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Osteuropäische Geschichte (Professur Schenk)

Projects & Collaborations

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Metropolises of the Periphery: Imperial Visions and Local Dynamics of Urban Modernisation in Vilnius, Tbilisi and Tashkent, 1865–1914

Research Project  | 1 Project Members

Since 2022, Russia's war against Ukraine has led to a fundamental reassessment of established paradigms of East European studies and imperial history. Starting in the 1990s, the paradigm of 'New Imperial History' had attempted to emancipate historical research on empires from a critical theory of 'imperialism': From this perspective, empires should not be seen as 'prisons of nations' but rather as at least temporarily successful models of organising economic and cultural interaction under the conditions of ethnic heterogeneity. Today, power asymmetries between the centre and the peripheries of empires as well as the role of political violence in maintaining imperial rule are increasingly coming into focus again. Furthermore, many historians of Eastern Europe have argued under the heading of 'decolonisation' that the historiography of empires should pay more attention to the perspectives of people at imperial peripheries instead of focusing on the discourse of elites in the centre.

My second book project draws on these recent impulses by aiming to shed new light on the history of urban modernisation in the late Russian Empire through a comparative study of developmental dynamics in three cities at different imperial peripheries – Vilnius, Tbilisi, and Tashkent. In contrast to traditional approaches, I understand 'modernisation' not as a linear process with a clearly defined goal but as a discursive construct that was of central importance for strategies of legitimation – as well as delegitimation – of imperial rule: Actors of the imperial centre used successfully implemented urban development projects as evidence for their purported civilisational superiority and thus for the legitimacy of their rule. This could amount to an equation of 'modernisation' and 'Russification'. Peripheral actors, on the other hand, could challenge these discursive hierarchies by constructing their local cultures as superior, by pointing to their own initiatives of 'modernisation', or by criticising the concept of 'modernisation' itself. In connection with this level of discursive history, the project examines practices of urban 'modernisation' which developed in the often conflict-ridden interplay of central and local initiatives and included political/administrative as well as economic/infrastructural and cultural aspects.

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Gender and nation in the biographical interpretations of Lesya Ukrainka's life and works: Ukraine-Russian Empire-USSR, 1898-2022

Research Project  | 2 Project Members

Lesya Ukrainka (1871-1913) is undoubtedly the most significant figure in Ukrainian women's literature: her works are full of both mythical and historical heroines torn between tradition and modernity; she wrote comparative studies on the European women's literature of her time; and she has played (and still plays) a major role in feminine and Ukrainian emancipations. Due to her emancipatory ideas, Ukrainka's works enjoyed unparalleled popularity during the Russian Empire, in the USSR and in post-1991 Ukraine. But they have been the subject of contradictory interpretations. The aim of this project is therefore to understand how biographical studies of Ukrainka have transformed her into a mythical figure who is a projection of the dominant ideologies of the three aforementioned eras. The project has three aims: 1) to improve the analysis of the status of gender and national issues in biographical studies of Ukrainka; 2) to build a classification of the types of biographical interpretations and the rhetorical, comparative and intertextual tools used to construct them; 3) to make our analytical models applicable to other writers. We will use a methodology at the crossroads of three disciplines (comparative literature; Eastern European history; Slavistics) and two transdisciplinary fields (women's/gender studies; post-imperial studies). The project will raise awareness of Ukrainian literature and the works of Ukrainka, which continue to have a significant impact on the development of the idea of the emancipation of women and "small" nations.

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Red Tower of Babel: Soviet minorities experiment in interwar Ukraine

Research Project  | 3 Project Members

This project aims to examine a unique minorities experiment as implemented by the Soviet government during the 1920s. It was designed to propagate national differences and provide each ethnic group with equal access to state and party institutions, judicial defence, and education in native languages. By employing this strategy, Soviet leadership aimed to secure the loyalty of its ethnically diverse population, and engage them in its socialist project. But those policies had the opposite effect. In less than a decade Soviet authorities reversed their policies and respond with violence, subjecting its minority populations to Russification and assimilation, ethnic terror, and deportations. The proposed project builds upon the existing scholarship to provide a unique account of the Soviet minority experiment as designed and implemented during the 1920s-early 1930s within the borders of Soviet Ukraine. Soviet Ukraine served as a trendsetting laboratory for Soviet minorities policy Union-wide. While few existing studies look at certain minority groups, this research aims to provide a first-of-its-kind comprehensive study of the Soviet minority regime based on a variety of primary sources both from central and local archives. The Soviet minorities policies are set against the contemporary international attempts to provide protection and guarantee the legal and cultural status of national minorities under the Versailles system and the League of Nations. Unlike most studies on the Soviet nationality policy, this project makes Soviet ethnic minorities its primary focus, scrutinising the Soviet minority experiment at various levels of power, from top to bottom. At the top level, it looks at the state strategies to organise the society along ethnic lines; at the middle local level, it studies how local party officials and minority specialists translated the state-imposed vision of ethnic proliferation to the local conditions. Lastly, at the bottom level, it looks at the way education and cultural workers adapted and carried out those programmes on the ground and investigates how people digested the new ethnic regime and adapted (if at all) their everyday life to the new expectations. The study is centred around the examination of three main strategies of the Soviet government that concerned national minorities (the strategy of a Soviet 'civilising mission', the strategy of ethnic proliferation, and the strategy of ethnic equalisation). The primary material gathered by the project, combined with its theoretical framing and comprehensive perspective, will form a significant and original contribution to the historiography of the Soviet and Eastern European interwar-period studies.

