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The major part of this book project was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 700913.
This book is about two distinct but related professional cultures in late Soviet
Russia that were concerned with material objects: industrial design and
decorative art. The Russian avant-garde of the 1920s is broadly recognised to
have been Russia’s first truly original contribution to world culture. In
contrast, Soviet design of the post-war period is often dismissed as hackwork
and plagiarism that resulted in a shabby world of commodities. This book
identifies the second historical attempt at creating a powerful alternative to
capitalist commodities in the Cold War era. It offers a new perspective on the
history of Soviet material culture by focusing on the notion of the ‘comradely
object’ as an agent of progressive social relations that state-sponsored Soviet
design inherited from the avant-garde. It introduces a shared history of
domestic objects, handmade as well as machine-made, mass-produced as well as
unique, utilitarian as well as challenging the conventional notion of utility.
Situated at the intersection of intellectual history, social history and
material culture studies, this book elucidates the complexities and
contradictions of Soviet design that echoed international tendencies of the late
twentieth century. The book is addressed to design historians, art historians,
scholars of material culture, historians of Russia and the USSR, as well as
museum and gallery curators, artists and designers, and the broader public
interested in modern aesthetics, art and design, and/or the legacy of socialist
regimes.
socialism, as in the realm of post-socialist studies there has been an increased interest in examining the rise and fall of socialism in Eastern Europe in generational terms.10 By analysing a particular social group, it is possible to view the exit from socialism in other ways and challenge the teleological accounts of socialism’s decline and Yugoslavia’s collapse. More specifically, it enables us to examine the experience of crisis. This book embeds the ‘last Yugoslav generation’ within the discourse of crisis that marked Yugoslav late socialism. It designates three
dissent, and its strategies of resistance developed under late socialism. It is the dissident milieux, the “parallel poleis,” and the “second” cultures of late socialism that served as new containers, but also as the lid, for postsocialist cultural reforms. This chapter turns its attention to “antipolitics,” a word for what is seen as the dominant form of the resistance of East-Central European intellectuals to socialist totalitarianism. It will argue that “antipolitics” should not only be regarded as the main oppositional strategy and force
This chapter explores representations of cross-border mobilities in the Ukrainian-Romanian borderlands. In 2007-2009, cross-border trading and shopping had established themselves as an important part of the local economy and integral to daily life in local communities. Nestled within the thousands of border crossings that were made every day were feelings of shame on the part of those living on the Ukrainian side of the border. This shame was relational across two levels: firstly, as a personal shame in the practices involved in cross-border small trading – the payments of bribes, the flirtation with Romanian customs officials and interactions with money-changers; secondly, a more general, collective sense of shame that such practices should be taking place across a border, which had previously sheltered Soviet citizens from the humiliations of living under late socialism in Ceausescu’s Romania. The chapter elucidates how for the villagers involved the intersection of these levels of shame emerged in dominant narratives of the trade, which not only challenged elite level nation-building in Ukraine, but also made use of existing narrative forms, primarily anecdotes and jokes. What emerges is a much more complex theoretical understanding of the trans-temporality of shame at the border.
that the same MUP_Dalakoglou_Printer.indd 173 17/01/2017 15:46 174 Appendix 1 name is used to refer to more than one person, as this is the case in Albania. This is partly due to the limitations set by state authorities. From the late 1960s onwards, the Albanian state issued lists of accepted names for newborn babies, mainly with the aim of eliminating names with religious connotations. The most striking examples of the naming regulations that late socialism promoted are names like Marenglen (derived from a combination of Marx, Engels, Lenin). MUP
why a viable Yugoslav political option failed to consolidate within the Yugoslav youth realm. The book opens up new questions and hopes to suggest new ways of studying late socialism –from a critical rethinking of the concept of dissent, processes of domestication of Western social movements in a socialist context, to approaching the youth sphere more seriously and providing a history of alternatives. Moreover, since the book only analysed a limited group of individuals 201 20 202 The last Yugoslav generation who have classified as an elite both in late
Epilogue A considerable amount of the work on this manuscript was undertaken in Denmark, where I stayed as a postdoctoral fellow at Aarhus University in 2016–18. As one of the leaders of European product design and a country with a profound national design mythology, Denmark is a magnet for a design historian. Exploring the European context for the comradely objects of late socialism, I frequently visited the library of Designmuseum Danmark Copenhagen. One afternoon in the autumn of 2016, during a lunch break in the museum café, the librarian Anja Lollesgaard
contemporaneity of art 11 from a historicist perspective, and in the context of Eastern European transition. This is the moment when the region gained, so to speak, its historical contemporaneity. It is in Eastern Europe that one catches the best glimpse of the processes of economic liberalization and deregulation taking place not only in what were once planned economies, one-party systems, and the culture of late socialism, but also in art. The book interprets the postsocialist contemporary as the by-product of a historical
different and unknown principles that had still to be learned and mastered. In the universe of Soros's modernizing discourse, “contemporary art” was most likely to appear next to the phrase “open society.” And even though it was not always openly stated, contemporary art was seen as an alternative to the highly centralized and controlled model of cultural administration practiced in the “closed societies” of late socialism. Therefore, from the start, many centers invested in the image of an equal-opportunity, new “alternative” to state cultural institutions, thus
in the final years of the regime. By late socialism, the combination of road production with the rest of the material circumstances manifested a practical failure in the application of the theoretical principles. According to the textbook a certain kind of relationship in the production of the material world would lead into a particular human consciousness. However, it stopped having this result already in the 1960s. The internal contradiction of road construction versus extremely limited road usage resulted in an infrastructure fetishism, where infrastructures