Lecture

Presenting Bulgaria’s cultural engagements with multiple actors in the Third World, this talk by Dr. Theodora Dragostinova (Ohio State University) highlights the global reach of state socialism, demonstrates the existence of vibrant partnerships along an East-South axis during the 1970s, and challenges notions of late socialism as the prelude to communist collapse in eastern Europe.

Zoom registration: https://osu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_tXaeNufPSGKoJM2a3-WIXQ

Presenters: Sean Cotter (University of Texas, Dallas), Emanuela Grama (Carnegie Mellon University) and Bogdan Suceava (California State, Fullerton)

Moderated by Adreea Ritivoi (Carnegie Mellon University)

In the summer of 2019, Hong Kong-- former British colony, current special administrative region of the People's Republic of China-- was swept up by a large, sustained protest movement. The spark that lit this "revolution of our time" as protestors have deemed it was an extradition treaty with China, but quickly evolved into a broader movement for a more democratically representative government and autonomy from the People's Republic of China.

The 1960s and 1970s were a boon for Soviet film. After decades of fits and starts film production. Moviegoers flocked to the theaters. True, Soviet filmmakers leapt over hurdles to make art in an authoritarian society. But while the Brezhnev era of Soviet filmmaking is often depicted as a period of great repression, the films out of the prestigious Lenfilm studio were far more imaginative than assumed. How did a new generation of Soviet filmmakers reconcile contradictory demands to make sophisticated and highly original movies?

What made Soviet people "soviet"? This question has dogged scholars for decades. But one innovative approach to digging into the "soviet" of Soviet life is through material objects and spaces during the late socialist era. Soviet things influenced Soviet people's gender roles, habitual choices, social trajectories, and imaginary aspirations. And, in turn, Soviet people used objects to shape their sense of self as part of a global experience of modernity that went beyond communist propaganda. How did objects make Soviet people and society "Soviet"?

Did you know that there were hippies in the USSR? There were. Faced with societal scorn and repression, Soviet hippies created a version of Western counterculture in and despite late Soviet realities that linked them youth cultures beyond the Iron Curtain. How did these Soviet long-hairs defy police harassment, survive psychiatric hospitals force feeding conformism, and social stigma? This live interview with Juliane Furst will delve into the story of Soviet hippies and how they ironically meshed with Soviet life.

The Cold War is often narrowly viewed as a binary struggle: The US versus the USSR. But what did the Cold War look like from the perspective of a small socialist state—Bulgaria—and its cultural engagements with the Balkans, the West, and the Third World? In the 1970s, Bulgaria's communist leadership invested heavily in cultural diplomacy to bolster its legitimacy at home and promote its agendas abroad.

The relationship between the Soviet Union and revolutionary Cuba was a flash point in the Cold War. Soviet aid played a critical role in Cuba—but not without controversy. The Cuban Revolution was born out of a drive to rid itself of imperialist intervention and foreign control. So how did Cuba reconcile the need for Soviet support with efforts to avoid dependency? Soviet-Cuban scientific exchanges were one key area where this tension played out.

Beginning in the early 1960s, the Soviet Union opened its doors to Third World students to study in its universities. The Soviets even established a special university for foreign exchange students, the People’s Friendship University. Tens of thousands came over the next two decades, an ample portion of which were from Africa. What was the experience of African students, many from newly decolonized states with middle class and elite backgrounds, in the Second World? How did Soviet people regard them?

Disability activism developed in the second half of the twentieth century in a world divided by the Cold War. While the history of how Western activists learned to speak in the language of civil rights is well documented and publicly celebrated, the legacies of activists from the socialist countries have been largely erased after the collapse of the communist governments in 1989-1991.