EVERYDAY COMMUNISM

This lecture course comparatively and transnationally investigates the twentieth-century communism as a modern civilization with global outreach. It looks at the world spread of communism as an ideology, everyday experience, and form of statehood in the Soviet Union, Europe, Asia (Mao’s China), and post-colonial Africa. With the exception of North America and Australia, communist regimes were established on all continents of the world. The course will study this historical process from the October Revolution (1917) to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986), which marked the demise of communist state. The stress is not just on state-building processes or Cold War politics, but primarily on social, gender, cultural and economic policies that shaped lived experiences of communism. We will closely investigate what was particular about communism as civilization: sexuality, materiality, faith, selfhood, cultural identity, collective, or class and property politics. We will explore the ways in which “ordinary people” experienced communism through violence (anti-imperial and anti-fascist warfare; forced industrialization) and as subjects of social policies (gender equality, family programs, employment, urban planning). By close investigation of visual, material and political representations of life under communism, the course demonstrates the variety of human experience outside the “West” and capitalist modernity in an era of  anti-imperial politics, Cold War, and decolonization, as well as current environmental crisis.