On Soviet Occidentalism, Empire, and Modernity (with Volodymyr Ryzhkovskyi)

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, “empire” and “modernity” have been proposed as particularly useful frameworks for the comparatively oriented and globally relevant research on Russia and the Soviet Union. Surprisingly enough, there was little exchange and cross-traffic between these two major clusters of innovation in the field of Russian and Soviet studies. By introducing the concept of Soviet Occidentalism, the talk aims to demonstrate the productivity of staging the encounter between the analytical paradigms of “empire” and “modernity,” while highlighting the potential of postcolonial and decolonial perspectives in doing so.