Guest: Erin Hutchinson on her award-winning article, “Gathering the Nation in the Village: Intellectuals and the Cultural Politics of Nationality in the Late Soviet Period” in the January 2023 issue of the Russian Review. The post Soviet DIY Folk Museums appeared first on The Eurasian Knot.
In the 1960s, Soviet intellectuals began creating do-it-yourself museums to preserve national folk cultures. They scoured village attics, abandoned churches, and rural homes to gather artifacts. In a recent article in the Russian Review, Erin Hutchinson tells the story of three of them–the Russian writer Vladimir Soloukhin’s efforts to collect religious icons, the Ukrainian artist Ivan Honchar’s mission to hunt down folk art, and the Gagauz poet Dmitri Kara Coban’s efforts to preserve Gagauz artifacts in Moldova. All three were dissatisfied with how the Soviet state represented their national cultures in official museums, viewing them as ideologically distorted or incomplete. Why did and how did they do this? What was the point and larger meaning of their DIY museums? And what was their fate? To get answers, the Eurasian Knot spoke to Erin Hutchinson to discuss her prize-winning article, “Gathering the Nation in the Village: Intellectuals and the Cultural Politics of Nationality in the Late Soviet Period” in the January 2023 issue of the Russian Review.
Guest:
Erin Hutchinson is an Assistant Professor at the Department of History, University of Colorado Boulder. Her research focuses on the cultural and political history of the Soviet Union, with a particular focus on the topics of nationality and empire. Her book project, Writing the Nation after Stalin explores the development of nationalism in Soviet culture after the death of Stalin. She recently won the Eve Levin Prize for the best article for “Gathering the Nation in the Village: Intellectuals and the Cultural Politics of Nationality in the Late Soviet Period” in the January 2023 issue of the Russian Review.
Send us your sounds! euraknot.org/contact/
Patreon: www.patreon.com/euraknot
Knotty News: eurasianknot.substack.com/
Website: euraknot.org/