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Staatliche Erinnerung an den Großen Vaterländischen Krieg und die Oktoberrevolution am sowjetischen Staatsfeiertag (1945-1987). Verschränkte Narrative und Aussenkommunikation im Kalten Krieg

PhD Project  | 2 Project Members

Das Dissertationsprojekt widmet sich der Geschichte sowjetischer Staatsfeiertage in der Nachkriegszeit. Am Beispiel der Feiertage der Großen Sozialistischen Oktoberrevolution (7. November) und des Sieges im „Großen Vaterländischen Krieg“ (9. Mai) soll gezeigt werden, wie die sowjetische politische Führung die Erinnerung an diese beiden für das sowjetische Projekt wichtigen Ereignisse konstruierte und versuchte, den Staatsfeiertag zur Lösung eigener, überwiegend außenpolitischer Probleme zu nutzen. Ziel des Projektes ist es, anhand der Analyse der beiden Erinnerungsprojekte zu zeigen, wie sich der Charakter des Staatsfeiertages nach dem Krieg veränderte. Der Fokus wird dabei auf die Analyse der Feierlichkeiten, insbesondere der Militärparaden auf dem Roten Platz, zwischen Mitte der 1940er Jahre und Ende der 1980er gelegt. Das Projekt befindet sich an der Schnittstelle von politischer Geschichte und Geschichtspolitik und konzentriert sich auf die Erforschung der Bemühungen des Staates, Feiertage und staatliche Gedenkprojekte zu gestalten und zu nutzen.

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Bicycle Mobility in Ukraine (1890-1990)

Research Project  | 2 Project Members

Cycling has played an essential role in daily life, commute, and material culture of Ukraine. In many of its areas, this has been the only affordable means of mechanical transport throughout the XX century. With a bike, people traveled to work, transported goods, and made new contacts in distant areas. The state managed the distribution of bicycles and used it at war. Nevertheless, the visions of modernizing the country focused on motorized vehicles. Despite its ubiquity, the bicycle got often discarded as a childish toy. First of all, my book project aims at making visible diverse historical experiences of using the bike for transport. From the time when bicycles appeared on the streets of Eastern Europe, the social profile of cycling and its intended use had changed dramatically. In my book, I would like to show how cycling originated as an act of conspicuous consumption by the Imperial elites in the Habsburg Monarchy and Russian Empire, and then gradually turned into a tool to make ends meet in the Socialist economy of peasants and workers. The book will be sensitive to gender, age, and ethnic aspects of cycling, trying to answer the critical questions of who cycled and for what purposes. Second, I would like to present cycling as a social construction . State authorities and political activists, traders, and consumers engaged in the process of debating aspects of cycling far before the local society learned to produce it. Although the first bicycles were imported together with new ideas of bodily conduct and culture of leisure, the local community appropriated the new commodity in its own ways. The state regulated traffic, taxed the cyclists, and regulated activities of the cycling associations. In turn, the users of the bicycles lobbied their own solutions for the set-up of public space. Using examples from the wartime and interwar period, I will show how the bicycle was put into the service by the Soviet State. In particular, I will show how the bicycle was regarded to be a public good, not a means for use in private purposes. Signed by Stalin's top-managers, Molotov and Kuybyshev, the state plans for production and distribution of bicycles reflected the idea that the bicycle should have been used primarily by party activists, administrative officials, military, customs control, doctors, mail carriers, and athletes. Moreover, the meager offer of bicycles for sale was open primarily to industrial regions and big cities, discriminating republics like Belarus or Tadzhikistan. Meant for the state, the bikes were mobilized to the Red Army twice in 1919 and 1939. Limiting cycling mobility has also been one of the aspects of Nazi terror in the occupied territories. The Nazi administration issued own rules about registration of bicycles and traffic, and eventually confiscated the bikes in most areas of today's Ukraine. At the same time, the bicycle appeared as a propagandist image for potential Ostarbeiters. The latter were encouraged to go to Germany, learn to cycle, and use the bike for everyday life together with the rest of Germans. After the end of World War II, the Soviet Union turned the production of bicycles to over 1 million per year. That meant that workers and peasants could finally afford the tool. Despite the ubiquity of the bicycle 1950-1980s, the official press did not cover the phenomenon of cycling in small cities and villages very much. Instead, the media focused on providing public transport, developing new models of motorized vehicles, etc. The local communities in areas outside large urban centers developed their own scenarios of cycling. The bicycle was a tool to broaden their mobility patterns so that one could reach neighboring settlements for business and private purposes, deliver deficit goods, attend a dance club, or find a spouse. Using the tools of oral history, I plan to describe the everyday practices and conceptions of cycling in areas with sparse connections of public transport. Last, but not least, I plan to present cycling in Ukraine as part of global phenomena . Several cases would exemplify connections between cycling cultures internationally. I will use an example of Columbia bicycles, manufactured in the late XIX century in Connecticut, USA, to show how the producers, agents, and consumers engaged in promoting a new practice of cycling. I will compare the numbers of production and distribution of bicycles in the Soviet Union to those in the USA, Western Europe, and China. I will show how the German equipment for bicycle production, paid as war reparations in 1947, stimulated new turn in Soviet bicycle production and use. In terms of cycling, Ukraine historically has had similarities to other parts of the world. Therefore I see this research as a way to produce a better understanding of micromobility worldwide.