Writing about former colonies of the Russian Empire, they traced imperial violence to merchant and industrial capitalism and sought to bring indigenous voices into debates about colonialism and its legacies while maintaining a firmly class-based analysis. Drawing on a co-edited volume of newly translated texts, the talk explores the originality and militancy of this scholarship. Early Soviet Marxist historians believed that decolonization required a complete break with Russia’s imperial historical narrative. Their work offers a powerful, if politically complicated, resource for rethinking Russian imperialism, settler colonialism, and the uses of history today.

Alexey Golubev is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Houston, where he teaches modern Russian and European history. He received his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia, held research fellowships at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the University of Toronto, and previously taught at Petrozavodsk State University in Russia. He is the author of The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia (Cornell University Press, 2020) and, with Irina Takala, The Search for a Socialist El Dorado: Finnish Immigration from the United States and Canada to Soviet Karelia in the 1930s (Michigan State University Press, 2014). His current projects examine early Soviet anticolonial historiography and the public communication of science and politics in the Cold War USSR.

The talk will be followed by questions from our colleague Dr Mansur Gazimzianov, after which the floor will open for discussion. 

Please write to Sudha Rajagopalan (s.rajagopalan@uva.nl) to register for the event. Registered participants will receive pre-publication drafts in advance to facilitate and inform the conversation.