Soviet Materialities

How did matter matter in the Soviet world? Soviet materialities rethinks the relationship between humans, things, and environments in the Soviet Union, moving beyond a simple study of objects made in the USSR to explore how materials shaped social life, ideology, and identity. It calls for a fresh approach to materiality, one that recognises the mutual formation of people and their material surroundings under Soviet socialism.

Bringing together a selection of original and interdisciplinary scholarship, its case studies range from the Turksib railway built across the Kazakh steppe to a collection of pickled brains, from the literal and metaphorical explosions of gelatine printing to an atheist museum built in a Sufi shrine in Uzbekistan, and from heirloom jewellery sold for survival during famine in Ukraine to the experimental performances of Conceptualist artists.

Drawing on affect theory, environmental history, the history of the everyday--and the theoretical interventions of New Materialism more broadly--Soviet materialities uncovers how distinct ways of understanding and conceptualising matter emerged in the ideological and historical contexts of the Soviet Union. Bridging history, literature, anthropology, art history and environmental humanities, this book argues that materiality offers a groundbreaking methodological toolkit for rethinking the Soviet past through material relations.

Mollie Arbuthnot is Assistant Professor of History at Nazarbayev University
Christianna Bonin is Assistant Professor of Art History and Theory at American University of Sharjah
Gabriella A. Ferrari is an independent scholar of Russian and Soviet visual culture