Ukraine.
1 See the “Moscow” chapter above.
2 Caroline Erin Elkin, “The Image of the Gorod-Sad: Searching for Howard’s Garden City in Almaty”, Tom, No. 3, 2016
3 Quoted in N. Berkova, “Vanishing Landscape – Soviet Alma-Ata from the Viewpoint of Documentary Film-Makers”, Tom, No. 3, 2016, p. 3
4 Yuliya Sorokina, “Ghost of a Garden City”, in Ritter, et al, Soviet Modernism (Park Books, 2012), p. 179
5 Yuri Dombrovsky, The Keeper of Antiquities (Longmans, 1969), p. 3
6 Ibid, p. 18
7 Ibid, p. 226
8 Alexander Wat, My Century (NYRB, 2003), p. 313
A City of the Future:
Astana, Akmolinsk, Tselinograd, Aqmola
1 R.W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933 (Palgrave, 2004)
2 For an informative journalistic account of immediately post-Soviet Kazakhstan that concentrates overwhelmingly on the Russian demographic “threat”, see Dilip Hiro, Between Marx and Muhammad – the Changing Face of Central Asia (HarperCollins, 1995)
3 Philipp Meuser, Astana Architectural Guide (Dom, 2016), p. 158
4 Astana Architecture Guide, p. 107
5 Explore this, and much else, on Albo’s site, https://www.astanamyth.com/
6 Nari Shelekpayev, “A French Welcome to the Kazakh Capital”, Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty, 22 January 2016, at https://www.rferl.org/a/a-french-welcome-to-astana/27505708.html
7 Astana Expo-2017 Future Energy (Bureau International de l’Expositions, 2017), p. 4
8 Goran Therborn, Cities of Power – The Urban, the National, the Popular, the Global (Verso 2017), p. 353
9 Ibid, p.354
“Where Our Tomorrow is Already Yesterday”:
Bishkek, Frunze, Pishpek
1 This work was recently translated – Selim Khan-Magomedov, Georgy Krutikov, The Flying City and Beyond (Tenov, 2015)
2 This is available in English at The Kids Want Communism,https://tkwc.tumblr.com/post/147186458225/queer-in-space-kollontai-commune-archive-%D1%81
3 ShTAB, “Manifesto of Queer Communism”, at http://www.art-initiatives.org/ru/content/manifest-kvir-kommunizma-2013
4 “Manifesto of Queer Communism”. This is an analysis close to that of recent historians on how the ambitious Kollontai’s ideas about free sexual choice foundered on a banal “materialism” seeing the body as a mere reproductive machine – see for instance Gregory Bateson, Sexual Revolution in Bolshevik Russia (Pittsburgh, 2010) or Dan Healey, Bolshevik Sexual Forensics (Northern Illinois University Press 2009)
5 Georgy Mamedov and Oksana Shatalova, “Against Simple Answers” (2017) at http://artseverywhere.ca/2017/08/17/against-simple-answers/
6 Georgy Mamedov and Oksana Shatalova, ‘Queer Communism is an Ethics’ in Ingo Niermann and Joshua Simon, Communists Anonymous (Sternberg Press, 2017), p. 90
7 An English version of one, Ursula Le Guin-like, heavily homoerotic story: Synat Sultanalieva, “Element 174”, at The Calvert Journal (2018), at https://www.calvertjournal.com/features/show/9831
8 Ben Lewis and Lars T. Lih, Zinoviev and Martov Head to Head in Halle (November Publications, 2011); they’re referring to the Soviet attempts to bring anti-colonial movements into the Communist International. See the minutes of the 1920 Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East (New Park, 1977)
9 V. Vitkovich, Kirghizia Today (Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), p. 18
10 Sam Tranum (ed.) Life at the Edge of the Empire – Oral Histories of Soviet Kyrgyzstan (American University of Central Asia, 2012), p. 91
11 Ibid., p. 66. Recent revisionist histories against the simple ‘colonial’ paradigm include Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan (Cornell, 2015) and Ali Igmen, Speaking Soviet with an Accent (Pittsburgh, 2012)
12 The speaker is a dancer, Galina Timoshenko; Ibid., p. 51
13 Mohira Suyarkulova, “Soviet Frunze – a Centre for Space Research?”, 1st Feb 17, available at http://cesmi.info/wp/?p=1460
14 This delightful bit of racism comes from Czeslaw Milosz’s 1951 The Captive Mind (Vintage, 1981), p. 19
15 Samuel Goff, “Empire State of Mind”, The Calvert Journal, October 2017, at https://www.calvertjournal.com/features/show/8287/revisiting-revolution-empire-state-of-mind-legacy-central-asia
16 Vitkovich, Kirghizia Today, p. 243