Bard College Berlin News
Soviet Paradoxes: A Day of Investigation
In theory, and in ideological claim, Communism was internationalist in ambition and outlook. In practice, Soviet Communism both intentionally and inadvertently fostered national and ethnic differences and divisions. The ethnic conflicts which emerged in its aftermath reflected this fraught history as much as they signaled conditions of state collapse. Furthermore, the Soviet Empire, though professing decolonial commitments, was in many ways a continuation of Tsarism. Speakers considered a range of contexts, from countries and regions within the Soviet Union (Ukraine, Chechnya, Tatarstan), to nation states of the Eastern Bloc (Poland, Bulgaria) to the distinctive nonaligned multicounty socialism of Yugoslavia. They also addressed the issue of the treatment of minority ethnicities in the USSR: the persecution of Jewish populations, and the nature, purpose and effects of the policy of supporting students from actual or potential Soviet-allied countries in Africa and the Middle East to study at Russian universities from the late 1950s.
The larger goal of the conference, as Professor Atanassow explained, was “to consider what the Communist experience can teach us about the nature and historical evolution of political modernity, and about the fundamental dilemmas of modern society. One such dilemma, which every modern polity has to face, is reconciling the core modern value of equality with cultural and sociological diversity. Communism promised to resolve this dilemma, yet was in a sense dissolved by it.”
Contributions spanned the fields of political science and sociology to art history and literature. In terms of chronology, the papers ranged from the early phase of revolutionary optimism (which attracted adherents from around the world) to the insularity and escalating repression of the 1930s, to post-1945 Cold War competition. Joshua Yaffa, Writer-in-Residence at BCB, spoke about the life story of the African-American activist and Comintern member Lovett Fort-Whiteman (b. 1889); Denis Skopin, in his study of Vladimir Aboltin’s photographs of Ghana, explained the simultaneous mistrust and exploitation of Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanism on the part of the Russian state.
A particular highlight for Bard College Berlin was the return of alumna Una Blagojević (Class of 2013), PhD graduate in Comparative History from Central European University and now an Affiliated Researcher in the ERC-project “The History of Feminist Political Thought and Women’s Rights Discourses in East Central Europe, 1919-2001,” hosted at the University of Vienna. Her conference paper “‘Is nationalism our destiny?’ Yugoslav Marxist Humanism, Self-Government, and the National Question” invited a comparison of the Soviet state with Yugoslavia’s alternative approach to state socialism.
The faculty and students of Bard College Berlin welcome the announcement that Ukrainian scholar Ostap Sereda will continue at BCB next year, supported by the Threatened Scholars Integration Initiative of the Open Society Foundations. Sereda leads the Invisible University for Ukraine program, and gave a paper related to his current research, “Rethinking Soviet Ukraine in American Academia. Was there a ‘revisionist turn’ in Ukrainian studies during the ‘Cold War’?”
At the conclusion of the conference, participants gathered at Metis Books and Café in Prenzlauer Berg to hear a conversation between Berit Ebert and the German novelist and journalist Khuê Phạm, who was born in West Berlin to parents from South Vietnam. With relatives who remained in Vietnam as well as family in California, Khuê Phạm investigated the silences and traumas inflicted by extreme violence, political division, displacement, and socio-economic struggle. Having grown up in the 1990s, she also observed the emergence of Germany from its Cold War division, and the increase in incidents of racist attacks that accompanied this transition. She warned against regression to that period, while counselling awareness that “society is not always as we would like it to be.” With Alice Bota and Özlem Topçu, Khuê Phạm is the author of the book Wir neuen Deutschen: Wer wir sind, was wir wollen (2012). Her novel Wo auch immer ihr seid (2021) is available in English translation as Ghosts and Brothers (2024).
The conference on National Internationalism was organized by Bard College Berlin, Smolny Beyond Borders, and the European Democracy Institute, with the support of Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur.
Post Date: 04-30-2026