Event time:
Wednesday, March 26, 2025 - 3:00pm
Location:
HQ room 136
Event description:
During the Gorbachev era, “writer-activists” became key figures in the emerging world of Soviet politics. This talk will analyze the activism of Soviet writers around environmental and language issues during this crucial period in Soviet history. Emboldened by the activism of Russian Village Prose writers and galvanized by the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, non-Russian writers began to champion environmental causes. Events in the republics began to spiral out of control, however, when intellectuals also began advocating for raising the status of non-Russian languages. Writers’ Unions in republics like Ukraine and Moldova quickly became hotbeds of nationalist political organizing. This talk argues that writers’ activism hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union by delegitimizing Communist Party rule and presenting the nation as a morally superior alternative to the crumbling USSR.
Dr. Erin Hutchinson is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder. She studies the cultural and political history of the Soviet Union, particularly focusing on the politics of nationality and empire. Her book project, Writing the Nation after Stalin: How Soviet Cultural Politics Produced Nationalism, explores how intellectuals, especially those of rural origins, sought to transform cultural understandings of the nation in the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin.