Soviet Materiality and its Ruins

Summary

To borrow Yuri Slezkine’s formulation, "the Soviet Union was an empire—in the sense of being very big, bad, asymmetrical, hierarchical, heterogeneous, and doomed". In this it differed little from the early empires that have long held archaeology’s attention. But unlike its precursors, the U.S.S.R. was guided by a political ideology premised vigorously on the relationship between humans and things—between labor, the non-human inputs of production, and property. Imperial sovereignty rested on profound material dependencies that stitched the multiethnic "federation" together, while the individual Soviet subject was forged out of the proverbial hammer and sickle. As with all empires, the promised utopia never arrived, and the Marxist-Leninist "mattering" of politics came at a terrible human and environmental cost. The doom of this bold endeavor is palpable today in the physical ruins of Soviet socialism, which haunt the archaeological record of the contemporary past across Eurasia. Based on preliminary survey, ethnography, and archival research, this paper represents a foray into Soviet materiality and its afterlife, taking as its touchstone the former Soviet republic of Armenia and the industrial ruins that litter its urban and rural landscapes. What is to be done with imperial debris?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 19978